D&D 5E (2024) Unconfirmed Dark Sun World Book

[Superchunk77]

Is this is a serious response or a parody of how people respond to stuff like that? It's literally impossible to tell but it sure reads like the latter!

Serious.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Fine, I'll concede the point that recently, WotC as a company can't seem to create any of these setting-type products very well.

Thank you.

I'm not trying to point this out to be mean or w/e, but I think it's pretty important to separate out what the actual D&D team members might want and what their skills might be from what WotC and Hasbro want and require from them. Especially as most of those designers will likely eventually move on from WotC.

In TTRPGs, there's essentially only one "corporate" RPG company, and that's WotC. A couple of others might heading that way, but they're still a fundamentally different kind of company, and not owned by a larger company whose sole and entire concern is short-term shareholder profits (a narrow concern that has lead Hasbro to screw itself - and sometimes WotC - over, quite a number of times).

So with a different, non-corporate company, it might be much fairer to blame "the writers" or the lead designer of a product. Here though we must look at the corporate goals and leadership.

I do think that whatever the cause, WotC have had a bit of a curve on the quality of the setting-type products, it started with a lot of fairly decent or at least moderate quality settings (including most of the MtG settings), but reached its nadir with Spelljammer, which experienced the incredible triple-threat of putting gimmicky format ahead of function (three identical-page-count slim hardbacks in a slipcase is... not a good format for a D&D setting book, sorry - almost anything not that would be better - like not making them identical page count even!), of experiencing some deeply and frankly easily avoidable idiocy with the monkey-people, and also a clear late-in-design change of direction which lead to faux-Athas being destroyed where they'd clearly originally intended it to be just straight-up Athas, right down to specific monsters. Every setting book before that was at least somewhat better (even if the general direction was decline), and every setting book after that has been better (that I'm aware of, anyway).

(Re: Spelljammer, I daresay the bizarre format choice was 100% on WotC leadership and 0% on the D&D team or what they wanted. The monkey business was clearly on the D&D team though, and the Athas thing... I have no idea. Did corporate at that time want to bury Athas, and the D&D team convinced them otherwise but too late to redesign? Or the exact opposite? Or something even more odd?)

Hopefully that up-curve continues and the inevitable Dark Sun book is good. I am skeptical, but I do hope. There are ways it could be done even within the strictures of WotC's goals, and still be good, but are they going to let people find those ways, or just enblandify it? We shall see.

Without looking it up do you know the current ruler of Cormyr?

I did until you asked me! Then I immediately forgot! THANKS!!! Classic ADHD brain-fail I admit.

So I had to look it up, and I was like "Oh yeah I knew that at some point!".

But as you say, I did have to look it up, you have me there! Raedra Obarskyr for the record. And to be fair, she sounds absolutely as insufferably flawless, smug, smarmy and eye-roll-inducing as every other bloody ruler of Cormyr, so Cormyr-fans, who clearly love insufferable twerps*, should embrace her!

* = (because what else is Cormyr about if not being insufferable in virtually every possible regard? Every awful trope of ultra-romanticised faux-medieval Britain and equally romanticised rural Midwestern America somehow rolled into one place)

 

[Parmandur]

Re: Spelljammer, I daresay the bizarre format choice was 100% on WotC leadership and 0% on the D&D team or what they wanted. The monkey business was clearly on the D&D team though, and the Athas thing... I have no idea. Did corporate at that time want to bury Athas, and the D&D team convinced them otherwise but too late to redesign? Or the exact opposite? Or something even more odd?

The Hadozee stuff was 100% Chris Perkins individually, because he thought it would be fun to have a Planet of the Apes reference but thought he didn't need a sensitivity readers. The format was really the core problem, as the content was fairly similar to those earlier Settijg books except for page count.: Eberron and Ravnica got 320 pages each, Theros and Van Richten got 256, Strixhaven was an experiment thst was actually somewhat creative and bold so a different beast...but Spelljammer got only 192 pages. Planescape is generally agreed to have done a better job...the big difference being that it got 256 pages long instead. And it didn't hit anybweird controversies as it was written by Wes Schneider and Justice Arman with the help of sensitivity readers, I suppose. But if the Spelljammer set got 256-320 pages of material...that would have made the difference.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I don’t agree with this, the update could easily be something that older fans and new ones like. Some of course won’t like it no matter what, but there is a good chance that old fans will also be fans.

