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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ProgBard" data-source="post: 7010893" data-attributes="member: 6803722">To expand a bit on my previous:Many fans who engage immersively with complex, long-running fandoms have a difficult time understanding that the things they find rewarding - complexity, long histories, the connections that can only be made throught deep immersion - are offputting to folks who are coming to the same material for the first time. The comics world has been dealing with this forever, obviously, and continuity fetishists in the funnybook realm can be relied on to make the same complaints we're hearing here every time there's a reboot or a retcon - including the accusation that those money-grubbing so-and-sos at Big Corporate Media HQ are catering to the shallow, lumpen masses who don't know this stuff like we do and don't want to. But the thing is that the lumpen masses have just as legit a claim on the material as anyone, and making them feel welcome is a good and wise thing (and not just for the bottom line).I say that some fans have a hard time getting this, but at their worst, they get it perfectly, and it's just what they want: the ability to draw tribal boundaries so the Real True Fen get rewarded for their engagement and the hoi polloi are kept outside the gates. I hope I don't need to draw a line under how ugly this is.Fandom isn't like marriage; you don't get special prizes for multiple decades of commitment. Nor do you get to demand gold stars from content creators because you did work the rabble weren't willing to do by digesting and internalizing years upon years of continuity. You might feel like that's what makes your stuff special and exciting, but the folks who appreciate it for other things aren't wrong. Believe me, as someone who loves a number of things that are long, old, complex, and more interesting the closer you examine them - Thick as a Brick, I'm looking at you - I get how tempting it is to roll your eyes when someone comes along who's only digging on it for the surface aspects. But the truth is that the surface aspects need to be the point. If Thick as a Brick isn't first of all a good album, all the rest of it is just wankery; it has to be listenable to someone with a baseline interest in the style of thing it is but who isn't on the inside about the history of why it's an in-joke about concept albums and who isn't interested in reading the album sleeve.All the above applies even more strongly to interactive media like RPGs. Which is why I think the D&D team is making a savvy choice in the way they're looking at the Realms and continuity. They're not saying the folks who engage immersively with Realmslore are stupid for doing so - indeed, what I'm hearing is that folks who know it all that well are going to appreciate various Easter eggs and internal connections that are going to pass everyone else right by - they're just saying, in essence, that each book in the 5e line needs to be a good album first. If everything you need to play it isn't in the game, it's not doing its primary job. And, to flail on my point a little more, the players who never look beyond the covers of the 5e books but still fall in love with the setting are not Doin It Rong. They get to call themselves fans too.Our hobby is a big enough world for all kinds of players. It has to be, if it wants to survive. So maybe wishing for a playground that makes it smaller and more insular isn't such a great thing - no matter how special and unique that playground would be.</blockquote>

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