D[isney] & Dragons

[Username17]

Yes, Frank, the power level of the Disney canon is way lower than that of D&D. What's your point? Maleficent might be peanuts next to a balor, but there are no balors in Disney canon. She is still capable of rendering multiple settings, characters, and plotlines obsolete on her own.

How? You can kill her with a sword! Now there's a whole other thing in which Monterey Jack is a fucking hamster and needs plot contrivances to take down a junior highschool student. So to the extent that there are a whole lot of Disney characters and settings where the expected power level is considerably lower than "random starting human with a baseball bat", I suppose Maleficent would also put the kibosh on those people to an equivalent degree.

But there's really no evidence that Maleficent isn't someone that you couldn't shoot with a gun. Even Monterey Jack could like jump on a shotgun or something and blow her head off with the same kind of plot contrivances that would be required for him to beat any human being in a fight.

Also, why is it a problem that Maleficent can personally pass boundaries on a whim when the heroes can do the exact same thing?

It's a problem if the boundaries exist at all. Because people want Disney mashups, not to visit Disney Adventures, which is something else entirely. Any problems you have with the vast power discrepancy between Nani Pelekai and Hades are in no way addressed by a dimensional boundary, because Hades can cross it anyway and then he's pissing in Nani's Cheerios just the same as if you hadn't had one. Planar boundaries only help segregate the weak characters from the strong ones if neither the weak nor the strong can cross them.

And if the planar boundaries keep anyone from crossing, that means you aren't going to run into a side story where the Rescuers are getting Timon and Pumbaa out of trouble. So the planar boundary causes some problems and solves zero problems. So it's a shit idea.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Personally, I'd be kinda bummed if ol' Chernabog isn't fairly hardcore and wouldn't complain if he was in fact treated like a Disney balor and that represented the top end of the scale. I mean, look at him ffs



Also, the Titans from Hercules should probably be pretty nasty bruisers. They seemed fairly dumb but things they hit should probably stay hit.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you were going to do a Disneyverse, you'd have to make a demarcation line for Disney villains that can be beat up by a trained, armed modern soldier and those that can't. The number of people in the second list is really small, even if you're including spinoffs.

Of course, then you have the question of whether you should even be doing combat in a Disney game that's more involved than a complex skill check. Even in more action-based series like Aladdin and Darkwing Duck serious combat forms a minimal part of the screentime.

[Chamomile]

Prak, there is totally a mechanism by which heroes can cross between worlds pretty much whenever they want to. That isn't even something you have to add in, hopping between worlds whenever you want is something that already happens in KH. All you have to do is yank out Sora, Donald, and Goofy from the main character position and replace them with other Disney characters. You seem to be operating under the assumption that using basic principles from the Kingdom Hearts setting means that you must also follow the Kingdom Hearts plot religiously, and nobody but the main characters of that series can ever do anything important. I kind of hoped that would be obvious when I mentioned excising all of the main characters doing those important things in the first place.

@Frank: Literally any villain can be killed by any character if they have enough plot contrivance on their side, so the fact that the weakest of characters could defeat the strongest of villains if the GM arbitrarily declares it to be so is a moot point. Maleficent (and villains like her) is a problem because she has access to an army. When you deprive her of that she retains the ability to muck up individual plotlines which is good because we want villains to do that, but she loses her ability to destroy entire settings before the heroes show up (another solution to this problem is to have the capability for crossovers be very recent, and the reason Maleficent hasn't taken over half of all universes available for taking is because she hasn't been around long enough to do so). If Maleficent is hanging out next to the settings for Snow White, Cinderella, and Tangled, how are either of those three settings still a thing? At all? Why are they not covered in thorns and green fire and Maleficent's imp things? None of those settings have access to the kind of magic that would even give them a fighting chance against Maleficent except maybe Cinderella, whose fairy godmother could reasonably magic up a sword and shield of the same caliber as the three good fairies. In a setting with planar boundaries, this is fine, because when Maleficent shows up it's either just to mess with people for a bit but not to do any lasting damage to the setting, or else it's part of a specific plot that heroes from other worlds will get involved in and attempt to thwart.

I forgot about Chernabog, but that only makes the problem worse. Here's a guy who can cause rifts in the earth from whence spill demonic armies and who is not actually canonically defeated ever, he just goes to sleep. I mean, technically he doesn't have to be significantly stronger than Maleficent, but he sure looks it. And he demonstrably likes to wreck things just because the scary music started playing. Chernabog is an issue even with planar boundaries so long as they're permeable at all, because he can apparently spawn a new army on a whim.

