Quote from: noisms;703722(...)

What I'm getting is that you are assuming I'm either deluded, or a liar.

Cool. Thanks.

Quote from: noisms;703692No, but I think that somebody who says that they read the Dragonlance books at the age of 12 and didn't think that they were action packed and cool to read with some really good passages is almost certainly lying or misremembering.

Actually the Dragonlance books are oddly low on the action part. The majority of the tale is traveling, sneaking, escaping, and wheeling and dealing to garner allies. Whole chunks of combat take place effectively offscreen.

According to an article in Dragon that was intentional as the omitted parts were often revealed in the modules. Never seen the modules so cannot say how accurate or not that was in practice.

So a kid could easily read DL and find it an engaging travel adventure, or intrigue adventure and not consider it an action adventure hardly at all. Probably someone out there read it and thought it was a nice romance adventure.

Quote from: Omega;703736Actually the Dragonlance books are oddly low on the action part. The majority of the tale is traveling, sneaking, escaping, and wheeling and dealing to garner allies. Whole chunks of combat take place effectively offscreen.

According to an article in Dragon that was intentional as the omitted parts were often revealed in the modules. Never seen the modules so cannot say how accurate or not that was in practice.

So a kid could easily read DL and find it an engaging travel adventure, or intrigue adventure and not consider it an action adventure hardly at all. Probably someone out there read it and thought it was a nice romance adventure.

Dragonlance was a series of romance novels dressed up in an epic fantasy plot so teenager boys could read it without going ewwww before they even started.

The most pressing issue of the Chronicles, after all, was who Tanis should get it on with at the end.

Quote from: noisms;703692No, but I think that somebody who says that they read the Dragonlance books at the age of 12 and didn't think that they were action packed and cool to read with some really good passages is almost certainly lying or misremembering.

Two years ago I picked up a dragon lance novel to read to my then 7 year old daughter and she thought it was turgid rot, well her exact phrase was daddy this is really boring can we read the lion the witch and the wardrobe again.......

I think it depends totally on people.

As a 12 year old kid I found moorcock, lovecraft and howard dull becuase there was no characterisation and the fight scenes weren't enough to save it. I could read Zelazny with great characterisation and combat, or Gor (first 7-8 books) for great characterisation and combat and some nicely purloined anthropology I could read David Eddings for world spanning fantasy Epics.

Now Eddings and Norman are hadly great novelists. Each has a nice way of establishing a character in a couple of sentences and each has a nice was with action but Primo Levi they are not....

Late to the party but I. too, have never managed to "get" DL, whether as a setting or fiction. To me it just seemed like a rather forced effort to get dragons more into the forefront of a game that sounded like it should have been 50% devoted to them, but in reality only featured dragons less than maybe 5% of the time.

Admittedly I was fast leaving my teens behind at that time, so I probably didn't have the right mindset to appreciate it.

Quote from: Vile;703827Late to the party but I. too, have never managed to "get" DL, whether as a setting or fiction. To me it just seemed like a rather forced effort to get dragons more into the forefront of a game that sounded like it should have been 50% devoted to them, but in reality only featured dragons less than maybe 5% of the time.

Admittedly I was fast leaving my teens behind at that time, so I probably didn't have the right mindset to appreciate it.

No. That about sums it up in a nutshell. We see I think 2 dragons in the first book, maybee 1 more in the second and the whole dragon war take place mostly off screen in the 3rd. I assume some of this omitted stuff was in the modules.

Books 4-6 "Time of the Twins" I do not recall any dragons at all.

The anthologies were though better at actually showing... well... dragons...

so you aren't the only one that noticed the oddity.

Quote from: Benoist;703734What I'm getting is that you are assuming I'm either deluded, or a liar.

Cool. Thanks.

More like unbelievably po-faced.

Quote from: jibbajibba;703819Two years ago I picked up a dragon lance novel to read to my then 7 year old daughter and she thought it was turgid rot, well her exact phrase was daddy this is really boring can we read the lion the witch and the wardrobe again.......

I think it depends totally on people.

As a 12 year old kid I found moorcock, lovecraft and howard dull becuase there was no characterisation and the fight scenes weren't enough to save it. I could read Zelazny with great characterisation and combat, or Gor (first 7-8 books) for great characterisation and combat and some nicely purloined anthropology I could read David Eddings for world spanning fantasy Epics.

Now Eddings and Norman are hadly great novelists. Each has a nice way of establishing a character in a couple of sentences and each has a nice was with action but Primo Levi they are not....

Well, a 7 year old girl is never going to be interested in Dragonlance, just like a 7 year old boy is going to find a Jane Austen novel boring.

I read most of David Eddings' stuff but surely that was even worse than Dragonlance when it came to being thinly-disguised romance? The entire first novel of The Malloreon, as I remember, is just about how Garion and his wife aren't getting along and how they resolve it.

Quote from: Vile;703827Late to the party but I. too, have never managed to "get" DL, whether as a setting or fiction. To me it just seemed like a rather forced effort to get dragons more into the forefront of a game that sounded like it should have been 50% devoted to them, but in reality only featured dragons less than maybe 5% of the time.

Admittedly I was fast leaving my teens behind at that time, so I probably didn't have the right mindset to appreciate it.

They do a reasonably good job of building dragons up over the course of the first book or so, so when finally they make an appearance it feels like an event. I think the first time a dragon is encountered one of the characters gets his face melted off by its acid breath. Great scene for a 12 year old boy.

Quote from: noisms;703850More like unbelievably po-faced.

