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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 1917451" data-attributes="member: 18832">I can understand why people think this way, but I can't understand how that attitude survives contact with the real world. <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=";)" />I doubt that there is any single person in the world who receives every word and concept coming out of Renton with ecstatic glee - any creative endeavour for profit is a balance between appealing to the consumer base and exercising one's own imaginative powers.Perhaps illumians, or the green star adept prestige class, or Eberron's lightning rail are indeed a significant and even shocking departure from the kind of fantasy that defines "traditional" D&D. On the other hand, there are also a not-insignificant number of people for whom the tropes and ideas of "traditional" D&D fantasy are stale, or even simply not what they're interested in right now.I recall Rich Baker attributing the green star adept, for example, to the influence of the kind of strange sorcery you encounter in Robert E. Howard's stories - representative of a subgenre of fantasy no less interesting or vital to its own group of fans as Tolkienesque epics are to theirs. Given that D&D does a poor (at best) job of mimicking the Tolkienesque genre, and was in its early days influenced easily as much by Howard and Moorcock as Tolkien at any rate, I can see no reason for the designers of D&D to try a broadening of the definitions of what D&D is like, since "traditional" D&D fantasy is only part of what D&D has historically been anyway!Anyone expecting everything Wizards of the Coast publishes to match what they want from a game of D&D is a fool, near as I can tell. Pick and choose, people! I like a great deal of what Wizards has published for Third Edition since the revision - crazy races and classes and monsters - but even I wouldn't expect that one campaign could reasonably contain it all. DMs have historically been great adaptors - if you can take an idea from your favourite fantasy decalogy and make it fit into your D&D game, why not bend your imagination towards adapting the bits of official D&D books that you only kind of like and making them fit better with your game?As I say often, I'm glad to see Wizards publishing things I don't care for in their books - because it means that someone else whose game is nothing like mine is picking it up and enjoying the game in a completely different way from myself, and that diversity is great for the hobby - and good for the company, when it means that both of us are buying the same book.Reasonable diversity is an unambiguously good thing - and illumians and their ilk don't even come close to exceeding the bounds of what's reasonable.</blockquote>

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