NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Primal" data-source="post: 4725964" data-attributes="member: 30678">I didn't mean to -- that was a generic comment based on what's become a mantra ("Burden of Lore and Mary Sues needed to go") to many who defend the changes. I'm sorry if it sounded like that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I still stand behind my point that Eberron has thousands of pages of quality lore (at least that's what my friends playing in Eberron say) vs. a similar amount in FR; of course, if we count *everything* that's ever published for FR (including all the material that was later corrected/"retconned" by FR Lorelords or outright ignored by fans), it's different. In the end, most authors are faced with the fact that you always more or less write according to limitations imposed on you by the publisher; if I submitted a FR novel to WoTC, I'm fairly sure that I'd have to rewrite large parts of it, or they might even do it themselves (as happened in editing with many of Ed's novels; 'Spellfire' was mangled so badly that IIRC Ed didn't even recognise some parts of it). That's what you have to accept, if you want to become an aspiring author. Even if you wrote a novel set in your own world, in very few cases it would be published "as is". When you do something you enjoy for living, such as writing RPG stuff or fantasy fiction, it's not the same as writing material for your campaign or . If you still can get satisfaction and feel inspired, that's great; but professional authors can't always wait for the inspiration to hit them, or argue that something in the setting must change or they can't write the stuff they were hired to do. I once read Stephen King saying that to be a successful author you need to write every day -- whether you feel like it or not.FR and Eberron may be imaginary worlds, but I wonder how many fans they would have without the depth and quality of lore that's both "accurate" and internally consistent? Not necessarily. Using FR as an example, I can't really recommend too many novels published during the first ten years when the authors had more "creative freedom" (often resulting in contradictory or simply bad stuff). For example, Anthony was apparently given "free reins" with 'Escape from Undermountain', even though Waterdeep and Undermountain was pretty well detailed in several FR accessories, and the end product conflicts canon on every page. If they had limited his creative input, I believe the novel would have been better, or at least more coherent and consistent with the existing Realmslore ('Once Around the Realms' is in a league of its own, but let's not get there). Then there were novels and accessories that detailed unexplored areas; this, as we know, resulted in RW cultures being more or less "shoehorned" into FR among other things. Boring? Formulaic? Yes and yes, even though the authors (to my knowledge) had free hands with most of those areas.  If this all comes down to "better creative results without any restraints", wouldn't that kind of imply that details and history are bad for RPG settings? And that all those setting-specific DDi articles shouldn't be published, as well? Especially as you can't expect every freelancer to commit to the subscription.Alright, that was meant as a sarcastic comment; of course people are free to discuss their feelings.  Well, then there's a problem; I can understand why it's different for freelancers, but if designers on regular payroll do not find time to do research on subjects they write about... maybe it's time for change? I mean, adding a few consultants/specialists to their payroll, or using them as freelancers would help a lot. Building a wiki in co-operation with the fans (since fans do them anyway) for each campaign setting would also help tremendously in the long run.Also, when you're researching a subject, you don't need to memorize everything -- just find the things that matter. Whether you're writing an essay or article, you need to use reliable sources, but not everything you read -- if an average student can do that, why couldn'tRPG authors? It depends. Some of my friends work in (privately-owned) companies in which employee imput is not really expected or appreciated. Also, change for the sake of change, especially constant change, is not necessarily a good thing; there should be a logical reason for change.Anyway, customers are another thing, but in public libraries it's often different, i.e. the customer is usually wrong. I'll give you a couple of examples here. Not so long ago there was a customer feedback research conducted in my library about should we arrange fiction by genres or not. The result was that overwhelming majority of the patrons said "Yes, I want more genres!", but the assistant chief librarian (surprised by the result) thought it would be too much work, and told everyone: "We're professionals and they are not, which means that in this case their opinion does not matter. Period." Another example are RPGs, which are usually (in my country) shelved in the youth and children department, regardless of the fact some of them contain material that would automatically land them in the lending department if they were not games ("It's a game, so it's for kids!"). When I vehemently argued that they should be transferred (not only because of the content, but also because no gamer I know would look for them in their current location), I was told that it's a "good idea" (and this happened like four years ago). The thing is, anything tying up library resources is often seen as bad, even if it would be logical change that would benefit the patrons and/or staff...And what if they find MAC OS just as difficult and complex? And, in case, if they switch from Microsoft to Apple, they probably need to spend quite a lot of time in researching the code before they can start working on it, right? Well, I'm not exactly convinced this strategy worked with FR that well. Of course, I don't know the sales figures, but my educated guess is that most "old guard" fans didn't buy the books. Whether they managed to hook in enough new customers, I can't say, but I seriously doubt it. IIRC, they didn't announce this "three-books-per-setting" policy until FR vented their anger at the changes. Now, it may or may nor have anything to do with it,but before that they said that additional books are possible, if the sales are good.   I wouldn't be suprised, because originally the FR designers promised the same for FR if it sells enough. Some of that lore has already been "retconned" and patched up, i.e. there are many products that had problems with internal consistency and canon and they no longer contain "accurate" canon lore. Plus, I don't know if anyone actually uses stuff from products like Marco Volo-adventures -- I don't. And neither do I use Drizzt, even though I don't think he's "lame" (if a PC insisted on finding him, it might be another matter). And even if I wrote a novel about a drow swordsman in the Silver Marches, I doubt I would use direct references to Drizzt. Neither do I think "But what will Drizzt or Alustriel or Bruenor do about it?" whenever I'm running an adventure there.</blockquote>

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