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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9810161" data-attributes="member: 6790260">So we pick a setting.What do we do with the 3/4 of the audience who aren't interested in that setting, or worse, outright hate it? Or 2/3, or 1/2, or whatever. What incentive is there for those people to stick around with a game that actively does not want their attention?I fully agree with you that D&D is not the perfect ultra-generic toolbox folks have claimed it is for ages. You'll never hear me say otherwise. D&D is a specific flavor. It's just a specific flavor that can go in a lot of dishes. Like say, cumin, or maybe cinnamon is a better pick since it's more versatile than people give it credit for but not infinitely versatile. You wouldn't put cinnamon into carbonara, but you can put it into "savory" dishes and have it taste great. Chinese five-spice powder usually includes cinnamon, for example, and I love using that in stir fry.Not being "perfectly generic Fantasy Game Engine" does not mean D&D is hyperspecific to a single setting. It has aimed for a chunk of the spectrum, not the whole spectrum. For a different analogy, "blue" is not a single color, it's a range of colors, and shades/tints/tones of that range. That doesn't mean you can now slot in "blue" wherever you would put "red", but it does mean that "blue" can mean things which are very heavily green (such as cyan), or things that are verging into purple (e.g. indigo or certain meanings of "royal blue"), even though blue is neither green nor purple itself. There's flexibility in what D&D is offering. There's much less flexibility in what Cyberpunk 2077 is offering. There is value in CP2077 being focused. There's also value--different value--in D&D being diverse. If there is any good lesson to learn from the victory of the 3e partisans in the 3e/4e edition war, it's that over-specialization is a real risk and carries serious negative consequences. That doesn't mean we should shy away from all specialization entirely, it just means we have to choose specialization carefully and for very good reasons, not simply because of a blanket assertion that specificity is better than generality.</blockquote>

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