Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I will never subscribe to the oft-repeated principle that new takes are always better takes. Nothing is a direct incline, and I'm very tired of hearing the opposite position being treated as some kind of axiom.Well, no.
That's not how marketing works. You cannot deny the power of name recognition. But, with name recognition does not necessarily come anything more than a passing familiarity with the brand. So, it's very, very powerful to whack an old name onto an idea and then change that idea.
Hell, we're playing a version of "Dungeons and Dragons" that would be completely unrecognizable to someone from 1980. Or 1990 for that matter. The idea that D&D shouldn't be called D&D because it's different just isn't going to fly.
And, let's not forget, that a lot of these ideas change over time. Dragonlance from 1986 compared to Dragonlance in 1996 is a very, very different beast. A whole lot of things got changed in 10 years. And a whole of things got rewritten. The only thing is that now, instead of those changes only being seen by a tiny handful of die hard fans that kept up with it, the new Dragonlance will be seen by an audience that probably dwarfs the size of the original audience.
Which means that there are a lot more things to pay attention to. Writing for the couple of thousand people who were going to see DL back in the day is different now. It just is.
It's kind of like the changes to the Ring of Power series on Amazon. Yuppers, they changed Middle Earth. Very much. But, there's a difference between some Oxford professor writing a book that he could only get published in a vanity press and the billion dollar investment Amazon is doing. Of course there will be changes. That's inevitable. And, that's art. We have a thousand different takes on Shakespeare. A hundred different takes on Sherlock Holmes. I have no idea how many takes on Frankenstein. So, yeah, we're going to get a new take on Dragonlance.
And that's a good thing. Otherwise Dragonlance goes the way of Nimh. Or Thieves World. Or Lankhmar.
New authors bringing in fresh takes and new ideas is a good thing.
And, while I'm sure its important to many, marketing and what will appeal to the most people and bring in the most money does not matter to me.