D&D 5E Toxicity in the Fandom

[Ruin Explorer]

is perhaps just a tad bit hyperbolic? I mean, just a smidgeon over the top of a reaction? Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with feeling passionate about it. And, kudos for not being insulting or particularly attacking anyone for having a different opinion.

To me personally it's not hyperbole. But I enjoy this particular kind of grimy 1970s cinema, and seeing it just reused without injecting anything new (even the basic aesthetic seemed to be a simple attempt to look at '70s as possible) just really didn't work for me. And the Batman elements - like I can easily see a good serious Batman movie (the recent one is actually my favourite but that's in part because it's utter "pulp" in the best sense - rather than "serious" - also they bribed me with Nirvana!) - they just made me giggle and made it all seem like hilarious deadpan parody rather than adding to it.

And the DALL-E comparison is particularly how I feel. If you look at the better stuff DALL-E has done, where it's been given a detailed description of period and style, and has just done one image (rather than the 3x3 grid format), what I'm seeing there is the same sort of strong but rote and nothing-to-say grasp on the aesthetics of a period or style. I genuinely think we'll see a DALL-E style AI in the next 10-20 years which can do similar with movies. They'll be mostly nonsensical at first but I bet with tight parameters, if we're all still here in 2042 we'll see an AI-generated movie that's like, 95% believable as a real movie (and probably better written/more sane than some '90s and '00s action movies!).

Now to be clear, I don't actually hate The Joker. For me it's like 6/10 movie, which is still vastly better than say The Eternals, or sorry Sam Raimi, The Multiverse of Madness (what a mess!). They really land the aesthetic, for example. It'd be much worse if they tried the 1970s aesthetic and failed, or if instead of being utterly derivative of Scorsese in a way that's rote but does understand the movies, was superficial and didn't understand the movies. Rote repetition with simple understanding is better than actively "not getting it".

I don't critique anyone who likes the movie unless it's because they simplistically think The Joker is a "good person" or "brilliant revolutionary" or similar, not a literal lunatic who happened to be in the right place at the right time - just one shaped by society's failures (and thus somewhat sympathetic). But I feel like despite fears beforehand, very few people had the "What a cool guy!!!" takeaway. Fewer than with typical Joker portrayals, even though this one was more sympathetic.

(Again, @Ruin Explorer, just to be 100% clear, you DID NOT do that at all.)

Just want to say to anyone who thinks you said this to me too much or patronized me or something, nope, you said this exactly the right number of times to ensure I "got it", so thank you lol!

 

[Hussar]

Heh. Again, totally wasn't trying to start anything, so, yeah... thank you for taking that in the spirit it was meant.

See, now, I do disagree with you about Madness. I rather liked the movie. I thought it hit the notes pretty head on. But, it really did dive deep into the Sam Raimi style, which, I thought was a bit overdone. But, overall? I actually quite liked it. Then again, I have zero problem with Wanda being a villain. She's been so in the comic books quite often, so, it wasn't jarring to me at all for her to be one in the movies.

Eternals? I think my biggest beef with Eternals was the color of the show was so wonky I couldn't see half of it. Most of the time, I just had no idea who was doing what and found myself very much not caring too much about it either. Definitely a movie I won't watch a second time.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Heh. Again, totally wasn't trying to start anything, so, yeah... thank you for taking that in the spirit it was meant.

See, now, I do disagree with you about Madness. I rather liked the movie. I thought it hit the notes pretty head on. But, it really did dive deep into the Sam Raimi style, which, I thought was a bit overdone. But, overall? I actually quite liked it. Then again, I have zero problem with Wanda being a villain. She's been so in the comic books quite often, so, it wasn't jarring to me at all for her to be one in the movies.

Eternals? I think my biggest beef with Eternals was the color of the show was so wonky I couldn't see half of it. Most of the time, I just had no idea who was doing what and found myself very much not caring too much about it either. Definitely a movie I won't watch a second time.

I felt like the movie had quite a few issues which dragged it way down:

1) I'm a comics fan, so I'm used to Evil Wanda, but in the comics, her Evil persona is an amplification of her normal one. She's normally a little cruel, proud, and capricious in the comics even as a "good guy", so when she's Evil and that's magnified that works. Whereas MCU Wanda is none of those things. She's kindly, humble, and steady. Yeah she gets upset and aggressively defends her kids, but it doesn't change that. Even in WandaVision, her extreme cruelty to the people of the town is only possible because she blinds herself to it, and it's not intentionally nasty, it's just what's required for her fantasy to hold. Whereas the Evil Wanda we got here was very like comics Evil Wanda, but that doesn't make any sense, because MCU Evil Wanda shouldn't be pompous windbag like Thanos, nor cruel/sneering in a cat-like "play with your victims" kind of way, but she is.