[Prak]

Ok, Cham, you're still not getting it. Sure, the chosen Keyblade Master and his posse can be Hercules, Simba and Aladdin instead of Sora, Donald and Goofy, though honestly it'd be preferable for people to be making their own characters wholecloth who just feel like they come from those worlds, and then because someone has a keyblade, they can arbitrarily traipse across the multiverse.

Maleficent can do it just because. There are demonstrably villains who can just decide to go to some other Disney world and wreck up the place because they're bored, and we don't even have to get into super powerful demon-gods for it.

Having distinct planar barriers between Greece, Agrabah and Tarzan's Jungle doesn't solve the problem of "Maleficent can wreak merry hell on 101 Dalmatians London" unless you explicitly say that she can't plane hop, in which case you're changing the AU that you think is so perfect. Maleficent is, essentially, a D&D Wizard or Sorcerer with a Raven Familiar, and the spells Wish (curses) and Shapechange (Dragon form). She also picked up Wall of Thorns somewhere along the way. Sure, she's killed by a magic sword, but she isn't lacking for power...

[Chamomile]

Keyblades do not facilitate planar travel at all. In fact, they restrict it. Locking up the keyholes prevents Maleficent (or other people who use Darkness to travel) from accessing it, but doesn't appear to have any effect on gummi ship travel. Locking the key in Traverse Town is something you do like a third of the way through the game, but it doesn't stop you from hopping back there for conference calls with Squall a couple of more times, nor does it stop them from leaving Traverse Town for Hollow Bastion.

There is nothing but Mickey's prime directive stopping literally anyone from hopping into a gummi ship and scooting around the universe wherever they please. OCs and Final Fantasy characters do it all the time, even though only a tiny fraction of them have keyblades. Cloud turns up in the Hercules world and then later on in Hollow Bastion, just because that's a thing he can do apparently. Squall's entire team goes from Traverse Town to Hollow Bastion, presumably because they're buddies with Cid, Chip, and Dale, who sell gummi ship parts for a living. The only reason Kingdom Hearts doesn't go into crazy crossover territory is because Square apparently doesn't think Disney plots are very interesting and does not see the utility in messing with them, and instead just punts some Heartless to the villains and lets Sora help the local protagonist sort them out. This is especially pronounced in KH2 and onwards, when the number of OC villains explodes.

And this is a huge missed opportunity, because there is absolutely nothing in the existing cosmology that prevents Simba from jumping in a gummi ship and blasting off to Halloween Town (except that probably his paws are not super awesome for flying the thing, but whatever).

EDIT: Also, 101 Dalmations is actually one of the settings Maleficent can't just level completely. She definitely has enough power to hand the dalmations over to Cruella de Ville without breaking a sweat, and she might do so just for giggles, since that's apparently why she cursed Aurora. But the British military would probably have something to say about her turning up and conquering/incinerating London, and even Maleficent's magic is unlikely to do more than even the fight between her horde of imp things and a large, powerful military with 500 years of technology in their corner. So if the GM wanted to say that Maleficent screwed the dalmations over just because, he can, but the setting itself can continue existing and there's no reason the heroes can't arrive before the plot gets rolling and Maleficent shows up to wreck it.

[Username17]

Maleficent (and villains like her) is a problem because she has access to an army.

Wat.

Maleficent's "army" literally gets lost for 16 years because it doesn't occur to even one of her orcs or imps that a baby they were sent after would age somewhat during that period. I am openly contemptuous of her ability to invalidate any setting with that army that she cannot personally overthrow with her ability to fill a city with a choking wall of thorns.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

I have nothing to say to someone who cannot comprehend why a legion of minions might have utility in occupying territory just because they're not very bright.

[Username17]

I have nothing to say to someone who cannot comprehend why a legion of minions might have utility in occupying territory just because they're not very bright.

Name one Disney setting that is obviated by having a single castle full of extremely shitty mooks. Just one.

Frankly, I am considerably more afraid of Gaston's torch wielding mob. It takes Maleficent's whole army to club one unarmed prince in a darkened hut.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Oh, no, Maleficent have to show up to do the obviating herself. Her imps just allow it to stay obviated. Denying her the ability to plant a horde of minions on Belle's hometown means that even if she shows up, conjures up a bunch of thorns, and then disappears in a gout of green flame, a few years later (if not sooner) the village will be back exactly the way it was before. They'll hack away the thorns, rebuild the houses, and get back to ridiculing Belle's dad and obsessing over the overwhelming virtue of a dimwitted caricature of traditional masculinity. If Maleficent can leave a bunch of imps on the ruins, they can't do that.

