Imperial officers refrain from shooting down the escape pod, because “there’s no life forms” on board… AND because there would be no Star Wars at all if they’d actually destroyed it. There really is no other reason.
Boba Fett falls into the Sarlacc’s gaping mouth because the trilogy draws to an end, and Fett just isn’t relevant anymore. There is no other reason.
When you reach chapter 19, and your book has 21 chapters, start tying up loose ends; it is what the producers of Lost famously failed to understand.
Eagles fly into Mordor and pick up Frodo and Sam because, again, the trilogy draws to an end, and two additional chapters with the Hobbits scrambling to get out and Gandalf and Aragorn desperately searching for them in and around Mount Doom would be both painful to write and painful to read. Sometimes you need shortcuts — mostly towards the end. Ask any writer.
About Tomb of Horrors, someone said, “Use divination magic to find out where the treasure room is, then dig directly down until you hit it.” Nice shortcut, aye; but that’s a game, not a story. On one hand, you have the supra-genius intelligence of a millennia-old demilich, and on the other hand you have the down-to-earth cleverness of a garden-variety tomb robber. Don’t you think Acererak would have thought of that even before his servants began building his eternal resting place? My money is on the demilich.
Don’t you think Sauron would have thought of the eagles flying over Mount Doom and dropping the One Ring straight into it? The guy is at least 50,000 years old; give him some credit.
Someone else asked on Quora, “Why not give the Ring to Ungoliant? Ungoliant eats the ring, destroys it, and kills Sauron. Game over.”
Well, we’re talking about a story, not a game.
People nowadays are so accustomed to Pokémon cards, it literally never occurs to them that all the creatures and items of a legendarium don’t necessarily exist at the same time and in the same killer deck. With Tolkien, you just need a teeny-tiny bit more attention to detail.
Ungoliant vanishes from Middle-earth at least two thousand years before the One Ring is even forged; it’s like asking, “Why not give the Maccabees an AR-15 to help them win the Battle of Elasa in 160 B.C.?”
But if you gave the ring to Ungoliant and she devoured it — what then? No Lord of the Rings trilogy? It’s the Star Wars escape pod conundrum all over again; they shoot it down, Beru and Owen live, Luke stays home, Han never meets Leia, etc.
Do you want writers to tell rich, compelling stories… or do you want to be fed daily puzzles to solve? Make up your mind already.
Our computer-programmer hive mind is getting very good at solving practical, mechanical problems. So we take the stories that we used to love, and turn them into mechanical tidbits.
“Where was Radagast the Brown during the War of the Ring?”
“What were the Valar doing during The Lord of the Rings?”
Expert puzzle solvers high on Red Bull.
The thing is, it’s not a game, it’s a story, and you don’t need to min / max it.
Radagast has never shown any interest in the affairs of Gondor, Rohan, or even Rivendell. It’s like asking, “Where was Gandhi during World War II?”
The Valar are gods, and they left Middle-earth at the close of the First Age. Some of the Eldar elected to stay, but it was their choice. Don’t ask, “Where were Yahweh and Archangel Michael during World War II?”
In a wargame, you’d be stupid not to use every single one of your assets. Don’t leave any wizard on the sidelines. Maximize your win percentage.
Stories are a completely different animal.
When you sit down to read a story — kill the switch; you’re not on your Xbox anymore.
Still on the subject of the Tomb of Horrors, somebody else said, “This is the kind of dungeon that needs a respawn mechanic at the entrance just to be tolerable.”
This one’s interesting. Tomb is indeed a game — but it also has a story. If you are an undead archmage who ruled for millennia over a kingdom of the living dead, and now you’re building a final resting place for your earthly remains, why in hell would you include a “respawn mechanic” at the entrance? It defeats the purpose.
The person who writes such a comment chooses to ignore the Story aspect and focus solely on the Game side. Video gamer, for sure. They’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands of dungeons, and they’re all pretty much the same to them.
But it is not the same.
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Acererak’s tomb are both “dungeons,” yet they are two very, very different stories—
I’m not a video gamer myself, but I saw my friends play lots of video games over the years, from World of Warcraft to L.A. Noire to Assassin's Creed, and one thing I keep witnessing is the player skipping over old letters lying on tables or desks, because it’s usually a whole page of text that would take them too long to read. They prefer moving on immediately to the next stage or dungeon level. And I guess the designers know this very well: they make it so that players can still finish the game even though they haven’t read all the clues and / or pieced together the whole puzzle / backstory. Except perhaps in something like Myst, where the puzzles really are the main thing.
