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Message: <blockquote data-quote="cowpie" data-source="post: 8487499" data-attributes="member: 98840">Correction -- I meant to say that they are contemplating doing this, which could result in this happening.  To sum up a number of earlier responses to the OP's  "cusp of a sea change" post, it was proposed that there's a newer generation with newer values that WOTC is marketing to.  The gameplay will stay the same in 5.5 and 6.0, but the old "nostalgia-driven" Gen-X values of 5.0 will be superseded with newer values of the new generation.  They are the core demographic now, so WOTC is going to cater to what they like, and that's casual light hearted play.  You can still mechanically do D&D stuff, but it's the content that will change.Dungeon crawling and heroic adventure are still options, but because of the new content changes I'm concerned this will limit player options to casual play only.  The new material will remove some content seen as a problem, and focus more on characters that are friendly avatars representing the players, and not older fantasy tropes simulating older mythology or fantasy literature.  No more evil orcs evil Drow, grimdark Conan or picaresque Fafhrd and Grey Mouser content.  Also this negates a lot of themes players might want to reproduce from ancient mythology.Case in point WOTC's recent errata release for all of their books, which feature lists of line-item removal of material, including removing alignment from the game entirely, to remove all references to good and evil, even as abstract concepts.  Since mythology incorporates concepts of good and evil, this potentially chips away and the narrative power of the mythical archetypes I'm talking about.  I think that those mythical archetypes are what draw people to the game, not nostalgia, so I'm leery about drastically changing the content.In other words, you can still have the trappings of a hero's journey: quests, dungeon crawls, leveling up and power ups, etc, But, if the content is edited so there's no evil to fight against, then this could devalue the importance going on the quest in the first place.  If Emperor Palpatine or Sauron are no longer evil, then why bother fighting them?  If the Heroes aren't objectively good, are they still heroes? No good knights of King Arthur facing the evil knighs of Mordred, per the new values, Which is fine, if that's what you want, but if you want objectively evil or good mythical characters, I guess pick up a copy of Pendragon?</blockquote>

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