So I feel like the writers really just didn't manage to land that. They made the assumption that if you turn Evil you automagically become a windbag and deliberately cruel (which she wasn't at all times, but often), which just felt like they hadn't earned, imho. You see this an absolute ton in mediocre-bad writing involving Evil Magic. World of Warcraft is particularly a serial offender here.

Olson's performance was better than ever, and she's already good, so there was that, but she couldn't save bad writing for me.

2) The story was just meaningless and didn't go anywhere or have anything to say. Just meandering multiverse nonsense that was like a bad episode of modern Doctor Who. It felt like it was setting a ton up and showing a lot of stuff but, there was little to care about. There was a lot about Dr Strange's history and personality (particularly via alternate versions), but none of it really told us anything we didn't know and it didn't move his character arc along.

3) Talking of Dr Strange, Cumberbatch's portrayal of Strange in this and No Way Home, together with how he's being written, makes him seem just capricious and even a bit stoned (like a lot stoned) rather than mystical and brilliant as he appeared in the original Strange movie and Avengers movies. It wasn't working for me.

Eh, I could go on but it feels like too much for what was a shallow, joke-y-but-not-funny movie that just wasn't very engaging. The best things about it were Olson's performance and a couple of the action set-pieces (but some of the other ones were just dull, including most of the temple fight, which must have eaten like 25% of the movie's budget).

As for Eternals, the movie just gave no reasons to give a single solitary shake of a lamb's tail about any of the characters. And when you have a huge world-shaking epic like that, that's pretty bad, because that's what you're relying on. I think it's telling that it ends with a huge alternation to the globe, that would recontextualize humanity's understanding of the Earth and indeed the universe, and yet every MCU movie and show canonically set afterwards has just acted like it didn't happen. I feel like the rug had been lifted and the brush is rapidly approaching for this one (which, I admit, I predicted as soon as an Eternals movie was announced but...).

 

[Zardnaar]

On a side note, I teach a lot of classes about doing business in cross cultural situations. I teach at a lot of different companies and it's something that comes up in classrooms all the time. The basic, most fundamental rule for dealing with cross cultural conflicts is to always assume that any problem is not because the other person is deliberately attacking you, but, because there is something missing from the equation. There is something that either you or the other guy or most likely both, have missed in the interaction that will clarify exactly why you want to reach over and choke the crap out of that guy on the other side of the desk.

The key is to always, always, try to take two steps back and find that missing piece. Why is that person saying/doing/thinking that? What is the missing element? Find that missing part and generally you can resolve most of the conflicts. It's very rare that that other person is actually trying to piss you off (although that is something that happens). By and large, the conflicts are occurring because both sides are failing to communicate.

It's something you saw in the edition warring stuff all the time. People would say something, it would be taken to mean something else, and then we'd spend the next several pages trying to make it back to where we started. If you're going to weigh in on an issue that you know is going to set people off, take the time to be VERY exact in what you mean. Written words are so easily taken out of context, stripped of meaning, and misunderstood.

Most of the complaints about 4E boiled down to the actual powers and class design.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Most of the complaints about 4E boiled down to the actual powers and class design.

Complaints from who?

If we're talking about "people who played 4E significantly", sure, because once you're playing those are definitely the biggest issues. All my key complaints about 4E would relate to those, for example. I feel like if you deleted like, 80% of the powers which were Reactions, Interrupts, or Immediate Actions, or reworked them so they weren't (including from monsters), you'd have very significantly improved the game. Likewise some of the later class designs (not necessarily Essentials but other stuff too) were a lot more solid than a lot of the earlier ones (albeit some were purely bonkers, c.f. the 4E Assassin).

If we're talking about people who didn't play 4E much, or not at all, which is a lot of the loudest and most consistent complainers, that's absolutely not true. The vast majority of "external" complaining about 4E was pretty broad and non-specific in nature and related things like the existence of Roles at all, the AEDU power system in general (rather than, in either case "actual powers" or "class design" relating to actual classes), changes to the lore, or just wild opinion-based complaints which ranged from the utterly nonsensical ("It's just WoW!") to the valid from a certain perspective ("It's not D&D!").

 

[Zardnaar]

Complaints from who?

If we're talking about "people who played 4E significantly", sure, because once you're playing those are definitely the biggest issues. All my key complaints about 4E would relate to those, for example. I feel like if you deleted like, 80% of the powers which were Reactions, Interrupts, or Immediate Actions, or reworked them so they weren't (including from monsters), you'd have very significantly improved the game. Likewise some of the later class designs (not necessarily Essentials but other stuff too) were a lot more solid than a lot of the earlier ones (albeit some were purely bonkers, c.f. the 4E Assassin).

