I have always found it impossible to play magical cyberpunk outside of Shadowrun; I can’t imagine adapting the Shadowrun system to play, say, space opera or high fantasy. Similarly, I can’t imagine playing high fantasy with Traveller rules, or cyberpunk with D&D. Something about these classic games prevents them from being used outside of their genre remit, which is why I don’t naturally turn to D&D Modern, though no doubt it’s perfectly capable of the task. This is probably partly because they’re the games I grew up with, and back in that more innocent age I adhered to the setting constraints they gave me and then when I grew up I couldn’t escape them; but I don’t think I’m alone in this feeling, and I think there’s a more fundamental artistic achievement here than merely capturing the attention of a 13 year old boy when he was vulnerable. Even now I can remember what it was like to open the AD&D Player’s Handbook (I think first edition, with the badly-drawn wizard on the front), and smell the very special smell of the paper, and see that densely written text; read Gygax’s strange (and in many ways wrong) prose, and appreciate the spells and monsters and actions described therein. There’s something very specific and powerful about the way that game is presented, like it contains its own lexicon and cosmology, right there in those 200-odd pages. The style of the game determines what you can do with it, and the presentation of AD&D, along with its gaming style, is so particular that you can’t just strip out the spells and monsters and use the system to run a space opera. I’d wager no one ever has, or if they have, they’ve slowly regressed.
I was reminded of this today by this excellent review of The Name of the Wind and The Children of Hurin, which compares the modern style of one genre novel (The Name of the Wind by Richard Rothfuss) with another, more suited to its task (The Children of Hurin, by Tolkien). The reviewer says about style:
style—the language and form of the novel—is seen as an unimportant adjunct to the “story.” It is not. A bourgeois discursive style constructs a bourgeois world. If it is used to describe a medieval world it necessarily mismatches what it describes, creating a milieu that is only an anachronism, a theme park, or a WoW gaming environment rather than an actual place. This degrades the ability of the book properly to evoke its fictional setting, and therefore denies the book the higher heroic possibilities of its imaginative premise.
I think this applies to RPGs as well. Creating style in RPGs isn’t just about the book (though the AD&D 1st edition is a great example of how this is done) but about how the gaming environment is constructed. Fiddly dice and tabletop mapping (AD&D); fiddly cards and tokens (WFRP3); miniatures and maps (D&D 3rd); starmaps and starships and sparse use of props (Traveller) – these are tools to create an environment that invokes a style. In some games this style is very carefully evocative of the nature of the game, and in others it is sterile (Aria) or actually versatile (Rolemaster/Spacemaster/MERP/Cyberspace). But without creating this specific environment – in the rules, in the aesthetic of the book, in the gaming environment, and in the nature of challenges and dramatic process – the game will fail to impress. Maybe this is why generic systems tend to be less successful than genre systems, and maybe also why some setting-specific games fail (because they don’t match their style to their setting).
The reviewer gives an example of this with Tolkien, contrasting the modern 20th century style of Rothfuss with Tolkien’s genre-specific style:
It’s a book by a man who knew intimately not only the facts and paraphernalia but the mindset, values, and inner life of his relevant historical period—more Dark Age than medieval, this time, but assuredly not modern. The most obvious, although certainly not the only, level on which this registers is that of the style, which actually does approach the classic elevation that Wollheim wrongly identifies in Rothfuss. The Children of Húrin‘s syntax is compact, declarative and unafraid of inversion (“Great was the triumph of Morgoth”). Its vocabulary is almost entirely purged of words not derived from Old English sources: so much so that the occasional Anglo-French term—for instance, the phrase “Petty-dwarf” with its petit-derived qualifier—jars a little. More, it is a prose written with a careful ear for the rhythms of English; a prose with a very satisfying balance of iambic and trochaic pulses, sparingly leavened with unstressed polysyllables (it reads well aloud)
This shows well the numerous tools that a writer can use to invoke effect, beyond just plot and ideas.The task of RPGs isn’t just to provide a distracting few hours of your life (as the reviewer so dismissively characterizes Rothfuss) but to provide a means of escape to another world. You don’t get this by slinging together a skill resolution system and a character sheet. You need a style for your game, a bridge between the imagination of the players and the mechanism by which they play it out interactively. Is this more difficult than constructing a good genre novel? I’m not sure, but I’m fairly confident it’s less financially rewarding. In any case, there’s a lot to be said for the stylistic achievements of the early gaming world, even if the systems themselves were crap and we eventually moved on to better ones. And I think the linked review gives some powerful examples of why these early games held our attention despite their flaws, through the comparison of two fantasy novels.
