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I'd have to look it up (it was part of the threads about the lawsuit Weis and Hickman brought against WotC for messing them around on the contract for the new DL novel trilogy) but I believe we found out that Hickman disagreed with some of the changes that WotC wanted to make to Dragonlance...

I get what you're saying, and in most part I agree. In modern D&D, in the most populous D&D player demographic, CoS largely defines Ravenloft, and of course it's going to be the most dominant influence on a follow-up book. But CoS itself IS a followup to 90s books (and the 00s Arthaus stuff)...

I knew Hickman hated that Ravenloft nicked Soth from Dragonlance, but i didn't know he hated the entire setting. It's interesting the dynamic though. Hickman is heavily involved in CoS, and CoS kinda expands Barovia to include EVERY possible Gothic horror trope - you've got werewolves, evil...

The "Elminster is unable to respond to your sending right now because he's busy dealing with something MUCH more cosmically important than your trifling quest, please leave a message after the beep" solution isn't really any more satisfying now than it was 20 years ago, IMHO. And you can't...

To be fair, the Dales in particular are not unproblematic from a design perspective. Not because of any cultural insensitivity issues, but because you're still stuck with Elminster and Storm Silverhand and the usual suspects there - the old FR problem that people have been complaining about for...

I would have probably used a big old dragon as the final bbeg. Keep to the classics for a starter game.

The reception of WotCs modernised Chult was ... not terribly enthusiastic, mind you. And WotC (and TSR before them) have largely ignored Maztica since, well, the Maztica line. Understandably. But you can very easily expand your coverage of the Realms without going near the place - or any of...

Yeah, it's certainly my preference as well. But I would have no hesitation in just flat-out banning some stuff too, if i had to. Dragonborn PCs I'd have trouble fitting in Krynn for instance, at least until the War or the Lance is over and you can talk about having draconian PCs. But a...

All very true. There's fundamentally three ways of dealing with the situation when you have a legacy setting that doesn't line up with modern D&Ds class availability assumptions etc. All of them have downsides. First is you can lean hard into the old canon. Classes X and Y are banned...

Yeah, Ravenloft was turned inside out and upside down much more comprehensively than Krynn in the 5e reinvention. Other than bits of Barovia, pretty much the only identifiable bits of old Ravenloft are some of the names. Krynn was handled with a much lighter touch - although the decision to...

There's plenty of examples. Most of them are in the history or background lore, or are just unspoken as the base assumptions of D&D have changed over time. And to be honest, most of them don't bother me very much, although everyone has a different annoyance threshold and different hot buttons...

Yeah, that was my impression too, though I’m no rules detail expert. Pact of the Blade moving to first level and letting you use Cha for melee attacks is way overdue and makes non-hexblade blade pact warlocks at least possible, but bards using a generic ‘arcane’ spell list is something I deeply...

Massive difference between 'not challenging the DM' vs 'being defensive and hostile' which is what i was talking about. I'm fine with being challenged. If the players say 'hey, what about X?' in disageement to a ruling, I'll quite often say 'oh yeah, you're right'. And I always give a new...

As a DM, I don't want to have to deal with people in my game who are going to be defensively rules-lawyering me all the time and are assuming at every turn that I'm there to screw their PCs over. D&D is a game for DMs too and that's just not my idea of a fun time. There's piles of players out...

The use of the word 'narrative' in the post i was responding to unavoidably implies a story, and death saves were being argued against on narrative grounds. And I'll note that the title of this post is all about the fiction. Like i said, if you don't see D&D as a story-telling medium (i...

To be extremely pedantic I'd argue there's a whole lot of narrative justification for this, because the PCs are the main characters of the story, and in heroic/action fantasy stories main characters ARE more immune to death than anyone else while faceless mooks go down when hit and don't get up...

A book of food history i read argued that it was the British period of isolation in the Napoleonic wars that largely set the trend (and then WWII rationing did their cuisine no favours by homogenising everything in the name of central distribution and standardisation so a lot of local...

Brave and the Bold even had an episode that directly talked about this in-universe. It was awesome.

It’s only one small data point, but in the ‘looking for D&D game’ Facebook group that runs in my city, there’s been three or four posts in the last week by people looking to join a d&d game and talking about how playing BG3 was one of the reasons they wanted to try tabletop. By comparison, there...

I think their experiences with those (dreadful) books are one of the reasons they won’t try it again. I suspect the slight aversion to going too deep into ickiness in the modern market is why we’re getting a giant book ahead/instead of an undead book or a fiend book, too.