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 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.
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 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.
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.
