Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8522583" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I'm of the opinion D&D no longer really "reflects" anything. It's become a source in its own right. We're approaching the 50th anniversary, after all. When Gygax and Arneson and the other luminaries were putting D&D together in the 70s, that was around the 50th anniversary of many of their sources. The 30s gave us the initial writing for Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the start of Conan's adventures, and The Hobbit. The fuller depiction from The Lord of the Rings was even newer--less than twenty years old.At this point, D&D has spawned literally entire genres of video games, created archetypes of its own almost from whole cloth, and cemented itself as THE tabletop game in the public consciousness. Just as LotR was big enough to spawn some generally quite excellent films (the Hobbit films...more debatable, shall we say) fifty years after its publication, so is D&D still able to drive Big Stuff as we approach its 50th anniversary.But, unlike LotR and a lot of those other things, D&D is still a living thing in many respects, it can still grow and change and do new things. In that sense, what we're seeing is less imitation of other things, and more players finding what they like and running with it. You see this most strongly in the shifting demographics of characters on D&D Beyond (and the rise of good art you can find via Google, too!) Dragonborn art used to be precious rare, the majority of it actually commissioned by WotC itself or other professional outlets. The past five years, though, have seen an absolute EXPLOSION of individual fans getting dragonborn art, and I couldn't be happier; we're seeing so much more variety and character as a result. Fat ones, skinny ones, really really dragony ones, nearly humanoid ones, women, men, wizards, thieves, nobles, necromancers, all sorts. As a dragonborn fan, this is lovely, as it means I have far more art to <s>steal</s> employ for helping demonstrate what my characters may look like.D&D having elves standing next to dragon-men and devil-people, because players genuinely think those things are just fun to do. Perhaps some will call that "anime" (though anime that feature humanoid dragons, even lizardfolk, are relatively rare; usually you have catgirls or fox-/wolf-people or the like). Perhaps some will call it "supers." Personally, I think that's putting the cart before the horse, thinking D&D is chasing after these trends, when in actuality it's being driven by the same forces that caused those trends to come about.</blockquote>

Verification