D&D 5E Do you think they will go back to driders being a curse instead of a blessing?

[Remathilis]

What lot of people? I see a pretty even split here, same as usual. Yet, the argument only seems to apply in rather specific cases.

IOW it's edition warring with a set of funny glasses and a fake nose.

Hogwash. I can like a fair amount of the changes done by 4e fluff (hellborn tieflings, dragonborn, coastal blue dragons, favored driders, devil succubi, draconic kobolds, hunter gnolls, and gorilla-orcs just to name a few) and STILL find 4e's mechanics to be... less inspiring.

I, like most rationale human beings, can hold two contradictory ideas in my head at the same time. 4e had some great ideas, but few of them were mechanical for me.

 

[Hussar]

Hogwash. I can like a fair amount of the changes done by 4e fluff (hellborn tieflings, dragonborn, coastal blue dragons, favored driders, devil succubi, draconic kobolds, hunter gnolls, and gorilla-orcs just to name a few) and STILL find 4e's mechanics to be... less inspiring.

I, like most rationale human beings, can hold two contradictory ideas in my head at the same time. 4e had some great ideas, but few of them were mechanical for me.

You're missing my point. Every single one of these threads. Every single one is predicated on Changes done in 4e flavour =bad, all other changes good. I'd have no particular beef if any other edition's changes to the monsters ever got criticised. Just for the change if nothing else. But, this has been a constant refrain for a few years now. "We need to roll things back to where they were in 2007" or "No change made after 2007 is good".

This isn't about mechanics. I never actually mentioned mechanics in my post. I was talking about flavour changes to monsters.

 

[jasper]

Wild comments from everywhere.
.. only male drow are turned into driders…. Psst SteelDragon Lolth has invited you into her den to see her intra webs.. Nudge Nudge Wink wink.

‘The curse of the medusa is really nasty’ True but I don’t have to tip the pizza boy anymore and will have a good business selling garden statues online. I will have get some evil types to sell off the used cars.
As a cursed drider you are forever stuck at the level you changed.
As a blessed drider you must pay 6.66 xp for 1 xp to advance.

 

[billd91]

You're missing my point. Every single one of these threads. Every single one is predicated on Changes done in 4e flavour =bad, all other changes good. I'd have no particular beef if any other edition's changes to the monsters ever got criticised. Just for the change if nothing else. But, this has been a constant refrain for a few years now. "We need to roll things back to where they were in 2007" or "No change made after 2007 is good".

This isn't about mechanics. I never actually mentioned mechanics in my post. I was talking about flavour changes to monsters.

I dunno. You think the threads tend to focus on 4e's changes... Because 4e is the source the most recent major changes to the system?

There were plenty of changes 3.5 brought to D&D that people complained about. I remember complaints about the nerfing of a lot of spell durations, for example. But they're old news. And now they are almost totally eclipsed by changes wrought by 4e. Even if 4e were the most wildly successful D&D ever, I think we'd still be able to expect it would loom largest in our posts in the lead up to another new edition.

Yeah, sure. 4e rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and the people who don't like it would prefer 5e to not follow its changes. Is there something actually wrong with that? If you're getting tired of the discussion, you have the power to not participate in it.

 

[amerigoV]

I dunno. You think the threads tend to focus on 4e's changes... Because 4e is the source the most recent major changes to the system?

There were plenty of changes 3.5 brought to D&D that people complained about. I remember complaints about the nerfing of a lot of spell durations, for example. But they're old news. And now they are almost totally eclipsed by changes wrought by 4e. Even if 4e were the most wildly successful D&D ever, I think we'd still be able to expect it would loom largest in our posts in the lead up to another new edition.

You couple that with this board growing up under 3.x/d20 it makes sense a good chunk want to go back to 2007 - a lot of people's entry point was 3.x so that is what roots them. If you want to go to 1999, you go to Dragonsfoot since they reject basically anything WoTC did.

[random aside] Hmm, that is an interesting random thought - are their websites that essentially stuck in time? I recall going to Monte Cooks old site (the boards side of it) about a year ago and it was pretty much a ghost town (not sure what Numera may have done or if that is a separate footprint). I use to hang out there all the time when I ran Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. But that is different than an active board that is like Dragonsfoot - an active community, but they stepped off the "train" in 1999 for all things D&D. Heh - kinda like that South Park where the kids find and unthaw Gorak/Scott. [/random aside]

 

[Shemeska]

You're missing my point. Every single one of these threads. Every single one is predicated on Changes done in 4e flavour =bad, all other changes good. I'd have no particular beef if any other edition's changes to the monsters ever got criticised. Just for the change if nothing else. But, this has been a constant refrain for a few years now. "We need to roll things back to where they were in 2007" or "No change made after 2007 is good".