Incidentally, this review is also an excellent and powerful defense of Tolkien.
Compromise and Conceit 
March 2, 2012 at 4:51 am
Saw your rather excellent comment on Kuntz’s blog. Took about 20 seconds to find it was you. Why didn’t you use your current internet handle?
Just curious, apologies for the off topic comment.
March 2, 2012 at 8:14 am
Hi Timothy (and I guess anyone else who has come here through my old blog). Often Blogger won’t accept wordpress handles – it just constantly tells you that you didn’t enter the codes properly. So when I comment on blogger blogs I use my blogger blog id…
March 2, 2012 at 8:18 am
I agree with your comments about how (many) game systems shape the worlds you use them for. I can’t imagine many systems about personal heroism being used to cleanly imitate less heroic settings. For example D&D 4e or Exalted both have personal abilities the characters use – how would they map onto a modern detective story? Why would I use systems so limited in investigation to run a detective story? Based on that I suspect that it’s the limitations present in the system that shape what they do more than the strengths. If D&D 4e was not primarily a combat game then I can imagine using it for less dungeon crawly purposes.
On the books I agree that language/style shapes how the reader approaches the text, but disagree with the comments as they relate to fantasy novels.
Firstly, the blog post’s assumptions do a disservice to authors (especially great ones). A Shakespearean novel/story is not one that uses language that 15 years old find nigh-impossible to engage with, it’s one that takes the essential elements of Shakespeare as they relate to the human condition and then use those. This is why we say that great stories are timeless. You can rip out 90% of the text and still be left with a story that an idiot can write into a best selling Hollywood movie because the ideas are gold.
Secondly, when we’re reading a fantasy novel we’re not reading a history book on the 14th Century. We’re reading a setting where real forces in the setting should result in a totally different outcome if extrapolated to the extreme. We could call this post-scarcity fantasy (because you’ve already done so in the past). In a more realistic sense, the middle ages lasted about 1000 years, but in fantasy novels we frequently have histories that stretch vastly longer than that without any social change. Not even the middle ages were static, why should we assume that some 20th Century-isms should not be present? Why haven’t elven philosophers determined that every person is equal regardless of their expected lifespan and therefore slavery and racism is wrong? How can racism make sense when the black guy next to you is normally a fairly normal nice guy, but the green skinned guy in the nearest cave is an absolute monster? Why would I be racist based on skin tone in that world?
Thirdly, engagement with the user is critical. The blog post notes that reviewers found Tolkien difficult to read. That’s cause it is. There’s a reason that almost all of us prefer the movies to the LotR books. They’re vasty easier to engage without losing anything significant.
Fourthly, of course modern novels show modern heroism. How many posts back on this blog would I need to go to find a critique that Tolkien is unthinkingly racist and sexist because of his times and source materials? Based on the standards and thesis that the linked blog posits how can a novel using a dark ages milieu be anything but sexist and racist. Why would a reader want to endure that? I have to put up with enough criticism of Tolkien to want any more of my preferred books be criticised due to an artefact of their creation.
Fifthly, the stories he other blog compares are totally dissimilar. Turin is a doomed hero in the model of Achilles or Oedipus. Kvothe is strongly suggested to not be done with his story (despite his protests). Why not at least compare it to LotR where there is a happy(-ish) ending? I’ve said before that LotR novels are difficult and unfun read. I’ll happily say it again. The story is fantastic and wonderful, the novels are a pain.
Finally, the other blog’s author makes a moral judgment at end that he should have shared right up front. “ His world—where triumph and glory are localised and temporary, and always give way to subsequent defeat—is in the deepest sense our world.” He thinks our world sucks and is doomed, therefore novels should reflect that. Yeah. If you think that of the modern world, then you’re going to think that modern heroism sucks and only doomed heroes can offer good models, and hence good reads. The other blog has this as a going in assumption. If you believe in the enlightenment and progress and the ongoing improvement of mankind then the novel styles you like will not match those liked by the blog’s author. And that’s the most important point – style matters because it shapes what you like/read. Saying it shapes what you can do in a novel requires bringing excessive assumptions to the text.
