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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9735085" data-attributes="member: 8461">I think part of the issue (and, I want to stress, only part of it) is that there's a difference between changing things by adding to what's come before, and changing things by removing part of their definitional characteristics.This is something I saw during the debate around 5E 2024 giving monsters that classically had only one sex an opposite-sex counterpart, with the medusa being the example that got the most discussion. One poster eschewed negative reactions to the change by saying "this gives us more options!" Which is true, but those options came by removing a characteristic of what made a medusa be a medusa in the first place. Which for most people I suspect would be the following (in no particular order):<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Snakes for hair</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Petrifying gaze</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Female</li> </ul>Eliminating that last one does allow for more different types of creatures, but there's now one-third less understanding of what makes a medusa be what it is. Consider that if you remove the "snakes for hair" part as well, you'd have even more options...but now you just have men and women who happen to have a petrifying gaze; you can call that a medusa, but would it feel like one? What about if you changed the petrifying gaze into an immolation gaze? Even more options, but it feels even less like a medusa.Now, to be fair, sometimes these changes stick. Medusa used to be a specific individual and not a particular kind of creature, for instance. But a lot of the time, deleting or altering a definitional characteristic results in blowback, and the more of them you change for a given thing (be it a creature, a character, a setting, etc.) the more blowback you're likely to generate.</blockquote>

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