How Weird Should D&D Be?

[Incenjucar]

I'm not able to access my collection at the moment, but one joke article in Dragon once had a bunch of humorously-themed golems, like the Chocolate Golem, for kids parties, and the Chia Golem, a beast-like clay golem with entanglement powers.

The chia golem remains an actually really really good idea in my eye... a golem that can shoot out vines is awesome, despite the silly origin. I'd love to see a remake that quietly tucks away the joke aspect and makes it into a serious threat. Would be great for a horrific garden maze.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I used something like a chia golem- I had a clay golem that was stationed- semi-submerged- in a swamp. Like a real chia pet, it had been covered Witt he seeds of local foliage which grew, letting it blend in...

 

[Serendipity]

Bring the weird! Not that I think the rules set needs to do this for me, my games are plenty wacky as it is, but the rules should enable that, if that's what is wanted.
But in adventures and supplements and all that, yes, embrace the weird!

 

[S'mon]

I like a range of possibilities. One setting can have warforged and gunslingers battling Cthulu while another is Tolkienesque High Fantasy.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Wow...Sorry, threadjack here, but I could not XP Fire Lance yet.

I don't usually follow too many hyperlinks, but those were awesome (esp the portable hole ).

Thanks for distracting me for an hour. An hour of many laughs mind you...and NO, not that weird. Most of these should stay hidden on this site alone. Funny.

 

[Andor]

I'm not able to access my collection at the moment, but one joke article in Dragon once had a bunch of humorously-themed golems, like the Chocolate Golem, for kids parties, and the Chia Golem, a beast-like clay golem with entanglement powers.

The chia golem remains an actually really really good idea in my eye... a golem that can shoot out vines is awesome, despite the silly origin. I'd love to see a remake that quietly tucks away the joke aspect and makes it into a serious threat. Would be great for a horrific garden maze.

Why remove the silly? Perfectly brilliant engineers and scientists have done silly things. Why shouldn't the Int 18 wis 6 Wizards do the same?

Maybe he was trying to woo a Druid? Or just wanted a portable herb garden to take with him while adventureing.

Ideally the PCs could be laughing their armoured butts off, right up until the moment it pulps one of them, and then seasons his corpse with chevril and thyme.

 

[Aeolius]

Different strokes, etc etc... If someone want to run a traditional dungeon crawl with kobolds and goblins or an urban campaign in a hamlet or thorp, they should be ready with little to no preparation. If someone wants to run an environmental campaign (desert, forest, naval/underwater, arctic), the rules should support this mode of play. If someone wants to devise a campaign set on a faraway moon or the Outer Planes, go for it!

This is where the inclusion of a World Builder's Guide would be helpful.

 

[Mallus]

D&D I feel should remain focused on the purely fantasy segment of the hobby.

Remain?

You should have wrote, "I feel D&D should try something new and focus on the purely fantasy segment of the hobby".

The baseline for D&D is classic, romanticized medieval times, and the basic game should reflect that. Low-magic, low-power, and consisting of a mostly "normal" world.

Really? Which books established this baseline?

I started with AD&D, Greyhawk, and the classic tournament modules. They were plenty weird (and fairly high-powered).

It's more accurate to say the typically D&D setting has a thin veneer of romanticized Medieval Europe covering a chunky, gooey core of Gelatinous Cubes (self-explanatory), talking giant lynxes (AD&D Monster Manual), ancient machines (see Lum the Mad, Apparatus, Kwalish), laser-shooting floating eyes (Beholder), brain-eating psychic aliens (Mind Flayer), giant insect monsters (numerous), a cornucopia of deadly molds/fungi (more numerous), dinosaurs (even more numerous -- wow Gygax must have really liked dinosaurs!), man-eating treasure chests (mimic), flaming swords, freezing swords, weird magic item stolen from Road Runner cartoons (Portable Hole), and so on.

 

[Kaodi]

Weird in D&D usually works best when it is also sinister.

In any case, while I am not sure I would call it weird, I hope that there 7e will have a module for fantasy mecha... (probably not in the Core, of course, but somepoint in the first batch of supplements) .

 

[Henry]

How weird should the default presentation of D&D be? Should it entice players to traditional fantasy or beyond it? It seems like something the game originally embraced at its inception with OD&D's robots, Temple of the Frog, and the suggestion that players could play pretty much anything. However over time it shucked a lot of this, by the time you get to the 2e core a lot of the weirdness had been expunged, we didn't even have monks anymore.

I'd say while weirdness is part of it, there's a difference between "weirdness in the setting" and "weirdness in the game." In the rulebooks, even from OD&D, it's always been traditional sword and sorcery available to the players, but then in the settings (like Blackmoor and Greyhawk") the weirdness was things the characters encountered, more to set as a contrast to the world they knew than anything else. Characters in settings encountered robots, but weren't encouraged to play robot characters. It's true that Gary did say in the )D&D books that the DM and players could work out anything together from playing dragons on down, but he did pointedly stay away from any advice about how it was done, and backpedaled from even that in AD&D.

As I mentioned in the guslinger thread, for default D&D? let's have the full gamut of traditional and "near-traditional" sword and sorcery (fighters, monks, barbarians, fighters, the works!) but I'd rather see anything outside of "sword and sorcery" as supplemental, so that the majority of players will build up their D&D like Legoes, rather than the equivalent of having to strip out factory standard elements from an already-built car.