[MUD-Dev] Acting casual about casual gamers

[Greg Miller]

Michael Tresca wrote:

> Greg Miller wrote:
> 
> > But does it really make sense for a level 1 dragon to terrorize a
> > village? Seems like thematic level independence is a reasonable
> > objective, but you have to be careful not to go too far :)
> 
> Fear the D&Dization of the fantasy genre!

[snip]

> How does anyone know what elves look like?  Of course, the inspiration for
> this art came from Deedlit in Record of the Lodoss Wars.  But Dungeons and
> Dragons (and Tolkien) has become our staple of fantasy.  It's so ingrained,
> some people don't realize where they got their preconceived notions about a
> particular beast or fantasy race.

But given that those notions exist, we have to live with it. As for D&D, 
it seems to draw at least as much from Lieber as Tolkien, and there are 
no doubt writers I have less familiarity with that have provided a 
significant number of our cliches.

> Don't get me wrong, I cut my gaming teeth on Dungeons and Dragons, and many
> MUDs owe a lot to the original game.  But it is by no means the absolute
> standard.
> 
> Maybe I have a world populated by dragons who are only one-foot tall (like
> the mini-dragons in Dragonrider's of Pern).  Maybe this world calls
> dragonflies dragons.  Maybe dragons are the psychological manifestation of
> the cumulative fears of the peasant populace.

But why reuse the name dragon, then? If you don't mean it to refer to 
what people traditionally associate with the term, what good is keeping 
the terminology? You wouldn't use the term "shoe" to describe something 
worn on the head very often, would you?

--
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Smarter than God? No, but I'm smarter than he was when he was my age.
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