Umbran said:
Yes, but this conflicts with the seven member cast. If you're doing a lot of world-exposition, you don't have as much time to develop characters. Remember, on commercial TV you've got about 40 minutes an episode to do everything.
Joss Wheadon can pull off an ensemble cast and world-building all at once, as seen in Firefly, but he's an exception. Unless you've got someone of his caliber at the helm, you probably don't want to be quite so ambitious.
Why not? Maybe our hypothetical scriptwriter can be as good as Whedon, but would never have discovered if he/she didn't try. If we say 'don't try', we are purposefully dumbing down the product - and I don't think we need to do that.
And a large cast could easily play into worldbuilding, actually. Take them from different ethnic, social, professional backgrounds, and occasionally throw them back. Give them links to huge portions of the world, and phrases like 'my hometown is in peril' become harder and harder to
avoid, thus giving our 'face' characters reason to care about the world, thus giving the viewing audience a link to something that's quite distant from most. Also, giving the cast provincial traits gives you world building and character development in the same bucket. It's efficiant!
Now, on the topic of 'flavour': the suggestions of 'low weird monster count' and 'flowery Olde Englishe' and 'morals' just clicked into place in my head. They say 'Camelot with a D&D ruleset' to me. Now, that's fine. But I think it's not making the most of D&D, which is all about the weird monsters and the cool spells and, increasingly these days, realistic world-building with D&D rules (like Eberron, which is closer to vanilla, straight-out-of-the-books D&D than Camelot is). Note that I'm not arguing against morals. One of D&D's great strengths in this regard is the alignment system, which is slightly recognised in-game, and thus allows people to actively talk about morals.
I realise that I'm stepping on uncertain ground here, as D&D covers so many bases and means different things to different people. But I think a D&D TV show should portray the product with as little filter as possible, and that means picking up the rulebook and using it, rather than the ideas other people have developed off it. I'm not really familiar with Eberron, so I can't say whether it's suitable or not. If it isn't, some quick worldbuilding before the show starts would be advisable, just so everything makes sense.
Do you see what I'm saying?