Also, we don't really know what the competence of Maleficent's imps is, but there's not a whole lot of reason to assume they aren't pretty good at beating people up (for purposes of this system I would assume they are all goblins and orcs). We know that they attack Prince Phillip in force and win, but we have no idea if a force half that strong would not have also won. We also know that two kingdoms with at least a few hundred heavily armored knights are both unwilling (or, if willing, unable, as they do have a few years to fight that war and lose offscreen) to hunt down Maleficent even after she effectively murders a newborn princess while mucking up an attempt to cement alliances. At this point they already had access to the three good fairies who magicked up Phillip's sword and shield, which allowed him to kill Maleficent's dragon-form single-handedly.

The only rational explanation for this that I can see is that Maleficent's typical strategy is to hide behind her wall of mooks casting support spells from a distance, and let overwhelming numbers and evil magic decide the battle in her favor. Since Prince Phillip's final confrontation with Maleficent was in the course of his escape rather than an attack, Maleficent was forced to leave her wall of mooks behind when her own drawbridge got used to trap them inside her castle. This was not a very bright move strategically speaking, but Maleficent's an unseelie witch or something and resolving personal offenses clearly takes priority over sound strategy for her.

And this is saying nothing about the ability of Hades, Frollo, Shan Yu, Governor Genocide from Pocahontas, Chernabog, or half the villains who show up in the Aladdin series (if we're counting that) to do basically the exact same thing.

[virgil]

Keyblades do not facilitate planar travel at all. In fact, they restrict it. Locking up the keyholes prevents Maleficent (or other people who use Darkness to travel) from accessing it, but doesn't appear to have any effect on gummi ship travel.

And what is preventing Maleficent from just getting in a gummi ship or what-have-you and crossing over herself? Or a recently freed Jafar, or Syndrome for that matter?

[Lago PARANOIA]

And this is a huge missed opportunity, because there is absolutely nothing in the existing cosmology that prevents Simba from jumping in a gummi ship and blasting off to Halloween Town (except that probably his paws are not super awesome for flying the thing, but whatever).

Even if young Simba did have a chance in hell of making a difference in the ebb and flow of the adventures of Tron, Jack Skellington, or Bonkers what exactly is his impetus for doing so?

I don't think you've noticed, but Disney protagonists are by and large not altruists or even adventurers. Excluding the serialized works, you have about four or five characters whom it would be in-character to drop what they were doing and meddle in someone else's world. The vast majority of Disney protagonists spend their time doing stuff like wooing a preferred member of the opposite sex or securing their legitimacy over a small area. And not just because they lack the personal power to do something about it.

You absolutely need some sort of metaplot that explains why they're working together. But you've specifically chosen to reject OC and Final Fantasy characters meddling in other peoples' affairs -- so why use Kingdom Hearts at all? I mean, that's the entire fucking cosmology of the original series right there. Some OCs or outside cosmic-horror force want to derail the original plots of the movies and it's your job to put things back on rails. You might not like that plot, but if you're shifting things back to the Disney characters how and why is Darkwing Duck supposed to care about Mulan fighting back against the Huns?

[Chamomile]

Keyblades do not facilitate planar travel at all. In fact, they restrict it. Locking up the keyholes prevents Maleficent (or other people who use Darkness to travel) from accessing it, but doesn't appear to have any effect on gummi ship travel.

And what is preventing Maleficent from just getting in a gummi ship or what-have-you and crossing over herself? Or a recently freed Jafar, or Syndrome for that matter?

Nothing, except perhaps not having a gummi ship on hand in the first place since she never needed one before. Maleficent on her own can't occupy territory, though. Without the ability to plant minions behind her, she can witch-troll all kinds of worlds, but if she wants to have lasting effect she needs to use local mooks, which means teaming up with local villains.

Lago, an adventure for the setting is completely trivial to work out. Kingdom Hearts could easily do original plots if they wanted, it's just easier to insert Sora and some Heartless into an existing plot and have the two cancel each other out.

How about: Scar gets an army on loan from Maleficent to help take over the Pridelands. As part of this plot, they need Beast's rose to use as a magical MacGuffin to help large armies cross worlds, so they head there and steal that, and probably abduct Belle in the process. In order to get there in the first place, they need a ship with a longer range than Maleficent's magic, so they head to Lilo and Stitch's world to steal Stitch's ship and magic it up into being usable for cosmological travel, drawing the attention of Cobra Bubbles, who calls in his contacts Fa Mulan and Robin Hood, who he had previously worked with during a team-up between the one big grey alien guy, Shan Yu, and Prince John to capture Stitch in exchange for a cache of laser weapons to help take over China/burn down Sherwood and find that ruddy fox. Hercules, who has encountered Scar before due to a team-up between him and Hades not long ago, tracks him down to the Pridelands to go do his hero thing. Cobra Bubbles pressures Aurora into contacting Kuzco, who has gained alchemical powers when the three fairies mucked about with Yzma's potions during an earlier team-up between Yzma and Maleficent, and Kuzco is eventually persuaded to join the team as well.

