D&D (2024) Should 2014 Half Elves and Half Orcs be added to the 2025 SRD?

[CreamCloud0]

Fair enough, but that also presumes that all beings on a world originated on that world. In many cases, particularly often with the fay, a species is an immigrant from another world or plane that could operate under very different laws.

also, IIRC, alot of the playable species in DnD were like, purposefully crafted by gods and deities, meaning there can be wildly different biological compositions all native to a single planet/continent, and magic is always a bit of a wrench in the works of logical evolution creating species with erratic and unpredictable abilities.

 

[Remathilis]

I'd say there probably isn't even a 5e community. There are lots of different little communities wrapped up around different things and we bounce around from community to community. A community might be as small as five people you have sitting around a table.

We each can decide what we want to call this thing of ours. There is no standard and there is no agreement and, at this point, I don't think there will be. Which means we get to choose for ourselves.

I have my definition of 5e and I think its important which is why I bang the table about it so much. I know many who disagree.

5e used to mean "the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons" but that definition has now changed. 5e is a platform, like Linux, around which several full RPGs and thousands of products revolve.

I think this definition is important because it ensures 5e is strong regardless of the business decisions of any given company who produces 5e-compatible products.

For those who feel as strongly the other way, what is their motivation?

My point was that the 5e Community isn't a bunch of isolated individual games but share and intermix with each other. People use material from D&D, TotV, or other 5e based games because they are a common set of rules and expectations, even if the individual expressions differ. I don't think many people, for example, ONLY use Level-Up and never use material from any other 5e game, so the idea that if you are using Level Up and include a Tasha's subclass, you are no longer playing Level Up is patently absurd. The game you are playing is defined by the core rulebook you want, but because 5e material can be mixed in a way I can't mix Vampire or Shadowrun, its fair to call the 5e community as collective even if everyone in the 5e community is playing slightly different types of 5e.

Because the alternative is to balkanize 5e into specific types and variants (D&D 14, D&D 24, TotV, A5e, etc) and say each of those games are separate islands and mixing them no longer creates a collective identity. There is no 5e, there is only D&D, Level Up, Tales of the Valiant, etc, and mixing those games is akin to trying to Go Fish in Poker; just because they all use similar elements doesn't mean you should be combining them.

This is poignant because D&D 24 isn't a new game, its another expression of 5e. And the fact it can be mixed with the larger 5e community means it can draw on those resources the same way TotV can use Tasha's to plug gaps in its offerings. D&D 24 is heir to the same rich collection of content that all 5e games can use. That's what I mean by "its all 5e."

 

[Minigiant]

also, IIRC, alot of the playable species in DnD were like, purposefully crafted by gods and deities, meaning there can be wildly different biological compositions all native to a single planet/continent, and magic is always a bit of a wrench in the works of logical evolution creating species with erratic and unpredictable abilities.

IIRC

The lore is that every setting is it's own bubble which some deities can enter and some cannot. And those who can enter create the player species for that setting and determines their physiology and native plane.

 

[Yaarel]

I'd say there probably isn't even a 5e community. There are lots of different little communities wrapped up around different things and we bounce around from community to community. A community might be as small as five people you have sitting around a table.

We each can decide what we want to call this thing of ours. There is no standard and there is no agreement and, at this point, I don't think there will be. Which means we get to choose for ourselves.

I have my definition of 5e and I think its important which is why I bang the table about it so much. I know many who disagree.

5e used to mean "the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons" but that definition has now changed. 5e is a platform, like Linux, around which several full RPGs and thousands of products revolve.

I think this definition is important because it ensures 5e is strong regardless of the business decisions of any given company who produces 5e-compatible products.

For those who feel as strongly the other way, what is their motivation?

"5e" is the name of a game engine.

The game engine can power many different kinds of settings.

 

[Mind of tempest]

"5e" is the name of a game engine.

The game engine can power many different kinds of settings.

true but no one has ever made a game engine the does everything equally well and few games on the same engine can just be mashed together with out a massive amount of duck tape

 

[Yaarel]

Fantasy is replete with nostalgic and even reactionary tropes - knights, hermits, swords, castles, redemptive violence, etc.

In order to make this tenable rather than horrible, these tropes are not explored in any sort of "scientific" or analytic fashion. They are carefully curated to tell stories that provide some sort of comfort or assurance. Often there is quite a bit of sentimentality.

I don't think these aesthetics of the fantasy genre fit with an attempt to imagine genuinely non-human intelligent beings.

I view "fantasy" as theme within "scifi", and scifi moreorless synonymous with "speculative fiction", specfic.

The boundaries between "hard science fiction" and dreamlike "fantasy" are arbitrary, where any fantasy trope can potentially be explained "scientifically", even plausibly in certain scenarios.


From your post, I agree, the fantasy themes focus on the folkbeliefs of the past, including mythology and fairytales, often with Romantic Era themes of nationalism and antirationality.

In other words, the figures within a fantasy story are mainly compelling "archetypes" within the collective unconscious, the shared tropes of a culture. In this way, even the most "nonhuman" archetype is necessarily a relatable human trope and human sensibility.

 

[Yaarel]

true but no one has ever made a game engine the does everything equally well and few games on the same engine can just be mashed together with out a massive amount of duck tape

The 5e engine doesnt need to do "everything". It just needs to find the most useful balance between simplicity (of mechanics) and adaptability (for diverse settings). This elegant balance is perhaps the most excellent quality of 5e as a game engine.

Meanwhile, because 5e is such a tough game engine it can handle a great deal of modularity where a specific setting can add special mechanics.

 

[Yaarel]

If it's all 5e, you won't need anything other than 5e to talk about the rules without causing confusion. If you have to differentiate by saying "2014/2024" or "new/old" etc., in order to avoid confusion, then we are dealing with a new edition or half-edition.

By your criterion above, the need to "differentiate" the rules for the Theros setting (level 1 feat), or Tashas (species-neutral ability improvements, class variants, etcetera), would therefore count as separate "editions". Your criterion implies that the use of the term "5e" has always served to include many different editions.

 

[Yaarel]

You need to look up what edition warring is, because calling 5.5e a new edition is not it.

Heh, as far as I can tell from the Enworld forum, the only people using the term "5.5" are, in fact, "warring" against the 2024 Players Handbook.

 

[TiQuinn]

Heh, as far as I can tell from the Enworld forum, the only people using the term "5.5" are, in fact, "warring" against the 2024 Players Handbook.

I’m not at war with the new edition. I’m calling it 5.5 because in the absence of calling it something that actually stuck with me, I went back to the standard numbering convention.