Games — all games, not just video games — had a pervasive effect on our collective consciousness: they made us dumber. On forums, you regularly come across questions like, “Why is Gandalf afraid of Sauron if they’re both Maiar?” Indeed, why is someone afraid of someone who is the same Thing / Class / Order? A level 9 wizard shouldn’t be afraid of a level 9 wizard, right? An Orange magic item should be more powerful than a Blue magic item, but it souldn’t be less powerful than any other Orange magic item, right?
I’m letting you in on a big secret here: magic items don’t have colors, and wizards (or any other class for that matter) don’t have levels. Those are just game mechanics; even in the fictional world of the game, they are not “real.”
Every single sword +1 has its own story, who created it, and why. Magic items aren’t created in batches and according to spec, so there’s no reason why they should be comparable or equivalent.
Green lightsabers, blue lightsabers, red lightsabers, fuchsia lightsabers, darksabers: it doesn’t mean a thing. People were startled in ’83 when they realized Luke’s lightsaber had changed colors, but that decision simply came from the fact that blue wasn’t really popping out against the perfect blue skies of Buttercup Valley, California (where the Sarlacc scene was shot). That’s all there is to it. Green ain’t better than blue. Stop obsessing over the thing. It’s not a ranking system like red belt, blue belt, black belt. It’s just a color — like the color of your neighbor’s Honda Civic.
Now, let’s replace the word Maia with the word Aristocrat. During the fifteenth Century, the Dukes of Burgundy were among the most powerful of all Aristocrats. But you could find a lowly Duke somewhere in the Italian backcountry who had almost no power or influence whatsoever… and yet he was still an Aristocrat. The lowly Duke of Gravina would piss his trentain trousers if he were ever summoned to Burgundy to appear at the court of Duke John the Fearless. But how can that be? How can a Duke be afraid of a Duke when they’re both the same Thing?
It’s because life is much, much more complicated than a game.
Ainur, Valar and Maiar — they’re not just plain categories like “Break” or “EX” or “Mega” or whatever. It’s a pantheon, not a kid’s game.
One YouTuber complained that Ralph Bakshi’s Saruman wore a red robe. “What Part of Saruman the WHITE Didn’t They Understand?”
Again with the damn colors.
“The White” is a title, not a dress code. The Black Prince never wore black, and only wielded his black shield in battle — once or twice a year. Again, this thing is an entire pantheon, not a cards game.
When Lucifer first rebelled, did God banish him from Heaven using a level 4 slot or a level 9 slot?
See what I mean? It’s absurd.
Well, I’d rather know whether Moses’ staff is a Staff of the Serpent or a Staff of the Magi, because it obviously can’t be both at the same time, right? That’d be BREAKING THE GAME, DUDE!!!!!
It’s right there in the very name of the channel: Game Rant. As in, Game.
A literary work ain’t a game.
Every story ever told don’t need to be gamified.
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Explaining everything all the time is exhausting, but some folks can’t help it. For instance, Steven Erikson’s books were inspired by years and years of tabletop role-playing — and it shows. Now, some readers feel the urge to “break down” the series’ magic system, and perhaps take it back to something gameable.
So you play TTRPGs, write a book about it, the book gets published, one of your players also writes a book about that game, it gets published too, you go on and write nine more books in the series, it becomes very popular, and then someone turns the magic in those books into a RPG-like system… We’ve come full circle, haven’t we?
Game → Story → Game
Now, explain The Laundry Files’ magic system. It’s definitely not your classic Chaosium stuff.
And what about the magic in American Gods? And what about the magic in Ash: A Secret History? Try explaining that.
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In a fantasy novel, you’ve got a story, but no game mechanics.
In a video game or tabletop RPG, you’ve got both story and mechanics.
In classic arcade games like Gauntlet or Gauntlet II, there is essentially no story, just rooms, monsters, treasure, more rooms, more monsters, more treasure, on and on and on.
Don’t let it all become one single big messy entertainment goulash, and you might want to thank me later.
A final note to aspiring fantasy authors: avoid building your intrigue around a tangible MacGuffin, because the relentless Red Bull gamer brains will unquestionably find a way to “solve” your great story without the need of your great story. Keep your MacGuffin vague, like Helen of Troy’s stunning beauty, like Adrian Veidt’s convoluted deceit — stuff that can’t be devoured by Ungoliant or dropped into Mount Doom.
