D&D General D&D Evolutions You Like and Dislike [+]

[Remathilis]

Nothing is stopping it other than the setting.

"Eberron is not blessed (or cursed) with deities that walk the land and take an active role in mortal affairs. Indeed, whether the deities even truly grant divine spellcasting ability to their clerics remains an open question, since even corrupt clerics can cast spells."

There's no maybe in there. They simply do not walk the land or take an active role, so no my cleric could not have his god appear to him and his village, because there is a limitation.

Distant gods is one of the main differentiators of Eberron. To remove that would destroy a huge chunk of what the setting is, because it's the differences and limitations that define a setting and sets it apart from the others.

Well, that depends on WHAT religion you follow...

If you worship the Sovereign Host or the Dark Six, you probably aren't getting to see your God in the flesh. There have been times that certain dragons have claimed to be the manifestation of a particular sovereign, but if they are or just a delusional dragon is debatable. That said, the Traveler is rumored to appear to mortals from time to time, particularly changelings who claim he lives among them disguised as a changeling.

The Silver Flame? Go into the heart of Thane and you can see the pillar of silver fire burning. You can even talk to it and sometimes it talks back.

If you worship the Ancestors of Areneal you can take a boat ride and visit the Undying Council in the flesh. Likewise, a priest of the Blood of Vol can meet their "deity" in the flesh if they are suitably evil and power hungry enough to warrant Lady Illmarrow's attention.

The Carrion Tribes worship the Fiends. The Cults of the Dragon Below worship all manner of powerful Daelkyr and Fiends trapped in Khyber. They only can't meet them because of the prisons their deities are trapped in.

And the Path of Light isn't a deity but a cosmic power. You can't meet it anymore than you can meet The Force in Star Wars.

What Eberron does lack is the omnipotent and all powerful abilities ascribed to deities in other settings as a result of trying to filter polytheism through the lens of Jeudo-Christian understanding. Its not that deities don't walk the land, it's that they aren't so powerful as to mimic the all knowing and all powerful Christian concept of God..

 

[EzekielRaiden]

the game does exist, that's true, but ask yourself, with everything in it, is it coherent?

Yes. You and I were both able to read the text and understand what it says. There are certainly ways it's incoherent, but they're never seen in something like which class or race is present. (The repeated "You can do X, or you can not do X. You decide!" non-advice, or "Just pretend non-combat is a combat, decide what CR it is, and then assign XP as you would normally!", would be good examples.)

is it consistent?

Sure. It's D&D fiction. It's developed its own genre at this point. That's why video games keep imitating it, after all; there's plenty of consistency in that. Look at World of Warcraft, for example. The writing is garbage overall, but the setting has, miraculously, been quite consistent overall. Too consistent for my liking, actually--they keep recycling the same story beats over and over again.

are there themes?

Absolutely! Appearance does not dictate nature--that's tieflings, and to a certain extent dragonborn and (half-)orcs. Legacy matters, and can weigh on you terribly, that's dragonborn and elves. The supernatural is natural, what with elves, gnomes, and various other species having clearly and openly supernatural power, even if they study no magic. The world is ancient, much much older than our Earth, with easily 50,000+ years of recorded history even if most of that has been irretrievably lost. (Keep in mind, all of "human history" in a maximally generous sense, including the non-recorded bits, probably goes back no more than 13,000-15,000 years, and even that's a stretch.) Magic is universal, which is why cultures that are so radically different have, time and time again, uncovered the exact same approaches do doing it. Most power must be earned in some way, but some power is bestowed, and some is even swindled! (That last bit opens up whole worlds of Faustian bargains, for instance.)

There are plenty of themes woven through just the PHB list. Ironically, it's the "core four" races, and to a lesser extent the "core four" classes, which don't have themes. Humanity literally doesn't have one because it can't, it needs to represent whatever the human player desires it to represent, so it has to be a mirror, and cannot make any strong statements itself. (This is, to be clear, a good thing; any strong statement we might make about what makes humans human is likely to look profoundly stupid, not to mention horribly racist, a century from now.) Elves have been completely stripped of the vast majority of their thematic message because it was totally specific to Tolkien and we just get the crappy cliffnotes version--same for dwarves. And halflings are so devoid of flavor that folks have genuinely posted threads on here trying to figure out what the point is!

Far from making a strong theme, the "core four" (at least in terms of races/species) are among the weakest themes someone could aim for!

or is it simply a big pile of mashed together concepts and aesthetics that Wizards thought would entice people to buy another sourcebook?

