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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darrin Drader" data-source="post: 4448758" data-attributes="member: 7394">The reason I feel that it's unfair to the fans is because they are normally well invested in the setting. If I have 20 to 50 books that flesh out a setting, I obviously like that setting. When you make a major timeline jump, you significantly reduce the usefulness of that material if you are to adopt the new material. If you decide not to adopt it, then the setting you;ve been following is effectively dead anyway. The people using the old stuff have lost new support products.Aside from that, specific characters and storylines simply stop because the majority of the people involved are no longer alive. If this jump is precipitated by a major event, then the characters who have struggled heroically in this new setting get to see all of their efforts destroyed by some force that has nothing to do with them. Honestly, I've only seen this work well twice - once with Star Wars and once with Star Trek. In the case of Star Wars, there are a lot of people who find the far future stuff less restrictive than the current stuff. I also think that it works because they didn't end the stories that take place in the other timelines. New Jedi Order became the Legacy of the Force, there are still new stuff from the prequel era coming out, and I think they're still doing occasional rebellion era stories as well. So the bottom line here is that it works because it's not being done to the exclusion of other timelines within the setting.In Star Trek's case, it worked because they were able to introduce new characters that weren't overshadowed by the old ones within the same timeline (though I would argue that subsequent series within the same timeframe were overshadowed by the older characters from the updated timeline).Now if you want to argue that a 20 year old setting that got a box set and a handful of supplements can be updated, that could work simply because the material that you're overwriting isn't particularly recent, nor is there a great deal of existing material for it. The only TSR settings that I think that could potentially work well with are Darksun and Birthright.</blockquote>

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