D&D 5E Revisited Setting News: Its not the 2023 Classic setting, but rather for 2024

[Tales and Chronicles]

You can't force PCs to do the stupid things horror protagonists do.

I generally dont even have to force them, they seem pretty willing in their stupidity

 

[Azzy]

Horror usually depends on the protagonists being idiots.

So do comedies....

You can't force PCs to do the stupid things horror protagonists do.

No, but oftimes they do stupid things without any prompting.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So do comedies....


No, but oftimes they do stupid things without any prompting.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say the players are genre savvy, whereas horror protagonists are genre blind.

 

[teitan]

I think you're definitely correct in that if you simply pointed at a piece of art and say "That's Greyhawk" it's not immediately apparent what's different about Greyhawk from FR. You can do that with Dark Sun, Spelljammer etc. That all being said I hope you're right and they just make more Realms stuff because I doubt they'll do Greyhawk right (any hope I had for that died when Mearls left) and because history has shown that FR is pretty resilient in terms of major changes over and over again, so Wizard's can kinda just do what they want.

I see a definite difference between Otus, Rosloff, Etc and how later artists interpreted the GH setting than the Realms or Dragonlance styles. It’s modern art that seems to have genericized it.

as far as dark fantasy… descent into Avernus is really dark people. I’m not sure why you all think WOTC is afraid to do dark or people don’t want to play dark. Cthulhu is huge, the majority of successful Kickstarters tend toward a darker aesthetic. There is a lot of confirmation bias. Hammer horror isn’t that dark while Ravenloft has some much darker stuff than hammer ever touched upon. I say that as a big hammer fan but they did move Ravenloft to a very Castlevania style vs the Hammer treatment of 2e.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Last I saw he oversees D&D in general as an overall brand and not just the game.

I don't think he's still the creative director. I took Ray took that job?

 

[teitan]

No players drive war machines that are powered like coinop machines using coins looted from bad guys, it's skeletor level little e evil at best. Dread Metrol is a grimdark crapsack world & it does a great job of doing it.

Soul coins and the machines consume the souls… you left out the dark bit.

 

[overgeeked]

Relevant:

Thank you. I hadn't seen that review.

I really like this one:

Return to Oz is a classic, perhaps because, as the Nostalgia Critic speaks to in his video, when he saw this as a kid, it was the first time he realised that maybe not all adults have his best interest in mind, and the movie doesn't talk down to him or try to hide the bad things from him. It's weird, creepy fantasy that treats kids like human beings who are living in this world. Dorothy isn't a Conan the Barbarian or Iron Man or Gandalf the Grey, like Frodo Baggins, she's a normal person, a child even, who is caught in very unnormal and dangerous and scary circumstances.

Right. It's an absolutely wonderful movie. A gem of children's horror. It's like they took the 84 items listed in the Fear Survey Schedule for Children and used it as a checklist for things to include. It's utterly brilliant.

D&D needs to lean more into that.

If only.

I think they can do so and approach a setting like Dark Sun with nuance without turning it into a machismo chainmail bikini Conan-esque fantasy and without encouraging and propping up racist ideas and slavery institutions. You can have everything out to kill you in a horrific world, and yet still steel yourself and press on in the face of adversity, even if you have very little power to fix the underlying problems of the world.

There's only so much you can sanitize a setting before it loses its flavor. I don't think WotC is capable of toning down the setting without making it a cartoonish parody of itself.

It takes the power of friendship, and not a good deal of luck, but most of all, the courage to act even when doing so paints a target on your back or puts in you harms way.

I wish the players I run D&D games for were like that. They mostly just cower and hide from any danger that's not comfortably beneath their level. Weirdly, the Cthulhu players I have are way braver with their characters and choices.

These are lifelong lessons that D&D teaches...

Some simply refuse to learn them.

and Dark Sun is a fantastic setting to teach them with, if the designers have the courage to wield the tropes and motifs of Dark Sun for good.

Again, I don't think they're capable of it. They're more interested in the lowest common denominator and making a profit than anything approaching moral courage and life lessons.

And such a product can be good business too. That takes good marketing though...

Message novels are notoriously terrible sellers. Kids don't want to be preached at. Again, it's a mismatch of expectations between what the adults think about kids and what kids actually deal with or want. It's adults trying to teach kids things the adults want them to know, but the kids generally either don't care or learned the same lesson a few years earlier than the adult was ready to talk about it.

since I'm sure some grognards will still say "they changed it now it sucks" and some moral panickers will still say "EGADS! It's got demon dragons and is godless and teaches kids about slavery! It should be banned!"

Again, see the moral panic of the Satanic Panic and the horror comics fiasco of the '50s. The kids wanted to play D&D, it's the parents who freaked out. The kids wanted to read horror comics, it's the parents who freaked out.

But there's a line they can walk and still make oodles of cash on it. I think this team can walk that line.

They can't use a broadsword as a scalpel. As evidence of that I'll point to Ravenloft.

They did a lot better with Van Richten's Guide, in my opinion.

We disagree. It was a joke.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I would say Eberron, Theros, Ravnica, Wildemount, and Ravenloft are all different from each other in extremely significant ways and very different from FR.

See, they could probably get away with any setting that includes or has room for everything in core 5e, and can be retrofitted to current sensibilities without changing the setting too much. Eberron, Theros, Ravnica, and Wildemount meet both qualifications. Ravenloft was too different and/or old fashioned for WotC to accept a proper adaption, and Dark Sun, Dragonlance, and Spelljammer will be the same.

Seriously, just wait for the Guild once whatever WotC publishes comes out. Releasing the IP is all WotC is good for at this point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Thank you. I hadn't seen that review.

I really like this one:


Right. It's an absolutely wonderful movie. A gem of children's horror. It's like the took the 84 items listed in the Fear Survey Schedule for Children and used it as a checklist for things to include. It's utterly brilliant.

If only.

There's only so much you can sanitize a setting before it loses its flavor. I don't think WotC is capable of toning down the setting without making it a cartoonish parody of itself.

I wish the players I run games for were like that. They mostly just cower and hide from any danger that's not comfortably beneath their level.

Some simply refuse to learn them.

Again, I don't think they're capable of it. They're more interested in the lowest common denominator and making a profit than anything approaching moral courage and life lessons.

Message novels are notoriously terrible sellers. Kids don't want to be preached at. Again, it's a mismatch of expectations between what the adults think about kids and what kids actually deal with or want. It's adults trying to teach kids things the adults want them to know, but the kids generally either don't care or learned the same lesson a few years earlier than the adult was ready to talk about it.

Again, see the moral panic of the Satanic Panic and the horror comics fiasco of the '50s. The kids wanted to play D&D, it's the parents who freaked out. The kids wanted to read horror comics, it's the parents who freaked out.

They can't use a broadsword as a scalpel. As evidence of that I'll point to Ravenloft.

We disagree. It was a joke.

Yeah, one thing I would never accuse WotC of is an abundance of courage.

 

[Azzy]

Yeah but it does Castlevania very well.

Woo! I guess.