D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

[Vaalingrade]

Maybe, but I think that could get messy too. Because then you have to give everyone two feats at first level, and then you have to question if humans can get three feats at first level. And then you have to deal with people who want to pick non-lineage feats for their extra feats.

It could be done, but it would also be easy to do wrong.

These all sound like wins to me.

Especially if you get to also maybe pick feats that let you be what you're normally not allowed to be until you get your subclass way too late in the game at first level instead.

 

[Chaosmancer]

You are acting the WOTC put tons of effort into balancing races in the PHB and DMG.

#6 is the Linage option.
#7 is actually not that much work as they won't stress over balance.

Do you have some sort of internal documentation showing that WoTC doesn't care about balance? Any sort of evidence beyond "but look at these two races and how I'm clearly right that they are so unbalanced that WoTC couldn't possibly have put any effort into it" like is done with literally everything that people claim WoTC is too lazy to have done?

 

[Guest 85555]

This doesn't seem relevant to the topic at hand, buuuut...

If I can just, dig into that last point. you do know works have been edited for absolute decades, right? Like, just for a famous example, the original Nancy Drew books were edited to keep with the times and not be with, Certain Words Used in 1930s America. Which are obviously dated things. You can't just put stuff published 20 years ago out today and expect it to have a good reception and not being seen as dated at best, offensive at worse.

Just because people have been censoring books, that doesn't make it right. And if they are at least acknowledging the changes, that is better. But it is truly bad in my opinion when changes are made quietly so we are left with a different footprint than the author actually made.

And you can publish things that were of their time. Part of the challenge of history and literature is encountering things like that. Sometimes it is for the good (you encounter an outdated but good idea that challenges modern thinking) and sometimes it is for bad (you encounter a an idea that advocates something terrible or reflects bigotry of the times). But the way I was taught to approach this stuff was read it, because the author isn't going to harm you with their words, and its important to know how people thought in the past (so we can understand how far we have come, where certain ideas could possibly lead to, etc).

Its rare you can get a truly timeless work. For something to be timeless, it needs to be adjusted and revamped to go along with time, because people and things just, change over time.

This I don't agree with. Obviously when something has been around for a while, you are always going to have different manuscripts, different printings, etc. And authors will continue to revise their work, but I do think we need to preserve the originals as best we can. This actually should be doubly the case if your goal is something like racial justice because by altering these now primary sources, you are altering the record of what the standards were at the time. We might not like that this author or that author used a certain word, but I would argue it is both important to the historical record to preserve that, and important to the work itself, so people can encounter it as it was meant to be encountered.

 

[Chaosmancer]

These all sound like wins to me.

Especially if you get to also maybe pick feats that let you be what you're normally not allowed to be until you get your subclass way too late in the game at first level instead.

It could be where they go in the future, but to me it does still sound like a difficult enough endeavor I can respect that it wasn't their first choice when trying to remake and rebalance the entire game.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Just because people have been censoring books, that doesn't make it right. And if they are at least acknowledging the changes, that is better. But it is truly bad in my opinion when changes are made quietly so we are left with a different footprint than the author actually made.

This is not censoring. Changing things isn't always censoring. If someone actively does it themselves, that's them adapting something. That's not always a bad thing, nor is it always a good thing. Changes can be judged on their own merits.

 

[Guest 85555]

This is not censoring. Changing things isn't always censoring. If someone actively does it themselves, that's them adapting something. That's not always a bad thing, nor is it always a good thing. Changes can be judged on their own merits.

In the case of an author changing their own work, I feel that is different. But it can still be a form of censorship. I would distinguish between an author making changes they feel improve the work, versus making changes they feel they have to make either to please their publisher or appease changing sensibilities. It still isn't the same as a publisher taking a dead author's work and revising their words. But it is a form of self censorship in some instances.

 

[Justice and Rule]

In the case of an author changing their own work, I feel that is different. But it can still be a form of censorship. I would distinguish between an author making changes they feel improve the work, versus making changes they feel they have to make either to please their publisher or appease changing sensibilities. It still isn't the same as a publisher taking a dead author's work and revising their words. But it is a form of self censorship in some instances.

It can be, but you just ascribing all changes to all works as "censorship" misses the meaning of the word. It renders it meaningless because we update things all the time.

 

[Faolyn]

You can say whatever you want to WOTC. My point is people using this moral argument about colonialism to move dungeons and wilderness exploration out of the game (at least the classic: kill things and take their stuff) are doing a disservice to the hobby in the same way that a disservice was done to art when people were morally outraged about Piss Christ.

OK, why is not doing dungeon delves where you kill monsters and take their stuff a bad thing that does a disservice to the hobby?

@Chaosmancer and @Justice and Rule have had examples of other reasons to explore dungeons beyond just killing monsters and taking their stuff. I can think of others as well, quite easily. Heck, you want to kill monsters? Have Evil--literally the alignment as a force of energy--be a thing that corrupts everything it touches, and Evil leaks into the mortal world in cracks at the bottom of chasms and ruins, and the PCs are tasked to find the cracks and seal them. There: you get your evil monsters you can kill without resorting to always evil races. You can even say the corruption is impossible to remove completely, so you don't have to have moral dilemmas about killing formerly-innocent beings.

Isn't it good to be more creative by coming up with new reasons to dungeon delve, rather than the same old "those monsters are green and aren't pretty so it's OK to kill them"?

There is also, quite frankly, a huge difference between religion and gaming, and comparing not including objectionable material from new books to an act that it stuns me the artist didn't realize would be considered extremely blasphemous by many people is just downright silly.

 

[Guest 85555]

OK, why is not doing dungeon delves where you kill monsters and take their stuff a bad thing that does a disservice to the hobby?

Choosing not to do them isn't bad for the hobby. This has nothing to do with a person choosing not to do them or a designer choosing to make a module about another adventure structure

 

[Faolyn]

I got back into reading it once, and got part way through the prequels... and then fell off it again. It is amazing, but I just can't keep it all in my head to follow the sub-plots. Plus, I keep getting stupidly busy with other things.

It's well worth it, if you ever go back to try rereading them.