March 2, 2012 at 2:11 pm
” In the deepest sense” – the next sentence goes on to say that, in the end, we all die. Enlightenment, progress, the ongoing improvement of mankind are for mankind – not for men/women, who die. Sometimes they die buying progress and improvement, sometimes they die trying to stop progress, often they just die. But we all die. This is a truth often glossed over in modern life, but ever present in pre-modern life.
As for LOTR being a difficult read, I never foun d it so. I think it depends on what you were brought up reading, so it might date. But the movies often glossed over the uncomnfortable messages of the book – and were the poorer for it. One particular example are the scenes where the ents decide to go up against Saruman. In the book it’s the considered decision of a free people, who know that this might well be their doom. In the film it’s more like George W tricking people into war in Iraq. A telling comment on screenwriters sense of modern morality.
March 2, 2012 at 3:20 pm
The subsequent sentences are:
“That is what it means to be mortal. We are all going to die; it’s demeaning to waste our energy in schemes or fantasies that tell us otherwise. What matters, as with Túrin, is the character with which we face that annihilation. Of the two heroisms presented by these books, his is the greater; and the most relevant.”
There is not a single word of hope in those sentences. Nothing about sometimes bringing progress. You can claim the author means it to be facing a grim reality, but I can claim Patrick Rothfuss was aiming to write a fantasy novel using modern language without sacrificing anything. So what? We interpret what is there. This blog author has written a post that displays a longing for the grave and a bitter dismissal of the modern world. [1]
As for what I was brought up reading, it’s LotR. That’s part of my dislike for it – I was probably too young to appreciate it. It’s an incredibly difficult read, primarily driven by how dull the novel is. The entire thing is a long winded travelogue that actually conceals its snappiest subject matter in appendices or endless endings [2]. But Patrick Rothfuss (and a lot of other novels that are grouped with it) would have been much better fare. Sometimes the “best” is a shit choice and thus much worse than the “average”. Makes you think about the pretentiousness of declaring something superior [3] without massive stated assumptions don’t it?
[1] Is he an academic, a nihilist or a frustrated left wing politician? Is there any difference? Taking all bets!
[2] I actually quite like the return to the shire, the leaving of middle earth and the post-novel histories. Return of the King is also by far the strongest story despite being ½ the length (appendices excluded) as something actually happens (multiple battles/wars, the destruction of the ring, etc).
[3] i.e. one book being a good use of your time and one being a pot boiler
March 2, 2012 at 11:23 pm
Very good points Paul. I think your disagreement with the reviewer doesn’t detract from his fundamental point though, about the importance of style. From my interpretation of your comments, you’re accepting that a modernist style is consistent with a different set of ideas to, say, a dark ages mythical style – it’s implicit in your linking of Rothfuss’s style with the modernist concepts of progress and achievement. I think the reviewer is saying this too. What you’re disagreeing with is the implied view of the reviewer (I think it’s implied, happy to admit it’s quite explicit!) that this is inadmissible in fantasy. I agree with you, that fantasy can and should broaden to include the kind of ideas you express and which, as you say, I’ve talked about here before. Perhaps the real criticism this reviewer is trying to get at – or should be getting at – is that there are lots of second rate genre writers who adopt all the standard ideas of middle-ages fantasy (the sexism and racism, the monarchism and the fatalistic future) but write it all down in a modernist tone, which doesn’t fit with the underlying politics and cultural ideas of the genre they’re adopting – perhaps a modernist tone should be used to portray a revised view of a fantasy world? Maybe this is why I like steampunk, which seems to really bend the social conventions of its settings and is often written in quite a modern style.
This issue of style vs. ideas is particularly interesting in the light of the wave of recent “grimdark” writers (the George RR Martins and Joe Abercrombies of the fantasy genre) who seem to be representing all the gritty realism (or what they perceive as the realism) of the medieval setting, while using modern language; whereas Tolkien, who used a more old-fashioned language that is theoretically more suited to his chosen setting, carefully stripped it of any of the bad aspects of the real medieval world: no rape, no explicit depictions of the kinds of war crimes we know went on then, no maternal or infant mortality, no child labour, and very little class-based oppression. I’m pretty sure we’d see the same abstractions in The Children of Hurin if we read it, yet his prose is more evocative of that time and place, according to this reviewer. Which is more important? Authentic setting or authentic style?
