Downloads and Dragons: Look what they've done to Fantasy, ma - Page 5
© Michael Martinez
Of course, as the Vulcans might say, only Tolkien can write The Lord of the Rings...or recite it. But then, very good Shakespearean actors can take Elizabethan English and make it sound like they speak it in their sleep, while the rest of us break the sentences down into fumbling half-delivered cliches straight out of drunken Bible readings. Most people just don't know how to talk like that.
But will it spoil the moment if Aragorn walks past a real wall from some 100-year-old ruin in New Zealand, or if Merry says, "Woudn't that put a nice twist on things?"
The chief difference between a "Dungeons and Dragons" adventure and The Lord of the Rings is that the players live the adventure as it plays out but only Tolkien can write The Lord of the Rings. LOTR wanders all over the map but it does so with a purpose. Frodo's adventure lies before him, mapped out if cloaked in mystery. Aragorn's journey is more uncertain. He bounces all over Rohan like a tennis ball in a wayward match, and about all he accomplishes is teaching the Rohirrim how to say the name of his sword. Aragorn doesn't began to take on real purpose until he gets hold of the palantir. By this point he is free to make his own decisions and strike out on his own.
The point of a well-coordinated adventure game (and they can easily become uncoordinated) is to drive the characters toward a common goal. That goal can be as simple as killing a vampire, looting a relatively empty dungeon, or saving the world. I like the save-the-world games myself, but I've played in some that were pretty tense and involved nothing more than getting the characters out of a trap (these were tournament games, of course). Anyone writing a "Dungeons and Dragons" movie could have gone either way. The plot for the first DnD movie (yes, there are supposed to be two more) is a pretty good adventure story with a serious goal, a complex villainous plot (people have to be swayed -- it's not simply a dark lord controlling legions of storm troopers versus some heroic fighter, as in "Masters of the Universe").
Nonetheless, a fantasy adventure is uncontrollable. There is nothing to prevent the players from naming their characters after soft-drinks and kicking in every door they find. You can't tell the players that defacing an altar in a temple is going to go unnoticed. Well, you can, but they may stop playing under you. You have to let some random die rolls determine how things go. And those dice might bring the cavalry rumbling over the horizon or a stampeding herd of dinosaurs. Worse, the cavalry troops might be riding some very hungry carnivorous dinosaurs. Are they friend or foe?
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