D&D 5E Am I no longer WoTC's target audience?

[Zardnaar]

That's not true about draconians in DL, and hasn't been since 1999. And having them be irredemably evil goes against the themes of Dragonlance.

Yeah I gave up on DL in 1997 after the second cataclysm/ Dragons of Summer Flame.
They blew the world up once to many. Kinda like FR.

 

[Rikka66]

I could care less about those products as well. I want to see a Birthright core book or Planescape, I think like me you are used to what we had then. A line of worlds and everything after was to support those lines. Now they are going off in tangents, and you would think that they would have learned their lessons when TSR did that. I know these items are selling now, but in the long run they have to support their main products. Get some more Ravenloft out there, more core worlds. I mean lets be real, Planescape would be Huge seller for them. Right now they are running it for the money as a business, boardgames, and hitting on novelty things that sell, like rick and morty, stranger things, etc.. I just hope they start putting out some more module books or books that support the worlds they are using. I still loved the old 2e times when there were box sets, modules, and crunch books galore, but sadly i think those days are long gone. It is whatever sells. As for me I am still hoping and holding out for a new hardcover for Birthright, my favorite setting. With the popularity of Game of Thrones you would of thought it would have been a no brainer.

The lesson they learned from TSR was not to release tons of settings with 20 supplements each. The tie-in starter sets are a very different kind of product from that.

I wouldn't call the connection between Birthright and Game of Thrones a "no-brainer". That's the kind of fad chasing that has a high chance to burn them, I think. Banking on tangential connections.

 

[billd91]

The lesson they learned from TSR was not to release tons of settings with 20 supplements each. The tie-in starter sets are a very different kind of product from that.

To say nothing of box sets that were priced based on what they thought people would spend, not how much they cost to produce (in some instances, higher than the price they set).

 

[David Howery]

A peasant with more than one pitchfork gets an A for preparedness. Is that like one everyday pitchfork and a shiny special occasion pitchfork?

bah. Peasants, just like modern men with modern tools, will have three pitchforks. One for the house, one for the garage (okay, barn), and one in case you break one...

 

[Garthanos]

I'm only 54, and I learned to program on punch cards. FORTRAN for the win (?)

I think we did one lesson with that... but honestly no to Fortran or Pascal and really really really no to COBOL

 

[pemerton]

Greyhawk, for the most part, doesn't give off a vibe like the Mos Eisley cantina

Just off the top of my head, here are some of the demi-human/semi-human races in GH as published:

• Humans
• Elves (high, grey/faerie, valley, grugach, sylvan, acquatic, dark/drow)
• Dwarves (hill, mountain)
• Halflings (harfoot, stout, tallfellow)
• Gnomes (surface, deep/svirfneblin)
• Orcs
• Goblins
• Hobgoblins
• Bugbears
• Xvarts
• Koboblds
• Gnolls
• Ogres (including merrow)
• Ogrillon
• Orogs
• Tasloi
• Lizardfolk
• Sahuagin
• Locathah
• Bullywugs
• Grippli
• Kua-toa (sp?)
• Giants (various sorts)
• Trolls (including scrags)

That's before we get to half- (elves, orcs, ogres at least), cambions, wererats and werewolves, Greyhawk dragons, etc.

Are we really saying that dragonborn are the straw that will break this camel's back? What's the actual argument?

My personal preference is to not go full on Mos Eisley cantina in my D&D games. It makes the exotic choices decidedly less exotic - and that's kind of boring.

Are you talking about setting design? PC party building? Encounter tables (for inns and taverns in particular?)? Something else?

As far as setting is concerned, I don't see the vast difference between (i) a grippli, a bullywug or even a tasloi and (ii) a dragonborn, as far as fitting in is concerned. This doesn't have much to do with random inn tables, though.

You have to accept when GH returns, it will be with some retcons

Putting these races in isn't even a retcon, because there is no meaningful sense in which they were previously absent.

