D&D (2024) Comeliness and Representation in Recent DnD Art

[FrozenNorth]

Burton vs Snyderverse Batman

There is only one true movie Batman, and his name is Adam West.

Why is it that things from your youth are the standard, despite the fact they are themselves remakes?

 

[Cadence]

Wait--since when does 4e Charisma indicate physical beauty? I've never read that--and, while I admit I'm not a comprehensive expert, I'm pretty sure I'd have seen something about that prior to now.

It doesn't - 4e and 5e are the editions that don't have it included physical appearance (and I'm glad they don't). Sorry if my phrasing was awkward in the original post!

 

[Thomas Shey]

No. it is no armour at all, it's just skimpy clothes. And that's fine, not every character needs to wear armour. But making skimpy clothes out of chainmail makes no sense, except perhaps in some fashion show.

Though there are very few fantasy games that don't heavily select for characters wearing armor of some stripe, so if you want to depict the characters as they'd actually look in play...

 

[Minigiant]

Yall talking about chainmail bikinis.

I want banded mail, gambeson, and fur armor. Who cares if about reality. That's the representation I want.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It doesn't - 4e and 5e are the editions that don't have it include physical appearance (and I'm glad they don't). Sorry if my phrasing was awkward int he original post!

Ah, okay, cool. Part of why I asked was that I distinctly remember making some, ahem, bawdy (body?) jokes to some friends about certain races with +Cha back in the day (can I say that now? Have enough years passed?) since it wasn't part of the description. We all got a good laugh out of it at the time.

(Yes, it was dragonborn. You can be certain that some of those jokes involved euphemistic uses of the word "dragon.")

 

[Kobold Avenger]

The Gambeson often gets shown as "padded armour" despite it's the thing you wear under Full Plate armour.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There's an argument that the extent base will be slow to leave, so they need to set their visual language more to the new players coming in. The extent fanbase isn't going to always like that, but there's always a tendency to focus more on newer players than ones that may be aging out anyway.

I hate that argument with the unbridled fury of a thousand suns.

 

[Micah Sweet]

When it comes to publishing an official setting, there's a bit of a paradox in this choice.

Because by allowing one thing, you cause people who don't like that thing to avoid it.

You could have chainmail bikinis in your art, and those who don't like it would then avoid your product. But if it's not important to your product, then why are you choosing to do something off-putting? If your goal is to appeal to a broad base of potential players, why would you choose to put that art in your product, knowing it would cut off a potential fanbase? What are you gaining with that tradeoff?

It's not sanitization to recognize that a broad appeal is going to require you to avoid things that are likely to give people a bad experience.

The answer, of course, is to not design literally everything to have the broadest possible appeal.

 

[ezo]

The Gambeson often gets shown as "padded armour" despite it's the thing you wear under Full Plate armour.

Technically an arming doublet is what you wear under plate armor (and even under mail armor).

A gamebson is its own armor, and usually slightly thicker than an arming doublet.

That's what I know if anyway.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Except that broadest appeal does not care, or used to not care. Art is always wasted space in a book, like the tiny dragon earlier, or cover art, as someone said was meant to "attract".

For the most part, the black girl flying with glasses and magic circles around her was a good piece of art. Think that was another thread about PHB art leak?

But what does that art offer? A PC example? There should be no PC examples. Weapon art, monster art, fine. If people need the PC examples for races, they should be on the PHB cover. But then you will run into, "Why is the wizard a slim young attractive black girl, can Asian looking old overweight men not be wizards?"

Art is always a problem when it highlights only one group. So either you look at the art and think, well an old white guy drew himself here, or you have to increase the cost of the book and depict all nationalities of humans as all classes, each in full page color art. That would be over 300 pages of full color art so where is the room left for the rules in the book?

I have always thought the art should just be filler where you had more page than text, if it was not like a diagram showing something like how a kobold and goblin look different.

Also, to remake something to rewrite it for a few new people, is sanitization of art, drawn and written. Anyone can ignore tye draw art and written art, read lore, in a game and just insert tueir own choices.

I am also not a huge proponent of art as a driving force in RPG products, and feel it is as you said better off to fill in formatting and actually illustrate stuff where it is important to know what something looks like.

That ship has, however, largely sailed unfortunately.