D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[TwoSix]

Yeah. Most Warforged in my game are artificers on Mechanicus.

I more or less injected Unicron into Mechanicus and has him be the dark brother of Primus for evil ones.

Gotta say, I like warforged transformers on Mechanus way more than Modrons.

Hmm...or maybe a factional split in Mechanus between the rational modrons and the irrational, radical warforged.

 

[Flying Toaster]

I'd argue we're in a better position at the moment because there absolutely was a stereotype of the controlling DM in the game, running awful games and killing people, but you having to play with them as that was the only game in town. The biggest DM and "This is what D&D is" being stuff like CR absolutely helps getting away from that, showing a more collaborative showing where you can absolutely see players have suggested some backstory stuff to chew on, and its been incorporated

D&D is collaborative fiction at the end of the day. Its shouldn't be controlled by either side

I definitely remember arguments about “killer DMs” in the Forum column of Dragon magazine, but never met any in real life. I believe that the very small size and relative isolation of my teenage AD&D groups actually curbed antisocial behavior by both players and DMs, as everyone implicitly understood that there was nowhere else to go.

I am not really used to the idea of players contributing to the setting lore, but many DMs complain that players do not engage with their homebrew campaign worlds very much, so maybe this is a good way to get those players more invested.

Do they still stick with the "They're from the future" stuff? The alien origin of mind flayers tends to be what I think of for them and was around at least in 3.5e. I don't think either 4e or 5e went into their origins, the only big illithid-centric work being BG3

I am not really sure about their lore anymore. I was OK with the older mind flayers from the 1977 MM, who were just these mysterious psionic squidheads who might be aliens (or maybe not). I lost interest in them once the designers went wild with what I like to call “illithidization”: gross body horror, endless niche variants of the original monster, and ever more convoluted and grimdark lore. They did the same thing with aboleths and some other powerful monsters.

I never cared much about related monsters like the githyanki or githzerai either. The proliferation of canon like the Blood War in later 2E and beyond was one of the things that led to me drifting away from the hobby for a long time. When it comes to weird proprietary D&D monsters, I always liked beholders, bulettes, displacer beasts, and owlbears much more than mind flayers anyway.