Canon vs. Original characters

I found an article originally posted on Gnome Stew, but definitely applies to our type of text-based roleplaying. It’s a debate between using canon characters (see the definition here), and original characters you’ve made up. SOmething that applies to a lot of people who set their roleplays in an existing world, like Star Wars, Star Trek etc, or Firefly (pictured here) which has a lot of scope to explore the ‘verse without ever mentioning the show’s characters. But isn’t it cool to have crossovers?

See the original article here.