NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8352948" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Originality has had a cultural vogue in the West for a couple centuries now, and thanks to globalism can tyrannize the whole world in our current epoch. For most of human history it was, if anything, the opposite extreme. Historically originality was more often looked on as suspect, and "novelty" and it's cognates have at times even had a negative connotation (which is likely the root of the specific word "novelty" also meaning a trivial thing). In a culture that is to any degree traditional, appeals to established ways of doing things have great persuasive power and art and entertainment is likely to be appreciated for how well it works within, references, and acknowledges some sort of accepted cultural canon. To take a classic (and classical) example modern students forced to read the Aeneid almost invariably scoff at the fact that the plot elements are all so highly derivative of Homer, whereas to Virgil's own audience this just marked that he was throwing down the gauntlet and doing a full on epic, and everything derivative of other works (he took lines wholesale from other epics) just better integrated the work with the literary canon, provided an erudite game of "spot the reference", and worked towards the goal of making the work more perfect rather than more original.I don't see our current cult of originality going anywhere anytime soon, if anything it will get more extreme before it gets "better" as people, at least where I'm at, seem to have only more contempt for the past and its denizens every day, and a culture that doesn't respect the past is basically always going to have a fetish for originality. I like originality well enough, but I wish people could moderate there fixation with it enough to better appreciate other ways works of art and entertainment can be good. We've gotten to the point where episodes in a series of space operas intentionally modeled on heroic epic cycles get lambasted for being too derivative of previous episodes. Really? An intentionally cyclical thing made in homage of cyclical things repeated itself? How dare it?!Meanwhile, in a tabletop RPG context, I really wish people would better appreciate not being original for basic practical reasons. When players are reliant on the descriptive ability and thoroughness of a game master for all their sensory perceptions having lots of things be as they expect them to be is a wonderful boon, even if that means being "unoriginal" or "tropey". It not only streamlines their correct perceiving and understanding of things, but it averts arguments over whether the person running the game failed to give them the needed information. It really does a disservice to "you can do anything" games if the setting and characters players interact with are routinely so disconnected from anything familiar that they have no idea what they should begin to attempt.</blockquote>

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