Quote:
Originally Posted by Atgxtg
I think one of the big tradegeies is that so much stuff is common to all game worlds. It makes the game much blander, since so many things are common from world to world. You have the same pseudo-Tolkien high, grey, and wood elves, over 90% of D&D supplemts and game worlds. Its one reason why regardlesss of setting, D&D plays the same. You got the same classes, magic systems, speices, and magic items, just the that the land masses change.
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I think its a bad idea to underestimate the "Its just too damn much work" factor here, though; even people trying to create original game worlds have only so much time to put into that creation, and have to decide on priorities. Often monsters, especially non-intelligent ones, are a low priority on that because they're fairly detail intensive but not particularly core to the player experience.
And in the end, its sometimes lost anyway. If you have an intelligent non-human humanoid type in a world that has some elflike qualities, people are going to, as a group, see them as elves almost no matter what you do; even if you emphasize the differences, what will lodge in people's minds is "oh, they're barbarian elves who hate magic", but it'll still be "elves".
So I think some of this is almost inevitable.