I think most fans of something old will wind up fans of something new. It's just that there will always be a vocal subset who will loudly complain, and the size and volume of thar subset will colour how people perceive the success of the product, regardless of its financial success.

I always find it strange how social media has twisted the word "fan" to appear to mean "someone who hates everything new".

It's a strange world.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But if the Spelljammer set got 256-320 pages of material...that would have made the difference.

I tend to agree yeah - 192 pages is crazy, especially when 64 are adventure and 64 are bestiary, so everything about the setting (that isn't conveyed in the adventure or bestiary) and all the player-facing rules have to be in the remaining 64! Pain! But they've course-corrected and I hope they will continue.

I think most fans of something old will wind up fans of something new. It's just that there will always be a vocal subset who will loudly complain, and the size and volume of thar subset will colour how people perceive the success of the product, regardless of its financial success.

Shorter-term financial success doesn't necessarily indicate quality either with TTRPG products (so many factors can play into that), and critical quality is always hard to gauge as, with love, about 80% of people who formally review official (rather than 3PP) D&D products are dedicated to praising them to the high heavens and absolutely minimizing any bad qualities, and the other 20% are dedicated haters who are doing the exact opposite, just absolutely laying into them often even more unreasonably than the praise. I struggle to think of any reviewers who I'd say give a balanced perspective.

I always find it strange how social media has twisted the word "fan" to appear to mean "someone who hates everything new".

I mean, I don't think social media has done this per se, I think it's a phenomenon you see mostly with corporate-owned media, where the perception (often not entirely incorrectly) is that the corporation is making the decisions and with an eye on profit rather than quality or integrity or being "true" to the IP in question. Certainly there are countless examples of this.

So we have this idea that "fans" must oppose the corporate goals, that they're at odds. You can see this in fan communities even before the internet is really a thing, let alone social media - Star Trek for example had a bunch of people who were very against TNG. Eventually though the sheer quality of it won them over or caused them to be so outnumbered by new fans that it didn't matter.

We actually kind of saw something similar with SW and the prequel trilogy. Ye Olde Fannes were burning their Star Trek merch in their garden (c.f. Spaced) but it created enough new fans, and later work caused enough reappraisal that the still-frankly-pretty-rubbish PT is now much less hatefully regarded, and seen more like a slightly ridiculous but beloved uncle than a horrible clown home invader as it initially was by "fans".

 

[Chaltab]

The Hadozee stuff was 100% Christ Perkins

I hear tomorrow is his birthday.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I hear tomorrow is his birthday.

Autocorrect strikes again! I had a friend complaining about a weak performance from Taliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest yesterday for similar reasons.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I tend to agree yeah - 192 pages is crazy, especially when 64 are adventure and 64 are bestiary, so everything about the setting (that isn't conveyed in the adventure or bestiary) and all the player-facing rules have to be in the remaining 64! Pain! But they've course-corrected and I hope they will continue.


Shorter-term financial success doesn't necessarily indicate quality either with TTRPG products (so many factors can play into that), and critical quality is always hard to gauge as, with love, about 80% of people who formally review official (rather than 3PP) D&D products are dedicated to praising them to the high heavens and absolutely minimizing any bad qualities, and the other 20% are dedicated haters who are doing the exact opposite, just absolutely laying into them often even more unreasonably than the praise. I struggle to think of any reviewers who I'd say give a balanced perspective.


I mean, I don't think social media has done this per se, I think it's a phenomenon you see mostly with corporate-owned media, where the perception (often not entirely incorrectly) is that the corporation is making the decisions and with an eye on profit rather than quality or integrity or being "true" to the IP in question. Certainly there are countless examples of this.

So we have this idea that "fans" must oppose the corporate goals, that they're at odds. You can see this in fan communities even before the internet is really a thing, let alone social media - Star Trek for example had a bunch of people who were very against TNG. Eventually though the sheer quality of it won them over or caused them to be so outnumbered by new fans that it didn't matter.

