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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9847381" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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.)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.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!All of fiction is like this, when you take it broadly. D&D has to take a broad view.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.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.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."</blockquote>

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