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mewse posted:Yes but 50 thousand. How many football fields would that be, lined up end to end imagine typing even one word fifty thousand times. and i bet most of his posts have more than one word? that's like a huge friggin book
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Nov 19, 2018 04:57
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How come more fantasy novels don't have sports in them
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Nov 19, 2018 05:04
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Big Bowie Bonanza posted:How come more fantasy novels don't have sports in them Rowling has commented on this, apparently the quidditch matches were the hardest part of the series to write. It was a necessary part of the school-days setting but it was apparently quite difficult for her to 1) set up a set of rules for a fantastical game in a fantastic setting and she felt she kinda failed because the game doesn't really make much sense, and 2) even harder in an ongoing series to tell new quidditch stories every book and still have them be original and interesting. Data Graham posted:
My favorite detail is the scene where the bathwater goes cold and has to be re-warmed. Like, even he knows this poo poo has gone on too long.
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Nov 19, 2018 05:14
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Big Bowie Bonanza posted:How come more fantasy novels don't have sports in them Good news! Sword of Truth has Ja'La dh Jin (I actually looked that up!), something like fantasy football. It's horribly written, just like most of the rest of the books, of course.
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Nov 19, 2018 05:48
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Torrannor posted:Good news! Sword of Truth has Ja'La dh Jin (I actually looked that up!), something like fantasy football. It's horribly written, just like most of the rest of the books, of course. fantasy football is too generous. libertarian murder football written by someone who has never watched football
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Nov 19, 2018 05:58
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Torrannor posted:Good news! Sword of Truth has Ja'La dh Jin (I actually looked that up!), something like fantasy football. It's horribly written, just like most of the rest of the books, of course. Beaten. I was gonna bring this up as a good reason against sports in fantasy.
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Nov 19, 2018 10:10
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Does chess count as a sport?quote:The three of them manage to reach the isolated city of Manator. Gahan ventures into the city seeking food and water, but is tricked and taken prisoner by the inhabitants. Tara and Ghek are also captured. In Manator, captives are forced to a fight to the death in the arena, in a modified version of Jetan, a popular Barsoomian board game resembling Chess; the living version uses people as the game pieces on a life-sized board, with each taking of a piece being a duel to the death. Because that's some classic poo poo right there
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Nov 19, 2018 14:10
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Does chess count as a sport? I loved those books so much growing up.
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Nov 19, 2018 14:28
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eke out posted:fantasy football is too generous. libertarian murder football written by someone who has never watched football That's what I thought, but I've never seen a game of (American) football, either, so I wasn't sure.
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Nov 19, 2018 14:55
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Course now I'm picturing a bunch of sword-wielding medieval heroes sitting around a campfire drawing up their rotisserie rosters and poring over stats on Draft Kings.
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Nov 19, 2018 15:09
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I fully believe that Sanderson has a fantasy game he is just waiting to throw in a stormlight book. It will be 60 pages and could act as a rule book if you wanted to play the it IRL.
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Nov 19, 2018 16:10
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I'm more thinking of a sport that isn't chess and can't involve a weapon like fencing and isn't people just boxing You end up with poo poo like pro bending I think because there's not a whole lot of intersectionality between sports fans and fantasy writers
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Nov 19, 2018 16:25
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CharlestheHammer posted:I fully believe that Sanderson has a fantasy game he is just waiting to throw in a stormlight book. It will be 60 pages and could act as a rule book if you wanted to play the it IRL. Warbreaker 2 will just be the rulebook for... that game with the colored stones. I'm blanking on a name, if one was given to it at all.
