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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6169708" data-attributes="member: 2067">Yeah, we're unfair.But we collectively pay their bills, so we get to be unfair. "It's not fair!" is the reaction of a child. Yeah, it's not fair. Consumers/users/fans are not really fair. They never will be -- they never are! Is it fair that Two and a Half Men has a series run longer than Firefly? Is it fair that east Africa is in the midst of a generational drought? Is it fair that your friend is better at Magic: The Gathering than you? Is it fair that D&D has so many more players than the Star Wars RPG?Heck no!What is fair is irrelevant. The world ain't an equitable place, and it's utopic to insist that it must be. One of the challenges of any company that wants to sell stuff is to figure out how to deal with the patently unfair environment they're selling stuff into. It's not fair that some people will buy WotC's stuff no matter what. It's not fair that some people will always see something wrong with what they do. It's not fair. It's just reality. If they want to sell things to people, they're going to have to deal with unfair people, because people aren't automagically equitable in their treatment of others -- quite the opposite. So "It's not fair!" is identifying something you don't like. What can you personally do to help address that problem? That's where I think some interesting conversation lies. This hinges on two things. First, what you mean by "okay." Is it logical and rational? Not a chance. But it's not logical to feel like the thing in the pink box is more feminine than the thing in the blue box, either. So "being logical and rational" is really an irrational standard to hold any random person to (including any random person crying about how 5e is the devil on the internet). So it is "understandable," in that this is demonstrably how people are. There is an emotional investment in a brand. That's part of the POINT of a brand, after all. It's part of our personal stories and our personal histories and these things get associated with strong emotions and so get expressed often in emotional terms. So is it permissible on, say, a message board about D&D, to post an emotional opinion about how you don't like 5e? Sure. It's "okay." Here at ENWorld, we take a bit of a dim opinion of overwrought venom and acrimony toward a given game, but this is mostly because it makes for lousy conversation, which is what the board is ostensibly about. It's not necessarily because people shouldn't think that way -- get a blog. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Second, the formation of that less-than-flattering opinion of the opinion implies that your own opinion is somehow more "okay" than the other. But, because people aren't logical and rational, that's probably a false sense of superiority. A passionate love of 5e is just as irrational as a biting hatred of 5e. It's not more correct or better researched or more defensible, so decrying others' irrationality is a vicious double-standard and a possible self-delusion. "Your opinion is dumb, my opinion isn't" is always false. We also take a pretty dim view of THAT here on these boards, for much the same reason: it's lousy conversation. Personally, I think feeling personally insulted by 5e is fine because people feel personally insulted by things that call into question treasured memories. It's understandable. It's something that's legitimate. What it isn't is a dialogue. So I'm not personally very interested in your personal feelings of affrontery. I'm interested in what specifically about the actual written material you don't like, and why, explicitly you don't like that bit. That's a staring point for interesting convos about why this bit or that bit is important to you and what changes are possible or likely. By all means, feel your feels. But feels are not a conversation, because the only thing anyone else can say about them is "Yes, I too feel these feels," or "Your feels are invalid, my feels are better!" When you start describing why you have your feels, the convo gets better.</blockquote>

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