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  1. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General D&D Archetypes that spread out to other settings and media

    Priests healing people isn't remotely a D&D thing. Sorry but no. Priests have had "healing powers" in myth and legend and even people's day-to-day lives (as far as they believe) for at a minimum 5000 years. D&D doesn't get to claim that lol. Clerics are very different to priests. Clerics and...
  2. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General D&D Archetypes that spread out to other settings and media

    Warhammer Fantasy is interesting here because it has some D&D influence but a lot more direct Moorcockian influence. Like I think it's probably reasonable to say Moorcock was the biggest early literary influence on Warhammer Fantasy (40K is a complex one), with Tolkien next, and D&D third. D&D...
  3. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General D&D Archetypes that spread out to other settings and media

    Definitely not. Games Workshop did that. Green orcs with tusks are 100% a GW thing. They had them from the mid-1980s or earlier, and D&D continued with pig-orcs and grey orcs as the main approach for a very long time after that. A lot of Warcraft is taken from Warhammer Fantasy because...
  4. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General WotC Continues D&D's Advance To Digital First Brand

    Why you gotta hurt me like this man, that's brutal. That said I can't rule it out when they're trying to sell games for $90 and stuff already (I mean, they always did, but it's becoming a lot more common). God knows how much GTA VI will cost.
  5. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General Hasbro CEO Says AI Integration Has Been "A Clear Success"

    I think the big question with AI doing a lot of that stuff is "Why would I want to read something nobody wrote?" and that very much applies to powerpoints. It's bad enough, criminal even that 100 slide powerpoints exist (anyone who uses more than 10 slides for a non-super-technical presentation...
  6. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General WotC Continues D&D's Advance To Digital First Brand

    I'm pretty sure we've already had products like that, just for years and not for major RPGs. I suspect if I thought about it hard enough I could come up with one. But yeah when we see this for D&D or w/e that's going to be pretty bad. And it will happen. How people and WotC react to it will be...
  7. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General WotC Continues D&D's Advance To Digital First Brand

    You've made no case whatsoever for there being a common irrational sentimental attachment, merely asserted that there is one. amd just pre-insulted and pre-demeaned anyone who thinks that non-digital-heavy approaches have value! Which you now agree they undeniably do! Why come in that hot? When...
  8. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General WotC Continues D&D's Advance To Digital First Brand

    And let's be clear - this has been WotC/Hasbro's goal since 2008. The disastrous "We want to make D&D like WoW" interview in 2008 wasn't a WotC guy expressing the idea that he wanted D&D to be an MMO, or play like an MMO, even though people misrepresented or misunderstood the out-of-context...
  9. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General Hasbro CEO Says AI Integration Has Been "A Clear Success"

    It's notable that the wording here is extremely careful. All the actual examples given are ones that consumers don't really care about - "financial planning, forecasting, order management, supply chain operations, training and everyday productivity". But they're clearly using it in ways other...
  10. Ruin Explorer

    WotC $HAS Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call + D&D and Chris Cocks on AI usage transcript excerpt (26Feb10)

    Definitely incorrect, I'm afraid. The reason 4E was created (and this has been discussed in interviews etc.) was that Hasbro issued an ultimatum that either D&D would start making $50m revenue per year, or D&D would get vaulted for now. 4E's approach to design, particularly to going...
  11. Ruin Explorer

    WotC $HAS Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call + D&D and Chris Cocks on AI usage transcript excerpt (26Feb10)

    I don't think that would stop them, sadly, when owned by a corporation. I think, based on the history of D&D at WotC/Hasbro, there's a very narrow band of existence between "The execs have Big Ideas for D&D! < shark-like grin >" and "We've decided to vault the respected D&D IP for now until...
  12. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General WotC Continues D&D's Advance To Digital First Brand

    I think a lot of it has to do with most of the screens being used for games being multi-functional. Like, it's fine to effectively keep your character sheet on your phone, but if you're also rolling dice on it, no-one else can see, which makes things less fun, and almost certainly you're getting...
  13. Ruin Explorer

    WotC $HAS Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call + D&D and Chris Cocks on AI usage transcript excerpt (26Feb10)

    I mean, I'm not sure D&D has ever really been in that situation for very long at any time. You could perhaps say when TSR was small that was the case, and then again when WotC first got hold of D&D that was the case but Hasbro bought WotC like, what less than three years after WotC bought D&D...
  14. Ruin Explorer

    WotC $HAS Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call + D&D and Chris Cocks on AI usage transcript excerpt (26Feb10)

    It's sadly a truism that cutting staff causes your stock price to go up, even often in situations where cutting staff doesn't obviously benefit the company and might potentially harm them. As execs tend to have a lot of shares in the company (often it's a major part of their renumeration, making...
  15. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General WotC Continues D&D's Advance To Digital First Brand

    Presumably you mean no reason not to use a computer? But that doesn't really follow, because just because someone "has access to" a computer of some kind doesn't mean that they have one which is appropriate for use at the table. In fact I would say, in my experience, it's a fairly small...
  16. Ruin Explorer

    D&D General WotC Continues D&D's Advance To Digital First Brand

    Yeah, this is what I've been expecting for quite a long time, now they're calling it "digital first" but previously it was also the logical consequence of them wanting to move D&D to being a "lifestyle brand", plus ca change I guess.
  17. Ruin Explorer

    WotC $HAS Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call + D&D and Chris Cocks on AI usage transcript excerpt (26Feb10)

    Uh-oh. Last time WotC did good and was profitable, and non-WotC Hasbro did poorly, WotC saw huge cuts to staff. Maybe the stock going up will prevent them feeling the need to do that at least.
  18. Ruin Explorer

    D&D Movie/TV There’s a Baldur’s Gate TV Show Coming!

    I sincerely hope the two lead writers are in that meeting and not really Vincke who has kind of a contempt for the setting.
  19. Ruin Explorer

    What videogames are you playing in 2026?

    I don't think it has an official genre name, but the furthest back common ancestor of this kind of game is Desert Strike, which was directly inspired by Choplifter, but took the similar gameplay into an isometric perspective (and added a lot more weapons) which worked a lot better. That also...
  20. Ruin Explorer

    Today I learned +

    As an aside, not an attack on you, no-one should really be using the term "Caucasian" nor really expecting anyone outside the US to understand it. It's an outdated, not-just-inaccurate-but-outright-wrong and inherently racist term based on weird pseudo-scientific myth-making from literally the...
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