NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sacrosanct" data-source="post: 8692034" data-attributes="member: 15700">After stewing on this for a day, and looking at the design changes of D&D over the years, I see a pretty strong correlation.  One that's immediately reflected by looking at art direction which is more often than not reinforced mechanically.  Here's my takaway:When D&D was created, the creators and expected players were fans of pulp fiction.  Dark swords and sorcery.  Violence, and unrelenting environments.  The game, in mechanics and art, reflected this.Then the satanic panic hit, Lorraine took over and gave direction to make the game more family-friendly (2e).  She saw how a large part of the demographic were kids, and not just college-age or older nerds who were fans of Howard and Lieber, and tried to focus on that market more.3e took over with a completely different art direction and mechanics.  The core gaming group were older now, and wanted complexity.  The art took on a DaVinci aesthetic (complexity) and the mechanics reflected that.4e tried to tap into the new huge fad that was happening: MMOs (specifically WoW).  The art style, with huge weapons and tons of armor more closely reflected the art style of WoW.  Mechanics emulated some of those things we saw in video games, like nonmagical healing surges and recharging powersBy the time 5e came out, a huge part of the geek community grew up watching Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and the Marvel Franchise.  Grit and sword and sorcery were long a thing of the past.  Art depiction almost always had the PCs in a heroic pose (like Marvel) and never as a victim.  PCs had powers like superheroes.  Compared to the earliest editions, 5e is very much a superhero fantasy, which makes sense considering what all of these new gamers grew up on. (Note, I'm not saying any of these preferences are a bad thing, just what the company was doing at the time).The point of all this?  So what's 5.5 going to look like?  Look at the past 10 years of what is popular in nerd pop culture.  I think that will drive some of the things we'll see in the future.  And I think it's why in the past couple of years, the game has been presented much more colorful and diverse because that's what's been happening in our pop culture as a whole.  Sacred cows and long-standing assumptions about who we are as people aren't inherently ascribed to any longer.</blockquote>

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