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Nov 19, 2018 16:32
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Big Bowie Bonanza posted:I'm more thinking of a sport that isn't chess and can't involve a weapon like fencing and isn't people just boxing You also end up with the Tournament Problem Games and sports are inherently, almost definitionally, unimportant. Whatever the book is about, it's almost certainly going to be inherently more important than the sport game, so why are the characters all playing sportball when the world is on fire or the orphanage is about to be condemned or BuckBeak is gonna get executed or ToonTown is going to be Erased or whatever it is? So in poo poo like Dragonball it's half the world is on the line and the other half of the time for some reason we're supposed to care about some dumb-rear end tournament. The other reason sports are important in the real world is that they function as proxies for tribal identities -- Philly, America, etc. -- and none of those tribes are present in a fantasy world soooo why would we care about their sportsball? You do occasionally get things like Myth Directions where it's just "The Gang Plays the Big Game" type plots
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Nov 19, 2018 16:40
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I think it works when the sport is part of the storyline like in the video game pyre where everyone's stuck in this lovely situation and the only way to escape is to play ritual fantasy basketball under your captor's rules to escape
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Nov 19, 2018 16:53
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Sports can work in a Sanderson book because so many chapters don’t really have a looming threat but just characters doing stuff to flesh out the world. Like that chapter with the fishing village or whatever.
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Nov 19, 2018 17:03
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Big Bowie Bonanza posted:I think it works when the sport is part of the storyline like in the video game pyre where everyone's stuck in this lovely situation and the only way to escape is to play ritual fantasy basketball under your captor's rules to escape In fantasy or SF though that usually turns into Game of Death style thing -- Hunger Games, Hunters of the Red Moon, etc.
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Nov 19, 2018 17:05
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:In fantasy or SF though that usually turns into Game of Death style thing -- Hunger Games, Hunters of the Red Moon, etc. Definitely, I liked in pyre that you didn't die for losing you just had to spend more time playing the game
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Nov 19, 2018 17:08
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CharlestheHammer posted:Sports can work in a Sanderson book because so many chapters don’t really have a looming threat but just characters doing stuff to flesh out the world. Like that chapter with the fishing village or whatever. I'm honestly kind of surprised in the wax/wayne era there's no coinshot/lurcher sports
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Nov 19, 2018 17:09
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Big Bowie Bonanza posted:I'm honestly kind of surprised in the wax/wayne era there's no coinshot/lurcher sports Rioters and Soothers embedded in the crowds Even better it's like a meta-competition between the teams' fans: who has the best emotional Allomancers on their side?
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Nov 19, 2018 17:20
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Sab669 posted:Warbreaker 2 will just be the rulebook for... that game with the colored stones. I'm blanking on a name, if one was given to it at all. I think it never is mentioned by name, which is extra funny. It's just "the game with the coloured stones" and he keeps winning.
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Nov 19, 2018 17:25
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Tahirovic posted:I think it never is mentioned by name, which is extra funny. It's just "the game with the coloured stones" and he keeps winning. I thought it was just him playing marbles, but I could be wrong. I know I don't know the drat rules to that.
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Nov 19, 2018 18:09
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It sounds like a long range Boccia / Boccia for giants or something similar. It does have rules but it's only stated that that Lightsong doesn't know them.
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Nov 19, 2018 18:15
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seaborgium posted:I thought it was just him playing marbles, but I could be wrong. I know I don't know the drat rules to that. Nah, it's not marbles because the colors and positions are more important, and the rules are apparently so complex that they just have someone there to tell you the score. Which is what makes Lightsong just loving around and winning all the funnier. Vasher was playing it too when he was on Roshar in guise of sword master Zahel
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Nov 19, 2018 18:15
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CharlestheHammer posted:I fully believe that Sanderson has a fantasy game he is just waiting to throw in a stormlight book. It will be 60 pages and could act as a rule book if you wanted to play the it IRL. Big Bowie Bonanza posted:I'm honestly kind of surprised in the wax/wayne era there's no coinshot/lurcher sports
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Nov 19, 2018 18:32
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Cicero posted:Giving me flashbacks to pro bending in Legend of Korra. poo poo, I knew something was tugging at the back of my mind about this subject. FWIW I thought that pro-bending stuff worked really well in-universe, I loved the whole idea of it and it made total sense.
