Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3929336" data-attributes="member: 2067">You're right.However, I'm going to pull out a videogame reference for comparison: Kingdom Hearts.For the uninformed, this is a videogame mashup of Squaresoft (the Final Fantasy poeple) and Disney (the animated empire people).It is positively dripping with references to places, events, and concepts (and styles!) from both series. East meets west, fairie tales meets dungeonpunk, *space travel* meets *chip and dale*. But while it drips with those archetypes, it manages to tell a story with them that is independnt of them, using them for it's own purposes and inventing new conceits where needed to make it hold together as a game itself. Sure, it has the Genie from Aladdin, and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7, but it also subsumes them both beneath it's own mantle of the power of friendship and the dangers of tampering with human nature (a bit of Merry Shelly meets after school specials).D&D was doing stuff like this before KH made it cool.It combined monks and barbarians, Vancian magic and Cthonian miscreants from beyond dimensions, wargames with storytelling....D&D has long been a fantastic hybrid of tastes, swirled together.Which makes it *very* adaptable.Kingdom Hearts can go from the land of Steamboat Willie to the depths of Tron to the Burtonesque weirdness of The Nightmare Before Christmas without skipping a beat, because it includes them all, and the central conceits of the game can bear a LOT of weight before collapsing.At the same time, it can't be the game that gives you the experience of being in early animation, or a live-action computer movie, or a stop-motion holiday musical comedy exclusively. Because it contains all those things, they'll shoulder up against each other and beat each other around and generally get their chocolate in each other's peanut butter.Similarly, D&D, because of it's polyglot nature, can ride a lot of tides. It can go from Weird Tales pulp jungles to, yes, Dungeonpunk pierced and be-tattooed heroes, to Anime-style "big guy with a big sword" to Fantasy Western to African Myth to Colonial Legends to Gothic Horror, and then go to something else next week. Likewise, it doesn't sit comfortably in one place for very long -- the more you try to make it fit Gothic Horror on a full-time basis, the more changes you need. But as part of the D&D salad, it makes the whole thing a little bit more interesting.D&D has always lacked focus, and because of this it has vastly appealed to very different styles of gamers. This is a Good Thing.My nervousness with 4e largely revolves around the central idea that, in trying to more tightly focus the rules, they've lost D&D's essential schizophrenia. This hits D&D right in it's junk, right in a VERY mighty strength for the game. The need for focus is real, but D&D has been unfocused and scatter shot for it's entire existence, and working against that is working against a real benefit of D&D (vs., say, WoW): that it can be what you imagine it to be, because it contains a little bit of everything.Doing this story-wise means that things not relevant for Points of Light (though that might be relevant in my own game, or your game) are cut. This makes D&D less able to be whatever I imagine it to be. Now, if I imagine it to be something not Points-of-Light-esque, we have a problem.</blockquote>

Verification