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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6155398" data-attributes="member: 2067">Sure, and if the MM is "here's a generic fantasy orc!" and a lot of the non-world-specific D&D stuff uses them, it's not a big deal. A little lame, maybe, but not a big deal.  It becomes an issue when the game assumes that every orc is going to be the generic fantasy orc in the MM and that every DM is going to use that orc unless explicitly stated otherwise. It's also an issue when that generic fantasy orc is hard-coded to be part of the brand because of something like the GSL that doesn't let you change that generic fantasy orc into some other kind of orc (or remove it entirely) if you want to advertise your book as compatible with WotC's stuff. It's also an issue when that generic fantasy orc is crammed into some setting it doesn't belong in because the brand must have a tight association. Furthermore, it doesn't reflect the reality of the actual tabletop game, where your orcs and my orcs are really not going to be the same thing, even if we're both using the MM generic fanatasy orc as the starting point, because of the different directions our own local tables are going to take them in. That's the kind of problem that arise in having an opt-out generic fantasy orc as the default, rather than an opt-in generic fantasy orc as an example. I also tend to believe that "generic fantasy critter" isn't a very compelling design in and of itself, and so a specific example doesn't need to be a bland critter, because it is explicitly something you aren't necessarily expected to have in your games. We see some of that issue with the proposed 5e cosmology: it's going broad to include EVERYTHING, and ending up kind of a frickin' mess. If we had an ethos of opt-in, we could instead, say, provide an entire cosmology based on the myths of ancient Egypt as filtered through a pseudo-medieval-european D&D. Which could be incredible and awesome and lead to videogames and novel lines and whatnot itself if it took off. Or be an inexpensive experiment among many if it didn't. If they're married to the idea of a highly branded cosmology, it's not something that's really even going to be tried, though: it'd run counter to the One True Way of the brand.</blockquote>

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