Subject: Haven't you read my post?
Author:
Posted on: 2013-12-21 10:55:00 UTC
Suggesting that all of D&D's campaign settings will use the same mini is like suggesting that Bioshock Infinite and Borderlands 2 will use the same mini because they both run on Unreal Engine 3.
I feel like Transformers should have multiple minis—one for each continuity family. After all, Ick-Yaks have only ever been mentioned in G1-related stories.
I think it should go something like this:
G1 family (includes BW and BM)= mini-Ick-Yaks
RID = ?
Unicron Trilogy (A/E/C) = mini-Scrapmetals
Live action film continuity = mini-Frenzys?
Animated continuity = mini-Lugnuts?
Aligned continuity = mini-Vehicons
Does this sound like a good idea? I am open to suggestions.
I am writing a mission in Forgotten Realms, and the badfic in question has more minis than a dog has fleas. So I ask the PPC hivemind: what should the Forgotten Realms mini be? A mini-Elminster? A mini-Drizzt? A mini-Guenhwyvar?
I don't think mini-Drizzt would work. What about a mini-Drider?
-Phobos
He's an iconic character from the specific setting, as opposed to just being generic DnD (and yeah, I agree with you that the different settings should probably have unique minis). I also think it'd be quite amusing to have the minis be based on Drizzt, given how popular he was for people to copy.
He is, as you say, a character. Minis should not be based on a main character, but rather on an iconic monster.
-Phobos
However, that does seem to be just a guideline, rather than an actual rule.
For example, NCIS has mini-LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers). Now, it's a little bit different from normal because that continuum doesn't have any monsters, let alone iconic ones, so you can't really use one as the mini. But I'm not sure that the Forgotten Realms setting has any monsters iconic to it specifcally, instead of just being iconic to DnD.
My understanding of the different campaign settings is that they are all sperate worlds in their own right - they have distinct geography, history, mythology, etc. The main thing that they share, the game mechanics, doesn't actually feature in the stories. I personally agree with Des that the different settings deserve their own mini, and Drizzt does at least have the benefit of being particular to the Forgotten Realms.
If we are just talking about assigning an iconic DnD monster to the setting, then your suggestion of driders is a good one. Other possibilities include: dragons (although probably have to rule these out as they'd be so similiar to the Narnis ones), gelatinous cubes, mind flayers, owlbears, purple worms and the tarrasque.
However, I'm not sure how much any of them actually feature in the Forgotten Realms, or even if they feature at all.
Law Enforcement Officers, or at least, un-capitalized law enforcement officers, appear in lots of canons, but NCIS is a show absolutely filled with them, so it fits as a mini there.
As long as there's some kind of beastie that affects Forgotten Realms' plot, it would suffice as a mini, even if that creature also happens to appear in main D&D settings as well.
(But please, no more mini-dragons. We've already got the "regular" variety for Narnia, mini-fire dragons as part of Airbender's cadre of minis, mini-time dragons for Wicked, and mini-ogre-dragon hybrids for Ella Enchanted. (Apparently, EE fanfic was a terrifying place back when the original OFUers were writing?) Also, hello Narnis the mini-dragon!)
I'm going to put in my non-vote right now for mini-Gelatinous Cubes, because that sounds simultaneously adorable, disturbing, and terrifying.
Anyway. The issue with Drizzt is that, for a lot of people, he's actually the main character of the Forgotten Realms stories. Imagine how... well, uninteresting things would be if Miss Cam had started off with 'mini-Frodos', and Meir Brin had followed with 'mini-Harrys'... everyone would have a horde of small copies of canon characters running after them. Compare that to the miniature flame-demons and talking spiders we got instead - which universe do you prefer?
Then there's the question of sentience... the vast majority of minis are not copies of intelligent creatures. Mini-Aragogs are, but they don't act like copies of Aragog - they act like small acrowhatevers. Mini-Drizzt? You'd be making small copies of a specific person, who then proceeds to be shipped off to a university (if such exists) to be forced into being a security guard, forced to attack fangirls - and, generally, treated as a slave. Um... isn't there something in Drizzt's backstory about slavery, and how he ain't a fan of it...?
I'm not a fan of character-derived minis in general. Mini-Nick Furys disturb me (and I've cowritten a story with one in, so yes, I have experience); the idea that there are mini-Cadfaels out there disturbs me even more. There are a lot of words for people who treat other people as property - and not many of them are nice.
So they make me, personally, uncomfortable. I would vastly prefer people to stick with minor, powerful, and iconic monsters - not miniature pet adult human beings. But, like the no-one said (yet), it ain't up to me.
hS
Is it bad that I find myself wanting to write a thing where people-minis (mini-Cadfaels, LEOs, Nick Furies, etc.) start protesting being treated as, well, minis, and/or begin petitioning for agent status?
And hS's arguments against character-derived minis are pretty convincing, I looked at the Monsters of Faerûn splatbook and found the Eyeball Beholderkin - which, fittingly enough, is a subtype of Beholder found only in Forgotten Realms. Since those are already small and most certainly not sentient, I'll use those as minis.
PS: Aragog is an Arcomantula.
Arcomantula is a mini-Aragog.