I also think the reviewer chose Children of Hurin for this comparison because, as you say, LoTR is not a good example of using style to evoke setting or theme, because the writing isn’t so great. If you tried to do the same review with LoTR in place of Children of Hurin, you’d be forced to admit that ideas trump style. As you say, we love LoTR for its ideas and world-building more than its writing style.
I also agree that the reviewer’s final points about “our world” are pretty hopeless, and guess this means the reviewer leans strongly towards dark ages mythicism. If you like your fantasy speculative and progressive, you’ll probably incline more towards modern “reinterpretations.” Would those modern reinterpretations be more or less powerful if they used a mythical language style?
March 5, 2012 at 12:46 pm
I can see a link about how style makes immersion in a social milieu easier. But his central thesis would suggest that some thoughts are impossible or more difficult to think in a particular style. For example, a summary of his thesis is that modern language lends itself towards assuming social democratic values while older language styles will shape the narrative towards
“Perhaps the real criticism this reviewer is trying to get at – or should be getting at – is that there are lots of second rate genre writers who adopt all the standard ideas of middle-ages fantasy (the sexism and racism, the monarchism and the fatalistic future) but write it all down in a modernist tone, which doesn’t fit with the underlying politics and cultural ideas of the genre they’re adopting – perhaps a modernist tone should be used to portray a revised view of a fantasy world?”
Hmm. I agree that there are lots of second rate writers who plonk modern expressions and morality together into a tale supposedly set in the middle ages. So the young hero says “yeah” and can’t imagine having their sibling die despite the absence of magic/medicine suggesting that they’ve probably already had about half their siblings die. As I’ve been buying some cheap kindle books recently I can note how much I hate concepts like magic being “genetic”. I know what that word means, but most mages don’t (Harry Dresden aside)!
But that’s where I start to disagree. I suspect its just bad writers instead of a stylistic constant. And Patrick Rothfuss is actually a good writer. Vastly better than later Robert Jordan books, not a grating incessant right wing tract like Terry Goodkind and actually much more nuanced than most of Terry Brooks characters or Tolkien characters. His lead character does behave in a way that is largely consistent with modern morality. But he does so in a society that seems to have been relatively stable and prosperous for a while (centuries would be my largely baseless guess). If I had to propose a general level of development for the Commonwealth where most of the action takes place I’d say early Industrial Revolution. They lack an widespread efficient power source (waterwheels or steam), but the relatively common nature of basic magic suggests that things like continuous non-flame based lighting is available to the upper middle classes at least.
Given that to propose that Tolkien’s and Rothfuss’s worlds should be compared as similar is actually the first mistake. Tolkien explicitly set up a world where there was zero progress for the broader masses. Numenor may have had useful magic but that was millenia ago and things haven’t advanced past horse and sword since. Rothfuss however has an anti-crossbow device begin to enter usage at a low cost. One of these worlds is advancing and the other is a reflection on the fact that the industrial revolution is a bad thing, even as millions of lives improved due to it.
The fundamental mistake aside, I still don’t accept the premise. To demonstrate it you’d need to say not “Writers tend to do these things” but “It is not possible to do this”. The former is an observation, the later is a rule. I don’t accept the rule is true. I believe it’s perfectly possible to write an equally good novel with non-modern morality and a modern tone. I do accept that some modern concepts and language would prevent this from being achieved (i.e. genetics, LOL, other especially modern wordings).
At the end of the day, establishing this rule would be an extraordinary proof of the way that language shapes the thoughts in it. I propose that as the extraordinary claim it must be with extraordinary evidence, rather than referencing two poorly chosen examples.
In other news, the Rothfuss series is good. I recommend it. Have you read it?
March 5, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Oh my. Serendipity. Parick Rothfuss has recently blogged about how much he dislikes the LotR movies compared to the books, and how he fears that the Hobbit will suck: http://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/2012/02/concerning-hobbits-love-and-movie-adaptations/
On an interesting aside, that blog also has a link to another page explaining some of the history behind the old Hobbit cartoon movie: http://genedeitchcredits.com/roll-the-credits-01/40-william-l-snyder/
I suppose the most honest thing to do would be post on his blog that he shouldn’t worry about his book being made into a movie. It’s told in a modern style and lacks the depth that Tolkien’s work loses when translated onto the screen. And he’ll know it must be true because bloggers have said it!
