Recent content by I'm A Banana

How big does the difference need to be? Like, Paladins and Rangers and Barbarians are just Fighters if you squint. Druids are just clerics. Clerics are mostly a variant wizard. Etc. Etc. Etc. When it comes to class-based design, you are always somewhere on the Splitter/Joiner axis. The more...

Personally, I think a lot of D&D's success can be attributed to doing a lot of different kinds of games well enough that it's fine. That people who like tracking ammo and people who just want narrative drama can both play the same game and enjoy time together at the same table. Maybe neither one...

The aesthetic did change, and that's what I was talking about. The OP might be mistaken about the historical accuracy of D&D, but that mistake doesn't invalidate the perception of change they're talking about. It's not historical accuracy, but it's not nothing, either. D&D today is OK with...

I've played a Ravnica game that was pretty successful. The party consisted of 3 members of Selesnya (a paladin, a wizard, and a cleric), one Boros bro (a sorcerer), one of the Izzet League (an artificer), and my character, a loxodon warlock from the Orzhov (his hook was: "What if the IMF + the...

I am quick to bust out the Abe Simpson quote. Change frequently surprises people, even though it's inevitable. Every time one of my millennial parent friends gripes about Skibidi Toilet or Labubus, it's all just "We're 40 years old, of course this all seems dumb to us, embrace your cringe...

One of the interesting things about how D&D grew was that it grew out of wargames, where historical accuracy matters quite a bit more. Part of the enjoyment of a wargame is in exploring military history, and I think a lot of early D&D inherited this -- see the list of polearms, for example. 1e's...

Alignment as a restrictive rule that one must obey (as originally conceived) is borked. It was the GM's job to police your behavior, penalize you for playing out of character, and, honestly, the whole system was more than a little evocative of some racist genetic determinism nonsense. Alignment...

Edit to add: Historical accuracy has never been a significant part of fantasy, nor should it be. Something not being medieval-accurate doesn't suddenly make it skip genres out of fantasy. It's still fantasy. Fantasy is about modern people, not about historical accuracy.

I wanted to start with this because you are in for an absolute treat. Each of the descriptions of the cultures in that book has a good focus on food to make the civilization come alive. The first adventure is entirely ABOUT a conflict at a food market. It made my group hungry more than once just...

The OSR scene has some of the older editions covered OK, so that feels less urgent, but it would be nice to kind of officially embrace the "no wrong way to play D&D!" philosophy and officially put out CC. Especially because to be in the OSR scene you already need to be pretty high on the...

Man, the part I was most excited about was older editions (2e, 1e) and 4e hitting CC. Especially 4e, since it's such a unique beast and it has such an ardent group of fans, I'd expect there to be a lot of interest there.

There's a sort of nihilism death spiral that can take over on this path. "Everything is made up and the lore don't matter!" Well, sure, but then there's no reason to invest in it, attach to it, no reason to elevate it, no reason to do better, endless excuses for phoning it in and messing with...

The concept art for Fizban's is more clear with the backwards orientation. I think the slight ambiguity of the Fizban's official art is why Palmer mentioned "leaning into it." Palmer's art is undeniably back-winged, much like this concept art. Very much, "If this is the design guidance I'm...

So much depends on the context and execution. Like, the "good" ending of FFX-2 was pretty well done, but so much of both that game and the one before it were about dealing with grief and loss that it felt kind of cheap, like a forced happy ending. And, "Somehow, Palpatine returned" is a meme...