ARAGOGCEPTION
Mini-Roots, from Artemis Fowl, mini-Cadfaels, from the Cadfael Chronicles, mini-Schrödingers from Hellsing, mini-Nick Furys from the Avengers movies, and mini-Roderick Deckers from A-Team, just to name a few examples. Heck, mini-Aragogs could be construed as a character-derived mini if you take the interpretation that they are small versions of Aragog rather than simply small acromantulas, and they were one of the first minis out there.
I agree with you that minis should be based on a species rather than an individual in the majority of cases, but Drizzt is one of the most well-known and iconic entities from the Forgotten Realms, and shouldn't be discounted solely because he's an individual being.
Most of the continua that you've mentioned don't have beasties in them. So they really don't bear any relevance to this discussion.
The onea that do have beasties are anofher matter. To answer those examples I would say this: Just because it has been done, doesn't mean it should be done again or even that it should have been done the first time. Not all precedent is good precedent.
-Phobos
Driders aren't quite that iconic. A dragon might do, or perchance a Phaerimm. What do you think?
They're the Narnia mini, confusingly enough. Narnia had, what, two dragons in all seven books? Maybe three, if you count Eustace's temporary transformation? In a way, though, it's a good thing, because it keeps any continua with dragons from automatically defaulting to said dragons as the most distinct native creature and means that the mini species can be more diverse.
As for the Phaerimm... well, no other continuum is going to have anything similar, I'm betting, so they're certainly unique. We should probably pick a mini that wouldn't provoke in the majority of agents the instinctive reaction to smash its horrendous pate in with any nearby blunt object, though. Minis can be menacing, but they normally don't go as far as "blood-drooling flying polyp/lamprey with almost-humanoid hands".
I note that Forgotten Realms is technically part of Dungeons and Dragons, and that hasn't got a mini set forth. Mini-Beholders, perhaps?
However, it's like saying two games that run on the Unreal Engine need to share a mini. Other words, FR uses D&D rules, but it is separate from the default campaign setting (Greyhawk). Unless you count stuff like Spelljammer as canon, 'default' D&D and FR have very little to do with each other aside from the crunch.
Why don't we just take a noteworthy creature/historical figure from Points of Light or Greyhawk and use that for all DnD?
Suggesting that all of D&D's campaign settings will use the same mini is like suggesting that Bioshock Infinite and Borderlands 2 will use the same mini because they both run on Unreal Engine 3.
A mini-Guenhwyvar sounds tempting, but Elminster is an original part of the setting so a mini-Elminster might work better.
Minis get decided by the continuum's OFU. If there's no OFU in that continuum, whoever writes the first mission in which a mini is mentioned chooses what sort of mini it is, just like how I decided that Teletubbies' mini is the mini-Noo-Noo in my first mission because there's no mention of it and no Teletubbies OFU.
I'm guessing Anjilly has/had a Transformers mission in the works, then, as she added mini-Ick-Yaks to the Mini page on the wiki.
Guess that means this discussion is moot.
Mostly anyway:
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=199610;article=179193;title=PPC%20Posting%20Board
The mini rules were faster and looser back then, and they just kind of got made up and thrown on the wiki at the drop of a hat.
Since this mini wasn't created the official way, and since there's still no OFU, the mini type (or types) for all of Transformers is still technically up to the first OFU or mission writer. I'll make a note on that entry saying such.
(Personally, I don't feel like the different Transformers canons are different enough from each other to warrant having all separate minis, but I'll leave that question up to those who have watched more than just Beast Wars, I guess.)
The thing is, sometimes characters can be portrayed very differently between continuities. For instance, "Wheeljack" from G1 is very different from both the Transformers Armada "Wheeljack" character and the Transformers Prime "Wheeljack".
One of the badfics I was planning to mission has characters from the Unicron Trilogy and G1 continuities tossed into it at random, with poor enough spelling to create a new mini just about every few paragraphs. If there's a mini of a character that could be in either, such Cyclonus or Jetfire(and the fic doesn't distinguish between continuities, before you ask, which is one of its many major charges, so the overlapping characters mentioned there could easily be from either reality), what would the mini be? Would it be a crossover mini, like the ones briefly seen in the OFUA, and contain aspects of both the Scrapmetals and the Ick-Yak, or would mini determination gravitate toward one continuity somehow?
They could possibly flicker between being mini-Ick-Yaks and mini-Scrapmetals for a moment, and then stabilize into being, say, mini-Ick-Yaks with Scrapmetal cannons growing out of their backs, or something. It's your choice, really.
Couldn't we just have the minis for all of Transformers be mini-Unicrons? Even though Unicron looks slightly different between continuity families, he's present in almost all of them, and behaves more or less the same way, since most to all of the Unicrons are supposed to be extensions of the same being. Maybe there could be slight variances of individual minis based on the character that was misspelled and their continuity of origin, but it would be relatively simple compared to keeping up with yet another continuum featuring multiple mini species.
It would mean removing the mini-Ick-Yaks, of course, but they never had an official PPC appearance, and only showed up canonically in a single episode of the original cartoon, so I don't think they'd be distinctive enough to be minis for the entirety of the G1 family regardless.
That...actually works really, really well. I like it!
Heck, the actual existence of Ick-Yaks in-series is questionable, as they're only ever seen in flashbacks, and the only character to recall them is the notoriously senile Kup.
This would, of course, refer to the home continuity of the character whose name was misspelled; a misspelled Dinobot (from Beast Wars) would create a mini-Ick-Yak, while a misspelled Airachnid (from Transformers Prime) would create a mini-Vehicon, and so forth.