I appreciate the kind sentiments. But it's hard for me to enjoy something if I know it's actively making significant numbers of veteran fans unhappy.
But the point is,
no matter what is put out, a "significant number" of fans are going to be unhappy.
There's also a matter of principle here. I liked the approach that Wizards took for most of 5E, appealing to both new and veteran fans (although they should still be doing more for 4E fans). I want them to keep doing that, but the way they handled Ravenloft concerns me (new ideas are great, but they didn't need such an extensive reboot to make changes). If Ravenloft is going to be their template for updating other settings, I don't know that I can support it.
And here's why: when 5e came out, I said that I had absolutely no reason to buy any Ravenloft books
unless they were different from what was already put out. My reasoning is that the 3x books put out by S&S were basically a continuation of the stuff TSR put out in 2e. Just advanced a few years and with a few things changed because of modules and the like, like Il Aluk being nuked. If the 5e books had been just a continuation of
that (minus the problematic content), then there would be absolutely no reason for me to buy them, since I already have all the setting info I need and can easily update the monsters, and I don't include the problematic things already.
I'm willing to believe that I'm not the only one who felt that way. Which means that it's likely that a significant number of fans would have been unhappy if 5e Ravenloft would have been the same. So basically, it's damned if you do and damned if you don't. No matter what WotC had done with Ravenloft, there would have been people who would be angry.
(And from my own personal experience, a lot of the people who were angry at Ravenloft were angry because of things like some characters being made into PoC or women, and because the female darklords had a personality beyond wanting a man or hating all men.)
And honestly, I'm not sure how you could make changes
without rebooting a lot of things. The three biggest changes were, IIRC, to Falkovnia, Valachan, Dementlieu, and I Cath. Falkovnia was a domain based entirely around racism (which in the S&S days included racism against non-European-looking humans), Valachan was both racist and sexist, what little there was to I Cath was sexist, and Dementlieu had very heavily-implied rape, and even without that the entire domain was based around removing people's consent. Get rid of those problematic things and you don't have any domain
left. Some people may consider this "sanitizing" the setting, but, well, I like to think of what Jon Sims (The Magnus Archives) said: he does horror, not trauma. Too many people still suffer from these things for them to be made part of a game that is likely to not be handled very well by even well-meaning DMs. So... reboot.
www.enworld.org
