"Leave your world behind and experience Jorune" that was the tagline of the setting that has inspired me the most. I'm talking film and literature type inspiration here.

But, I always found it interesting that settings that promise the most in terms of wonder, stangeness, alieness....well fantasy, are the ones rejected by most gamers.

I'm talking about games like Tekumel, Tales of Gargenthir and the many other so called weird settings. Why is this ? Is there some correllation between fantasy literature and the settings most gamers like to play?

Let's talk about this, if anyone is interested.

Regards,
David R

I think most gamers are more into 'familiar' fantasy. Something they can set down and play and already have a basic feel for. Elves are elves, dwarves are dwarves kinda stuff. But having to set down and wrap your head around a setting that is far off from the norm can be off setting to some players. Especially when the only way to really do it is by reading 40 or so pages of source material.

That's my two cents. Your milage may vary.

Most gamers don't really want a heaping helping of creativity. They prefer creativity as a spice rather than the main course. Too much creativity alienates them. There exists a small minority of gamers that can't get enough, but it's definitely a niche of a niche. Standard Fantasy games have a guaranteed market, because the tropes are so familiar. It requires no work to comprehend them and get into action.

-clash

I'll leave aside 'most gamers'. In fact I think worlds like Jorune and Tekumel are the ultimate conclusion of the world-building strand within the subculture. They are immense guidebooks for travelers.

I think it's actually a broader problem in that a lack of familiarity gives us nothing to connect to. All the great stories are about humans. We understand humans and why they do the things they do.

Fantasy (in the usual sense and not the dictionary sense in which you use it) is easy because the most iconic fantasy races are really literary/mythic aspects of humanity. If you've grown up within reach of Western culture you have some idea of dwarves (short doughty humans who live underground). You haven't grown up with some green frog-creature with an unpronounceable name.

So reading about Tekumel is a bit like reading about a vanished culture like the Aztecs. If one likes that sort of stuff, one marvels and speculates, but ultimately it is difficult to feel for the Aztecs. They're too different from us.

If you look at Conan for a contrast, you see that the world Howard created is not much more than a stage on which Conan struts. It also pulls on shared cultural context (Stygia, we know, is a place where no good is likely to happen) and imagery (the big white Northerners, the swarthy decadent Southerners). RPG worlds in general are more like this, because RPGs in general are about the characters.

Droog has some really good answers there.

I'd also add that I think a lot of fantasy: both fiction and gaming, is pretty phatic. But rather than blather on about that, I'll just post a link to an amusing rant about it.

From where I'm sitting, Tekumel and even Exalted are games with a lot of setting to learn. Even if I can bring myself to read through and learn the whole thing, I still have to figure out how to teach it to the rest of my group. So even with the cultural hurdles set aside, there'd still be the practical ones. I do like interesting settings, but I prefer them to be done in broad strokes, with plenty of room for bullshitting things. A truly novel setting like Tekumel requires learning a new set of ground rules, rather than just tweaking some of the usual ones.

From the introduction of Harn:

Robin Crossby: All works of fantasy should be woven of familiar threads. Because it is impossible to entirely describe an alien world, readers must be able to fill in the gaps with their own knowledge and experience.


Although I wouldn't put it the same way as Robin, I kinda understand where he is coming from and I think many gamers share a similar sentiment.

Of course, with the media explosion, a lot of "weird" things are exposed sufficiently that they do become more familiar. But the basics are solid. If it's too weird, it turns some people off.

If Jorune had been exposed in novels and films, it would certainly have made more sense to some.

Oddly enough this is my approach to sci-fi, specifically Nebuleon.

Allow me to interject for a moment.
A base understanding of what is familiar and what is considered to esoteric has to be established for a conversation like this to have any choherence. in short units must be constructed. How different is different, how much familiarity characterizes the familiar? Now these units are probably best left at a simple, ordinal scale of measurement, but even such a simple scale, they will facilitate a more useful dialogue.
Now, I'll ask you all to resist the temptation to merely dismiss this as being subjective, which while true, helps us not at all.
So therefore, I propose that we use values ranging from 0 to 1 on what I will call the Familiarity Scale. something rated as a 1 will be very familiar; something rated as 0 will be extremely esoteric. These extreme values, however should not be used, though, because few things will really lie at either end of the spectrum, but rather most things from Leave it to Beaver to Jourune will have a decimal value: perhaps .95 and .03 respectively.
The question then becomes, where does the tipping point lie?
Now that i have provided guidlines for the discussion, I encourage you to proceed once again.

Depends on the marketing goals.