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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6290531" data-attributes="member: 2067">At a higher level than individual tables, typically. When your publishing doctrine states that Defaultsylvania is the One Setting To Rule Them All, you stop imagining what else there could be. There was one cosmology during 2e, with all those campaign worlds -- I would've loved to see a hundred different ones. Eladrin being jammed into 4e Dark Sun means less word count devoted to the races native to that land, that make it distinct. If the Nentir Vale in 5e has to use the Great Wheel, you'll have things like the Feywild and Arborea fighting over who gets to have eladrin. D&D is not generic fantasy. What it is, though, as a game, is a fantasy kitchen sink. Which means that it SHOULD be able to do the Hobbit and the Game of Thrones and Harry Potter and Conan and Elric and anime fantasy and steampunk fantasy and....heck, all of them at once, if that's what the group wants to play. It's not generic, but it's not a specific flavor, either. It's eclectic. It's a lot of flavors. It's an ecology of ideas, not one specific idea. The game was built that way, as a thing you could throw basically any fantasy into. No reason it shouldn't remain that way. There's a third option you're ignoring: give multiple answers. Make them ambiguous and mutually exclusive. Present them as in-world gossip and rumor. Don't present a default, present options you can choose. No reason there has to be one truth. There can be millions. The error here is in presuming that this rules out Warcraft-style orcs (*cough*Eberron*cough) or Tolkien-style orcs. Certainly eveyrone who has used those orcs as inspiration for their own tables would dispute the idea that D&D doesn't contain them. The above is one specific vision of orcs, and not even one that's been consistent in "presumed default" accross the editions (2e's orcs were Lawful Evil!). It's not the only way orcs can or should be on D&D. It doesn't define what Orcs Are, it shows one way that they could be. There's a fourth option, one that is much more honest in how people actually play the game: multiple definitions that you can use a toolkit approach to swapping around.</blockquote>

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