D&D 5E The Audience - Do you feel like you're the target audience?

[humble minion]

Or perhaps some enterprising 3PP sets out to do a "Shrouded Star" retroclone that deliberately evokes the style of Dark Sun. Which both frees them from having to be completely faithful to the original and allows them to do a Mature Gamers imprint instead of D&D's mandatory All Ages rating.

Someone already did that - might have been called Red Dawn or something like that? The kickstarter was, if i remember right, successfully funded and working on stretch goals, when it abruptly got yanked and as far as i know no explanation was forthcoming. Strong suspicion is that there was some sort of legal measure taken by WotC who saw these guys flying too close to the sun, copyright-wise.

Mind you, they'd already run into some thorny territory on the more difficult aspects of old Dark Sun - their description of their faux-muls as 'ideal slaves' raised a few eyebrows, for instance. And they only twigged to the need for a sensitivity reader quite late in the process, which was a worry. Surely if you're doing a Dark Sun reboot/tribute/ripoff/sequel in 2023, this is one of the FIRST issues you think about?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

@Ruin Explorer, you're pointing at Pathfinder, which is much later than what I was talking about. That's after the end of 3e. Yes, Dragonlance was there, and there's a few odds and sods. But now? We've got what 18 full campaign length 5e adventures. Almost two per year. That's the comparison I'm making. There's more campaign in a box products for 5e than there were for the previous 4 editions combined.

That's simply not true unless you solely count official WotC products. I'm not sure what the point of you hyping it up is though. It's obviously a pretty natural progression, nothing that 5E suddenly invented or "explored" and again, as I pointed out, many of 5E's products of that nature are rather half-arsed and/or incomplete compared to earlier ones.

 

[Hussar]

That's simply not true unless you solely count official WotC products. I'm not sure what the point of you hyping it up is though. It's obviously a pretty natural progression, nothing that 5E suddenly invented or "explored" and again, as I pointed out, many of 5E's products of that nature are rather half-arsed and/or incomplete compared to earlier ones.

Again, I have to repeat, we’re simply not going to agree here. I’m not “hyping@ anything. I just do not have any of the issues you have. I do feel like these products are pretty much hitting exactly what I want. So no I don’t see them as half assed at all.

I’ve either run or played in seven of those campaign in a box products over the past nine years. And successfully completed three. That’s two more than I had completed in any other edition. So yeah I’m happy. I’m sorry that I like this stuff? I guess?