D&D 5E Next (3rd book of the year) endless speculation thread

[tetrasodium]

WotC's strategy is not to publish rehush, in internet age you have to offer something enough new. Crunch needs time and playtesting to find the right balance power and fun gameplay, and the lore/background/fluff has to be enough flexible to allow a multimedia franchise. Today the metaplot of no-FR or M:tG franchises are totally frozen. WotC said the strategy about the old titles is like a music company selling a compilation of the superhits by a veteran band.

WotC has to offer something can't be imitated by 3PPs, and not only original brands.
[/b]
And WotC needs a clear strategy about allowing fandom to publish fiction based in alternate timelines of famous settings.[/b]

Eberron is a perfect example of why it's not that simple. The eberron community had been bringing mechanics forward to 5e for years before wayfinders and much of it was slightly incompatible with wayfinders in different ways just as they were slightly different ways of bringing things forward into a system often designed to fight against the inclusion of that sort of thing being brought forward. The datsun community is already in the same boat with different people trying to bring things forward in different ways with wotc's lack of support making it more complicated and less compatible.5e tried to design against the needs of settings that differ from fr baselines so wotc needs to somehow support those settings in 5e before the communities can hold their nose over cherished missing bits and put lush for a good enough stable point of reference

Edit:5e eberron drew a lot from the community work and its discussions (which is hood) and the 5e eberron is a great presentation but 5e is still 5e and there are still a lot of areas where wotc wasn't willing to change things away from the fr specific version or rebuild existing mechanics. One of the easiest examples is languages going from default setting pub to something more setting appropriate like this

Lightning Round 2/26/18: Languages, Elementals and Pirates!

I’ve just returned to dry land after organizing gaming on the JoCo Cruise. I’ve got lots of things I need to work on, but I have time to answer a few more questions from the last lightning round. A…

keith-baker.com

 

[hopeless]

To be fair to me Eberron is Star Wars.
Its a matter of perspective.
What do you see in Star Wars that you recognise in D&D?
To me lightning Rail and Elemental powered Airships and fighting up there reminds me of sequences from the Clones Wars!
To him the basic premise of Dragonlance is the same as the OT!
Its pretty easy to understand.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

In other words, "DL is a Star Wars rip off".

Not even a little bit

 

[Mind of tempest]

Not even a little bit

only in the hero's journey way

 

[doctorbadwolf]

only in the hero's journey way

That wouldn’t be a ripoff, and the two works use the heroes journey quite differently.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Not even a little bit

Lord Soth says "I find your lack of faith disturbing."

 

[NiClerigo]

The Silver Flame is strong with Jaela Daran in Eberron, though. May the Flame be with you. Keith Baker has referred to Jedi-like elements in the Church of the SF, and when I DM Eberron I often find Star Wars songs fitting as background music

 

[Demetrios1453]

The fork-lift truck required to shift it: FR is too big to fit into a single volume.

They've packed it all into one volume many times before. In fact, the 3e FRCS is often held up as an example of what a good campaign setting book should be. They could easily do something similar using the 5e setting book format, with a similar page count. And once they clear out the prestige classes and the giant 3e-era stat blocks, there would even be room for adding in a short update of the recent history of the setting.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

They've packed it all into one volume many times before. In fact, the 3e FRCS is often held up as an example of what a good campaign setting book should be. They could easily do something similar using the 5e setting book format, with a similar page count. And once they clear out the prestige classes and the giant 3e-era stat blocks, there would even be room for adding in a short update of the recent history of the setting.

The 3rd edition book is far from complete - it doesn't cover much more than SCAG despite being about twice as thick.

But WotC don't want to "update of the recent history of the setting" any more than they have too - they don't want to confirm or deny 4e. It's not a living setting, canon is whatever the DM says it is. It a resource, not a straightjacket.

 

[the Jester]

The Que Shu don’t need changed because the whole setting is about the gods returning and everyone finding religion. The gods were gone, false gods installed and then the gods returned. All people. Not just white people or savages. Everyone thought they were myth.

The problem is that the whole story smells really strongly of being an allegory for Mormonism. I didn't get that when I was a kid who didn't know much about religion who was reading the books, but it's inescapable now. And that particular story really is all about the white guys bringing civilized ways to the savage non-whites, which- I think most of us can agree- is very problematic these days.