D&D 5E D&D Next Art Column Discussion: May

[Hussar]

Hrm, interesting. And it's a really hard line to define.

I'd be pretty okay with anything you'd see in a mainstream Marvel or DC comic - and maybe from the more grandma friendly end of the pool. I know that Wolverine and whatnot can get pretty gruesome. I'm thinking Spider-man, that sort of thing.

Then again, I haven't really collected comic books in a REALLY long time, so, maybe I'm way off base.

I look at it this way, anything you could see on the cover of a Dragon magazine is fine with me.

 

[Tehnai]

I said PG-13, with moderate goriness.

I figure it can't be R, because DnD should be a gateway RPG, thus be marketable to a younger audience.

I don't think it should be less than PG-13, because it's still a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff. And children under 12-13-ish rarely have the patience/focus to read rulebooks anyways.

 

[Klaus]

Hrm, interesting. And it's a really hard line to define.

I'd be pretty okay with anything you'd see in a mainstream Marvel or DC comic - and maybe from the more grandma friendly end of the pool. I know that Wolverine and whatnot can get pretty gruesome. I'm thinking Spider-man, that sort of thing.

Then again, I haven't really collected comic books in a REALLY long time, so, maybe I'm way off base.

I look at it this way, anything you could see on the cover of a Dragon magazine is fine with me.

Very off-base. DC and Marvel comics veer towards the adult collector more and more. During last year's "Siege" crossover of Marvel Comics, There was a full splash page of pseudo-Superman Sentry ripping Ares (god of war and member of the Avengers) in half, with the intestines spurting out in full view.

 

[delericho]

I chose R, because I am an adult who doesn't play with children, so I felt that I would be trying to speak for other people if I chose otherwise.

The thing is, I'm also an adult who doesn't (currently) play with children, and I have no problem with R-rated art in and of itself. Nor indeed do I have any inherent issue with more explicit material, in and of itself. Still, I don't want present in the D&D core. (I would, however, be fine with it being present in supplements that are clearly marked as being for "Mature Audiences".)

This actually ties in quite nicely with my opinions about sexism in the artwork, and since I can make the argument more clearly that way, that's what I'm going to go with.

Here's the thing: my wife is not a gamer. However, she is a big fan of "Lord of the Rings", is fairly well-read in fantasy literature in general, was recently caught reading the latest Pathfinder book, and is indeed a bit of a geek herself (but don't tell her I said that). In many ways, she is exactly the sort of person that WotC should be aiming to recruit as a player - someone interested in the subject matter, and who might, with the right push, become a gamer.

Now, I don't think that the artwork in the game should be tailored specifically to market the game towards her. To be honest, I'm not actually sure what that would really mean. But what I am quite certain of is that WotC shouldn't fill the books with artwork that will drive her away. So, if the books are full of wall-to-wall cleavage, if every female character is barely dressed and posed for maximum effect, and if the female heroes are constantly being depicted as being in peril (with the big, tough men around to save them, of course), she'll push them aside, roll her eyes, and never take another look at the game.

The extension of that towards the "age rating" of the artwork should be quite obvious - I don't necessarily want the game aimed at 10-year-olds. In fact, that would almost certainly be counter-productive.

But I have a nephew who's nearly six, and who one day may become a gamer. Another parent in my group has children well on the way to becoming gamers. That's the audience of the future. WotC don't need to aim the artwork for them... they just need to not include artwork that will prevent me from giving my nephew a PHB when the time comes.

(Oh, and incidentally - it's not enough for the Starter Set to be kid-suitable. The Core Rulebooks, at the very least, must also be suitable. Because "kiddie versions" invariably suck.)

One of the things that I remembered about D&D in my teen years was that it felt slightly "edgy." What I mean by that was the fact that it wasn't something my "square" parents would have approved of.

Edgy is fine. Edgy is good, even. And parental disapproval is probably no bad thing.

The line you want to avoid crossing is the one between 'disapproval' and 'banning'.

 

[Kaodi]

10+ , all the way.

I also voted for the highest level of gore, not because I necessarily want it to be typical of the art, but I want it to be available to the the art.

If there is a way to describe appropriate gore by analogy, would it perhaps work to say that anything you could see in an episode of CSI would be appropriate for D&D?

