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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ProgBard" data-source="post: 6783260" data-attributes="member: 6803722">In contrast, my impressions of 5E are that it's the most supportive of D&D's diversity of settings in its baseline assumptions that any edition has ever been. I don't recall any prior edition taking as much time in its PHB and DMG to namedrop all the established settings, nor to make as much point as they do to say that you might have a homebrew world that you can twiddle the knobs on to your liking. I've never seen an edition that puts out adventures with guidance on how to adapt them from the baseline setting, nor a setting-specific guidebook that does the same thing. I've never experienced a D&D with as much baked-in perspective that this is your game to do with what you will, from the core books to the APs. It's one of the reasons I came back to the game with 5E.You want to know why the 5E line has focused on the Forgotten Realms? It's not a swiving conspiracy. It's because FR hits the sweet spot of generic + popular that represents the biggest spread of the game's baseline assumptions. It's a way of saying, "Hey, we bet your campaign world looks a lot like this, and where it doesn't, you know what to do." It's because the map in the adventure needs to have some place names on it, and they might as well be in the context of the world with the most name recognition. It's not because Ed Greenwood is secretly the Borg Queen. You want to boycott the line because it says "Faerun" in the background text - hey, if that's the hill you wanna die on, go right ahead. But don't fool yourself into thinking it's because you're being "forced" to do anything in particular with the fifth edition of D&D, not when the designers have gone out of their way to point out the opposite.This game isn't designed to "support" all our special snowflake homebrew worlds. It's not Fate, for the gods' sake, and we shouldn't expect it to be; indeed, there are reasons to think that trying to move it in that direction is a suboptimal choice. Yeah, it can give you a certain number of varyingly-crunchy toolkit options, but those were always going to be within the more or less narrow confines of "generic D&D." The days of crazy-ass niche-y splatbooks are past, for good or ill. That's not The Man trying to keep you down, it's a matter of necessary focus and careful resource management (a thing one might think gamers had a more intuitively sympathetic perspective on, it bears pointing out).And let us not forget: You know who was really invested in making sure everyone was playing D&D the same way? Gary bloody Gygax, while we're waxing nostalgic about how wonderful things useta be. (A tradition that seems to have been taken up by a not-inconsiderable number of OSR folks, more's the pity, which is one of the several reasons I wish those guys well but am not one of them.) Exactly none of that attitude has been present in any of what the Wizards folks have been saying, in the game text or outside of it, even if you squint really, really hard. (With the possible exception of AL, for reasons that are both practical and glaringly obvious.)I'm old enough to remember the first time D&D was a "brand." It was pretty great, actually - we had not just the Saturday morning cartoon, but action figures and toy figurines in KayBee (while I'm dating myself) and all kinds of ancillary merchandise. You know what came with that? Iconic characters and other stuff that grounded an "official" baseline for stuff that was recognizably D&D. If they're going to achieve anything like that again - and keep in mind that it took about a decade from the genesis of the game to get the property to that level, back in the Golden Age and all - the managers of the brand would be stone fools to not build on the proper names and iconic characters of their most recognizable setting. "Some chubby nerd on the Internets curls his lip every time you say 'Drizzt'" doesn't even register as a blip in the Con column for that. Sorry. That's not purely cynical capitalism at work there, either. It's the sound decision-making that people who are trying to thread the needle of marrying a beloved creative hobby to a vocation make instinctively, and rightly so, and I'd wager the little finger of my chording hand that they're making it out of love at least as much as for any other reason. Making "The Suits at Hasbro" into a bogeyman does these creators a huge disservice in this regard. And, frankly, says a great deal more about fannish entitlement than anything about the actual people making the game.</blockquote>

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