Because it makes heretics impossible. If God provides the Pope with cleric spells but not Martin Luther, then clearly Martin Luther is wrong (or vice versa).And within the fiction, why is it unfair that someone might be punished by their god for breaking a divine commandment?
I'd much rather have divine magic being linked to the cleric's (or paladin's or whatever's) belief that they in tune with their god. A cleric of Sune who starts destroying works of art or breaking up loving couples... that's clearly counter to Sune's nature, and they should probably seek out a different patron. But I could totally see a conflict between a cleric believing that beauty is something that should be shared with the world, and art being widely accessible to everyone, while another believes art is treasure to be protected and saved for the deserving.
I never got how most dungeons are supposed to repopulate overnight. Dungeons tend to be closed systems, occasionally with a poorly defined tunnel leading to the Underdark or something. So how are they supposed to get reinforcements? I mean, in some cases you might have a caster animating the dead or summoning minions, but that's an exception. D&D dungeons generally aren't Gauntlet dungeons that come with a monster generator that needs to be destroyed to stop pooping out monsters.Also, the world reacts. Dungeons repopulate, guards reinforce defences etc.
I think changing encounter pacing and related stuff would require a far more thorough reworking of classes and abilities than the scope for the 2024 revision allowed. Also, last time they tried that, it didn't work out so well for them.So this is the thing about encounter building, encounter frequency and the rests.
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I don't see that any of this has changed.
I'm ambivalent to the inclusion of Greyhawk. I mean, there's nothing wrong with having a setting included in a game, but it feels off to have Greyhawk being the example setting in the DMG and then having future material focus on Forgotten Realms with occasional visits to other settings. It feels a lot like (a) a bone thrown to grognards and (b) taking the opportunity to fix problematic parts of the setting.So it appears DMG has lot of setting stuff, Greyhawk stuff in it. This is just my opinion, and I'm sure many disagree,but personally I could not care less about that, and even if I did care, I don't think its place is here. DMG should be about building settings, and customising and running the game; it should be the GM's toolkit. Setting books for official settings should be their own thing. By leaving the setting stuff out of the DMG there would have been much more room for other things.
Which seems to be more than Birthright or Mystara are getting. Or Jakandor, for all of us fans.It looks like a single line in the official campaign settings table that vaguely and briefly mentions Dark Sun. The equivalent to "yeah, it exists."
I think it's possible to make a modernized Dark Sun setting. But I think it's risky, and perhaps nearly impossible to do one that appeals to modern sensibilities (Dark Sun needs to be a Luke Cage setting, not a Black Panther setting), the current direction of game design (notably having psionic-themed subclasses for a variety of classes instead of as a separate subsystem with a class or two based just on that), while at the same time not be off-putting to old-school Dark Sun fans. And given the risks involved, I would not really blame Wizards for saying that there are much juicier fruits hanging in much easier places to pick them on that tree.And wasn't it someone like Justice Ramin Arman who stated they want to give Dark Sun a shot, if they had the chance.
What is the Matrix?