Fewer deeper archetypes or the kitchen sink

[Li Shenron]

Now, maybe trying to allow any conceivable character in the game is a mistake. Does it not risk diluting D&D?

There is a difference between allowing/supporting any conceivable character and providing a nearly-ready implementation of it.

Personally I think that D&D already allows any conceivable character since the start of an edition (core). Your fantasy is the limit... but then apparently many gamers don't have as much fantasy as they think, or (in the case of DMs) have too much a rigid mind to allow players roam free, probably because they're obsessed with balance and thus scared of tinkering with character creation rules.

And here come the publishers with a flood of supplements which could have been written by the gamers themselves, but carry that spark of being "official" that makes the obsessed/scare DM allow them more easily, even if the day before they forbid the same thing when proposed by a player.

But my bottom line is that as long as the more original stuff ends up in supplements rather than core, then I am not worried, because it always defaults to optional. Of course if you allow everything, you end up with a kitchen-sink/diluted game, but this is only your fault

My question is: Are the new archetypes of newer D&D a cause of the fan base being splintered? Do you find it a bit disappointing when you get into a game of D&D (yay!) but realize that you are now part of a Lilo and Stitch/Sailormoon-crossover game?

And here comes the problem IMHO... some of those new archetypes end up in core, and that's what causes the most damage to the fan base, because (whether they make it explicit or not) core defines the "default" of the game.

 

[Li Shenron]

The world changes, so too must the game. By marketing to everyone, we may lose a few. But by marketing to those few, we will lose more; some of them before they even start playing.

The game doesn't need this, the business does.*

I know this sounds selfish, but I am on the buying end of this business, not on the selling end, and therefore I only need the game to match what I like. I don't really mind if then it ends up being bought by 100k, 1M or 10M people, although of course there is a minimum level of market success under which it becomes a problem to find people to play with (but that actually might happen exactly due to having too many editions around).

*and perhaps that's not even the whole truth... there are countless businesses that thrives better on a smaller fanbase, selling more does not always equal to making more profit

 

[Mallus]

I have no doubt it was inspired by the Thor comics. Hey, it's just a damn cool magic item! But that doesn't mean the game has to have rules for all of these things, that strike our fancy, the moment they become popular culture.

I don't want to see a 100 classes or 1000 Feats (how I wish those numbers weren't an exaggeration...) for emulating every popular genre character, either. But D&D traditionally did have rules for things like Mjolnir, Stormbringer and an Acme Portable Hole -- you found them in the section on magic items. That's a good place for them.

If you read the post, then you know that it was a continuation of the following thought...as opposed to the parsed down individual quote you posted.

You quoted me before I edited the snark out. Apologies. I disagree with your sentiments re: the current level of player creativity and desire/capability for immersion, but I could have expressed it a constructive manner.

But those are not mythological or literary archetypes for D&D. They are popular! Yes. They are "fantasy"...arguably [in the sense that Twilight is "modern fantasy" and Pirates of the Caribbean is "historic fantasy"], Yes.

But they are not D&D archetypes.

D&D archetypes include martial artists straight outa Shaw Brothers chop-socky films and rogues/magicians from ultra-far future milieus. I feel it's keeping with the spirit of the game to periodically add to the list of archetypes. Potter-esque wizards and Avatar-esque benders seem like likely candidates.

In my fantasy world of 5e D&D, I would expect and hope to see a good 12-15 archetypal classes available from day one...maybe a few variants in an appendix (though with what we know about Themes, it seems variants might be all, or mostly, taken care of).

That sounds reasonable -- but I'd to see some classes drawn from more recent, popular fantasy. D&D has always been about mixing genre influences together. What belonged in D&D? Whatever is cool. There have been plenty of cool new things created since 1970s.

I think it's a mistake to view older D&D as some kind of treatise on fantasy archetypes -- it's better seen as an eclectic mix of what the authors loved, at the time. That's the tradition we should carry on.