Penny Arcade on 4e Naming Conventions

[Lakashim]

Am I the only one that remembers the ruckus that "Golden Wyvern Adept" caused?

People cried out about the "crap fluff" and "telling me what is in my setting".

Now D&D 4 gets criticized for being too generic?

 

[underthumb]

There's always something new and different to complain about, isn't there?

Generic names in the published rules are generic ON PURPOSE. So that you will come up with your OWN material instead of worshipping at the altar of someone else's creativity.

Treating uninspired, generic writing as a kind of virtue is really quite odd. I encourage you to read (what I take to be) awesome counter examples, such as Planescape, if you have not already done so. I think there's more to inspired, original writing than creating cannon-worshiping geeks and such.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Am I the only one that remembers the ruckus that "Golden Wyvern Adept" caused?

People cried out about the "crap fluff" and "telling me what is in my setting".

Now D&D 4 gets criticized for being too generic?

Golden Wyvern Adept was crap fluff. Shadowdark is crap fluff. It's not being criticized for being too generic. It's being criticized for containing crap fluff.

edit: ...and one might notice that it contains crap fluff despite our outcry, with the specific offences removed. They took out the crap fluff we complained about, but left in the crap fluff we didn't know about, without understanding the general point that we don't want any crap fluff at all.

 

[Oni]

Darkbad

I like that.

Sounds like the sort of place a tribe of lost children would warn you about.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Golden Wyvern Adept was crap fluff. Shadowdark is crap fluff. It's not being criticized for being too generic. It's being criticized for containing crap fluff.

edit: ...and one might notice that it contains crap fluff despite our outcry, with the specific offences removed. They took out the crap fluff we complained about, but left in the crap fluff we didn't know about, without understanding the general point that we don't want any crap fluff at all.

What's the difference between crap fluff and good fluff? Is it objective or subjective? Can you list some example of good fluff for comparsion?

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

What's the difference between crap fluff and good fluff?

Well, a good start for a working definition might be that crap fluff is anything that a pair of satirists come up with in order to construct the worst possible name for a location in a fantasy setting.

That WotC hit that nail squarely on the head is quite a vindication for those of us who have been criticizing their ability to construct proper nouns for the last few years.

Can you list some example of good fluff for comparsion?

Walking into the obvious trap, how about:
Anything by Ari Marmell, most of Planescape, a decent amount of the Storyteller games, a lot of the stuff from the early D&D modules and supplements--particularly the stuff that has remained in the general consciousness over the years.

A good way to tell if something is good is to look at whether it has stood the test of time. Good versus bad is not an objective measure, but rather the aggregate of the community's subjective opinions. However, it's not that difficult to get a grasp of whether a given idea is going to work well, based on what has worked in the past.

With respect to WotC's NounAdjective naming conventions, the only successful example from the past that I can remember is the Underdark, but that seems to be an isolated case. Indeed, the NounAdjective naming convention has generated so many ill-conceived names for so many writers over the years that Penny Arcade predicted (successfully) that its readers would understand what they were parodying with the "Further Songs of Sorcelation" series. I think that it's telling that WotC not only did not avoid NounAdjective names like the plague, but embraced them as company policy, apparently not aware of the negative public attitude toward them that Penny Arcade has capitalized on.

 

[AlexS]

NounAdjective names are crap, but the main difference between Shadowdark and Feywild as opposed to Underdark, Waterdeep or Greyhawk is their relative age. The old ones are crap, too, it's just we're used to them.

Of course, it could be worse- they could've thrown together a random collection of letters to make pseudo-Tolkien names for places. Then we'd be stuck with even more pronunciation debates.

 

[Logan_Bonner]

Man, I guess we should have gone with Underfell and Underwild after all...


(Note: This is a joke. These names were never on the table (as far as I know).)

 

[I'm A Banana]

Now D&D 4 gets criticized for being too generic?

No, it gets criticized for sounding dumb.

I mean, the "genericness" of the words is part of the reason it sounds dumb. Part of the beauty of Gygaxian prose was that the man obviously owned a friggin' thesaurus. Instead of "Shadowdark" you could have used something like "Umbral Pits" or "The Cimmerian Gulf" or "Crepuscular Warrens," or, I dunno, use a thesaurus.

"Golden Wyvern Adept" has the exact opposite problem in that it has no relation to any shared reality.

"Feydark" doesn't try hard enough; "Golden Wyvern Adept" tries too hard. There is a middle ground.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I sorta like hyper-generic fluff names. Since it means that it is just that much easier to warp into something else, it is a nice simple base to build upon.

Where I would want better fluff names is in setting books, where I am specifically buying it for tools to build that specific world as I wish it to be.