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D&D is not the nuanced art house film of fantasy TTRPGs. There are other games that aspire to that. D&D is the market leader that acts as a gateway for new players. That means it has to be appealing and easily understood to a bunch of 15 year olds sitting around a table for the first time. Broad...

D&D is not a game of subtlety and realism. The reason non-human species are easily identifiable is narrative clarity. Art needs to be understandable and narration needs to communicate succinctly. It's the same reason every member of GI Joe or the Avengers has a unique and instantly recognizable...

To be fair, it's something Mary Shelley cooked up quickly for a writing contest because a vacation got rained in. And it was mostly a metaphor for what a terrible father Lord Byron (of the Byronic hero) was. But out of such humble roots, new genres are born.

Well, that's the topic of the thread, ain't it? How do you make aasimar more appealing. Goblins have a lot of media presence that gives them a ready made audience, even if the D&D version isn't the same as the more popular image. (They're not even green!) So goblins have a head start. But...

Crawford dropped that their target is two player races covering a given niche, to give players a choice. His example was orcs and goliaths as the two "big and strong" races that get Powerful Build. Generalizing from that, we might see tiefling and aasimar as the two planetouched races. And we...

Hmm. How would you translate a Gundam protagonist into a D&D context? It's not easy. Gundam is an odd juxtaposition of a "chosen one" hero gifted greater power with a war setting where death is easy and inherent power is scarce. Both ends of which are poor fits for D&D. Probably you'd have...

Again, poor visual identification. You look at character art of a dwarf or an orc or a tiefling, and you instantly recognize what they are. A random collection of minor VFX doesn't create a cohesive racial identity or easy character recognition. I'm not saying that aasimar don't have non-human...

That's why I have no objection to the implementation of psionics that 5e settled on. It's a little distinctive, but mechanically it's completely interoperable with the rest of the ruleset. No weird subsystems or special interactions or alternative resolution methods. They fit into a group just...

You mean this thread? On the front page? Dude, just Ctrl+F if you don't spot it. https://www.enworld.org/threads/mcdms-flee-mortals-now-on-dndbeyond.704197/

At least as a general thing, the PHB rules are core elements that lots of other features tie into, while the DMG rules are optional modules that can be plugged in or out more easily. If you change how grappling or concentration works, it has knock on effects for classes and feats and spells that...

No no no. Obviously, this is two elder dragons playing Pokemon, pitting their champions against each other in a proxy contest. The gold wyrm's adventurers versus the red dragon's elite kobolds. The winning team's backer will claim victory, while the loser will have to cede the point of...

I wouldn't worry too much about it. There's always a cutoff, be it based on physical printing limitations or budget or whatever. Editors edit, layout specialists tweak things, and you get there in the end. I think it was in this same article, they drop mention of how the Revised PHB makes sure...

Oh, come on. I enjoy a little psionic flavor now and then, but age is no guarantor of authenticity. Otherwise it wouldn't be "authentic" D&D without racial level limits, gender based Strength penalties, and twelve types of historically dubious polearms.

Every endgame type creature was psionic in 1e because psionics and magic weren't interoperable. You needed psionic defenses to counter psionic attacks. That meant a creature without the full psionic defensive suite could potentially be cheesed, and there was no way Gygax would let that fly. So...

If you're going to have a non-human character, it should be part of their story. Visually they should be immediately identifiable as their species, with an emphasis on being both distinctive and easily cast as a compelling character. That might mean being badass, sexy, cute, intimidating, or...

Really, it makes all the sense in the world for them to be there. The devs signaled their intent to add a celestial counterpart to tieflings for the Revised PHB all the way back at the start of the UA process. The Ardlings proved unpopular, and everyone just kind of assumed they gave up on the...

Kids these days, the ones playing D&D at least, are still geeks. And geeks just love doing deep dives on history and lore, and learning all the hidden details and callbacks in a rich fictional setting. You don't have to nostalgia bait them to get them interested. You just have to dangle the...

Let's also keep something clear. They're not making Greyhawk the default setting for the PHB. They're using it as a sample setting in the DMG to illustrate world building for DMs. The two are not the same. In the article we got this from, it talks about how the PHB having a setting appendix...

More importantly, the 3e PHB divine pantheon definitely was. I don't know about anyone else, but those gods being in the PHB meant they were treated as a default for a lot of campaigns. I'd struggle to name three nations from Greyhawk without checking, yet I have a familiar attachment to Kord...

D&D is, after all, still a geek hobby. There are a lot more people willing to identify as a geek now, you can fly your geek flag a lot more openly, but it's still a geek thing. And geeks love their history. There's a push and pull at work here. Old and out of touch is bad, but attempts at...