Result:

Try to keep up, Lago.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Where's that image from, anyways?

[Prak]

Keyblades do not facilitate planar travel at all. In fact, they restrict it. Locking up the keyholes prevents Maleficent (or other people who use Darkness to travel) from accessing it, but doesn't appear to have any effect on gummi ship travel. Locking the key in Traverse Town is something you do like a third of the way through the game, but it doesn't stop you from hopping back there for conference calls with Squall a couple of more times, nor does it stop them from leaving Traverse Town for Hollow Bastion.

According to TV Tropes, Birth by Sleep adds in "that Keyblade wielders are free to travel between worlds, but are not to tell their inhabitants about the existences of worlds besides their own." Now, I haven't played that one, so it may be talking about them being allowed to, rather than able.

There is nothing but Mickey's prime directive stopping literally anyone from hopping into a gummi ship and scooting around the universe wherever they please. OCs and Final Fantasy characters do it all the time, even though only a tiny fraction of them have keyblades. Cloud turns up in the Hercules world and then later on in Hollow Bastion, just because that's a thing he can do apparently. Squall's entire team goes from Traverse Town to Hollow Bastion, presumably because they're buddies with Cid, Chip, and Dale, who sell gummi ship parts for a living. The only reason Kingdom Hearts doesn't go into crazy crossover territory is because Square apparently doesn't think Disney plots are very interesting and does not see the utility in messing with them, and instead just punts some Heartless to the villains and lets Sora help the local protagonist sort them out. This is especially pronounced in KH2 and onwards, when the number of OC villains explodes.

And this is a huge missed opportunity, because there is absolutely nothing in the existing cosmology that prevents Simba from jumping in a gummi ship and blasting off to Halloween Town (except that probably his paws are not super awesome for flying the thing, but whatever).

Well, there's the availability of Gummi ships stopping them. I can't imagine that Simba can just roll up to Rafiki and say "Yeah, I want to say fuck it to my responsibilities as Pride Alpha, and putt around the stars, pissing on other worlds." It also assumes that Simba even knows about Gummi Ships. A hypothetical alien race that has interstellar warp technologies would not me that you yourself can jet off to Mars just because you feel like it.

EDIT: Also, 101 Dalmations is actually one of the settings Maleficent can't just level completely. She definitely has enough power to hand the dalmations over to Cruella de Ville without breaking a sweat, and she might do so just for giggles, since that's apparently why she cursed Aurora. But the British military would probably have something to say about her turning up and conquering/incinerating London, and even Maleficent's magic is unlikely to do more than even the fight between her horde of imp things and a large, powerful military with 500 years of technology in their corner. So if the GM wanted to say that Maleficent screwed the dalmations over just because, he can, but the setting itself can continue existing and there's no reason the heroes can't arrive before the plot gets rolling and Maleficent shows up to wreck it.

I would imagine that the myriad animals that Simba apparently rules, or the massive chinese army (and plenty of spirits that are probably inclined to help the wife of the chinese army's general) that is basically a "suck Zhao's cock" away from Mulan's direction, various pirate ships, titan defeating gods of Olympus, etc. would all have something to say about a literally invading army of goblins and orcs directed by an evil fae witch-queen.

Maleficent's "army" literally gets lost for 16 years because it doesn't occur to even one of her orcs or imps that a baby they were sent after would age somewhat during that period. I am openly contemptuous of her ability to invalidate any setting with that army that she cannot personally overthrow with her ability to fill a city with a choking wall of thorns.

I do mildly agree with Cham that though they may be fucking stupid, that doesn't mean they can't club people over the head. But, yeah, any world sh can conquer, it's her magic, or vastly more intelligent raven, that is doing it. Seriously, she should just trade her army in for more raven familiars.

They'll hack away the thorns, rebuild the houses, and get back to ridiculing Belle's dad and obsessing over the overwhelming virtue of a dimwitted caricature of traditional masculinity. If Maleficent can leave a bunch of imps on the ruins, they can't do that.

