law, narrative

[tempter]

I went ahead and grabbed delegelata for my law school posting. Honestly, I'd rather set up an off-site WordPress account (or similar) and an RSS feed, but I don't really have the time or energy to deal with that and classes at the same time

Comments

[crowyhead]

Polaris is AWESOME! I played several sessions last summer and found it both fun and fascinating. I also found that the episodic nature of the scenes made for a really good exercise in learning to go for broke in my regular gaming. One of the things my gaming group has been playing with lately is the idea that while it can be fun to let some things gestate for several sessions, at some point you have to really go for it and commit, and more often than not it's better to do this sooner rather than later. We've been gaming most often with The Shadow of Yesterday, which really lends itself to this, since it tends to be ALL ABOUT the moments of drama.

[tempter]

Yeah, it is pretty cool. :)

Shadow of Yesterday is the Moorish campaign setting for it? I was THIS close (holds up fingers) to picking them both up at GenCon, but I ended up getting something else since glorgana and mess_iah had already decided to get that

[tempter]

Yeah, that was the Gaiman interview you linked to, right? That was actually what reminded me to order a copy. I'd heard of it years before, and always sort of wanted to read it, and since I was already at the computer when he mentioned it I just popped over to Amazon

[tempter]

I think it's really the bad instantiations of any archetype that are the most notable. They're almost caricatures of themselves. I haven't seen Eragon, but God knows there are enough bad fantasy/sci-fi stories and movies that fit the mold. (After I made the mistake of paying money to see Dragonheart, I swore off seeing dragon-based movies in theatres.)

Just because there's a structure that's common to most stories doesn't imply that there's any kind of surjective mapping from that structure back to the story. To put it another (slightly less mathy) way, that structure is a necessary, but not sufficient, element of these stories.

If you pull out that structure from, say, one of Neil's stories, you're left with curious and interesting characters that you want to know more about, just no plot to guide things along. Similarly, if you take a pile of crap and wrap it around the skeleton Campbell provides, you don't get a good story, you get a crap-covered skeleton.