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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5037450" data-attributes="member: 3820">Or Robin Hood and King Arthur, Cinderella and Snow White. The concept of the "knight in shining armor" is more fully ingrained in modern culture than Aragorn is by a long shot. Most kids learn about fairies and castles and monsters long before they read LotR or Conan. I figure that also contributes to the tendency to have more emotional connection to things that feel like the stories you grew up with. There's also regional culture to consider. American fantasy can be notably different from European fantasy, for instance; D&D and Warhammer are very much products of American writers on one side and British writers on the other. That's instrumental to the formation of, say, "the modern American vampire myth" as opposed to "the 14th-century Balkan vampire myth" or "the 19th-century English vampire myth." And it's generally easier for an audience to buy into myths that are closer to their own culture.It's a bit of sampling bias there, though, because most gamers started with D&D, and D&D featured elves as they appeared in LOTR, orcs that are green, stupid and evil, and short dwarves that use axes and hammers and are bearded drunkards. If the first and most influential RPG in the world establishes the same stereotypes that also exist in LOTR, well, yes. Therefore presenting D&D elves that are "sufficiently unlike" Tolkien's is a tricky sell, because they're also probably unlike Silverleaf, Mialee, Drizzt and Melf.I'd be interested to see where such people could be found. How do you keep kids from being exposed to the more cleaned-up versions of fairy tales and keep them only to the old folk tales? I don't think you can subtract the place that culture in general plays in these things. I think you could get a good world, though, if you had three people who each liked one thing in particular — but was open-minded about finding out what their collaborators liked about their particular preferences. If, on the other hand, each one hated stuff that wasn't their favorite, it would probably be a crummy world. It takes a lot of creative genius to make up for the kind of willful blindness that hate fosters.</blockquote>

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