Ok, sure. But so what? Hades can do the same thing. Fuck, Hades can just call up actual hero level threats. Literally. He can just drop the fucking Nemean Lion in 19-whatever London and the military can't do shit unless they think to try suffocating it. Barbossa's skeletal pirate fleet wouldn't be bothered at all. So it's not just Maleficent, a lot of Disney Villains could roll into 101 Dalmatians and fuck shit up. And as you point out, they can do the same thing in the KH multiverse too, some just need Gummi Ships.

So we're back to "the KH Multiverse is a mess (albeit a fun one), and there is no reason to use it." The fact that it's cosmology is such a mess is a strike against it, and it has no actual points in favour of it over simply spreading the Disney cultures over a vaguely real world map and timeline.

[Prak]

damnit, double post.

[Chamomile]

Prak, you are making all kinds of assumptions to dismiss this cosmology when none of those assumptions are actually built into it. There is no significant reason to believe that gummi ships are available in quantities great enough to transport armies, nor for that matter is there any reason to believe that heroes will be unable to get access to the gummi ships needed to transport just two or three characters around, and in fact those are contradictory assumptions, nor is there any reason to believe that a plausible reason to get Simba adventuring couldn't be found but I'll spare you all the Disneyfied Avengers plot summary demonstrating exactly how Disney crossover adventures can be a thing since I just barely posted it. There is no reason to believe Hades can spare monsters to go and randomly menace other worlds, and in fact very good reason to believe that he won't dispatch any monsters at all unless there's a good strategic reason for it, since he has those pieces on his chessboard and all of them look fairly important. There's no reason to believe that Barbossa's men would be a significant longterm threat to any setting when they're vulnerable to explosives, not at all impossible to imprison, and are also pirates not really interested in sticking around occupying places anyway. You've also apparently flat-out ignored the part where I said this:

Hercules and Mulan should be okay, though. The former has gods and heroes watching their back, while the latter is a country where an army isn't anything to write home about unless it has literally millions of soldiers.

Yes, there are setting that will plausibly survive contact with Maleficent. There are also settings that won't, the majority of which are in Maleficent's same timeframe, which means to make a crossover universe work you need an explanation as to why villains from one setting don't raze other, similar settings to the ground.

Figuring out how Disney setting can plug into each other on actual map sounds like it'd be fun and interesting, but it's also going to result in a world wherein at least a third of the Disney canon could never actually take place in recognizable form, so it's a non-starter for crossover fiction. You can contrive reasons as to why planar boundaries are unworkable, but making up reasons why we can't have a Disney crossover setting is the opposite of what you said this thread was for.

[Lago PARANOIA]

How about: Scar gets an army on loan from Maleficent to help take over the Pridelands. As part of this plot, they need Beast's rose to use as a magical MacGuffin to help large armies cross worlds, so they head there and steal that, and probably abduct Belle in the process. In order to get there in the first place, they need a ship with a longer range than Maleficent's magic, so they head to Lilo and Stitch's world to steal Stitch's ship and magic it up into being usable for cosmological travel, drawing the attention of Cobra Bubbles, who calls in his contacts Fa Mulan and Robin Hood, who he had previously worked with during a team-up between the one big grey alien guy, Shan Yu, and Prince John to capture Stitch in exchange for a cache of laser weapons to help take over China/burn down Sherwood and find that ruddy fox. Hercules, who has encountered Scar before due to a team-up between him and Hades not long ago, tracks him down to the Pridelands to go do his hero thing. Cobra Bubbles pressures Aurora into contacting Kuzco, who has gained alchemical powers when the three fairies mucked about with Yzma's potions during an earlier team-up between Yzma and Maleficent, and Kuzco is eventually persuaded to join the team as well.

What? You were serious? I ignored that plot because it's completely retarded. I thought that you were just on an Awesome Binge (warning, not actually awesome) like most Internet 2.0 writers, like the supposed awesome of Axe Cop or Dr. McNinja.

Why is it stupid? Because it's a crossover that in no way interacts with the original backstories or personalities or motivations of the original characters. It reads just like the amateur fanfiction of someone who thinks that their Smash Bros. or Marvel vs. Capcom story MUST be told but doesn't actually put any care into seeing how the characters would organically fit into the plot without constant contrivances or handwaves.

I mean, fucking seriously, here is that exact same plot with only the proper names being completely translated.