This isn't about mechanics. I never actually mentioned mechanics in my post. I was talking about flavour changes to monsters.

I've been quite open in the past about particular flavor changes that I didn't like: 3e FR going from the Great Wheel to a nominally distinct cosmology largely based on the FR gods' domains in the Great Wheel, with the change being retconned in. Orcs going from LE to CE without little explanation while Gruumsh and all of their dead souls were still in LE/LN Acheron. Names of some of the unique guardinals being changed in 3e because someone didn't like the previous name in 2e. 3e hand-waving away the role and place of the Deep Ethereal and some other tinkering with the Great Wheel. I didn't like those and I did complain about them at the time, loudly and yes, obnoxiously in some cases.

Hussar, it isn't like people never complained about various flavor changes in 3e or any other edition, it's that by comparison to any other edition, as I see it, 4e completely and totally went off the rails with what seemed IMO like a deliberate attempt to sever itself from the flavor of previous editions of D&D. As a result of that it's the largest and most frequent target, on top of being the most recent edition and therefor getting the freshest complaint storm.

 

[I'm A Banana]

FWIW, I know a few people who really do miss the dog-men kobolds. Mostly some real grogs, the sentiment is out there. And I would not be half-shocked to see them making an appearance in 5e.

And fat halflings have been missed since 3e.

4e made a lot more changes (the drider one specifically is not one of the more major ones, but it's one that got anchored in 4e), of course.

And it's not edition warring to hate on a given change that 4e wrought. Far from it, in fact -- edition warring is tribalistic sniping about how some edition sucks or is above criticism. Just saying that you don't like Change X is specific, narrow, and about the change, not about the edition.

Veterans of the Edition Wars sometimes have PTSD and jump at shadows.

 

[OmegaMan950]

4E did go off the rails in regards to previous edition lore, but to me it was something that had to be done. Plus a lot of the material in previous editions could be contradictory or murky eg. What was Vecna's mentor? Is it called Beastlands or Happy Hunting Grounds? Where is Tharizdun currently located? Did the Faction War completely mess up Sigil, or is it all resolved as Monty Cook desired but couldn't fix before TSR fell apart. These things might sound unimportant to most people, but they're in the same place I'd put the topic of drider transformation being a blessing/curse - only being relevant to any particular DM's game as it suits their needs. We can't expect new DMs, casual DMs, or DMs branching into other campaign settings to hunt down long out of print (or buy pdfs, nowhere near a substitute for the real thing) material costing a fair bit of money to satisfy old school lore, and if you say "The old material can be reintroduced in the new edition rulebooks" I'm going to respond with "It's going to push out the new ideas".

I like 2E Planescape, but one of my favourite 3E books was Beyond Countless Doorways which didn't really fit into the Great Wheel model. I like 2E Darksun, but I'm not going to stress if a 4E adventure has goblins in it. I like 1E Spelljammer, but I'm not going to care where Aebrynis is situated. Why? Because I'm only going to use what's important to my game.

 

[Umbran]

I find most of this pretty intellectually dishonest.

Perhaps you should be avoiding accusations of dishonesty.

Say you disagree. Give your reasons. Even suggest that they may be undervaluing data (if you actually have data, instead of just personal feelings on the issue). But claiming folks are knowingly and willingly avoiding the truth because they don't like it isn't exactly playing by good rhetorical rules on your own part, now is it?

 

[Sunseeker]

Some general thoughts:

I think there's a lot of "I don't like what 4e did with [thing]" because it was the latest edition. It's freshest in people's minds in both good ways and bad ways. I'm fairly certain I had several conversations with 3e'rs back before 4th launched about the things they didn't like in 3rd and hoped 4th would revert/improve.

Anyone who will take the time to stop and think about any edition will realize that there are flaws. Personally, I don't give a doop about a LOT of the fluff, and this is why I advocate DDN should delineate fluff and crunch, and why I dislike spells written in prose. I want to know what it does, how it does it, and what I need to know to apply it. Afterwards I can find out who invented it, what it looks like and how it smells.

For things that go beyond the physical, such as why one got turned into a Drider, or what alignment something is, I really just don't care. I don't run pre-written material and if I do, I just wave my hand and say "It's that way because they wrote it that way." When it comes to my games, things are evil, chaotic, curses or blessings because that's the way I wrote them.

Orcs pig-nosed or butt-ugly doesn't really matter to me. The player orc looks like how he wants it to look within the game at the table. And that's all that really matters, how the table is portraying the issue. I'd be more than happy if WOTC just put the fluff in a sidebar and didn't muddy up the crunch with it.