thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-12, Sarah wrote:
In email to me, Ben Lehman used the word "challenge." As in, good fanfic challenges its source material.All good fiction challenges its source material.
All fiction has a "canon."
Fiction which lacks some form of strong interaction with its canon is unlikely to be at all effective or engaging.
Narrative RP is a form of fiction.
Narrative RP which is effective and engaging is that which challenges its canon.
The existence of this "canon" is sometimes obscured by the fact that the players are all so attuned to it that they don't even particularly note its existence. Such canon is often only noticed when and if the group encounters a player who lacks the rest of the group's intimate knowledge of the shared canon.
The same dynamic is in play with the readers of fiction. This is the reason that translations of literature from other cultures are often heavily footnoted. The work's intended readership does not require the footnotes, and quite likely thinks of the "canon" of the work as "just the real world." To a foreign reader, however, the work may be incomprehensible without aid—even though presumably the foreign reader lives in the same "just the real world" as the original author of the text and his intended readership do.
Without a shared canon, fiction—of which RPG is a subset—just doesn't work very well. This is true regardless of whence that canon derives.