I never used tasloi in my campaign world prior to acquiring the Monster Manual II, but using them wasn't a retcon. It was just incorporating new material. This has always been the norm for D&D, especially GH which is a very capacious setting.

it is hard enough to proper roleplay an elf as being something different than a human with pointy ears.

Of the non human humanoids, dwarves are quite easy to play because of their stereotypical traits.
Also a gnome or Halfling and also Halforc is not to hard to roleplay. But a reptile or a halfdemon?

For a dragonborn if played proper you should take some reptilian traits, e.g. warm up in the sun, constantly probing smells with their tongues etc. Their whole emotional background should be totally different than a mammal type.

For any half demon/devil/angel I do not know how to even start here. Maybe play them very very strict to at least one part of their supernatural progenitors homeplane alignment.

Are dragons cold- or warm-blooded?

When it comes to playing a tiefling, wouldn't Hellstrom (Son of Satan) or standard pulp fare be a starting point?

Not to mention that GMs play dragons and demons pretty routinely.

No D&D, and certainly no GH, material that I'm aware of treats non-human peoples as meaningfully alien, so I don't see why we'd suddenly start with dragonborn and tieflings.

 

[pemerton]

hating Tolkien like some intellectual literary snobs like saying Shakespeare isn’t that good.

Where does this come from? No one on this thread has said they hate Tolkien or that they hate Shakespeare.

But JRRT's work is not tradition - it is adaptation and invention (as he discusses in some detail in his work on fairy stories). And it can't be true both that GH involves some sort of contrastp with high or romantic fantasy and that it is bound by Tolkien's limits.

everyone expected Elves and Dwarves to be like those from Middle-Earth and Hobbits to exist.

As presented in AD&D (which is the context in which GH was first published) dwarves were almost entirely derivative of JRRT, and elves close to. Half-elves are straight from Tolkien, as are hobbits, orcs and half-orcs (like the spy at Bree).

But GH needn't be limited to Tolkien, and in many ways is not well-suited to it because evil in GH is somewhat diffuse rather than all the result of the Fall.

halflings are what? Pretty sure they were even called hobbits in the earliest material, until they realized that might border on infringement of some kind. So they changed the name of the race to the word used by characters in the books to refer to the hobbits.

Not only does Chainmail have hobbits, but it has tribes of Orcs identified in Tolkien-esque terms, like White Hand, Lidless Eye, etc. In AD&D these became the tribes mentioned in the MM (Vile Rune, Broken Bone etc) which in turn became the holy symbols of the Orc gods when Roger E Moore published The Orcish Point of View in Dragon.

Tolkien himself was inspired by norse myth and other folklore, and D&D was influenced by a lot of folklore, too

JRRT was a scholar of Germanic languages and was intimately familiar with that folklore in its primary sources. He published a famous scholarly treatment of Beowulf.

I don't think it's really apposite to compare Gygax's knowledge of folklore to Tolkien's.

Tolkien's elves would be taller than all but the very tallest humans, and they'd probably have higher stats in every single slot. Which would obviously be unplayable

In 3rd Age Middle Earth what great deeds did elves achieve? I think it should be quite possible to have a RPG that accurately represents JRRT's elves and is still quite playable. Burning Wheel goes at least some of this way.

D&D obviously isn't that RPG, but this is a result of particular features of D&D and the way PC build feeds into action resolution.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I don't think it's really apposite to compare Gygax's knowledge of folklore to Tolkien's.

Gygax was very knowledgeable actually, rather more eclectic than Tolkien, who was deeper but narrower.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes, when thief is pretty much the only class your race can succeed at, you are going to morph into thieving scoundrels.

And what's wrong with that?

There's always a need for more thieving scoundrels...and who are you calling scruffy-looking?

 

[pemerton]

Gygax was very knowledgeable actually, rather more eclectic than Tolkien, who was deeper but narrower.

Did Gygax work in languages other than modern English? (I've never heard that he did.)