Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="see" data-source="post: 8405861" data-attributes="member: 10531">Er, no, it was the entire point all along, because my involvement in this entire chain or replies (follow the up-arrows) started with a reply to:I was always discussing your assertion of what faerie dragons in D&D should be.Well, what they "should be" is necessarily a question not of what any individual would have preferred (de gustibus non est disputandum, after all), but rather what WotC needed to have published in order to achieve WotC's goals.Thus why my initial response was not "invisible prankster cat-dragons are cool!" or "tradition is sacred", but rather:I was assuming, I grant, it would be obvious that "gratuitously insulting to the existing fanbase" was a reference to commercial viability. Insofar as that was not clear, I owe you an apology for not being explicit.Now, as far as . . .. . . I think that radically changing faerie dragons seven years into an edition is an even worse idea for WotC than doing so at the change of an edition, when people expect things will change.Yes, there are legions of new fans acquired over the last seven years. The thing is, these new fans of 5th edition are fans of 5th edition as it exists, not fans of a hypothetical revised version they've never seen. They're as likely to be attached to the faerie dragons they saw for the first time in the 5th edition Monster Manual as any played-since-1983 fan is attached to the faerie dragons they saw for the first time in the 1st edition Monster Manual II.  Few of the new fans will care if a new book contradicts some "canon" that was done in 1974, 1984, 1994, or 2004, but many many more will if it contradicts canon from 2014.The drow case you invoke is not parallel, since the "classic" drow are being kept as-is alongside the new cultures (that the designers on social media keep pointing out the Menzoberranzan drow aren't changing is a clear indicator that they get this), and the change doesn't invalidate the current Monster Manual statblock the way replacing existing faerie dragons with a completely different version would.The correct move for WotC, then, is to parallel the shadow dragon with a new fey dragon template with its own distinct name, while leaving the extant faerie dragon alone.</blockquote>

Verification