How about: Mad Madame Mim gets an army on loan from Clairebelle the Cow to help take over the Camelot. As part of this plot, they need Mary Poppins Umbrella to use as a magical MacGuffin to help large armies cross worlds, so they head there and steal that, and probably abduct Pinocchio in the process. In order to get there in the first place, they need a ship with a longer range than Mad Madame Mim's magic, so they head to the spacedock of Emperor Zerg to steal Zerg's ship and magic it up into being usable for cosmological travel, drawing the attention of Darkwing Duck, who calls in his contacts Gizmoduck and Aladdin, who he had previously worked with during a team-up between Long John Silver, Captain Hook, and Oogie Boogie to capture Sally in exchange for a cache of laser weapons to help take over Star Command/burn down Neverland and find Sandy Claws. Merlin, who has encountered Mad Madame Mim before due to a team-up between her and Jafar not long ago, tracks her down to Camelot to go do his hero thing. Darkwing Duck pressures Bonkers into contacting Gadget Hackwrench, who has gained alchemical powers when the three adopted nephews of Scrooge McDuck mucked about with Professor Nimnul's potions during an earlier team-up between Professor Nimnul and Mad Madame Mim, and Gadget Hackwrench is eventually persuaded to join the team as well.

I have a pretty high suspension of disbelief and tolerance for corniness, but I absolutely refuse to play in a plot that so callously disregards the backstories of characters unless they intersect perfectly with the DM's retard story that I may as well be playing Mad Libs. But that's exactly what happens when you have an amorphous anything-goes setting with no clear metaplot or boundaries or reasons for the people to interact.

(edited to be gentler)

[Username17]

Yes, there are setting that will plausibly survive contact with Maleficent. There are also settings that won't, the majority of which are in Maleficent's same timeframe, which means to make a crossover universe work you need an explanation as to why villains from one setting don't raze other, similar settings to the ground.

Uhhh... you still haven't named even one setting that can't handle a Maleficent incursion. Her army can be handled by "some guys with weapons". Care to name a single Disney setting that can't come up with that?

-Username17

[infected slut princess]

It reads just like the amateur fanfiction of someone who thinks that their Smash Bros. or Marvel vs. Capcom story MUST be told but doesn't actually put any care into seeing how the characters would organically fit into the plot without constant contrivances or handwaves.

What the hell. You guys are talking about putting all the characters from Disney stuff into a setting -- I submit to you that it would be utterly, completely, absolutely impossible to make the characters "organically fit into the plot without constant contrivances or handwaves." None of those things were ever meant to interact with each other in a coherent manner except at Disneyland theme park. Therefore this line of criticism strikes me as somewhat retarded.

Disclosure: I thought Chamomile's plot was one of the stupidest things i've ever read and if the DM put me through that in a Disney RPG game, I would kill myself.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Look, I wouldn't mind a Disney crossover plot where Gadget, Basil, Darkwing Duck, and Bonkers were trying to solve a kidnapping mystery. All of them are various forms of law enforcement/vigilantes who have taken on those cases in the past. We don't need any special explanation or pleading as to why Darkwing Duck would put his vigilante work on hold to go searching for a missing squirrel princess for a couple of days.

I also wouldn't mind playing a Disney crossover where Long John Silver, Captain Hook, and pre-zombie Barbossa used the Beagle Boys to terrorize coastal towns. Because that's consistent with all of their idioms and motivations. We don't need to ask why any of these guys are all on pirate ships and blasting towns with cannons while demanding their treasure.

By the same token, I similarly wouldn't mind a Disney crossover plot where Lumiere, Gus, and Piglet went on an epic search through Beast's scary castle to look for Belle's lost necklace. I'd think it was small beer, but I don't find the concept inherently offensive. We can go on and on.

But if you're proposing a clue-hunting mystery plot where Belle is one of the main characters? Or a swashbuckling adventure where Jafar is one of the main villains? Or a 'search for the bride's necklace before the wedding starts!' plot with Jack Skellington as one of the searchers? Unless you have the most epic explanation ever, I'm going to go right ahead and say fuck you.

I don't have particularly high standards for realism or external sense. But at the bare minimum the plot should actually care about who is participating in it. Chamomile's word salad plot had very little to do with the original characters other than fixing the relationship with some of the proper nouns. While of course any crossover will by nature forcefully be hammering a previously incompatible (or at the very least entirely new) setting on top of the existing character's stories, it should take utmost care to respect the characterization and motivations of the transplanted characters. A Punisher/Batman crossover should not feel the same as a Punisher/Foolkiller or a Punisher/The Question crossover. For a potential crossover plot, if you can swap in a completely different character and barely have the story change except for some aesthetics and catchphrases then what you have is utter shit.