We actually kind of saw something similar with SW and the prequel trilogy. Ye Olde Fannes were burning their Star Trek merch in their garden (c.f. Spaced) but it created enough new fans, and later work caused enough reappraisal that the still-frankly-pretty-rubbish PT is now much less hatefully regarded, and seen more like a slightly ridiculous but beloved uncle than a horrible clown home invader as it initially was by "fans".

Excellent points!

And generally, I'm all for the good fight that is protecting the "IP" from their soulless corporate overlords.

Also, the Star Wars Prequels are garbage, they are just not quite as bad as the Sequels. But then, none of the Star Wars movies are as good as rose-coloured nostalgia would have us remember, and yet I enjoyed all of the above well enough to say I'm a fan, so I guess I'mnot immune to it myself!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And generally, I'm all for the good fight that is protecting the "IP" from their soulless corporate overlords.

Yeah I think the problem is when people start getting overzealous or knee-jerking, or start bringing in extraneous political/cultural stuff, which we saw a lot with the SW sequels (prior to TRoS I would have rated them overall better than the PT, post-TRoS I can't really say that lol, though like the PT, even TRoS has a couple of fun bits).

I think one other problematic issue we see today is that audiences (and this goes for videogames too) are often quite good at realizing they didn't enjoy something, or didn't enjoy it as much as they expected, but instead of saying "I thought it sucked", people always need to come up with reasons, and I blame twerps like me in part for this, because this is a real post-social-media or least post-forums thing, because if you just say "I didn't enjoy X", on forums or social media, twerps like me will always be < nasal whiner voice > "Welllll why didn't you like? Huh?? Explain!" (or worse). We can't just let people not like something, and because of that, those people have had inculcated in them a sense that they need to come up with reasons.

But they're really spectacularly bad at identifying the actual reasons. The actual problems. This is very obvious from the specifics of a lot of the critiques of movies and videogames.

Especially when they're quite subtle or complex in the ways they don't work. Like, the strongest criticisms of TLJ, the hardest to argue against, are around pacing and structure. I loved TLJ (as did my wife) genuinely on first watch, but on re-watches, the structural and pacing issues are pretty noticeable (and I think Johnson struggles with this a little even in his well-regarded mystery movies, I note).

But most people aren't going to identify that. They just think "I didn't like it", and then they either get pressed on "why", or feel the need to pre-emptively come up with "why". And so they identify more superficial elements, or more minor elements they didn't vibe with, or worse, they read someone else's reasons (which may well be intentionally dishonest cultural warfare stuff, carefully phrased to pass inspection, like the attacks on the non-white and non-male actors in TLJ) and elevate those to being the reasons. Which can then make things pretty hard to discuss, because people tend to double-down on whatever they decided was the reason.

The same also applies to praise, note, but seems to matter less. I've seen movies with pretty weak acting and scripting praised for those elements quite frequently, or terrible editing particularly praised for editing (or in one notable case, winning the Oscar for acting, my step-mum who is a director of photography had some choice words about that lol), but it's people just trying to come up with reasons why they liked something, when the actual reason is maybe "the movie just had a really charismatic lead and great pacing".

(Of course all this and I still struggle to explain the very lukewarm critical reaction to The Running Man. I saw that movie. It was really good - very on-the-nose, but who cares, this is 2025, we could do with more on-the-nose stuff. It was a much better movie than half the action movies which were better reviewed this year. Oh well, it'll no doubt become a cult classic - a lot of movies that stand the test of time get weirdly lukewarm reactions at the time.)

 

[Kurotowa]

I always find it strange how social media has twisted the word "fan" to appear to mean "someone who hates everything new".

There's a good segment of "fans" who feel they've staked an ownership claim on the thing they're fans on. Which then gives them a right to gatekeep new fans who aren't appreciating it the right way, and to proclaim that new official additions aren't worthy because they deviate from the headcanon they've established.

And look, I get it. There's been enough beloved series that have been bastardized with cheap cash grabs or abandoned to the mists of time that you understand why a lot of fandoms feel like they've had to take over stewardship. But a lot of these people are overly possessive and quick to grab power.