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<blockquote data-quote="Nawara" data-source="post: 7689853" data-attributes="member: 29530">For what it's worth, I prefer the legal, &quot;inspired by&quot; versions of settings anyway. A lot of the time, the result of avoiding IP violations is a better roleplaying setting than the original universe that the game is trying to emulate. Fictional universes are generally designed solely to enable the author/screenwriter to tell a story about a protagonist, but roleplaying settings have a completely different set of needs.When you make a carbon-copy universe, you can make a lot of problems inherent to licensed universes go away: You can reduce the importance of Mary Sues, you can flatten power imbalances between character types, you can make the setting more of an open-ended sandbox, create new factions that would distract from the original work's central themes, you can create new Big Secrets that haven't already been spoiled by the book/show/movie, you can do away with or fix things the fanbase hates, and all sorts of other things that aren't available to the makers of licensed games.All of the above contribute to making, say, Dark Matter a better roleplaying option than X-Files. Same with Greyhawk over Middle Earth, Freedom City over Metropolis, Spirit of the Century or Adventure! over Indiana Jones, Spycraft over James Bond, any of the Wizard School RPG settings over Actual Harry Potter, any of the Teen Heroes settings over Actual X-Men, and (I've heard) Ponyfinder over My Little Pony.Similarly, I imagine that a well-made D&amp;D 5e setting intended to emulate the feel of Game of Thrones would produce a far better gaming experience than the actual setting.If you want to use the original universe, of course, nobody's stopping you. There's always far more setting material available from non-RPG sources (e.g., Wookiepedia and Memory Alpha) than you'd get in a licensed RPG book.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Nawara, post: 7689853, member: 29530"] For what it's worth, I prefer the legal, "inspired by" versions of settings anyway. A lot of the time, the result of avoiding IP violations is a better [i]roleplaying[/i] setting than the original universe that the game is trying to emulate. Fictional universes are generally designed solely to enable the author/screenwriter to tell a story about a protagonist, but roleplaying settings have a completely different set of needs. When you make a carbon-copy universe, you can make a lot of problems inherent to licensed universes go away: You can reduce the importance of Mary Sues, you can flatten power imbalances between character types, you can make the setting more of an open-ended sandbox, create new factions that would distract from the original work's central themes, you can create new Big Secrets that haven't already been spoiled by the book/show/movie, you can do away with or fix things the fanbase hates, and all sorts of other things that aren't available to the makers of licensed games. All of the above contribute to making, say, Dark Matter a better roleplaying option than X-Files. Same with Greyhawk over Middle Earth, Freedom City over Metropolis, Spirit of the Century or Adventure! over Indiana Jones, Spycraft over James Bond, any of the Wizard School RPG settings over Actual Harry Potter, any of the Teen Heroes settings over Actual X-Men, and (I've heard) Ponyfinder over My Little Pony. Similarly, I imagine that a well-made D&D 5e setting intended to emulate the feel of [I]Game of Thrones[/I] would produce a far better gaming experience than the actual setting. If you want to use the original universe, of course, nobody's stopping you. There's always far more setting material available from non-RPG sources (e.g., Wookiepedia and Memory Alpha) than you'd get in a licensed RPG book. [/QUOTE]

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