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Nov 19, 2018 18:35
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Big Bowie Bonanza posted:How come more fantasy novels don't have sports in them They are, they just don't normally have modern sports because it's not a modern setting. Though you do occasionally find not-soccer or not-baseball in some series.
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Nov 19, 2018 19:58
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Data Graham posted:poo poo, I knew something was tugging at the back of my mind about this subject. Yeah pro bending made sense to me. It seemed like the rules were well thought out and there were no obviously cheap win conditions
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Nov 19, 2018 21:34
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The problem with most fantasy sports is, holy poo poo, why aren't the fields littered in corpses Like given Quidditch speeds and heights it's played at bodies should just be droppin'
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Nov 19, 2018 21:38
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The problem with most fantasy sports is, holy poo poo, why aren't the fields littered in corpses It's a sport that takes place in a magic school where the focus is tilted heavily towards defensive and support magic. Maybe someone skimming the ground and suddenly crashing could still happen, but someone falling out of the air a few dozen feet and hitting the ground without a ref or some other wizard catching them? The biggest question is why the school has a house that is literally "we exist to produce assholes and evil wizards" and that nobody thinks it might be a bad idea.
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Nov 19, 2018 21:58
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Most fantasy novels are medieval schtick where everyone is fightin' all the time, so the "sports" are duels like in Kushner's Swordspoint or GRRM's jousting tourneys or Abercrombie's fencing tournament with Jezal and Gorst in the first trilogy. In the magic school subgenre there's Not Quidditch like in the Magicians. No really successful fantasy novel has done anything like Ian M. Banks did in Player of Games, as far as I'm aware. A Dresden Files novel might have done something with the aztec stone ball game, but it wasnt super memorable.
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Nov 19, 2018 22:51
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Pratchett did sports kinda ok. He had not-Chess in Thud and not-soccer/rugby in Unseen Academicals.
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Nov 19, 2018 22:54
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Pro bending is probably the coolest implementation of fantasy sports using the actual elements of the setting. I can see the modern-set mistborn having cool magic sports, but iron and steel allomancy are the only cool flashy powers that would work in sports and there's only so much you can do with those two.
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Nov 20, 2018 00:05
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I would say the reason there arent more organized sports in fantasy is because organized sports are very much an invention of the industrial era and most fantasy takes place before that
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Nov 20, 2018 01:04
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I would say the reason there arent more organized sports in fantasy is because organized sports are very much an invention of the industrial era and most fantasy takes place before that I thought football (the non-US version) started formalizing rules prior to the Industrial Age.
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Nov 20, 2018 01:07
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I mean the color factions of Rome were a huge thing for a long time. Hell they survived the dark days of the Arab incursions.
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Nov 20, 2018 01:56
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Don't forget the famous ballgames practiced by various pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies.
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Nov 20, 2018 02:10
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean the color factions of Rome were a huge thing for a long time. Hell they survived the dark days of the Arab incursions. Oh, yeah I forgot completely about the Roman chariot racing. It was a professional sport with four main teams: Red, Blue, Green and White. Drivers got paid per race and there was a HUGE betting culture around the races. Since it was free for people to attend in the cheap seats, a LOT of people followed it. Circus Maximus could hold upwards of 250,000 people. Before that even the Greeks had hippodrome races and the Olympic Games could be used as evidence of organized sports. But the Roman races is one of the first example of professional athletes, I believe, if not THE first.
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Nov 20, 2018 02:17
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navyjack posted:Pratchett did sports kinda ok. He had not-Chess in Thud and not-soccer/rugby in Unseen Academicals. In Thud it's actually not-Hnefatafl.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games
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Nov 20, 2018 04:35
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It's SF not fantasy but there's plenty of entertainingly written sport in the Culture novels by Iain M Banks, including batball, dog fighting, and dinner games of skill with the Affront in Excession, lava river rafting and other tidbits in Look to Windward, and then pretty much the entire plot of The Player of Games is spun out through games and sport.
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Nov 20, 2018 16:16
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