😉
March 5, 2012 at 10:41 pm
That post of Rothfuss’s is the antithesis of the progress you say he puts in his novels. I haven’t read them … maybe I will.
I agree that style doesn’t make thoughts impossible to think or make a particular milieu or genre impossible, but it can jar and it can make the effect one is looking for harder to achieve. Another way this happens, imo, is when people insert modern political systems (like socialism or libertarianism) into pre-modern societies, as Goodkind basically does in his novel. Again, I’m sure it’s possible but it makes the task harder. I guess this also means that it would be hard to write post-scarcity fantasy in Tolkien’s style. Perhaps that’s part of the reason it isn’t a more popular aspect of the genre – because it requires a modernist view but most authors are trying to create a pre-modern feeling, often incorporating style and political elements to get it.
I do think good writers can carry off this clash of style and setting, or can use it to change the boundaries of the setting. For example I think Glen Cook did this in the Chronicles of the Black Company, with the slightly soldier-story language both enabling him to portray mercenaries rather than honourable nights, to carry off a tale about the people on the wrong side of the battle between good and evil, and to make powerful female characters conceivable in an otherwise bog-standard fantasy setting.
So I agree it’s not a rule, but style and setting can jar, and the contrast can spoil or enhance a story.
March 6, 2012 at 11:26 am
OK. It seems we agree that style has an influence due to enhancing tone or damaging suspension of disbelief.
One caveat is that a clever fantasy writer could emphasise the duration of their history and prevalence of magic and use that to justify all sorts of non-medieval traits such as socialism or liberalism or equality of the sexes. If you’ve had a magically empowered society sitting around for thousands of years, containing elvish philosophers who spend literally hundreds f years shooting the breeze then it’s perfectly reasonable that political theory could be as advanced, or even more advanced, than the real world.
But I’ve never seen anyone who explicitly set this up. I think this is an untapped potential vein of fantasy, similar to your comments on post-scarcity fantasy.
Actually, now that I think about it, some of the Herald stories by Mercedes Lackey could be taken that way. A set of incorruptible agents of the gods (in the form of horses) choose a caste of people based on their abilities and morality who are entrusted with running the kingdom. And you can’t be King/Queen unless endorsed by such an agent. The result is a fantasy kingdom as run by the New York Times editorial board.
March 6, 2012 at 7:32 pm
I agree the basic issue is bad writing – and bad world-building. Sounds like Rothfuss is worth a read (thanks – I am always glad to be able to add another to the pile). I see no reason why fantasy – particularly fantasy with working magic – should have to stick with the grim realities of medieval life. Which anyway had considerable variety – there were places that would be considered socialist today, places and times where the sexes were more equal than others, even places with low infant mortality. I also think, though, that writers of Tolkien’s time and earlier were more attuned to attitudes to life and death that have now largely vanished. That view saw death as part of life, inevitable. So hope (of life) was foolish. Courage and worth lay in perseverance and in how you would be remembered. You went on, despite the odds. And the greater the odds, the more praise on going on. It was not success or failure that counted (for everyone, in this view, fails in the end), but in how you met your fate. Heroes died like everone else; they just died in a better way.
It’s an attitude embedded in the classical Greek and Roman outlook (“call no man happy until the end”, said Solon), even more so in the Norse stories. Tolkien could take his reader’s understanding of this outlook for granted, but it’s now faded past recall in the general mind.
March 7, 2012 at 8:15 am
And while I don’t think Tolkien is a great stylist, he reads a lot better if you were brought up on Malory, the Victorian poets, bits of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, oddments of the Greek and Roman authors and so on – in other words, the standard English upper middle class/grammar school upbringing/education up to the 60s. Or in my case, a pale colonial shadow of this diet.
March 7, 2012 at 10:24 pm
I think maybe the review was trying to say this, Peter T. I agree: it’s hard to build a fantasy world with speculative social structures and technological progress (through magic) and write it in this classical style, since they jar. But I don’t think it’s impossible. I really wish fantasy would both a) do more of this speculative work and b) use more speculative writing styles to achieve it. But ultimately I guess there’s just a lot of bad writing in the genre …