All of fiction is like this, when you take it broadly. D&D has to take a broad view.

taken as a whole of what it provides the thematic identity of DnD's content is a hell of a mess.

Is it? Or is it a vast field of untapped potential waiting to be explored? Because your "mess" is the breadth of human creativity at play.

when you've got a warforged totem barbarian standing next to a slimic hybrid drunken fist monk, a gnome chronurgy wizard and a tortle artilerist artificer.

What's wrong with that? Genuinely. What is wrong with that? Sounds like an awesome Eberron party. Unless you mean to say that Eberron "is a hell of a mess" without themes or consistency, which I cannot imagine you would ever say, since it's obviously false.

and so that's the constructive purpose of curation, taking, or excluding, with intention, pieces to create a setting that evokes a coherent mood, tone, aesthetic, to enhance the play experience by the intentionality of what we create.

I mean, I literally just showed there are plenty of themes to work with when you keep all the PHB options. You haven't really demonstrated anything except the vague notion that sometimes it's better to be more focused about theme, I guess? Otherwise all you've done is baldly assert that what we have is somehow bad, without ever actually saying why, except in a circular way--"it doesn't have theme because I declared it doesn't have theme, therefore it's bad."

 

[mamba]

How about dragonborn?

They're in the PHB. In 5.0, they were literally one of the weakest races in the game (hence why they got two revisions before 5.5e). They're a darling for getting banned banned banned banned.

What's wrong with them?

up to the DM, same as the tortle. I don’t think that something arbitrarily making the cut to be in the PHB1 rather than the PHB2 (Xanathar’s) makes any difference

I see the books as a collection of options, not as mandates. I would not want Dragonborn in Krynn, in FR I don’t care either way

Also, do you not see how this is saying other people--ones making no imposition whatsoever except "I'd like to play the game I was shown"--must jump through hoops, must prove how their participation deserves inclusion, but the GM claiming power and authority and very much imposing a laundry list of impositions has no responsibility whatsoever?

no, you are both having preferences and have to come to an agreement, simple as that. More often that not there is not even anything to discuss / disagree about

 

[EzekielRaiden]

no, you are both having preferences and have to come to an agreement, simple as that. More often that not there is not even anything to discuss / disagree about

Okay. I see that as meaning that the GM is required to present the reasons for why their choices should be acceptable first, because they're the one arguing that limits not present in the actual game itself should be applied. The burden of persuasion (since there is no "proof" here) is squarely in their court, not the player's.

 

[Maxperson]

THAT'S STILL TEAMWORK.

For God's sake, we aren't talking about that. Lanefan was very specific about how much antipathy he has for teamwork.

For someone who cares so much about meaning-in-context, you keep ignoring it whenever it's inconvenient to you.

I've read his posts. His players do engage in the sort of individual role teamwork I described. Mostly. He just doesn't try to force it and sometimes a PC doesn't play as part of the team. From what he describes, though, when a PC in his game doesn't play as part of the team in even a loose fashion, that PC is often/usually killed or kicked out, because it endangers everyone in the group.

 

[Maxperson]

What Eberron does lack is the omnipotent and all powerful abilities ascribed to deities in other settings as a result of trying to filter polytheism through the lens of Jeudo-Christian understanding. Its not that deities don't walk the land, it's that they aren't so powerful as to mimic the all knowing and all powerful Christian concept of God..

Right, so I can't meet a god. Delusional dragons aren't gods. The silver flame isn't a god. The council aren't gods. A changeling isn't a god. None of what you describe gets around the direct quote from the 3e setting book I quoted.

"Eberron is not blessed (or cursed) with deities that walk the land and take an active role in mortal affairs. Indeed, whether the deities even truly grant divine spellcasting ability to their clerics remains an open question, since even corrupt clerics can cast spells."

I bolded it for you since you seem to have missed it the first time. My claim wasn't that you couldn't meet the non-deities that are in Eberron and are worshipped. My claim was that you can't meet a god like you can in almost every other setting.

 

[mamba]

Okay. I see that as meaning that the GM is required to present the reasons for why their choices should be acceptable first, because they're the one arguing that limits not present in the actual game itself should be applied. The burden of persuasion (since there is no "proof" here) is squarely in their court, not the player's.

you can see that however you want. If the player can argue with ‘but I like it’ then the DM does not need more than a ‘I do not like it’ as justification either.

You can take that as the implied reason whenever a DM says ‘no tortles in my game’, or ask them whether there is more to it.