If we're talking about people who didn't play 4E much, or not at all, which is a lot of the loudest and most consistent complainers, that's absolutely not true. The vast majority of "external" complaining about 4E was pretty broad and non-specific in nature and related things like the existence of Roles at all, the AEDU power system in general (rather than, in either case "actual powers" or "class design" relating to actual classes), changes to the lore, or just wild opinion-based complaints which ranged from the utterly nonsensical ("It's just WoW!") to the valid from a certain perspective ("It's not D&D!").

Things like "it's just WoW" boil down to the power system with a side helping of roles.

A few 4Eisms survived into 5E the class and role structure is gone burger. Fundamentally people didn't like 4E and that was fundamental to 4E and they're gone.

They're the big problems not the only problems. And it couldn't be fixed with essentials because its still there.

The fix was 5E.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Fundamentally people didn't like 4E

This seems like some fairly silly edition-war nonsense, given the sales on 4E. It's more like "4E was highly divisive and split the community".

Things like "it's just WoW" boil down to the power system with a side helping of roles.

Sure, but it's a cheap meme that that doesn't have any meaning or critical bite. It was very clear from discussions at the time that an awful lot of people using it hadn't actually played WoW and weren't even passingly familiar with it, for example. It's one of those things people say to express a general feeling of dislike, rather than an informed criticism or complaint.

The fix was 5E.

Thinking as 5E purely "fix to 4E" is shows precisely the lack of perspective that we've been discussing. 5E is interesting, because it definitely was an "Apology Edition" in that it wanted to get back people lost to PF1 in the 4E era, but it also wanted to give people who didn't like 3.XE/PF or who had tired of certain aspects of those systems reasons to play it. This is something people - including me - often forget or skip over, but it's absolutely vital.

It's notable that it ditched a lot of the 4E approaches, but also ditched most of what 3.XE/PF1 did, all that huge rules complexity, the literally hundreds of Feats, the built-in expectation that Feats were a major part of character power and customization (which interrelated with the rules complexity). Prestige Classes and Exotic Weapons and the assumption from 3E and 4E that you WOULD have magic items all went on the pyre. It tried to drag LFQW into a swamp and drown it, and whilst LFQW is still twitching a bit, it's certainly mostly dead. Further, 5E did something very 4E-esque, which is that it tried extremely hard to make every class about equally powerful - and largely succeeded (assuming at least 3-4 encounters/day)!

And as well as trying to both please people who had been burned by 4E's approach, and people burned by 3.XE/PF's approach, one thing 5E excelled in, probably more 1E/2E as well as obviously more than 3E/4E, was accessibility. And that's what really allowed 5E to reach the heights of success it has now. That accessibility wasn't an accident - I feel certain WotC felt like they'd lost a lot of potential players over the years due to the complexity of 3E and 4E (4E was less complex and more exception-based than 3E, but like, 20-30% less, which was still way too much). I don't think they anticipated how big they could go, but I think WotC had a sense they could go bigger with a more accessible game.

So anyway, I think it's important to understand how 5E actually rejected and embraced elements for 3E and 4E, and really of 2E and Basic or RC D&D even, rather than being solely aimed at one thing. I remember when I first read it, I felt like it was almost an alternate-reality 3rd edition because it felt more like something that came after 2E than 3E or 4E, to me.

(I note that over time elements of both 3E and 4E have crept back into 5E, so that's interesting, too.)

 

[beancounter]

Part of the toxicity problem is how people react to it.

If someone says something that offends you, you can ignore it (Often forums have an ignore setting), and move on. Typically, if you don't feed the trolls, they will get bored and go away.

You can choose not to assume the most extreme interpretation of what someone says. Ask for a clarification before going nuclear...

It can be helpful to develop a thick skin for your own mental well being.

Just because someone is "wrong" on the Internet does not obligate you to correct them.

If you are offended by everything, then you may be part of the problem.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If you are offended by everything, then you may be part of the problem.

Equally though that's often used as an excuse by people who are posting pretty obviously offensive stuff. We've all seen someone spewing really gross stuff, and telling anyone who disagree with them that they're "looking to be offended" or "snowflakes" or whatever. Usually there's a strong element of irony in that the person being offensive and telling others they're "just trying to be offended" is themselves extremely thin-skinned and easily upset.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Oh, I do so love the 'you're just too thin-skinned to take obviously good-natured abuse' position.