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

[Micah Sweet]

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

Depends on the game, and the specific mechanics one is trying to mash together. In that way, 5.5 is at least as different an expression of 5e from 2014 D&D as LU or TotV are from either or each other.

 

[Scribe]

LOL! The people using the term "5.5" have been outspokenly critical against the 2024 Players Handbook. Such as @Scribe, @Micah Sweet, @CreamCloud0, and others. I will let them speak for themselves, but they do come across as unhappy with and warring against the D&D 2024 core rules update. The use of the term 5.5 seems a shibboleth for an edition war.

5.5 is no way an edition war. Its simply easier to type than "The 2024 Revision to the 5th Edition of the game Dungeons and Dragons."

If you prefer, consider 5.5 short hand for 2024 Edition, which is what it is.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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 "warring" against it really (although there are certainly other expressions of 5e I prefer, and I don't see it as worth the money). But I simply cannot see it as the same edition as 2014 D&D, and refuse to treat it as such. 5.5 as a term works for me, and I've seen it used all over (not just ENWorld).

 

[Scribe]

Next time I'm out of town I'll have to mention to the FLGS owner that his reference to the 2024 Revision of the 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons as '5.5 PHB' is edition warring...

 

[Micah Sweet]

LOL! The people using the term "5.5" have been outspokenly critical against the 2024 Players Handbook. Such as @Scribe, @Micah Sweet, @CreamCloud0, and others. I will let them speak for themselves, but they do come across as unhappy with and warring against the D&D 2024 core rules update. The use of the term 5.5 seems a shibboleth for an edition war.

That doesn't mean it's an inappropriate term generally.

 

[gban007]

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.

I agree with this and @Micah Sweet's other post around what can also lead to greater differences, I do think in DnD though we haven't really seen as much differentiation as could be the case under those circumstances. the Player's Handbooks tend to only have humanoid races, and a lot of the old mechanics were just things like 'like humans, but stronger, or faster, or more dexterous', so even if deity created, the deity didn't differentiate far as such.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I agree with this and @Micah Sweet's other post around what can also lead to greater differences, I do think in DnD though we haven't really seen as much differentiation as could be the case under those circumstances. the Player's Handbooks tend to only have humanoid races, and a lot of the old mechanics were just things like 'like humans, but stronger, or faster, or more dexterous', so even if deity created, the deity didn't differentiate far as such.

You're right in practice, mostly. But it doesn't have to be that way.

 

[pemerton]

IIRC

The lore is that every setting is it's own bubble which some deities can enter and some cannot.

There is no the lore in this respect. Even if one treats a particular book - say MoP or SpellJammer or whatever - as canonical, a majority of tables at any given time probably didn't even own or have access to those sorts of more esoteric rulebooks.

Gygax in his DMG pointed towards pseudo-scientific explanations for some basic ecological phenomena of the campaign world, but I doubt a majority ever cared about such things even back then.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There is no the lore in this respect. Even if one treats a particular book - say MoP or SpellJammer or whatever - as canonical, a majority of tables at any given time probably didn't even own or have access to those sorts of more esoteric rulebooks.

Gygax in his DMG pointed towards pseudo-scientific explanations for some basic ecological phenomena of the campaign world, but I doubt a majority ever cared about such things even back then.

I don't see the question of how many people cared about something in the rulebooks is at all relevant.

 

[pemerton]

I don't see the question of how many people cared about something in the rulebooks is at all relevant.

If you're going to assert that D&D lore is X, when a majority of D&D players (both on a time-slice basis and a longitudinal basis) have never cared about X, I think your assertion collapses.

Players of D&D can, and have, made up whatever fictions they like about where sentient beings come from, how that relates to the gods, how that relates to scientific ecology, etc. Similarly for gods, the cosmos/multiverse, etc.