NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4875012" data-attributes="member: 2067">I was hoping someone would bite at that, 'cuz it gets us a little closer to something usefully on-topic. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Your first reason I can broadly agree with. Marketing agrees with you there, too. <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=";)" /> People will self-select based on their own aesthetic tastes, and most American males 18-24 probably won't pick up a bright pink PHB done with illos in the style of a gay-boy romance manga with lillies splayed all over the tables and charts. Likewise, kids these days probably won't pick up anything with big hair, throbbing muscles, chainmail bikinis, and multi-eyed piles of slime. It's not modern, current, or interesting. That's about art direction and, well, marketing, though, not so much about game design. Put fast cars, bikini models, and explosions on the cover of a Parcheesi set, and you'll sell at least a few. Your second reason is a little shakier, because "tone of the game" is highly imprecise. Parcheesi is parcheesi no matter how you dress it up; Star Wars Monopoly is still Monopoly, and still about currency management, not about killing Darth Vader. Replacing the top hat with a little metal Chewbacca doesn't change the fundamental rules or feel of the game, though it might change the banter at the table around the game ("My hotel on Hoth is an igloo!"). Drawing every character as if it were from a boy-love manga wouldn't change the fact that dwarves are tough and that eladrin can teleport. Though the audience might be surprised to find no mechanics for keeping your love a tightly-held secret and no GM advice for innuendo and symbolic lilly placement, even drawn in this style, 4e D&D would still be a game about beating up monsters on a minis field. It might attract a different audience (and thus evolve in another direction as fans demand different things), but the "tone," as it were, wouldn't change.</blockquote>

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