 

[Klaus]

Here's the thing: my wife is not a gamer. However, she is a big fan of "Lord of the Rings", is fairly well-read in fantasy literature in general, was recently caught reading the latest Pathfinder book, and is indeed a bit of a geek herself (but don't tell her I said that). In many ways, she is exactly the sort of person that WotC should be aiming to recruit as a player - someone interested in the subject matter, and who might, with the right push, become a gamer.

You mentioned Lord of the Rings. That's not a bad goalpost, actually. The LotR trilogy had Boromir riddled with arrows, corpses laying about, partly-rotted ghosts, on-screen dismemberment (for Lurtz, in FotR), some bloodshed, but nothing overt (certainly nothing compared to other Peter Jackson movies). That's something I'd aim for in D&D art.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Context Is King.

When I look at my media consumption, I tend to steer away from violence and gore for prurient interest (something like the SAW movies). The most violent things I watch are probably pop-cultue Japanese anime, and those are pretty family-friendly, if occasionally a little squicky (Naruto and Bleach come to mind -- not so much Ninja Scroll or Akira, but then again, that might not be so bad...more Rated R than Rated PG-13). Some dramas I watch might include a lot of violence, but more often it's "adult situations" (something like Breaking Bad) that sometimes happen to include violence.

For D&D, violence and gore that is only there to titilate is going to turn me off. There's a few instances of that in the BoVD for 3e: "Hur hur guts hur hur," added for no discernible reason but to make twelve year olds feel like big grown ups. But there are BoVD pictures that I am "meh" or "cool!" about. And D&D has a pretty brutal default setting, where people and creatures die in glorious combat on a daily basis. If a typical D&D combat were depicted "realistically," there would be blood and guts and foam and charred husks and ichor and half-skulls and all sorts of the kind of stuff that gives cops and military members PTSD.

So I think for this, going a little more "heroic fantasy" would be nice. I wouldn't mind something closer to the media I watch than the accounts of the Spanish-American war I read in A People's History of the United States last night, or the pictures of the corpses and executions of people we might currently see on the news. I want action and adventure, not grisly carnage.

But D&D is a violent world, so to NOT show people getting walloped and bleeding and even dying, or to NOT show a necromancer assembling body parts, would be a little disingenuous. So violence -- even deadly violence and even occasional dismemberment maybe -- is part and parcel of D&D. It just needs to be in context. In the Caves of Chaos adventures I've played, no one wound up with a lasting scar or a cleaved skull or a leg chopped off. But there was violence. And torture implements. And prisoners.

A little word about that 1e succubus, though: Kids today don't need D&D books or National Geographic to give them a peak at the naughty. They have 4 Chan, which is going to deliver that a lot more efficiently than anything WotC could ever publish (unless WotC can get away with publishing Lemon Party, Two Girls One Cup, and Loli, and I don't think they can). You cannot compete with the internet. Just be true to what you are. For a succubus, that might include some breasts, and that's fine. For a combat scene, that might include a nasty-looking sword blow, and that's fine. The moment you start trying to appeal to the naughty, you're entering a world that's changed tremendously since 1974, or even since 1994. D&D doesn't necessarily need to be friendly to (the parents of) six year olds, but it DOES need to realize that it won't be naughty and transgressive with a pair of breasts or a BDSM drow priestess these days. It's just gonna look silly if it tries. Like saying "Excuse my language, but DARN IT!"

 

[TerraDave]

The last couple of articles have been fine...but it seems like he has done a little less for them (its your turn...).

Anyways, we know how this goes: the biggest fans of "edgy" art are those who are (technically) not supposed to see it.


Not that I want to get into some of our own fond gaming memories...like seeing Eldritch Wizardry in a toy store...

 

[Savage Wombat]

When I tried to picture "moderate gore" I immediately thought of the HackMaster ads in old Knights of the Dinner Table comics. It looks much more silly than evocative, cool or gross.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

While I certainly voted for significant violence to be allowable, I think the starting age should certainly be teenagers. 10 is too young to play, 12 is pushing it, but smarter and more mature kids of that age starting D&D is fine, but really the game should be intended for those who are at least teenagers. That was roughly where I started to get interested in the game, and that's where I think others should start.

My teenage years is roughly when I also started playing video games with significant violence (with games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom), so that I feel should be a guideline of age and depictions of violence.