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The problem with 4E's published adventures is they were not the right kind of adventures for the system. 4E is best when combat is the dramatic climax of an epic story. Not as part of the attritional grind of a dungeon-crawl. Big, combat-heavy dungeon settings are just not a good environment for...

People are giving Plemora a hard time, but is s(he) wrong? Take one industry luminary and four experienced GMs who have a modicum of the skills he cites. Send them each away to a cabin for 60 days to develop and write a game system. Publish them all online under pseudonyms with exactly the same...

Are we going to ignore the fact that the demonic, occult, and violent content that offended people 40 years ago still offends a lot of people today? Or are there certain kinds of offence over D&D that we're treating as legitimate and others that we aren't?

“Old boys club” is pejorative. People who reach the top of almost every industry have to work their way up over many years. Experience and a proven track record matters to those who hire for top positions. You’re hiring someone to lead a 2-year, $10 million project. It’s perfectly justifiable...

But you see how incoherent this all is, don't you? The drow are dark-skinned, so they're a racist portrayal of Black Americans. They're also cruel and arrogant ubermensch, so they're Nazis. So drow are stereotypical Black American ubermensch Nazis?

D&D's creatives and creators are mostly made up of people who have played D&D for 20+ years, because working as a designer at WotC is the pinnacle of the field, and people typically don't reach the pinnacle of a field in a year or two. You spend years as an amateur, years doing freelance work...

That's expanding the definition of racism so widely that it can be applied to virtually any depiction. Give me half an hour with such a broad brush and I'll come back here with a persuasive argument that gnomes are anti-semitic. We're back to the argument that depicting any group with strongly...

The narrative of savage fast-breeding barbarians descending on virtuous settled folk and menacing civilization isn't peculiar to Europeans or the 20th century. It's a human universal. Every settled corner of the earth has been threatened, raided, and conquered by nomadic people since forever...

Do we have any evidence that the presentation of mental illness in a fantasy wargame has any effect on people's real-world beliefs and behaviours? Any more than the relentless violence conjured up in a fantasy wargame affects people's real-world beliefs and behaviour? The fact something could...

I was addressing a comment about why D&D's default setting isn't more like Eberron by pointing out the popular appeal of familiar, generic fantasy. As for WotC's basis for making their recent changes, they wouldn't be the first company to mistake a few hundred people complaining about something...

It seems peoples' idea of what orcs are differs pretty substantially depending on what era of D&D and other media sources they call back to. Orcs as barbarians doesn't seem to have been a thing until well into 2E. And then it really took off outside of D&D in World of Warcraft. I draw on earlier...

Because Eberron is more complex and challenging. And this may be frustrating to sophisticated gamers like us, but most people don't want complex and challenging in their light entertainment. They want accessible and straightforward. They want snooty elves and ale-swilling dwarves. One of D&D's...

Which raises the question of how you distinguish hobgoblins and orcs behaviourally without being a racial essentialist. Because even being 'like Romans' by default is the sort of thing some want to remove from the game.

Killer whales and chimpanzees are arguably sapient. They kill other whales and chimps. Are they being malevolent?

In my games humanoids eat people. Goblins, orcs, ogres - they capture humans and demi-humans, bring them to their lairs, and devour them. Especially children, as they're easier to catch than adults. The presence of an orc band or goblin lair near a settlement isn't a nuisance or source of...

So it's racist if ogres are brutal? And medusa are cruel? And dragons are greedy? Basically, monsters cannot be monstrous by default? You're demanding that we fundamentally dismantle how drama works. Not just in D&D, or in Western culture, but in all storytelling in every culture. Drama works...

The dramatic function. You’re suggesting the only function of race/species is appearance. That’s remarkably limiting.

Then what is the dramatic function of race? If an ogre community can be aggressive or gentle, brutal or sophisticated, collective-minded or individualistic, then what does the community’s ogre-ness bring to the table? Why make them ogres at all, and not humans? Or centaurs?

Not at all. Do you think the PCs would be justified in killing on sight in those scenarios?

Your party has been traveling in the Underdark for weeks, and nearly wiped out by the hostile inhabitants several times. The scout spots a warband of troglodytes approaching down the tunnel. There is nowhere to hide or evade. Prepare to ambush with prepared spells, or enter into negotiations...