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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9739635" data-attributes="member: 18">Even this raises massive, massive questions, because which "Arthurian fantasy"? Arthurian fantasies vary insanely, there's no one standardized style. Like, Pendragon has a very specific and quite narrow take on Arthurian fantasy, I'd strongly argue is absolutely not representative of the genre as a whole, regardless of whether we're talking about that genre pre-20th century or in 2025 and including modern takes.There's a good discussion of Arthurian mythology in one of Dr. Eleanor Janega's podcasts, possibly Gone Medieval - she's discussed them on a few shows but there's one where she has a multi-episode discussion, and it's fascinating to look at how the mythology changed and evolved.Anyway, D&D has to keep changing and keep up if it wants to stay relevant.It used to be able to define the fantasy genre but I'd suggest that as fantasy has got much more popular in pop-culture over the last three decades, that's "gotten away" from D&D. Like, in say, 1998, only nerds read fantasy novels, there was basically little-to-no fantasy on TV or as movies that wasn't related to Greek myth or urban fantasy. Post-LotR and post-GoT (both the books and the show), that's changed, and videogames have been huge too, because fantasy is an extremely common and successful genre in videogames. So D&D no longer controls and defines the space in the way it once did. It's still influential but even then the influence is often indirect, filtered through anime and videogames, and picking up a lot of stuff along the way.I think dials/settings are a really good idea, especially, if they're really clear and well-defined and well-considered*, and can thus be used by more than just DMs making choices, but also designers designing products to have certain feels and styles.* This hard-requires NOT rushing a product to market. Unfortunately 4E, 5E 2014 and 5E 2024 were all rushed in the end (I don't know if 3E was or not, because I don't know as much about the development history of 3E, but given 3.5E came out in 2003 I strongly suspect it was too), and I don't believe the designers bear any responsibility for that, or likely anyone on the actual D&D team, almost certainly that is down to WotC management way above that level. I guess this is imaginary 6E so we can imagine this doesn't happen again, however unlikely that might be!</blockquote>

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