"High Fantasy" vs. "Sword & Sorcery" gaming: the underlying reason of conflict and change in D&D

OPEN AND PUBLIC FIRST DRAFT

When I was in the process of discovering old-school, there were a couple of forum discussions that had a key role in the deconstruction of my gaming paradigms, and the slow building of a new way of approaching D&D that made me comprehend and enjoy it better. I got them bookmarked and still go back to them from time to time, when I need to clarify some things for myself.

Many of this discussions predate the old-school renaissance. There was no Labyrinth Lord, no Sword&Wizardry, no Fight On!. The OD&D Discussion forum did not exist (I believe it had an important role in the renaissance), the blog-sphere was very small, OSRIC was just beginning, and so many things we have today where just not there. I believe that this discussions where quite relevant for the understanding of the game to many, but I'll never really know - they where at least very important for me.

Here they are. They are somewhat long. If you want to read them, prepare yourself for a very thought provoking experience. There is a lot you can agree and disagree on, but they are really fascinating discussions. Keep an eye for the old-school "usual suspects":

Swords & Sensibility: the evolution of the tone of D&D.

Inspirations for D&D setting past and present.

Swords & Sorcery in a Nutshell

Picaro and the "Story" of D&D

What follows in this blog post will be easier to understand if you have read the discussions linked:

You might be thinking "hey, but this discussions are more about swords & sorcery than old-school itself!". Yes, indeed they are. But what happened to me is that:

Once I understood sword & sorcery as applied to gaming, I began to understand so many things old-school D&D is so often criticized for.

A non exhaustive list:

1) Higher degree of player skill involved in survival.

2) Higher degree of luck involved in survival.

3) Save or die effects (a big one).

4) Random encounters.

5) Lack of automatically balanced challenges (another big one).

6) Powerful, impartial, unforgiving DMs.

7) Lack of "story", as something mostly pre-planned to play itself.

8) Lack of "adventure paths" or "sagas".

9) Possibility of playing any alignment, at any time and moment.

10) Lack of pre-planned rewards everyone should automatically obtain.

All of which boil down to: Lack of player entitlement.

In "High Fantasy" gaming, as opposed to" Sword & Sorcery" gaming, the PCs, the good guys, are meant to win on the sole reason they are the good-guys, and good should always triumph. If it were to be defeated, it's defeat should be meaningful, it should be a contribution to the ultimate end: the victory over evil. The game starts with the premise that good will finally triumph over evil, maybe after much suffering and loss, but that is the main theme guiding and controlling all what is happening and should happen.

In sword & sorcery gaming, nothing of that is true. Success is not based upon your goodness, higher morals, or desire of the well being of the world. In sword & sorcery gaming success is based solely on luck, access to resources and sheer ability. Even if your character is good, or the protagonist, that gives him no entitlement whatsoever to success, or to "special treatment".

Without really noticing it, many people don't want to play sword & sorcery gaming. What they want, is to play a story about good winning the epic battle against evil. This is what you see many people striving for. It's not that explicit or evident, but it's there. But the true is that, if you want to play High Fantasy with D&D, specially old-school D&D, the game WILL FAIL YOU.

"How can my character die to the poison of randomly rolled spider?".

"I needed to fudge the dice in order to save the story".

"Every hero should have the appropriate magic items".

"By the moment they reach level 12, I plan the mayor confrontation with their nemesis - so I need them to survive at least until that point, it's the story".

"A character should never die to the random encounter or to mere mooks, his death should be fighting something significant".

"I don't want the DM to ruin my character, he is supposed to mean something, he is the hero".

The conflict between this two genres has been, in my humble opinion, a main factor driving change thought the history of D&D. It's certainly not the only one, and it might be it's most unperceived, but I really believe it plays an underlying mayor role. In many flaming edition wars and D&D hate over the net, what's really in discussion is what type of game people want to have: a game of High Fantasy vs. a game of Sword & Sorcery. I think many people don't realize this. Or if they do, they don't put it out so explicitly.

