Recently, Rosewater invited viewers of his Tumblr to explain which plane(s) they disliked the most, and why. Two responses caught my eye. First:
bloodstonegoth said: Amonkhet or Kaladesh, best examples of how wolrdbuilding suffers when you insist on pushing your mediocre, character-driven story instead. Nothing on those planes felt natural.
The way they put it, it sounds like they're regarding character-driven to be low-wattage, or at least not something that conjures quality all by itself. Yet I'm not sure what else drives a story. (Please not prophecy. I absolutely despise the very concepts of Destiny and Fate.) Was the Weatherlight Saga driven by something besides its characters? Not that the Saga veered terribly far away from Dominaria; Rath and Mercadia were the only real outside places that Gerrard & Co. landed on, and neither of them were that dissimilar to Dominaria, I think (Rath's constant windstorms aside).
Granted the problem might be the kind of characters who are doing the driving right now--those with an unavoidable remove from the vast majority of the Multiverse's denizens. That arguably makes them hard to identify with. Arguably. A bit more importantly, they're generally doing a lot of plane-hopping. That doesn't leave as much time to flesh out a plane as we've had with Dominaria itself. Even when the planes are a good deal smaller than Dominaria.
That brings me to the first shackle I think I see in the setting, although it's one I've long thought of. Namely, does the conceit of the Blind Eternities and all the little planes within work against deep world-building? The Weatherlight Saga, as well as several of the sets that preceded it (i.e. Antiquities, The Dark, Fallen Empires, Ice Age, Alliances), fleshed out Dominaria, but that was it. I think Rath was the only outside plane that got development...and I'll confess I wasn't involved in the game at the time, so I don't know what depth it received, and how much its conflicts, precepts, et al. really differed from those associated with Dominaria. Point being, the storyline didn't give us much in the way of a feeling of a Multiverse of multiple planes. Fast-forward to Mirrodin onwards, and we get far more of a multiversal sense, yet I can't shake the feeling that none of the newly inaugurated planes, not even places like Mirrodin and Kamigawa, got as much attention as Dominaria did. (Only so much you can do with three novels per plane...) Maybe if we concentrated on four or five planes, you'd get deep world-building, but that still works against the Blind Eternities conceit. I just don't see a way to win here.
And now, interesting response number two:
iod256 said: I’m aware [of the conceits behind the Gruul]. Ravnica is in a marketing-determined status quo though, so Gruul will always just be another part of the city. Nature on Ravnica is tamed. There is no sense of things men could never understand or tackle. That’s what a city and technology represents: man’s dominance over the world. At that point, the fantasy feel is gone for me.
This coheres to a point we were talking about in an earlier thread, about why firearms don't seem to pop up outside of the Alaborn. My thought was that magic, at least to a point, takes the place of machinery. Assuming you can mass-produce them and make it possible for non-sorcerors to use them, wands would relieve the selection pressure for creating pistols, for instance. But this point--that technology compromises fantasy conceits--stands out. Even the most primal firearms probably smack of industrialism to most of us Anglophones (China might be a different story), so that...undermines the fantasy, and primacy of magic. Which makes me wonder if a high fantasy world must be at least somewhat parlous, as human primacy over nature must never be complete.
I will admit that on rereading Iod256's comment, I noticed the bit about Ravnica being caught in a status quo due to market research. Granted that according to Rosewater, little time has elapsed between the events of Dragon's Maze and Guilds of Ravnica. But at the same time, reliance on what the market currently demands seems to shackle storytelling itself. Such research only tells you the kinds of stories that are already liked. It's not going to tell you what new kinds of stories will be well received, although I doubt anything would elicit such information. Such reliance on what the market already likes necessarily constricts storytelling into preconceived channels--and I mean narrower than the idea that even by Homer's time, every possible type of story had already been told. Relying on the preconceived carries a real risk of undermining through boring the audience via predictability. So how to tell a sufficiently fresh story?
I left Magic shortly after Tempest was released. Then I returned during Shadows over Innistrad. To me the introduction, and reliance, on Planeswalkers like Bolas and Jace was a shock. Now, we're into Ravnica part three and quite frankly, the entire Planeswalkers story arch already bores the bejesus out of me. Just kill them already, keep them dead, and move on.
Here's the thing everyone seems to forget. We're the Planeswalkers. Think about what this means when a bunch of characters, who also happen to Planeswalkers, get watered down and printed onto a card. The story of Urza and Mishra happened in such a way that they were near myths. You never saw either one directly on a card. Just their artifacts or their spells or whatever. Those characters aren't printed until later. So it was up to the player, the Planeswalker, to piece the story together.
Instead, we get spoon fed a story arch played by the same characters over and over and all we get to do is to watch. It's no longer my battle, it's Jace's.
In my view, Amonkhet block really pushed this story based narrative to an extreme. Not even Homelands was that bad. At least we could ignore Sengir and his family.
Don't get me wrong. The Egyptian theme was fine. I just could've done without the whole Bolas thing.
Interesting part is, the Mending (which is what "watered down" planeswalkers as a whole) was written in because it appeared that people couldn't identify with the planeswalkers because they were too powerful, apparently even when considering the likes of Teferi and Jeska. So, Creative decided, the time had come to bring the planeswalkers down to earth, as it were.
