D&D 5E The 5E Art is Awesome

[Reynard]

Hey, I actually like the piece a lot for those very reasons. As others have stated, the painting shows characters engaged in very much Neutral (or possibly Evil, depending on what kind of dragon that is) behavior. This isn't the after-math drawing you find so much these days, where the bloodied, exhausted hero leans against a tree near the body of a gargantuan foe. These adventurers all look pretty uninjured, posing next to a creature about the same size as them, in a way that suggests, "We killed this thing for sport and glory." Comparisons to fishing photos are apropos, and I imagine Elmore had that at least in part of his mind when he painted it. On the other hand, dragons are far more intelligent and sentient than trout.

Personally, I want my campaigns to allow for player characters to fill the dirtbag adventurer role as easily as the hero adventurer role. The one thing I don't want in my campaign is for players to play dirtbag adventurers, but feel as if they're playing total heroes. The LG heroic murder hobo is a delusional psychopath, and, if I'm doing my job, the campaign world relates to him or her as such. (Within the bounds of ultimately having fun, of course. I don't want to keep some sort of moral and ethical score and use my DM screen as a pulpit to impose a draconian morality on my players, at least not beyond some ground rules that are accepted up-front.)

It's hardly an either/or conundrum. Characters can be generally moral and still want to go skin some displaced beast pups because they fetch the best price. And the whole murder hobo bit is overwrought: in a world in which the penalty for banditry is a beheading after a "he said" trial, the paladin is breaking any code by wiping out the brigand camp to a man. But this is sort of a tangential discussion to the awesomeness of 5E art.

 

[DM Howard]

I'm convinced the artist who drew the 5E Halflings is just a major fan of Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker.

I really like the art of 5E, but I also miss some of the "old school" feeling art that inspired me when I first started playing at the very end of 2nd Edition.

 

[redrick]

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I'm convinced the artist who drew the 5E Halflings is just a major fan of Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker.

I really like the art of 5E, but I also miss some of the "old school" feeling art that inspired me when I first started playing at the very end of 2nd Edition.

It's very hard for me to compare the experience of opening my 5e PHB to the experience of opening my first PHB (which was 2nd edition.) I'd need give these books to an 11-year-old and try to gauge just how much it fired up that little kid's imagination.

 

[Unwise]

I do really like most of the 5e art. I particularly like the different looks of the humans. Some africanish looking guys and girls, a samurai looking lady and some rather interesting looking monsters. I don't like it when some of the monster art looks like they took human faces and photoshopped them into being a monster. Some of it skirts the uncanny valley too closely.

The other day I actually found myself skimming the PHB in such a away as to consciously avoid the halfling pictures. In much the same way as one might flick through a first aid book hoping to avoid the pictures of compound fractures. It is one thing to not like art, it is another to actually feel repelled by it.

Player 1 who came in late: "I'm thinking of playing a Halfling..."
Other players: "We kill it with fire!"
P1: "What the...why the hate?"
Others: <Opens the PHB to the right page and shows her>
P1: "Sweet mother of monsters! Abort, abort!"

10 minutes later
P1: "I am going to play a halfling guys. I'm going to be a Greater Old One Warlock, who has a pact with Dagon. I'll come from the town of Innsmouth. My character has the Innsmouth Look"

 

[JWO]

I like the halfling artwork myself but it doesn't really matter that much when you've got the entire internet at your disposal. If you don't like how something's represented in the books you can just do a Google/Pinterest image search to find a version you prefer. I don't really like what they've done with the goblinoids so I have an alternate library of pictures of goblins, hobgoblins and bugbears that I grabbed off the internet.

Overall, I'm a big fan of the artwork, not just stylistically but also because there's lots more diverse representation than I've seen in previous editions (apart from maybe Pathfinder), and relatively small amounts of cheesecakey nonsense.

 

[Reynard]

I must say that among my favorite pieces in the MM is the ogre -- much better than the 3E version.

 

[Klaus]

What, no love for the halfling wizards on pages 44, 142, 156 or 180?

 

[jodyjohnson]

sticky-noted every boob/thigh/stomach cutout, as well as any other art that read "creepy male gaze"

We tried this at the mall with real people, but got arrested.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I'd say that piece captures what is, for me, a central part of D&D: many (though not all) adventurers are murderous dirt-bags. That is why, as a Dungeon Master, it is my duty to bring these degenerates to justice.

They might not see it that way, but I can come home and look at that picture and say, "see? these 'heroes' are monsters."

Yeah, I don't see it that way at all. That might be a young dragon, but it's still pretty big, and it still could have easily killed livestock and people. Putting it down doesn't make the people in that picture "murderous monsters" any more than someone who kills a cougar that has been killing off livestock and attacking people.

I'd also add that the DM's job isn't to be against the PCs, or to "bring the degenerates to justice." That's how you end up with all these stories about jerk DMs. A DMs job is to run the adventure, the world, and be impartial (hence why the DM was originally called a referee).

 

[Sword of Spirit]

It's worth noting that it was a green dragon, which are generally evil. Most likely they killed it in response to acts it had already committed. If they had not, and were preemptively eliminating a threat, it's more debatable on the morality of the act, but I wouldn't automatically condemn the adventurers for it. There simply isn't enough info. Everyone sees what they want/expect to see in the picture.