The main reason many people don't like the older versions of the D&D game, it's because its a game of sword & sorcery as opposed to a game of high fantasy. But many people don't realize this is the main reason for their dislike. As they think D&D should satisfy their High Fantasy pretensions, and it fails at it, they think the game is badly designed.

In the older versions of D&D, your alignment, or your position as a player/protagonists: "Gave you no entitlement, or right to anything. No outside support to achieve your objectives. The only one you could rely on was yourself.

And in that way, the spirit of sword & sorcery was brilliantly and elegantly captured in D&D.

High Fantasy Tropes in D&D:

D&D included from it's beginning tropes that are more common to High Fantasy literature than to Sword & Sorcery literature: elves, dwarfs, hobbits, some of the evil humanoids, unicorns, good dragons, etc.

Sometimes it is believed that playing D&D in the spirit of sword & sorcery means removing the demi-humans out of D&D "because they don't appear in the sword & sorcery novels". I think that is not correct. Sword & Sorcery is a concept HIGHER than the novels in which it concretes itself. What's important is not if the novel has elves, hobbits, or none of those. If it has clerics or not. What's important is the underlying worldview and moral system.

High Fantasy literature is based on a Christian worldview. According to Christianity, good will finally triumph over evil. God intervenes in history to carry out his plan of salvation. Even more: to many Christian denominations, evil has already been defeated by Jesus Christ on the Cross.

Sword & Sorcery literature is based on an Atheist worldview. So there is no god to take care of you. No god to be the parameter and judge of morality. No higher force of good that will finally triumph over evil. Humanity is alone. So it's all about power and survival.

So... what makes your D&D a game of High Fantasy or Sword & Sorcery, is not if you play with elves, dwarfs, hobbits or clerics. It's about the underlying worldview and moral system of the game setting. The high fantasy troupes are then just cosmetic. What's important is the spirit on which the game is played. They rest are just superficial elements.

Indeed, you could play d20 Conan in a High Fantasy spirit. The Howardian tropes is not what makes the game sword & sorcery. It's the spirit in which the game is played.

The few High Fantasy tropes that made their way into D&D, might have been the main source of confusion as to which genre the game was trying to emulate. People expected the game to work like a High Fantasy novel, and it utterly fails at it.

The game is not badly designed. It is simply not designed for High Fantasy gaming.

The game is designed for sword & sorcery.

History of the D&D game under this analytical approach:

From OD&D to AD&D 1E the game is self-consciously a sword & sorcery game. The cosmetic inclusion of some High Fantasy tropes might be the source of confusion to some, but the game presents itself as sword and sorcery.

2E wants to be High Fantasy, but it does not have the mechanical support to achieve it. There are nearly no elements of player entitlement. They game fails to achieve it's premise. This is the main reason for the spawning of some many alternatives to D&D, that want to achieve High Fantasy with the mechanical support D&D does not have. Those games focus on "getting the story right".

3E wants to go back to it's sword & sorcery roots. But the inclusion of some elements brings some confusion. The majority of fans, many without noticing it, want a game about High Fantasy. THIS is the major underlying source of conflict in all edition wars. High Fantasy elements start creeping into the game, either explicitly in the books, or by the generalized idea of how it is supposed to be played.

4E has more High Fantasy game elements ingrained into the system. But it still has some of the incoherency of 2E and 3E.

Old-school and New-school. Concepts that don't work to understand the differences in the game:

Looking into the future. Could we abandon the use of old-school and new-school as the way of separating the different ways of playing D&D?

Sword & Sorcery D&D vs. High Fantasy D&D would be, IMO, a much better model to understand the differences on how the game is supposed to work.

Ascending armour class, unified XP, etc. are matters that are really secondary in the discussion. What's most important is the SPIRIT in which the game is played

Rules light vs. rules heavy, particular approaches to certain aspects of the rules (AC vs. AAC), are different discussions , and the differentiation should be made.

Old-school and new-school are a mess of ideas and different concepts unnecessarily put together. We need to separate and re categorize the issues and subjects of discussion. Old-school vs. new-school has proven not to work.