D&D 5E How should be the future Oriental Adventures.

[Tun Kai Poh]

I said this over in the thread about Crawford and his tweets on alignment, but I feel the more they move away from the alignment system, the less likely there will be another Asian-themed book. The structure and honor codes and all that seem more tied to alignments than in more generic settings. So unless they come up with a good replacement for an Eastern theme, I think this has gone way to the back of the line.

Well there are a lot of games that do D&D-style fantasy but don't use D&D-style alignment rules - and I can think of dozens of ways to run games set in fantastic settings inspired by Asian regions that don't involve "honour" the way it's been romanticised by OA or L5R (sorry L5R old friend, your concept of Samurai honour is a mess and has more in common with Tojo's Japan than a lot of historical lived experience...) so that isn't really a reason not to try.

Anyway. Religion and philosophy and how people structure their ethical codes has always been more complex and interesting in our world than how the Alignment grid handles it - whether we're talking about Middle Ages Catholic France, Sassanian Persia, Yuan Dynasty China or Warring States Japan. I personally prefer to group NPCs by factions and overlapping belief systems than by alignment.

 

[Azzy]

It does fit the whole bizarre 5E theme of "designers insanely overvaluing the ability to fight without an actual weapon", sadly.

On that I agree, it seems that they have gone out of their way to make unarmed combatants (that are not monks) suck. This annoys me quite a bit as I would like to have a non-monk pugulist or a (unarmmed) martial artist that has to religious/spiritual baggage.

 

[Azzy]

There are still fantasy works set in feudal Japan in various periods (the Shogunate like with Blade of the Immortal, the Warring States period like with Inuyasha, the Heian period like the Onmyoji films), but there isn't really a particular catch-all term for those works

Yeah, the closest I can think of is "chanbara", but that's more concerned with samurai (with or without fantastical elements) or "jidaigeki" which really encompasses period drama in general (again, with or without fantastical elements).

 

[Chaosmancer]

I said this over in the thread about Crawford and his tweets on alignment, but I feel the more they move away from the alignment system, the less likely there will be another Asian-themed book. The structure and honor codes and all that seem more tied to alignments than in more generic settings. So unless they come up with a good replacement for an Eastern theme, I think this has gone way to the back of the line.

The fact that you can't see them creating an Eastern Themed game without some ridiculous honor system baked into it is just plain depressing.

 

[humble minion]

The fact that you can't see them creating an Eastern Themed game without some ridiculous honor system baked into it is just plain depressing.

Yeah, and quite aside from that, I would have thought that the bond/trait/ideal/flaw system basically removes the need for any additional tacked-on 'honour' system anyway. It allows a PC to define what honour means to them (if anything!) rather than having a single universal GM-adjudicated 'honour' scale which slots everyone in neatly as a single number.

And it makes it more interesting, anyway - lots more scope for conflict between people with different concepts of honour, arguments/debates/wars over the finer points of honour, etc etc.

D&D's been trying to move away from mechanical enforcement of roleplaying strictures for a long time, i can't see them reversing course so completely just to shove in an arbitrary and oversimplified 'honour' system to pander to one particular samurai stereotype, especially when the flaws in the very concept have been pointed out ad nauseum.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

If I say Japanese are more hard-working because the effort and discipline are very important in their culture, or Chinese are politer than Spanish, you can answer they are positive stereotypes. Maybe, but I don't imagine an Asian reporting me about that. And positive stereotypes in speculative fiction can be right to show positive examples to be imitated. Why not to create characters who promote any moral vitues like the social skills?

Of course we have to take care about censorship. The cartoon movie Abominable was censored in Vietnam because.... in a scene with a map Vietnamese territory was showed as a part of China.

* Could we create a fantasy nation mixing Russia and China? for example blonde hair and almond-shaped eyes, and clothings like a mixture of pien-fu and sarafn or kaftan (robes/tunics).

* Wuxia D&D isn't only Kara-tur. WotC can create new worlds as Kamigawa. The first step isn't to sell the house but the bricks, and later you watch how are the house they build to imatitate their style according their tastes. How should the lore and racial traits of the PC races "from the far lands" to be interesting?

* Why not to produce a game-live show where J-idols play one-shot module based in J-Horror movies or monster from folklore? Or kid-friendly innocent maho shojo (magical girl, like puella magi, sailor moon or pretty cure) who have to "heal" cursed objects what have become tsukumogami.

 

[Azzy]

Or kid-friendly innocent maho shojo (magical girl, like puella magi, sailor moon or pretty cure)

Kid-friendly?

Have you actually watched Madoka?

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I said this over in the thread about Crawford and his tweets on alignment, but I feel the more they move away from the alignment system, the less likely there will be another Asian-themed book. The structure and honor codes and all that seem more tied to alignments than in more generic settings. So unless they come up with a good replacement for an Eastern theme, I think this has gone way to the back of the line.

Does the lack of a system for knightly chivalry prevent there from being an European-themed setting? It doesn't.

And frankly I think that back in 1e even when that book was introduced, most people ignored things about honor in that book. I'm certain they did the same thing about it in 3e unless they really were trying to play Legend of the 5 Rings D20, which most people weren't.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Kid-friendly?

Have you actually watched Madoka?

Clearly not, that thing was brutal.

Spoiler: Spoilers about the Show

You find out after the girls get their "wish" and gain magic, that they essentially become liches, forever children with their souls bound in the gemstones they use for their magic. The witches they fight? Other magical girls who have fallen to despair and grief which twists them into monsters. Of course, the "grief seeds" those witches drop are also the only way to remove the stain of despair from your own soul.

So, keep fighting and trying not to die or have your soul destroyed for eternity, and don't think negative thoughts or you will become a monster.

There is actually a really wonderful fan-story called the Golden Empire that really gives a great sense of this struggle.

If I say Japanese are more hard-working because the effort and discipline are very important in their culture, or Chinese are politer than Spanish, you can answer they are positive stereotypes. Maybe, but I don't imagine an Asian reporting me about that. And positive stereotypes in speculative fiction can be right to show positive examples to be imitated. Why not to create characters who promote any moral vitues like the social skills?

Ok, let us take a hypothetical. You run a company and you have a spanish worker and a Japanese worker. You have a big overtime project that needs to be done. It is a ton of work. Who do you give it to.

According to this stereotype, the Japanese worker, he's harder working and will put in more effort, because that is his culture.

But, is that actually true? Even if he is a hard worker, can he handle that work-load? What if he is scared of losing his job, so he won't mention that he is felling overworked, because every time this decision comes up, you want to give more work to the person who will actually do it?

This is one of the ways that "positive" stereotypes can be just as bad as bad stereotpyes

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I think some of the best movies about Asian characters are the Harold and Kumar movies, as they took on some stereotypes and shattered them, demonstrating how some "positive" stereotypes are a bad thing.