I don’t see the DM as having a burden beyond this, just because some book includes a bit of text. The game text is not holy scripture passed down from on high, it is a baseline that people are encouraged to adjust

Also, would you accept the reasoning that neither tortle nor silvery barbs are in the PHB? If not, why is the PHB important to your argument?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

you can see that however you want. If the player can argue with ‘but I like it’ then the DM does not need more than a ‘I do not like it’ as justification either.

You can take that as the implied reason whenever a DM says ‘no tortles in my game’, or ask them whether there is more to it.

I don’t see the DM as having a burden beyond this, just because some book includes a bit of text. The game text is not holy scripture passed down from on high, it is a baseline that people are encouraged to adjust

And I see the GM as having numerous responsibilities, because with great power comes great responsibility. If you intend to impose limitations on something that is literally selling itself as embracing the infinite creativity of the human mind, you'd damned well better tell me why those limits are better than creative freedom.

Also, would you accept the reasoning that neither tortle nor silvery barbs are in the PHB? If not, why is the PHB important to your argument?

It was important because it nixed the key component of your objection. I personally consider that objection ridiculous (amongst other negative descriptions), but for the sake of argument I accepted that you would require such a thing, and thus pointed to something foundational, underpowered, and (extremely) popular, so that none of those objections could possibly apply. 5.0 PHB dragonborn are, as stated, in the PHB so it cannot be argued that they're somehow power-creep or ridiculous obscure stuff; they are, as WotC has functionally (and perhaps explicitly?) admitted, quite under-powered and clearly the weakest species option in the 5.0 PHB; and we have repeated evidence that they are wildly popular and, as far as we can tell, only growing in popularity.

Hence, if you were to start a new campaign tomorrow or to invite people to join an existing campaign tomorrow, you would be quite likely to have one or more players who would want to play one.* They are almost surely interested exclusively for their aesthetic or thematic elements since the mechanical ones are weaker than any other option they could've picked (far, far better to play elf or half-elf in 5.0--as in, half-elf is pretty much objectively superior in nearly every way?). And they're present right there in the PHB, in addition to being made famous by Baldur's Gate 3,** one of the most beloved computer games of this decade.

*IIRC the last data where we could directly compare proportions indicated dragonborn were around 12% of characters, and they've only increased since then. Call it 1/6th now. The odds that a 5-person party wouldn't include someone wanting to play a dragonborn are about (5/6)^5 = ~.4019, aka around 40%. Meaning, about 2/3 of fresh five-person parties will include at least one person who'd like to play one. That's much more likely than not!

**And, as a dragonborn fan, I couldn't have been happier. I was profoundly worried when they said straight-up nothing at all about dragonborn for over two years of development time. All those fears melted away the moment I saw those initial face-sculpts, and they followed through on the rest of the execution. The Dark Urge is a genuinely fascinating character, and the "default" version being a dragonborn is thematically genius relative to the stories of BG1/2/ToB.

 

[mamba]

It was important because it nixed the key component of your objection.

I never used ‘it’s not in the PHB’ as my argument, so not sure what you think you nixed

I personally consider that objection ridiculous

the objection that they are not in the PHB? So we are on the same page here, it is not relevant whether they are in the PHB or not.

To take this further, would you then expect a DM to accept all WotC material and do you draw a line at third party material, or should they accept that too, after all your selling point was ‘embrace the limitless creativity’?

 

[Maxperson]

I would not call "nobody knows for sure if the gods exist" a restriction. Especially since that can...literally just cease to be true at any time if the GM wants it. It's not like Eberron suffers a fatal exception error if you say "well, actually, the Sovereign Host are real, they just don't meddle in mortal affairs".

As for the latter...given the literal explanation is now "well...you don't personally worship a deity...and the deity never talks to you...and you never actually offered, exchanged, or proposed any services...and you never studied any deities...but you still definitely get your powers Somehow From A Deity", I think you can see why I don't actually find that restriction in any way meaningful. It's so full of exceptions at this point it functionally doesn't exist.

A Paladin who swears an oath, but is also actively hostile to all gods, would still get divine magic, because their adherence to their oath apparently impresses some unknown, never-identified, totally-silent deity THAT much. Even though that person could literally go on a crusade against the gods themselves. So......what, exactly, is the difference between that and just getting the power from the oath itself, other than a longwinded explanation?

But you don't get your powers definitely from a deity in Eberron. Nobody is saying that the DM can't remove the limitations that exist in Eberron. We're saying they do factually exist in Eberron, and we are correct. There are limitations built into the setting, and those limitations are critical to the feel of Eberron.