I'm sorry, but this thread gives me images of the Army Officer in Monty Python who is continually shutting down the sketches because they are too silly.
"...It's a dog's life (clears throat) I mean a man's life in today's modern Army..."
Mmm hmm.
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I don't really care for parody in my adventures. If they are, in fact, parodies and not just adventures that use elements we may reconize (from coincidence or intention) from other works. Parody generally assumes an element of comedy, which I have never cared for in RPG's, expecially D&D. I would be playing no D&D, though, if I limited my adventures to ones that had zero similarity to some other work of fiction in some way. If we try and rid future works of fantasy of all references that might be similar to other works, then we might as well give up now.
Unforgivable. It is the writers responsibility to know every possible genre and know them enough to avoid any possibility of a percieved similarity to a past work so that readers are not led to make hasty assumptions and/or complaints. ;) Someone get a rope and hang this man. :D
Great. Now I have to figure out some paranoid way to twist your words to support my conspiracy theory. Good luck with that. ;)
Drive to Alabama. Purchase three boxes of instant grits. Fling the grits into the air. Puzzle over the flung grits until you make out some letters. Assemble the letters into a word. Use to word as the name of your city! Or maybe, just maybe, I could write a letter of complaint to the makers of grits for calling them something so clumsy and unimaginative, or some other minutiae concerning grits that has little to do with the actual grits. I could probably do either, I guess.
So the problem isn't exactly with the story, it's with the name supplied. Let's say I have a campaign set in Greyhawk. Dungeon has an adventure set in the city of, say, Waterdeep. Waterdeep is not located in the Greyhawk setting. The name is totally inappropriate for my setting. What should I do? Keep in mind, the problem is not with the actual content, per se, it's with the name they gave the location.
I would have a problem with an adventure that truly does rely on references to other, unrelated works in order to understand the story. I think there is a difference in assuming that someone has knowledge about something that they are required to act on and borrowing an idea from another genre. I could be wrong, but I think the real idea behind the original complaint is to show that they "got" the reference. I can't really imagine someone being genuinely bothered enough to complain. With hundreds of issues of Dungeon, has there really been a slew of adventures based on comics? Come on. Really?
...Once the magazine stops talking to new players and starts to revel in a secret code only the cognoscenti (sp?) understand will be the day the hobby gets into dire straits. Or the music dies. Or something. True, but is that applicable to this situation? Let's just say that the person who wrote this adventure came right out and admitted to everyone that they used a concept from a particular comic book as the basis of the work. Let's just assume that for argument's sake. Now, would you have to understand the plotlines comic-book roots in order to "get" the story or derive any entertainment value from it? Absolutely not. Think about any given story that you know. Well, chances are, it's based on themes from another, older, story. You may not even know the original roots. Does this mean that almost every story you know is appealing to ONLY folks that know all of the elements of the original stories? Certainly not. Personally, what I would take issue with are ideas that have no meaning apart from some special in-joke that has no intrinsic meaning by itself. The concept of an academy that teaches gifted youngsters can indeed stand on it's own. I doubt that someone that is totally ignorant about the X-men is being bothered that there might be some hidden meaning or correlation to something they aren't "in the know" about when playing this adventure. It seems to me that the only ones that have a problem with it are people that DO see the reference, not people that are ignorant about it desperately seeking the hidden truth of the story origins.
I'm a pretty easy-going guy, and generally I do not like to criticize, but I would have to say that The Portent consistently baffles me in a couple of ways. First, I wonder if I missed something in the joke. The latest one: the guy has an iPod video device and downloaded some movies for it, but goes on to complain that the screen is too small to see what the movie is. Is that the entire joke, or is the anachronism of an iPod in such a setting also considered part of the humor? I understand that occasionally some humor escapes me, so I'm not going to rail against the strip, because it may be popular as far as I know. I just really, really, don't get it. No offense.
Nope; the new Gord story hasn't come out yet. It'll be in #344. Oh, great....thanks!
Hey everyone. I did a search on the topic and didn't see any info on this, so I apologize if it has been discussed already. I remember seeing in a recent issue (the past couple months) of Dragon that we would be seeing a new Gord story by Gary Gygax. I may be totally crazy, though. Has that come and gone already, or did it just fall through? I'm not complaining...I understand that stuff happens, but I was really looking forward to seeing some new Gord material. Any other fans of the series here? I have been looking for copies of the book and finally completed another collection of all the novels. It's alarming that they are so difficult to find in good condition. I hope they can do an anthology reprint sometime in the near future. There haven't been a lot of stories out there that involve the sheer numbers of the various members of the D&D Pantheon like the Gord books. Most were from the lower planes, but it made sense in context with the plot. Have a great day, everyone! |