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

[overgeeked]

I said. It's because it's pretty much expected that your CoC character is going to go insane and die. Although I'm sure there are plenty of people who really care about their CoC characters.

And there's a lot of people who play D&D expecting their characters to die. Because it's an action-adventure game after all. One where you conduct home invasions and murder your way to power. Expecting your character to get through that unscathed is...an interesting...stance to take. Do people really enjoy murdering their way to power but can't accept the idea that their own character could get hurt or die? That's something else.

 

[Mistwell]

Greyhawk confirmed

(I'm just putting this out there for the vibes. It never hurts.)

 

[Faolyn]

Von Karkov was a weird hybrid vampire/panther that didn't consider a single element of his jungle domain beyond big cats. His story is nonsensical and removes agency from him and doesn't have much of a different MO than Strahd does.

It wasn't even a jungle. The Gazetteers said that the woods (redwood forests) are heavily populated by moose and wolverines. But then there are the cats. And while sure, they could be any sort of melanistic cat, it's completely natural to see "black panther" and think of jaguars and leopards.

 

[Faolyn]

And there's a lot of people who play D&D expecting their characters to die. Because it's an action-adventure game after all. One where you conduct home invasions and murder your way to power. Expecting your character to get through that unscathed is...an interesting...stance to take. Do people really enjoy murdering their way to power but can't accept the idea that their own character could get hurt or die? That's something else.

You know, I wasn't actually saying that every player refuses to let their D&D PC get into danger. I was just offering a suggestion that maybe it's because CoC and D&D have different goals in mind, that's why players play their characters differently in them.

 

[JEB]

I can agree with that sentiment. Though, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft doesn't fall into this category. Imagine if they made that level of changes to a really popular setting like FR.

That's what I was getting at. They could get away with a reboot of Ravenloft (at the cost of annoying a vocal portion of veteran fans), but that might not work as well for all the other candidates.

My guess - they could totally reboot Spelljammer; they would be taking a big risk by totally rebooting Dragonlance (but could do a reset to the War of the Lance); and a total reboot of Dark Sun will depend on how many of the core elements (dying world, arcane magic bad, psionics good, oppressive sorcerer-kings, dissimilarity with core D&D) get tossed aside in the process.

They do that all the time for FR, to the point its become a meme.

FR most definitely has not been rebooted to the same extent as Ravenloft was in 5E. Retconned, yes; physically changed, yes; but not disassembled and rebuilt from scratch.

 

[overgeeked]

You know, I wasn't actually saying that every player refuses to let their D&D PC get into danger.

No, but I am because that’s my experience with D&D 5E players.

I was just offering a suggestion that maybe it's because CoC and D&D have different goals in mind, that's why players play their characters differently in them.

Right. The goal of D&D is to murder your way into as much power as possible…while making sure you don’t get so much as a scratch. That dissonance is confusing to me and what I was commenting on. High risk, high reward I get. No risk, high reward I don’t.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I guess the point I'd bounce off from Faolyn's example above is that overfocusing on bad things targeting a specific demographic or gender, even by bad people IN NARRATIVE, can end up reinforcing the bad thing in real life. Abuse and discrimination on the basis of gender and sexuality is a lot trickier for D&D to tackle than racism because fantasy races give a milieu of distance from the real world issue while still being abundantly apparent that enslaving dwarves and breeding them to fight in your gladiatorial arenas is bad and slavery as a concept is bad. It's not an easy topic to explore and probably the most difficult one to tackle within a Dark Sun adaptation. But it's still miles away easier to gracefully deal with than sexual violence is, since gender and sexuality in D&D largely reflects that of our real world, even if historic and present gender dynamics and abuses and predispositions are swept aside for a more neutral and equal approach in most D&D settings. The legacy of the chainmail bikini still carries a lot of problems here, and so a Domain focused on a sexual predator is just as bad as Prince Xizor using his pheremones to manipulate Leia back in Shadows of the Empire. It's not something you want to bring forward into the new editions, even if characters like Kilgrave in Jessica Jones strikes some intense horrors for viewers and certainly for Jessica herself.

The difference between Xizor and Jessica Jones is that JJ the show, even if based on a male-written comic book, was strongly female-written and avoids the male gaze stuff like the plague. It doesn't devolve into sexist fantasies because it's about overcoming this horror.

It's hard to do that same justice in D&D in a way that isn't demeaning or immediately present for the players at the table because they've all got genders too (we're not all elves or hobgoblins or centaurs, though, so fantasy racism is a WEE bit easier). Sexism is perhaps just a little too close for comfort, and toes the line between fiction and reality, when roleplaying should stay on the side of the fiction.

Understood. So, all of that to say, the answer is pretty much yes. There are acts of villainy even villains can't do. I get it, but it is unfortunate that we are forced to limit story telling in this way.

 

[Faolyn]

Understood. So, all of that to say, the answer is pretty much yes. There are acts of villainy even villains can't do. I get it, but it is unfortunate that we are forced to limit story telling in this way.

You can still include as much of that as you want in your game.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

in particular the worldbuilding

The worldbuilding was the problem with the 2nd edition version. Once the vampires start engaging in international trade and commerce they stop being monsters and become people with unusual dietary requirements. 5e restores the nightmare logic that first appeared in the second module, The House on Griffin Hill.

was rarely if ever contradicted

Nightmare logic facts just change. It serves to undermine the players genre savvy and makes the horror far more effective. The simple fact that stuff changed, irrespective of what the changes where, was a massive improvement over "this is a real world, but with more vampires" of the 2nd edition. And of course, with nightmare logic stuff could change back at any point, so you can use whatever version best suits.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Ravenloft is right for the adult players tired with only dungeon crawling. It is a "brand" with a great potential, not only for D&D tabletop, but also other products: survival horror videogames, comics, novels, (one-shot) action-live movies produced by Entertaiment-One... Now my suggestion is after showing the "tools" to await and see how the homebred Ravenloft is created by the fandom with their own ideas, and what new things are accepted or rejected.


The setting has been rebooted, but maybe it is still a sequel, only with lots of changud details by fault of Vecna, Azalin and some time travel (this in D&D is stranger than a green dog, but possible, however the rules could work too different in the demiplane of the dread). Maybe it was the consequence of a partial succes of god Vecna in his vengueanze against the dark powers who jailed in his dark domain.

Today the rules about politically correction are different, for example almost never the characters can smoke in the current movies, but they are the own players who have to choose how they want their games. My advice is everybody has to remember if we want a better future then we have to defend the respect for the human dignity.