[Prak]

Prak, you are making all kinds of assumptions to dismiss this cosmology when none of those assumptions are actually built into it. There is no significant reason to believe that gummi ships are available in quantities great enough to transport armies, nor for that matter is there any reason to believe that heroes will be unable to get access to the gummi ships needed to transport just two or three characters around, and in fact those are contradictory assumptions, nor is there any reason to believe that a plausible reason to get Simba adventuring couldn't be found but I'll spare you all the Disneyfied Avengers plot summary demonstrating exactly how Disney crossover adventures can be a thing since I just barely posted it.

Cham, I'm really glad you can spot contradictory assumptions. Now can you spot the contradictory assumption of Simba being able to get a gummi ship, versus gummi ships being rare enough that Maleficent can't transport an army that way?

There is no reason to believe Hades can spare monsters to go and randomly menace other worlds, and in fact very good reason to believe that he won't dispatch any monsters at all unless there's a good strategic reason for it, since he has those pieces on his chessboard and all of them look fairly important.

Actually, there is. Hades is implied to be the god of not just the grecian underworld, but the entire Disney underworld, in the very AU you are positing is such a great setting for a Disney Crossover TTRPG. This is important because it means that it costs him little to nothing to pop up in pretty much any 'verse, and that he can reach across the entire canon to pluck any given Disney villain that's been killed and plop them down where ever he wants. The fact that he dispatched the hydra, Erymanthian Boar, Nemean Lion, Stymphalian bird (or possibly a harpy), Ceto, a minotaur, gryphon and gorgon, all just to try to kill Hercules means that he either has no strategic mind at all, and thus would similarly throw monsters at a problem till he ran out or it stuck, or has so many monstrous minions that he can throw monsters at a problem to his heart's content. This was in the attempt to clear the way for his actual plot (the Fates told him that Hercules would stop him if he lived to be 18 or whatever). Even if he cannot spare monsters to ravage a setting he could probably let a damned soul out on probation with a bit of hellish might to do so.

There's no reason to believe that Barbossa's men would be a significant longterm threat to any setting when they're vulnerable to explosives, not at all impossible to imprison, and are also pirates not really interested in sticking around occupying places anyway.

Not an entire setting, but keep in mind that pirates actually are a serious problem in parts of the world today, and they're not even undead. Also, the pirate who was blown up was likely only disabled until they broke the curse, not slain. There's no reason to believe that his discorporated parts would not have attempted to reform, or at least been able to if gathered (witness, if nothing else, the disembodied hand that continued to attack Governor Swann). I'm not saying Barbossa's crew would be a major threat to an entire world, but they could be a nice nuisance to the modern era royal navy.

You've also apparently flat-out ignored the part where I said this:

Hercules and Mulan should be okay, though. The former has gods and heroes watching their back, while the latter is a country where an army isn't anything to write home about unless it has literally millions of soldiers.

Yes, there are setting that will plausibly survive contact with Maleficent. There are also settings that won't, the majority of which are in Maleficent's same timeframe, which means to make a crossover universe work you need an explanation as to why villains from one setting don't raze other, similar settings to the ground.

You have yet to explain why they don't such in the KH universe. This is my point. The thing that you laud about the KH universe is that the planar boundaries means that Maleficent can't just go wreck up 101 Dalmatians' London. What I'm saying is that she totally can, because the planar boundaries are not boundaries to her. Thus the biggest point which would be in favour of KH is actually invalid because it's not in fact true. Also, if it were true, then you'd need to explain why the heroes team up at all, or even just the other powerful, but unimportant to the source story, characters we want to actually compose the hypothetical party. Sure, you could make a party with the included stats for Simba, Hercules and Peter Pan. But ideally, you'd be statting up Disney-fied Jason (of the Argonauts), an Elephant, and a pixie. With hard planar boundaries, you have to come up with an arbitrary reason why these three special characters can leave their distinct worlds, and thus changing the very thing that is the reason you are proposing KH's universe, or you pick a world and stay in it, creating The Argonauts, or a bunch of Savannah animals that grouped together, or an adventuring party of pixies, and thus there is no reason for using th KH multiverse, because you are ignoring the other worlds completely.

Figuring out how Disney setting can plug into each other on actual map sounds like it'd be fun and interesting, but it's also going to result in a world wherein at least a third of the Disney canon could never actually take place in recognizable form, so it's a non-starter for crossover fiction. You can contrive reasons as to why planar boundaries are unworkable, but making up reasons why we can't have a Disney crossover setting is the opposite of what you said this thread was for.

But that's not what I'm doing. I said that outside of the video games the KH universe is an unworkable mess, and trying to explain why the very things about it which make you think it's a good one to use either don't hold true, don't work the way you think they do, or are part of why it's an unworkable mess.

