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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5927884" data-attributes="member: 2067">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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> 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!"</blockquote>

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