What makes a good franchise, and, coincidentally, a good tabletop role-playing game?
It boils down to two things: low-concept, and humor.
For example, my next dungeon is a “psionic dungeon.” The party is gonna have to make lots of Psionic Saving Throws if they want to progress within those eldritch alabaster walls. Let’s say there’s a giant flow of ⸨psionic⸩ lava rolling down the stairs. Those who make their psionic save won’t see anything but a regular set of stairs, and they can reach the top in two rounds; but those who fail the save see that huge wave of lava all too well, and if they get too close to it, they even feel the scorching ⸨psionic⸩ heat, and if they actually step into the lava, they take actual ⸨psionic⸩ fire damage… And they can die. And their friends can’t do anything about it, even if they keep yelling, “There Is No Friggin’ Lava! It’s All In Your Head!!!”
There’s a humor factor in this, of course. Big letters sculpted right into the floor of a room read: “Tangled Forest.” Everyone but the cleric saves against psionics. The party crosses the room in a few strides, but the cleric has to go around tree trunks and step over misshapen roots and fallen branches only he can see and touch. It takes him fourteen rounds to join his comrades at the other end of the room.
If you can insert a psionic dungeon or, let’s say, a zombified Walmart in your campaign, then that game is low-concept – and it is not a flaw, mind you.
You can have a zombified Walmart in D&D, why not? Omin Dran and the gang once ended up in Seattle and found a PlayStation console, didn’t they?
And you can have a zombified Walmart in Marvel, of course.
And you can even have a zombified Walmart in Star Wars; you just need a weird enough planet where strange vortices keep spewing out junk snatched from the future in “galaxies far, far away.”
You cannot have a zombified Walmart in Nibiru.
You cannot have a zombified Walmart in Dune: Adventures in the Imperium.
D&D has humor. Marvel has humor. Star Wars has humor.
That is key.
Purple Worms on strike, demanding better working conditions? Totally okay.
Arrakis sandworms on strike? Nope.
Twi’leks launching a new social media platform? No problem.
Mentats launching a new app in Dune? Nope.
Psionic dungeons in D&D? Sure. In Marvel? Sure. In Star Wars? Why not? The cave on Dagobah is basically a psionic dungeon.
Dune is very high-concept indeed, and it won’t make a very good franchise. Apart from the sandworms, there are no monsters to speak of. And you can’t play a wicked Ferengi or a woke Ithorian or a scheming Githyanki.
If you want your next game to be a zombified, psionic Walmart, you’re in for a treat, I guarantee it. If you just want your heavily-armored highborn from House Whatever to square off against heavily-armored fighters from House Harkonnen, well, I bet there are several video games out there that can do it for you – and much faster, too.
Whenever they make a high-concept thing like Curse of Strahd, they say it’s a demiplane – in other words, a pocket dimension inaccessible and thoroughly cut off from the rest of D&D. If you take a fantasy setting and make it high-concept without the demiplane hack, it becomes some sort of Middle-earth. You can’t have Tomb of Horrors in Middle-earth, because it would imply that Acererak once ruled – in lich form – a vast kingdom of the undead, and now you have to fit that element in your timeline. Is a lich stronger than a Maia, or weaker than the Witch-king? How did this vast kingdom of the living dead impact the Sindar, the Ents, the Dwarves?
Middle-earth only have something like 12 sorts of monsters in all. Ogres, Trolls, Uruk-hai, Orcs, Goblins, but no Gnolls, no Hobgoblins, no Troglodytes, no Lizardfolk, no Kobolds, no Hill, Stone, Frost, Fire, Cloud or Storm Giants, no Otyughs, no Xorns, no Ropers or Storopers, no Beholders, no Mind Flayers, no Umber Hulks, no Githyanki or Githzerai, no Mimics, no Piercers, no Trappers, no Carrion Crawlers, no Green Slimes, no Black Puddings, the list goes on and on and on—
You can’t have hundreds and hundreds of different monsters in a high-concept setting like Middle-earth or Dune.
Modrons? They’re from Nirvana. Devils? They come from the Nine Hells. Apart from the Timeless Halls and the Void, are there planes of existence in Tolkien’s cosmology?
High-concept means explanations.
Explain that Balrog? It is the last of its kind, created by Morgoth during the First Age, and annihilated – except for this one who fled the scene – when the Valar came and destroyed Thangorodrim.
Explain Shelob? Well, she’s also the last of her kind, a rather puny descendant of the great spider Ungoliant, the one who consumed the Trees of Valinor.
Now, explain those Gelatinous Cubes, please…?
Low-concept doesn’t need any explanations: it’s an open buffet, and you can have whatever the hell you want, really. Rabbitfolk? Yes! A Lamborghini? Why not! AD&D had cowboys from Boot Hill, after all. A Star Trek phaser? Sure! Dave Megarry’s druid actually had one. A karate robot? Absolutely! There’s one in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks…
What you can’t have is a crashed spaceship full of Vegepygmies in the Misty Mountains south of Rivendell. It would shatter Tolkien’s cohesiveness – like Peter Jackson did in The Hobbit when Bilbo and the Dwarves are trying to cross the mountains and stumble right into a titanic rock hurling match between 300-foot tall Earth elementals.
You broke the world, Peter.
The largest “monsters” in Middle-earth are Smaug and the Balrog; but if you suddenly introduce 300 feet tall elemental giants that could stomp on a Balrog with one foot and kill it stone dead – that changes the whole story since Beleriand. Indeed, if such gigantic creatures had existed, wouldn’t Morgoth had made good use of them? If he could recruit Ungoliant, he could also recruit those guys. Forget Gothmog: one such elemental giant would have sundered the ramparts of Gondolin like a sledgehammer pulverises a watermelon!
Peter Jackson took this well-balanced, high-concept world, and tried to turn it into a low-concept monster extravaganza not unlike D&D. Read my lips: It. Doesn’t. Work.
Imagine this scene in Dune: Harkonnen ships are leaving Giedi Prime to return to Arrakis, when all of a sudden they come across two Borg Cubes, or two Cylon Basestars. WTF?!?
This is essentially what Peter Jackson did in The Hobbit.
You can still take a low-concept setting and “high-conceptualize” it with lots of writing, abundant explanations, and the “demiplane” trick, but you can never take a high-concept setting and make it low-concept. Try as much as you like; you won’t succeed.
Some gamers on social media seem to hate Greyhawk, and I don’t understand why, since they also admit that Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms ultimately suffered from the same flaws as the World of Greyhawk. Lots and lots of monsters and weird kingdoms and character classes and planes of existence? “Fun” is the word you were looking for. All low-concept settings are more or less kludged together: it is the only way to go.
Low-concept makes for funnier games, while high-concept brings about better novels. Movies and TV shows are somewhere in between.
Disney seems to be more interested in buying low-concept franchises, which are easily manageable. I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney ended up buying Dungeons & Dragons. The endless deluge of bad TV shows and movies directed by J. J. Abrams would be something to Behold.
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