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Every .5 e had its own griping and grousing, too. 4e fans don't all agree on if Essentials was a good idea or not. Lots of people think parts of 2014 are better than parts of 2024 (and lots of people don't think 2024 went far enough!). Not everybody thought Skills & Powers was a good addition...

If you sign up to play an adventure game, you expect to go on adventure. If you sign up to play a horror-themed D&D game, you expect the night in the old abandoned house to be spooky. If you sign up to play a D&D game about dragon-slaying and dungeon-crawling, you expect there to be dungeons...

A D&D edition change is usually much more seismic than a "periodic rules update," or else we wouldn't have had the 3e/4e edition wars, and we wouldn't still have some very vocal 4e fans complaining about what they see as a kind of design backsliding in 5e. We wouldn't have the OSR trying to...

To drill down a bit: the big thing PS did was it made monsters into characters first. Those monsters included, for instance, fiends. Any D&D player can tell you that fiends are always evil, but in PS, being "evil" didn't mean they weren't nuanced characters first. It maybe told you what team...

System-wise, 5e did it best, understanding alignment as a rule for roleplaying. It's a little anemic, but that's nothing new. I was kind of enamored of 5e's Flaw/Bond/Trait/Ideal system as adding texture to it, though that was also a little underbaked. Though my honest answer is a little bit of...

People are doing that, though. The OSR is a wildly inventive space. Pathfinder's still chugging along last I heard. I bet if they OGL'd or CC'd the 4e rules, folks would jump on that immediately (heck, I might be one of 'em, there's a lot of interesting stuff to do with that fork of the game)...

There's some ambivalence here for me. Adaptation, evolution, and growth are inevitable and generally positive things. On board in principle. But, these are frequently employed as excuses to do things that aren't so much better as they are just different. D&D attracts creative people who want...

The appeal for the players is that it might be fun to play some tragically flawed heroes who have some personality trait that will eventually cause them to flop out dramatically. To set up those dominoes in play and watch them fall. To give the DM enough rope to hang the party with, and then...

This makes me think of horror genre again. If the PC's just choose not to spend the night in the haunted house, we wouldn't be telling a story about a haunted house. So what makes the PC's go into the haunted house? To do the obviously bad thing?

I keep thinking about the similarity in horror and tragedy. Like, even from a mechanical perspective (like with Sanity or Dread's jenga tower or...) - the idea is that to achieve a near-term goal, you sacrifice long-term stability. Walter White is willing to sacrifice his relationships to feel...

A potential nuance to this convo: If tragedy isn't something we can really inflict on a PC, how might we do a campaign with the theme of "tragedy" that maybe treats the PC's as a sort of chorus - the observers and audience to the great tragedies of others? The PC's should be pretty central...

I'm OK drawing with a fairly broad brush, so I'd say anything from classic Greek tragedy to Shakespearean tragedy to modern tragedies like Breaking Bad, Scarface, Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men, etc. (even arguably things like Dark Souls)

So, let's talk genre in D&D. One of the harder genres to splice into the heroic fantasy of standard D&D is tragedy. To evoke the pathos of someone doing their best to do good and utterly, completely failing. How do you evoke this? What in D&D seems to get the most in the way of it? Can you...

Here's my take: Lore is mechanics. Combat stats should not be the whole of a monster's mechanics. There's no such thing as a setting-neutral creature.

Convenience is King, and Project Sigil never gave off an air of convenience. It always seemed like whale-bait at best to me - maybe a place for dedicated hobbyists to do some neat stuff, but never something your average D&D player would spend hours in. Seems like WotC is learning that lesson now.

There's a bit of fundamental confusion about D&D that is something of a result of its popularity. Is it a game primarily about fighting monsters cinematically? If so, and combat is tedious, it needs some more game-system juice. Things like the escalation die, or big, dramatic things that swing...

Sigil.

Can't wait to see what an LLM entirely trained on House of Leaves spits out...

"we give ourselves aneurisms" isn't exactly a fair understanding of what people who don't like this are doing, is it? "Don't talk about it here on the D&D discussion site, tell them directly instead" is a pretty weird thing to tell someone on this D&D discussion site. Sorry, was I telling...

IMXP, AI solves the problem of not attracting enough investor attention, since a lot of investors are aggressively in favor of it (mostly because of the supposed labor cost savings). Long term, I don't think that's a good strategy for D&D, because the value of a D&D product for me is...