Well what you could do, instead of being an asshole about it and project all manners of motives into my posts, is ask instead. You prefer to make some pretty retarded assumptions, stupid shortcuts and fire into the crowd basically spewing what amounts to total nonsense, to me. You're turning into an internet flame warrior, and that's a waste of time and space.

We could start by separating the issue of the novels from the actual Dragonlance game setting. Then, what I thought about Dragonlance then, and what I think about Dragonlance now. And what I think of the people behind it, for that matter, since that might be relevant to actually make you realize that your assumptions are a load of crap.

The novels never appealed to me. I thought they were boring. I remember reading one particular DL book I actually liked, but that was years later, and I was already in Canada. I think it was the Test of the Twins, not sure. Point remains that to me, next to Moorcock (I love Elric, and Hawkmoon as well, by the way, still now) and Tolkien (my first attempt to read the LOTR stalled in the middle of book 1 of 6. Then when I started reading it again some three months later, I reached the Council of Elrond... and finished all six books in three days), the DL novels were not good.

I played the DL modules in a really cool game, and I cherish that memory. I came to like DL, or rather, the idea of the setting I had in my head at the time, as I would find out much, much later. One of my very first attempts at world-building was based on that idea I had in my mind of Krynn based on the Atlas of Karen Fondstad and the Dragonlance Adventures AD&D sourcebook. So in that sense, this idea of DL participated to my imaginative landscape today.

I once wrote that the 3rd ed Dragonlance setting disappointed me because I wanted the setting of the original DL, not the War of Souls and all that stuff. I wrote: "When I see any Dragonlance stuff out there, I'm sourly reminded this is NOT the Dragonlance I knew." This reminds me of that Greek orator in I Claudius who asks the Herald where he learned to project his voice like that, to which the Herald responded "I was an actor, Sir, but I had to change carreers. The theater is not today what it was." And the orator answers: "I will tell you something... " He glances at him. "It never was, what it was."

Well. What I had only become to guess back then was that it never was the Dragonlance I thought I knew. It never was, what it was.

Today, I think Dragonlance, the game setting, actually did enormous damage to the D&D game by participating to the gradual change from the "exploration of dungeons and wilderness" game to the "heroic ren fair fantasy storyline emulator" that AD&D2 became. Sure, it was extremely popular at the time, and I liked playing in the original modules, though I now realize these weren't exactly run "by the book", but I can see how the game changed, and not for the best, in hindsight.

Still, that's not talking about the novels, which I thought were tedious and boring, even back then. We actually joked about it a few days ago with Ernie, because we talked about it in relation with Margaret Weis, who was really helpful after all the trouble Ernie went through and actually was giving us advice on some issue we had he and I. What I have indirectly experienced of her tells me she is a really, really nice person. I'd still have to tell her I didn't like the DL novels if she asked me what I thought.

So, there. See? You could have asked.

Quote from: noisms;703851Well, a 7 year old girl is never going to be interested in Dragonlance, just like a 7 year old boy is going to find a Jane Austen novel boring.

I read most of David Eddings' stuff but surely that was even worse than Dragonlance when it came to being thinly-disguised romance? The entire first novel of The Malloreon, as I remember, is just about how Garion and his wife aren't getting along and how they resolve it.

Well, at the age of 12 a reader varies a lot in what they will like.


But really...Eddings vs Moorcock, Lovecraft and Howard?

My head just exploded!

Quote from: Bill;703950Well, at the age of 12 a reader varies a lot in what they will like.


But really...Eddings vs Moorcock, Lovecraft and Howard?

My head just exploded!

HP Lovecraft vs Atomic Robo.

With some help by Charles Forte and Carl Sagan...

Quote from: noisms;703851Well, a 7 year old girl is never going to be interested in Dragonlance, just like a 7 year old boy is going to find a Jane Austen novel boring.

I read most of David Eddings' stuff but surely that was even worse than Dragonlance when it came to being thinly-disguised romance? The entire first novel of The Malloreon, as I remember, is just about how Garion and his wife aren't getting along and how they resolve it.

You say that but she loves killing things and taking their stuff Oh and usually eating them afterwards by turning into a tiger

The Mallorean is rubbish its basically a nostalgic attempt to recapture the Belgariad. The Belgariad is I would say one of the better fantasy epics. Eddings is able to give a crisp character protrait in a short paragraph. The dialogue sparks and there are some nice world building ideas.

Quote from: jibbajibba;704014You say that but she loves killing things and taking their stuff Oh and usually eating them afterwards by turning into a tiger

The Mallorean is rubbish its basically a nostalgic attempt to recapture the Belgariad. The Belgariad is I would say one of the better fantasy epics. Eddings is able to give a crisp character protrait in a short paragraph. The dialogue sparks and there are some nice world building ideas.

There were some bits of The Mallorean I remember liking, but I read it ages ago, so I may be misremembering. One is this scene where the main characters are riding through a forest and these zombie-like beings are attacking them in constant waves, until eventually one of the wizard characters conjurs up this kind of sphere of immunity, so they all spend the night under this invisible magical dome while crazed zombie things try to break through but can't. I thought that was really well done.

Quote from: Bill;703950Well, at the age of 12 a reader varies a lot in what they will like.


But really...Eddings vs Moorcock, Lovecraft and Howard?

My head just exploded!

I'm not entirely sure Eddings is all that different to Moorcock or Howard in terms of ability. Moorcock had much, much more interesting ideas, which is what separates his wheat from Eddings' chaff, perhaps.

Lovecraft I would say is the best of those on offer, because his work is actually philosophically interesting and sometimes highly evocative. He does it rarely, but now and then he writes stuff that is genuinely almost transcendental.