Like as not, the time of mythic, planes-shattering battles is over. From my perspective, this might actually be a good thing. I'm rather suspicious of power fantasies in general--not good mental training for humility et al.--and pretending to be as devastatingly powerful as Urza definitely counts.
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bloodstonegoth said: Amonkhet or Kaladesh, best examples of how wolrdbuilding suffers when you insist on pushing your mediocre, character-driven story instead. Nothing on those planes felt natural.
The way they put it, it sounds like they're regarding character-driven to be low-wattage, or at least not something that conjures quality all by itself. Yet I'm not sure what else drives a story. (Please not prophecy. I absolutely despise the very concepts of Destiny and Fate.) Was the Weatherlight Saga driven by something besides its characters? Not that the Saga veered terribly far away from Dominaria; Rath and Mercadia were the only real outside places that Gerrard & Co. landed on, and neither of them were that dissimilar to Dominaria, I think (Rath's constant windstorms aside).
Granted the problem might be the kind of characters who are doing the driving right now--those with an unavoidable remove from the vast majority of the Multiverse's denizens. That arguably makes them hard to identify with. Arguably. A bit more importantly, they're generally doing a lot of plane-hopping. That doesn't leave as much time to flesh out a plane as we've had with Dominaria itself. Even when the planes are a good deal smaller than Dominaria.
That brings me to the first shackle I think I see in the setting, although it's one I've long thought of. Namely, does the conceit of the Blind Eternities and all the little planes within work against deep world-building? The Weatherlight Saga, as well as several of the sets that preceded it (i.e. Antiquities, The Dark, Fallen Empires, Ice Age, Alliances), fleshed out Dominaria, but that was it. I think Rath was the only outside plane that got development...and I'll confess I wasn't involved in the game at the time, so I don't know what depth it received, and how much its conflicts, precepts, et al. really differed from those associated with Dominaria. Point being, the storyline didn't give us much in the way of a feeling of a Multiverse of multiple planes. Fast-forward to Mirrodin onwards, and we get far more of a multiversal sense, yet I can't shake the feeling that none of the newly inaugurated planes, not even places like Mirrodin and Kamigawa, got as much attention as Dominaria did. (Only so much you can do with three novels per plane...) Maybe if we concentrated on four or five planes, you'd get deep world-building, but that still works against the Blind Eternities conceit. I just don't see a way to win here.
And now, interesting response number two:
iod256 said: I’m aware [of the conceits behind the Gruul]. Ravnica is in a marketing-determined status quo though, so Gruul will always just be another part of the city. Nature on Ravnica is tamed. There is no sense of things men could never understand or tackle. That’s what a city and technology represents: man’s dominance over the world. At that point, the fantasy feel is gone for me.
This coheres to a point we were talking about in an earlier thread, about why firearms don't seem to pop up outside of the Alaborn. My thought was that magic, at least to a point, takes the place of machinery. Assuming you can mass-produce them and make it possible for non-sorcerors to use them, wands would relieve the selection pressure for creating pistols, for instance. But this point--that technology compromises fantasy conceits--stands out. Even the most primal firearms probably smack of industrialism to most of us Anglophones (China might be a different story), so that...undermines the fantasy, and primacy of magic. Which makes me wonder if a high fantasy world must be at least somewhat parlous, as human primacy over nature must never be complete.
I will admit that on rereading Iod256's comment, I noticed the bit about Ravnica being caught in a status quo due to market research. Granted that according to Rosewater, little time has elapsed between the events of Dragon's Maze and Guilds of Ravnica. But at the same time, reliance on what the market currently demands seems to shackle storytelling itself. Such research only tells you the kinds of stories that are already liked. It's not going to tell you what new kinds of stories will be well received, although I doubt anything would elicit such information. Such reliance on what the market already likes necessarily constricts storytelling into preconceived channels--and I mean narrower than the idea that even by Homer's time, every possible type of story had already been told. Relying on the preconceived carries a real risk of undermining through boring the audience via predictability. So how to tell a sufficiently fresh story?
In terms of #1....
I left Magic shortly after Tempest was released. Then I returned during Shadows over Innistrad. To me the introduction, and reliance, on Planeswalkers like Bolas and Jace was a shock. Now, we're into Ravnica part three and quite frankly, the entire Planeswalkers story arch already bores the bejesus out of me. Just kill them already, keep them dead, and move on.
Here's the thing everyone seems to forget. We're the Planeswalkers. Think about what this means when a bunch of characters, who also happen to Planeswalkers, get watered down and printed onto a card. The story of Urza and Mishra happened in such a way that they were near myths. You never saw either one directly on a card. Just their artifacts or their spells or whatever. Those characters aren't printed until later. So it was up to the player, the Planeswalker, to piece the story together.
So we got to visit Urza's Tower or Mishra's Workshop and leverage their toys in our own battles.
Instead, we get spoon fed a story arch played by the same characters over and over and all we get to do is to watch. It's no longer my battle, it's Jace's.
In my view, Amonkhet block really pushed this story based narrative to an extreme. Not even Homelands was that bad. At least we could ignore Sengir and his family.
Don't get me wrong. The Egyptian theme was fine. I just could've done without the whole Bolas thing.
Like as not, the time of mythic, planes-shattering battles is over. From my perspective, this might actually be a good thing. I'm rather suspicious of power fantasies in general--not good mental training for humility et al.--and pretending to be as devastatingly powerful as Urza definitely counts.