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Message: <blockquote data-quote="embee" data-source="post: 8224943" data-attributes="member: 7026827">What SHOULDN'T be in a Starter Box set:The MechanicalBlank graph/hex paper: It won't get used. Whereas many of us doodled dungeons whenever we could, kids nowadays doodle on computers, not on paper. A set of 7 dice: 7 dice are only good if you're trying to irritate or confuse new players. You can't roll 4d6dl with 1d6. You need 4d6. You can't roll advantage with only one d20. You need 2 for advantage. The set needs 1d4, 4d6, 1d8, 1d10, a percentile die, 1d12, and 2d20. 2 sets of initiative cards: Cards are great. They're wonderful for tracking magic items. But for initiative tracking, it's cumbersome and inferior. What's the best way to track initiative? A pad of paper and a golf pencil. Pen and paper and dice are fun. But acknowledge that for a Gen-Zer, they may not be THAT fun. The PhilosophicalFan service that pays homage to the game's roots: I'm sorry to say this but no one wants to look at the older editions art styles and anyone who does is already playing D&D. If you tell your kid "This is what it was like in my day," they will not want to play it. Evil Races: What if you had a pair of orcs that were guarding a prisoner in the service of their Dark Lord? It would probably be okay to kill them right off the bat because we've been told that orcs are inherently evil and these orcs are doing evil things for an evil boss. Now, what if you overhear these orcs say that they hate working for that Dark Lord but they're scared of being killed and, in fact, all they want to do is run away and start a life somewhere so they can not have to do evil things all day? You'd hopefully question whether orcs are inherently evil. If you asked the orcs their names, they might even tell you that they are named Shagrat and Gorbag and that they are from the Lord of the Rings and that Tolkien himself said that even orcs could be good. Cultural appropriation, Eurocentricism, and otherism: Obviously, a lot of ink has been spilled in the past year over the misappropriation of Roma culture for Strahd. Changing a couple of things about them is a start, not an end. There does need to be a frank discussion over D&D's fraught history as an outlet for "nerd power fantasies" and, frankly, lazy reliance on old racial tropes. For example, there's no reason why a monk that fights has to be conceived as some kind of discount Shaolin monk. A monk is just an ascetic practitioner of a religion. Most religions have at least some practices that can be deemed ascetic.  And then there is the stubborn anchoring of D&D to a pseudo-medieval Europe. Europe is not an entire world. It's about the size of the contiguous US or Australia. If D&D is to be a world, set it in a world. Not a pocket of a continent. Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.</blockquote>

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