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<blockquote data-quote="Aaron L" data-source="post: 7925822" data-attributes="member: 926">And that's a very delicate balancing act, trying to expand to a larger audience while battling the inherent truth that doing so will dilute the unique qualities that make it beloved to the core fans.&nbsp; The narrower the audience the deeper a thing can be, and making it more palatable to a wider audience necessarily requires making it more shallow and generic so as to cast as wide a net as possible and appeal to the lowest common denominator.&nbsp; The &quot;It's Popular Now It Sucks&quot; attitude isn't just crude hipsterism, it has a sincere truth at the core of it.This genericization has a been an increasing problem with the Forgotten Realms for decades; &quot;everything plus the kitchen sink&quot; may make room for something for everyone, but it also necessarily means dilution to the point of blandness.&nbsp; Think of what Disney does to traditional mythological stories, removing any kind of hard edge to the original stories and turning them into saccharine and toothless shadows of themselves devoid of anything that might potentially offend anyone.I am still very glad that they did a great job of mostly managing to pull it off with the 5th Edition, even if I am very unhappy with the proliferation of the gaudy demon- and dragon-people as common playable races in the core PHB (they are just incredibly irksome and gross to me, rendering things that should be reserved as unique and special into mere mundanities.)&nbsp; But apparently they are popular with people who want their cute horned monstergirls like you see in certain lame anime and video game series. It's actually shifted the entire tone of D&amp;D away from its origins in recreating the feel of old Weird Fiction pulp stories of adventurers going out and exploring dungeons to gain fame and fortune, where fighting monsters was merely part of the process as another obstacle to overcome, to something much closer to the horrifically awful Isekai anime genre and with the entire goal of adventuring becoming merely to fight monsters and gain levels for its own sake. (Don't get me wrong; I love good anime, but when it's bad it is incredibly bad, and I think it has been a bad influence in this case.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Aaron L, post: 7925822, member: 926"] And that's a very delicate balancing act, trying to expand to a larger audience while battling the inherent truth that doing so will dilute the unique qualities that make it beloved to the core fans. The narrower the audience the deeper a thing can be, and making it more palatable to a wider audience necessarily requires making it more shallow and generic so as to cast as wide a net as possible and appeal to the lowest common denominator. The "It's Popular Now It Sucks" attitude isn't just crude hipsterism, it has a sincere truth at the core of it. This genericization has a been an increasing problem with the Forgotten Realms for decades; "everything plus the kitchen sink" may make room for something for everyone, but it also necessarily means dilution to the point of blandness. Think of what Disney does to traditional mythological stories, removing any kind of hard edge to the original stories and turning them into saccharine and toothless shadows of themselves devoid of anything that might potentially offend anyone. I am still very glad that they did a great job of mostly managing to pull it off with the 5th Edition, even if I am very unhappy with the proliferation of the gaudy demon- and dragon-people as common playable races in the core PHB (they are just incredibly irksome and gross to me, rendering things that should be reserved as unique and special into mere mundanities.) But apparently they are popular with people who want their cute horned monstergirls like you see in certain lame anime and video game series. It's actually shifted the entire tone of D&D away from its origins in recreating the feel of old Weird Fiction pulp stories of adventurers going out and exploring dungeons to gain fame and fortune, where fighting monsters was merely part of the process as another obstacle to overcome, to something much closer to the horrifically awful Isekai anime genre and with the entire goal of adventuring becoming merely to fight monsters and gain levels for its own sake. (Don't get me wrong; I love good anime, but when it's bad it is incredibly bad, and I think it has been a bad influence in this case.) [/QUOTE]

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