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So, I think an awful lot of people are talking at cross purposes here. For instance, I'd hold up the MCU as an example of precisely the opposite assertion--that adventure stories don't need Good vs Evil to be meaningful to a wide audience, because the MCU doesn't look to me like it has any...

I DM a game for my daughter (she’s almost twelve), my wife, my wife’s boyfriend, and a friend who is essentially family. My daughter is playing an awakened housecat Wizard. She does all the (rogueless) parties scouting, under the (frequently correct) assumption that if she’s spotted, enemies...

A somewhat pedantic point, as it's not really relevant to the discussion, but for the record they don't keep Torah scrolls in tefillin. Torah scrolls are very large--you definitely couldn't wear one on your arm or forehead! The scrolls in tefillin only include a few lines from the Torah.

Depending on the Jewish person in question, this may actually be less welcoming then standard Polytheistic Dnd. Back when I was religious, I happily played characters who worshiped polytheistic gods, knowing that (from a Jewish perspective) such Gods are entirely fictional, and therefore...

I don't think an "accurate and compassionate welcome" is even possible in this case. Jewish mythological concepts are so different from DnD that the only way to integrate them would be to mangle them beyond recognition. I mean, can you imagine what combat would look like? Rocket tag to see who...

There are explicitly Arabic, Egyptian, Norse, etc lands, peoples, and mythological entities present in DnD. The same isn't true for Jews (there are a few Jewish mythological concepts floating around, most obviously Golems, but they've been entirely shorn of their Jewish aspects). And frankly...

Yeah I used to wear tefillin every day while saying shacharite back when I was religious. I never saw the Dnd use of "phylactery" as having anti-semitic connotations, in part because liches don't have any other tropes commonly associated with anti-semitic stereotypes. Plus, frankly, the practice...

Gods do not have a single alignment. Mortals do, because mortals are limited. A god has every alignment. If mortals consider a God to be "good," that's just a function of how they interact with that God. They could find the God to be very much the reverse in different circumstances. (I came up...

I don't really know much about football, but I assume that being drafted into the NFL works like a military draft. If they ever try to draft me, I have plans to escape to Canada. Unless it's a football-themed beer, or...football-themed architectural design? Both of those things seem weird, but...

Consider Inigo Montoya. I don't think anyone is going to claim he's not a swashbuckler. He isn't, however, particularly charismatic. He's not particularly good at convincing people of things. What has he done, though? He's studied swordsmanship, in both a practical and academic sense. The...

Thanks for your comments! Thanks for pointing it out--it sounds really interesting! Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to find it on ENWorld or through a google search. Would you happen to have a link? That's a good point--in the campaigns I play in we often start at level 3, but it...

As to d’Artagnan, he sprang toward Jussac himself. The heart of the young Gascon beat as if it would burst through his side--not from fear, God be thanked, he had not the shade of it, but with emulation; he fought like a furious tiger, turning ten times round his adversary, and changing his...

There does seem to be a tendency in that direction, probably in an attempt to bring a frankly super-heroic character down to earth. I'm inclined to say some portrayals take it too far--I eventually stopped watching Sherlock because they'd turned him into such a jerk that I lost all interest in...

I'm being exceedingly pedantic now...but if you can't argue about the stats of fictional characters on an RPG forum, when can you? If we're trying to represent the Holmes from the books, I don't see how he could possibly be dump-stat CHA. He's charismatic enough to have Watson frequently...

The PC I'm playing right now is actually mildly bigoted...against his own half-elvish ancestry. The campaign takes place in Sigil, so the DM gave us a fair amount of leeway to construct the prime material plane we come from. I thought it would be interesting to subvert some of the common tropes...

I've started doing this almost exclusively, actually, to fit with the arch tone that I've been trying to give my campaigns. "Heroic fantasy" never entirely worked for me because PCs are almost universally goofballs. Leaning into it by going for dry, cheerfully dark comedy is working much better...

A few years ago I DMed a game where there were no PC humans or demi-humans at all--instead, I worked with the players to come up with unique creatures for them to play. The setting might be described as a bit Dark Crystal-ish in that pretty much everyone is a muppet and the world is full of...