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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6457174" data-attributes="member: 2067">There's a trade off to be made.If you retain tight control, you will not avoid embarrassments, you will just avoid certain kinds of embarrassments, and accept the responsibility for those that you do stumble into. You will be able to shape the product catalog. But it's a lot of work. And it involves paying people to do that work. And it's not fool-proof. And it lets certain elements of the gaming community that you can't afford to service languish. Moralizers gonna moralize, and you can't appease them by changing "devils" to "baatezu." If you surrender tight control (perhaps in favor of a community system....like ENWorld's Reviews....), there will be products you don't want associated with your game, at least tangentially. But you have plausible deniability and you can let those products you wouldn't normally bother to create serve their more limited audiences and bring them into the fold of the main game (Dancey's network externalities at work!). It's a lot LESS work, though it might involve some framing, and if you do it right, you just need to kind of keep an eye out maybe. But you'll have a broad appeal.Overall, for a game like D&D, I'd push for the second option. D&D has always been a game that people do their own thing with, for good or for ill. We were all 13 year olds rolling on the random harlot table and killing Thor or whatever at one point or another. The people who made the BoEF thought there was a market for it (since they haven't made anything since, I don't think that bet panned out for them). D&D benefits more from a riotous explosion of whatever people can throw at it than it does from being a curated and deliberate experience. You don't show up to a game of D&D to play WotC's game, you show up to a game of D&D to play a game with your friends that lets you do whatever you want to do with it. There's a lot of benefit to be had there.And the Decency Police didn't notice the BoEF, and they won't notice a 5e BoEF, either. Things like that don't make a ripple (or else FATAL would be more widely known). They're gonna dislike the game because there's wizards and demons in it, and mostly because weird kids have fun with other weird kids playing it, and we're not about to get rid of THOSE. You can't appease people who simply want to destroy you. You've got no choice but to be the best you can be at what you do. For D&D, that means ennabling all sorts of weirdness.</blockquote>

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