Humbleness as applied to development..

[Sheikh]

Never assume you know what other people think.

A better description of what I assumed is that I assumed others to have a similar nature or traits to myself and this is pretty common for humans to do.

[Fatback]

Not true I know I'm one of a kind

[Faerunner]

 

 

ASoIaF bored the heck out of me, read book one, stopped reading it after the first third of book 2(same for the tv show). I am just not in to low Fantasy, I don't see the point of it. If I am going to read something that is real and gritty, I'll pick up a historical novel or something similar. There was an interview with G.R.M. in the Rolling Stones magazine, in which he described how he felt about Tolkien's works. Here is the quote:

 

"Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone – they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?"

 

Who cares about tax policies? Is that the point of the story, does it add anything to it? I personally like to read epic fantasy and I expect the story and characters to be fantastic. I do not go in to an epic fantasy or sf book and say "man this is totally not believable".

 

Martin is an excellent example of someone who confuses "dark and terrible" with "realism." I don't especially like it when games aim for realism, because it's usually code for "everything is really awful for everybody all of the time." That's not realism, that's just a different kind of fantasy, and usually a worse one, because it's so self-conscious.

 

That said, I think Josh is aiming for verisimilitude, which isn't the same thing as realism. Verisimilitude, for a fantasy game, is just making sure that people and the systems they establish still behave like people and the systems they establish in our world. They deal with different things and the laws of physics might be different, but the people stay the same.

Amen regarding "realism" being confused with "everything's terrible for everyone all the time." I often see works with excessive doom and gloom being praised as "realistic" when, really, I think so many terrible things happening so often not so. Just as it's not very realistic for situations to be good and happy all the time, I don't think it's realistic to have so many terrible situations all the time.

 

As long as the characters act like believable people, I'm happy.