Lore is concrete
Usually I take the weekend off, but this got to me too much. This is part of the reason I am at War. Anna states Lore is a rubber band, to be stretched and pulled to fit your whim . I say No, Lore is not a plaything to be stretched over your stories like some piece of Saran Wrap, you stretch Saran Wrap to much it breaks. You pull a rubber band too much that breaks. Lore is concrete, immovable, like the foundation of a house. Like a solid foundation you build your house, or your story on this foundation.
To site her example of gnomes in Westfall. Sure it is not beyond the realm of possibility, so is martians attacking westfall from Mars. Gnomes are working diligently to reclaim their land. They were to busy to ‘Help’ The humans, so why would a dedicated gnome who is busy helping his homeland help with harvesting equipment.
This is from the Blizzards website.
“The Gnomes served the Alliance well during the Second War, but strangely, they refused to send any personnel to aid their allies during the Burning Legion’s recent invasion. Though their designs helped turn the tide against the Legion, the Dwarves and Humans were shocked by the Gnomes’ decision to withhold their courageous troops and pilots.”
A good writer knows their boundaries, and those boundaries have clear lines. Once you start blurring those lines it no longer fits within the setting your trying to write your story. More and more I see these RP’er stretching and bending the Lore, and that is what angers me. If you can’t play with the Lore at hand, then maybe your a shitty writer, and need to take you butt off an RP server.
March 20, 2010 at 8:26 pm
A condom bends to you needs but one size does not fit all. Maybe, lore is not perfect like a condom. You hump too much with your lore and it just might break and get you prego.
March 20, 2010 at 10:32 pm
I buy the ribbed condoms, and turn them inside out. For her pleasure bullshit. I’m a selfish lover!
March 20, 2010 at 9:30 pm
I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible. Unless I’m mistaken, there’s a gap of 15-20 years between the end of the Second War and start of the Third. Since the troggs didn’t invade Gnomer until around the Third War was going on, it would make sense for a couple gnomes to move to Westfall to help with harvester maintenance and have a child shortly after the Second War.
I do agree that there’s some stuff you just can’t do, like some of the crazy “half-demon half-dragon in disguise as a blood elf” stuff that pops up from time to time, though.
March 20, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Here’s my point it is possible, but improbable, why would the gnomes not help the alliance in an hour of need, oh wait westfall farmers need help sure.
March 20, 2010 at 11:03 pm
As with real life, there’s a pretty significant difference between the decisions of a government and the individual decisions of each of its citizens. Maybe there was a very close vote in the Gnomish Senate.
We don’t really know, is the point – and as long as we’re not stepping on each other’s toes, we’re free to fill in the blanks.
By your own admission, you don’t RP in WoW and have very little interest in it or respect for those who do. Your argument in this post thus strikes me as particularly disingenuous, but I’ll bite in the interest of sparking something useful from these comments. Without the freedom to write our own stories and fit them into the vast blank spots Blizzard has left in the lore, we’d just be rewriting the same campaigns and quests over and over again – an exercise in redundancy.
March 21, 2010 at 12:20 am
This is where I think your wrong there is plenty of room to maneuver in the lore, I just don’t want to give away all the secrets. But I will give you an example.
The Gnomeregan grainaries were running dry, so the gnomes struck a bargain with the Westfall farmers to build harvesting machines in exchange for the grain, thus once the job was completed the gnomes left. Without the gnomish engineers to repair the gear, the machine fell in disarray, and the machine malfunctions. The Gnomes being short staffed sent an enginner to repair the machines….
yadda yadda yadda, see how I used the lore, and not bent it, or stretched it.
A good writer uses the lore as your foundation, not as something that bends like a willow in the wind.
March 21, 2010 at 12:34 am
…that’s far more invasive to established lore than Anna’s story, dude. It creates a famine, an entire system of government contracts, and a widespread equipment malfunction. Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily too invasive to use – but it is easily the sort of thing that could run into contradiction, where someone else has an RP story about how the Westfall citizens created those harvesting machines with their own ingenuity, or some such. Stuff like that happens all the time, and you have to get creative – the entire purpose of roleplay.
Whether that’s a workable scenario or not, it is more lore-bending than Anna’s very straightforward origin story, in which one pair of Gnomes decided to strike out for themselves, for one of a thousand reasons, and found a place where their talents could be used. It is, in fact, a textbook example of “making the lore fit your character,” as opposed to “making your character fit into the lore.”
March 21, 2010 at 12:46 am
invasive or not I am using lore from Blizzards own website. The Gnomes were under siege, under siege enought to look for resources, not a huge jump that one of those resources would be food. Shoni is in Stormwind looking for parts because Gnomeregan is in desperate need. Now if she said Stormwind, I would be ok, there are Gnomes in SW, they are there.
Now you do have me there I am not a good writer, never said I was, but I wanted to give an example of a better reason fitting the lore, then just, ah gnomes are here to help, while the entire nation of gnomes is dedicated to the reclamation of gnomeregan.
That’s the point of your argument thoug, I think they need the character fit the lore, and not the other way around.
March 21, 2010 at 1:49 am
“…while the entire nation of gnomes is dedicated to the reclamation of gnomeregan.”
Except, oh, for the fact that… they’re not? What about the dozens of gnome NPCs in the game who are completely uninvolved in the struggle to retake Gnomeregan?
March 21, 2010 at 1:52 am
We don’t know enough of those NPC’s motives. How do you know what their doing isn’t helping the War effort in Gnomeregan?
March 21, 2010 at 2:06 am
…Wow. You’re so right. I hadn’t realized just how much getting the Theramore lighthouse fixed would further the Gnomeregan war effort. And Whiskey Slim is totally lying about why he wants his lost grog back… it’s not so the captain of his ship won’t beat him for letting the cargo go overboard, it’s so he can send it to Gnomeregan to raise the troops’ morale! No, of course, it’s the only logical explanation. Weren’t you the one complaining about stretching the lore? How is it not stretching the lore to ascribe motives to NPCs that are in no way indicated in any of the quest text?
Of course, even if you were correct in your (rather… elastic) theory, you don’t know enough of Annie Mae’s parents’ motives to say whether THEY might not be helping the war effort, considering that their move to Westfall (and Annie Mae’s birth) predates the trogg invasion by, oh, two decades or so.
March 22, 2010 at 1:38 pm
haha Corise its a game try not burst a blood vessel there.
hmm Do RPers ever leave the house/basement?
March 22, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Thank you for giving me the best laugh I’ve had all day.
March 22, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Was that an ‘out of character’ laugh? or perhaps a gnome chuckle?