The idea is to imagine what a single world that covered the Disney Animated Canon (and some Dreamworks and Pixar, such as How to Train Your Dragon or Brave) would look like in terms of races and classes. The idea would be to have a mixed party that draws on the entirety of the DAC(plus similar products from other companies), without having stupid shit like Gummi Ships, or contrived things such as "They're all Keyblade Masters" (a group which I will point out has only included one Disney character, so far as I know, Mickey).

Ok, so basically what we want is at least five periods (and honestly more is better), which would look like this:

• Prehistory- Fantasia segments, Dinosaur
• Ancient- Aladdin, Hercules, Emperor's New Groove (...equivalently), [Prince of Egypt]
• Premodern
  • Could be split into
  • Medieval- Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, The Black Cauldron, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, Tangled, -Brave-, [Kung Fu Panda 1/2], [How to Train Your Dragon]
  • Renaissance- Snow White, Little Mermaid, Hunchback of Notre Dame, [Road to El Dorado]
  • Victorian/Edwardian/Colonial-Post Colonial- Story of Ichabod Crane, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Aristocrats! (supposedly, anyway), Winnie the Pooh, Great Mouse Detective, Pocahontas, Tarzan, Brother Bear, Home on the Range
• Modern
  • Could be split into
  • Industrial- Pinnochio (given the year of publish for the original novel), Dumbo (consider the dialect of the crows), Bambi (though could be anywhere from Victorian to Modern, given that a gunshot is the only period identifying thing, so far as I know), Adventures of Mr. Toad, 101 Dalmatians, Jungle Book (though little if anything relies on this placement), Fox and the Hound (could be Modern, though), Atlantis, Princess and the Frog
  • Modern- Saludos Amigos/Three Cabelleros (grouping all shorts around the time that would be necessary for a cargo plane to exist), Make Mine Music (defaulting to time it was produced), Rescuers(Down Under), Oliver & Company, Lilo and Stitch (with a few Futuristic characters, or vice versa), Chicken Little, Bolt, -Toy Story 1/2/3-, -Bug's Life-, -Monsters Inc/University-, -Finding Nemo-, -Incredibles-, -Ratatouille-, -Up-, [Over the Hedge], [Monsters Vrs. Aliens], [Megamind], Wreck-It Ralph
• Futuristic- Treasure Planet (perhaps the Galactic Federation dissolved between the time periods of L&S and TP. Hell, maybe it was humanity's transition to interstellar status that did it), Meet the Robinsons, -Wall-E-
• No Clear Period- Lion King

-x-: Pixar
[x]: DreamWorks Animation

[FatR]

What? You were serious? I ignored that plot because it's completely retarded. I thought that you were just on an Awesome Binge (warning, not actually awesome) like most Internet 2.0 writers, like the supposed awesome of Axe Cop or Dr. McNinja.

I was sometimes afraid that I'm the only one who feels this way. On crossovers, I feel that nowadays they are, like, the third worst bane of fanfiction after shipping and pointed disregard of the original's mood (and related to the later). I like good crossover, heck, Super Robot Wars are among my favorite games. But it seems that almost none of fanfic writers got a memo that you must pick thematically compatible settings. And I feel that Awesomeness111!!!11!1 is cancer. Well, maybe interacting with Exalted's fans gave me a strong inoculation against that. Because, you know, they made me notice that "Why don't you relax just enjoy the awesomeness?" is the most common retort to "Look, those things don't make any fucking sense and are actually disruptive (here's a detailed explanation why)!"

Well, returning to the original theme, I guess this means that some sorting of settings in thematically compatible groups is necessary.

[virgil]

I'm willing to accept a certain level of Awesome, such as Dr McNinja, but that kind uses more genre-neutral elements to mix. Even then, it requires a certain level of tongue-in-cheek. Megacrossovers, like Care Bears vs Scorpion, bring too much baggage and the juxtapose is almost never good because of the conflicting genres.

Addendum: I noticed that TV Tropes has something related to all this, Friends & the High Council

[Lago PARANOIA]

Ok, so basically what we want is at least five periods (and honestly more is better), which would look like this:

Looking at your list, I also think that splitting up the Disneyverse by time periods is a lost cause. The Incredibles would have a much easier time working alongside Hercules and Merlin both in comparable power level and motivation... but your list implies that they should first go to Oliver or Toy Story for help.

I repeat: if you must do the Disneyverse it at the bare minimum needs to be split up by power level or highly abstracting abilities such that Maleficent's spellcasting isn't that much better than a friendship speech by Buzz Lightyear (the toy, not the Star Command character). Once you do that you can split it up by genre: explorer, law enforcement, homebody, administrator, military, so-on.