D&D 5E Further Future D&D Product Speculation

[overgeeked]

Someone who started with 3E in 2000 at age 18 would be 40 now.

I repeat. Whipper snapper.

I see no particular reason to believe reception has been poor. I mostly see and hear good things about those products.

Well, I'm not saying they were poorly received, broadly speaking. I'm pointing out that there's a difference between sales and reception among old fans.

Sales will be wildly high considering 5E is the most popular edition of D&D ever. That doesn't mean old fans like the new stuff.

There are more fans now than there ever were before. Even if all the new fans bought the new stuff and all the old fans didn't...5E would still be wildly popular. It's not an either, or.

It sells well =/= old fans like it. That's literally the only point I'm trying to make.

 

[Mercurius]

I think a non-Arab could write something with a cultural consultant. AFAIK Grubb didn't have that.

What if the non-Arab was a cultural consultant, or at least was well-educated and/or did a ton of research?

I understand the impulse - to represent a culture as authentically as possible, and to diminish stereotypes and pejorative depictions as much as possible. But I don't think we should equate one's ethnicity with the ability to write about history, legends and mythology.

And we're never going to entirely avoid bias or "fantastification" - especially when dealing with folklore, myths and legends. I mean, our entire understanding of history is biased. I think the key is just to be aware of stereotyping and negative depiction, and diminish that as much as possible.

 

[Rikka66]

And 4E Dark Sun definitely did not have many people play it, given it was a late product for a short-lived edition (I also have no idea how prominent slavery was in it - less prominent than 2E I dare guess).

Comparing the 2e box set and 4e campaign setting, the 2e set has 247 uses of the word "slaves" compared to 132 uses in the 4e version, "slavery" is 19 to 26, and just "slave" is 96 to 89. Obviously the number of uses isn't as important as how it's used, but it's something. Probably the more important differences are that the 4e version is focused around Tyr having recently become a free city that has banned slavery, and that unlike the 2e version it's not an explicit rule that Templar characters can order slaves to do things for them.

 

[overgeeked]

What if the non-Arab was a cultural consultant, or at least was well-educated and/or did a ton of research?

I understand the impulse - to represent a culture as authentically as possible, and to diminish stereotypes and pejorative depictions as much as possible. But I don't think we should equate one's ethnicity with the ability to write about history, legends and mythology.

I think that's key. The average person on the street isn't necessarily an expert on their own culture. Sure, they know more about it than the average person on the street from a different culture, but an expert will know more than both no matter what culture they were born in. That said, an expert from that culture will clearly know more about that culture than an expert not form that culture.

And we're never going to entirely avoid bias or "fantastification" - especially when dealing with folklore, myths and legends.

I'd rather a fantasy version of the Arabian Nights that avoids the racism and stereotypes than an utterly perfect and true to history version of the Arabian peninsula.

I mean, our entire understanding of history is biased. I think the key is just to be aware of stereotyping and negative depiction, and diminish that as much as possible.

Exactly.

 

[Greg Benage]

p.s. I'm not directly responding to you, Greg, just the ideas presented in your two points.

Thanks for that, but I get it. To your points, as I understand it, the idea is that "reminders" of trauma are traumatizing (quotation marks because I keep seeing this word used, not because I'm being dismissive). Further, media that exposes one to trauma without providing substantive tools to understand or cope with it is harmful. Some call it "violence" against marginalized people (quotation marks for same reason).

For physical violence, I suspect it depends on context. Violence in combat, for whatever reason, doesn't appear to be a source of much concern. Perhaps advocates and activists for veterans simply don't tend to operate within this kind of paradigm. However, I suspect if the game focused on domestic or sexual violence, it would draw an awful lot of attention.

 

[Faolyn]

OMG! I had forgotten the updated version of the chronomancer class (and subclasses for others) should need UA articles for playtesting.

There's already the chronurgy and graviturgy wizard archetypes from Wildemont. It's not full a Plane of Time, however.

What I would like to see is a full-fledged Manual of the Planes that contains Planescape elements (Sigil, the Factions) rather than just Planescape, so it could go into detail about the lesser-known planes.

 

[bedir than]

What if the non-Arab was a cultural consultant, or at least was well-educated and/or did a ton of research?

That can be a good start and for small projects may be enough.
I'd suggest it isn't for a full book. I may be biased on this in that I'm confident enough that I could do the necessary research on limited topics and depth of creation, but I would absolutely fail at a broad creation of significant size.

 

[TheSword]

Of those, only Dark Sun and Planescape rated in their settings survey from the early days of 5E. As much as I’d love Mystara to come back, it’s either Athas or Sigil.

If they’re really wanting to push the mass combat line, Dark Sun and Birthright are the obvious choices. But of those, Dark Sun is wildly more popular.

Yes but you’re forgetting that Birthright was the winner of the fantastically accurate Survivor Campaign Setting thread…

 

[Faolyn]

For physical violence, I suspect it depends on context. Violence in combat, for whatever reason, doesn't appear to be a source of much concern. Perhaps advocates and activists for veterans simply don't tend to operate within this kind of paradigm. However, I suspect if the game focused on domestic or sexual violence, it would draw an awful lot of attention.

This is likely because D&D combat assumes that the sides are either equal or at least armed, armored, and trained, and the relatively few times that we see one side being grossly outmatched, such as a bunch of raiders attacking a defenseless village, the raiders are treated as the definite bad guys and you have a legitimate reason for fighting back. Yeah, you're going to have groups that decide to kill everyone in an orc village, down to the last baby, but those groups are (I hope) an extreme minority. There's also that, most of the time, a lot of the horrors of combat are kind of glossed over and the game itself abstracts it. You can run combat entirely as "I roll a 16," "that hits," and "I do 12 points of slashing damage" and that's perfectly fine. I'd guess that's distant enough to not upset most people.

OTOH, from what I've seen (mostly from stories online) those DMs who do like to focus on domestic or sexual violence, torture, or dismemberment, etc., tend to do so in pornographic detail because it's practically a fetish for them.

 

[Greg Benage]

I don't know @Faolyn: I think if there were advocates concerned with veterans issues, PTSD, etc., who also were operating within the same intellectual or academic paradigm I referenced, there would be very loud opposition to many D&D staples (ambushes, "finishing off" downed comrades, explosive traps, etc.). Maybe there are such activists and I simply haven't run across them -- I'm still studying!