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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 3581393" data-attributes="member: 3887">And by 'reject' they usually mean 'vary slightly'. Which is fine, BTW.Who doesn't like new content? I mean, outside of the autistic community.I think too many rules subsystems in the same game are counterproductive.By this logic, the creation of any new or and music becomes 'somewhat dubious', seeing as the vast majority of work is built upon the stuff that came before it and doesn't represent a radical departure.Perhaps we should have stopped at the Dutch Masters and the Gregorian chant. Seriously though, do you believe something has to be 'wholly new' in order to justify it's creation, especially since we're talking about a hobby. It's not like we're frittering away grant money. Some people enjoying learning about new stuff that's kinda similar to old stuff they already have. This explains the popularity of fantasy fiction. Wait, make that genre fiction. Or most fiction, come to think of it. Nothing new under the sun and all. Tekumel is a niche product. Are you arguing against the creation of niche products? I imagine that Forgotten Realms leaves a lot of M.A.R. Barker fans rather cold.Rich and often contradictory, to the point where the names are almost reduced to cyphers to which almost anything can be attributed. Not that there's anything wrong with that.I did something similar with my homebrew, coincidentally enough, called CITY, Except that I tried to keep the familiar archetypes while ditching as much of the racial baggage that I didn't want as I could. So I have a skinny, pointy-eared magically adept race called the Shirac, who could be summed up as 'Sufi elves, with a dash of Jedi'. In fact, they began life simply as the 'sand elves'. But it took too much effort to differentiate them from iconic elf, so I decided to approach things from the opposite direction. I looked at the archetype behind 'elf' and tried to describ the superset that 'elf' was a subset of, namely, skinny, mystic pointy-eared being. So while my Shirac aren't elves, they're derived from the same archetype that elves are. Or so I said at the time I was writing my homebrew. Of course, I was also drinking a lot then, so take what I say with a grain of salt, and perhaps a lime.See above. I agree with the general sentiment. It's nice to work off of a shared base of references, but I disagree that entities like 'elf' or 'hobbit' should be treated as tropes or universals. So what you're saying is 'Know your players'. Fine. And some groups want nothing but published settings. You're right about the value of playing with tropes, but err on side of caution when it comes to the extent to which you can and should play with them. A lot of people take great pleasure in customizing their games of choice. So what if they come up with totally original content. Sometimes a few palette swaps or a racing stripe down the side is enough. And you shouldn't begrudge them that.</blockquote>

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