WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

So, just satire. That doesn't seem problematic to me. Unless they listed them as "Lawful Good" or something dumb like that.

Don't know about it being strictly satire, but it's definitely social commentary.

The Mercykillers were ostensibly an "any Lawful" type of Faction, with a fairly obvious trend toward LE among the leadership doing...well, that.

There were some Lawful Good among the ranks, though - namely Arwyl Swan's Son, a high-ranking paladin who was heading up the "this isn't right" crowd and ultimately led them to splinter off into the Sons of Mercy.

 

[Remathilis]

So, just satire. That doesn't seem problematic to me. Unless they listed them as "Lawful Good" or something dumb like that.

Any Lawful. The Mercy part tends towards Good, the Killer part towards evil, and the faction was only ever a shotgun wedding of two very different views of Justice.

That was the best part of the PS factions, they focused the Law and Chaos axis and left good and evil as secondary concerns.

 

[lvl20dm]

Also I think new Ravenloft is better than the old one.

I liked 2e Ravenloft, and I'd have to agree. I've been running a Ravenloft campaign using VRGtR for over a year and it's been really fantastic. It is a very playable book and setting.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So you don't actually hate lore changes to older settings. You just don't like it when it applies to the settings you like.

But you already have the lore as it stands. The newer books changing that will do nothing to you or your table. If the newer Dragonlance book said that the Feywild exists and gnomes come from it, that wouldn't change how you play the setting in 5e because you already have everything you need to play the setting (older lore + newer mechanics).

If you insist on something staying the same just because you like it even though it won't affect you, you're getting overly upset at something that does not matter to you. It's just wrong. That's an unhealthy way to engage in media.

I'm happy with consistent lore updates. Franchises do it all the time. Reboots are  not necessary.

And I do like Spelljammer, quite a bit. My "fix" for the Astral Sea doesn't change the old lore.

 

[Scribe]

Don't know about it being strictly satire, but it's definitely social commentary.

It would be something else if Wizards of today actually put some social commentary in with teeth in the re-release.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So, just satire. That doesn't seem problematic to me. Unless they listed them as "Lawful Good" or something dumb like that.

The factions don't really have alignments, just belief systems. They do have favorite planes, and some of them certainly tend towards certain alignments.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I liked 2e Ravenloft, and I'd have to agree. I've been running a Ravenloft campaign using VRGtR for over a year and it's been really fantastic. It is a very playable book and setting.

I know this sounds insane to many of you, but I value setting consistency over raw playability.

 

[Remathilis]

I know this sounds insane to many of you, but I value setting consistency over raw playability.

Elrond:
Our time here is ending, Arwen's time is ending. Let her go... let her take the ship into the West. Let her bear her love for you to the Undying Lands, there it will be ever green...

Aragorn:
...but never more than a memory.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I'm happy with consistent lore updates. Franchises do it all the time. Reboots are  not necessary.

Sometimes they are. Sometimes continuity gets so overgrown and convoluted that the only reasonable option is to reboot.

And I do like Spelljammer, quite a bit. My "fix" for the Astral Sea doesn't change the old lore.

If you include the Astral Sea as an important part of Spelljammer at all, that is changing the old lore.

I know this sounds insane to many of you, but I value setting consistency over raw playability.

That doesn't sound "insane" to me. It sounds stupid and detrimental to the hobby.

 

[Malmuria]

I don't have much experience with Planescape (I like Sigil, but I think the Great Wheel is a terrible cosmology), but does it have much problematic content that needs changing? Does it not fill its intended role as well as it could? Because those were the two main driving factors behind the changes to Spelljammer and Ravenloft.

Spelljammer replaced the Phlogiston with the Astral Sea because D&D's cosmology is already complicated enough, the Phlogiston isn't fun to play in, and "Astral" literally means "starry", so they just did the obvious thing and dropped the Phlogiston for the Astral Sea. WotC thought that the Phlogiston wasn't fulfilling the main goal of Spelljammer, having fun space adventures in D&D, and so they dumped the idea they thought was bad and replaced it with one they thought was better and cooler (being able to visit the corpses of dead gods in the plane of stars).

Ravenloft changed to get rid of most of the problematic stuff (changed Vistani into a multi-racial culture and got rid of some of the Romani stereotypes, dropped Caliban for Hexblood, changed up some of the Domains of Dread), but it also changed because the setting's main goal is to be D&D's horror setting. And the entire concept of "The Core" in Ravenloft doesn't work well with horror adventures, because horror adventures work better when the characters feel isolated and claustrophobic (stuck in a small space without anywhere to run).

I know that I think Planescape doesn't fill its role as well as it could, because I think the Great Wheel is bad, but I'm pretty sure WotC doesn't share that same opinion. They like the Great Wheel so much that they found a way to cram it into Eberron. So I doubt that WotC would "ruin" the setting in the way that I would. I'm about as hesitant about buying the Planescape book(s) as I am about Dragonlance, but for very different reasons.

There are a few problematic areas with planescape. One is that it not only relies on alignment, but relies alignment as a metaphysical concept, though not without individual choice. This sort of doubles down on concepts of inherent good or inherent evil they've been trying to get away from. Second, the original setting was intent on placing gods from real world religions into the great wheel in sometimes cavalier ways (growing up hindu, this is something that I noticed and that bothered me).