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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elfdart" data-source="post: 3032922" data-attributes="member: 31475">Oh please, the "science" in Star Trek is phonier than William Shatner's toupee.Depends on how you use them. If you're just going to use them as a shorter version version of Alan Hale Sr. (a chubby bearded actor who usually played Errol Flynn's sidekick), I see no reason why people would be interested. But if you looked outside the creatively constipated genre of Fantasy, you can turn them into fairly interesting characters. In many fairy tales, dwarfs are vicious, cruel and greedy. Rumpelstiltskin comes to mind. A story with a short, greedy little bastard as one of the main characters (and often from his point of view) has worked before. Danny DeVito made a career out of it, as did Joe Pesci. That's just dumb. Midichlorians are mentioned all of three times in the prequels. Moisture vaporators are mentioned three times in the original movies. Both are just plot devices. The former to explain how the Jedi are able to find possible recruits to their order (also why there are so few Jedi) and the latter to explain why Owen Lars had any use for droids in the middle of a desert. The midichlorians are just a symptom of being endowed with the Force -not the cause of it, just as certain antibodies are symptoms of a disease. The difference is that back in the 1970s, people were capable of watching a movie and noticing what was important and what wasn't. Star Wars owed more to The Searchers than Kurosawa. Luke Skywalker and Martin Pauley could have been swapped and nobody would know the difference.Speaking of Westerns, as I mentioned above, I have no use for cliches from Fantasy novels. They were hackneyed long before I was born and have sucked worse ever since. When I want an idea for a character in my D&D games, I look to westerns, horror, war movies, crime novels and any other genre I can think of. Yes, they are full of cliches too, but as Mae West used to say "If I have to choose between evils I'll take the one I haven't tried before." I've played two dwarf characters and both were quite memorable because they had nothing to do with the standard-issue dwarf of every fantasy novel. The first was based on Freddie Sykes in The Wild Bunch while the second was based on the Burl Ives character in an old Gregory Peck movie called The Big Country, both westerns. The best material for movies, TV shows, novels and games comes from those who refuse to be bound nd gagged by the cliches of a particular genre. Spy movies used to always revolve around guys in trenchcoats, fedoras and sunglasses stalking one another in the foggy, gloomy streets. Ian Fleming chucked most of that and added elements of Don Juan (especially his womanizing), as well as Victorian-era fantasies about exotic villains and their fiendish schemes that are undone in the nick of time. James Bond owed more to Sherlock Holmes, Fu Manchu, Hitchcock and Don Juan than it did to The Third ManStar Wars owes more to westerns, samurai movies, King Arthur and Wagner's operas than it does to science fiction. I'll take Star Wars and James Bond, and you can have the cookie-cutter Fantasy.</blockquote>

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