WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[Micah Sweet]

So basically, if they had put kender and warforged into Monsters of the Multiverse*, we wouldn't have needed an Eberron or Dragonlance book?

* And similar books for classes/subclasses, feats backgrounds and magic items/spells.

Also, thank you for being completely transparent that where each setting would stop is subjective based on when you stopped liking the changes rather than try to justify it with some objective measure.

There's some bits and bobs (I'm always interested in a 5e take on the Knights and the Order for example), but basically yeah. As I've said many times, I don't like changing history, but it doesn't look like the new book is doing that to anywhere near the degree I was worried it might.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I know this is off-topic, but how familiar are you with it? Are you familiar at all with its version of "undead"-worshipping elves (the Aereni worship divine corporeal undead that control their civilization, and the Tairnadal practice ancestor worship and try to take on the traits of honored ancestors)? Or the concept of the Silver Flame (a divine flame created through the sacrifice of the Couatls that protects the world from demons and aberrations)? Or Riedra (a psionically-controlled dystopia ruled by telepathic tyrants that serve a demigod of nightmares)?

I'm somewhat familiar with them (I own most of the books, because I used to buy everything), but I won't win any trivia contests. I have a lot of respect for the work Keith Baker has put into the setting, and I love engineers and robots a lot (alot a lot), but the setting was just too late to fit into my nostalgia box, and my tastes outside engineers and robots for fantasy RPG tend to run very traditional (raised on 1e mechanics and 2e lore), so its just never really caught my attention.

Edit: also not a big fan of noir as a genre.

 

[OakenHart]

I don't quite understand the idea of the original post. 5e D&D is the most popular and successful D&D has ever been in its entire history. And the idea is "it's too successful, we need to change up to be more like earlier less successful versions of it"? Twitter was not doing well already, and they managed to actually somehow get worse and less successful under this new "visionary leadership". This is not a model to be following.

I can see an argument that maybe they went too far in the other direction of 2e's "too many settings dividing the fanbase" issue, but I'm not sure the solution is some single person making sweeping changes not based on data and professionalism, but on emotional kneejerks and memes.

What I'm wondering is that WotC has data. I was under the impression that their one true in-house full setting book (Eberron) in 5e was successful. Is there a reason why they did not try to imitate that success with other settings and instead went back to adventures with setting lore within, or am I mistaken in the Eberron setting book being successful?

 

[Vaalingrade]

Eberron was updated right.

Eberron was also designed to work that way instead of selling novels and burying itself under a spine-shattering weight of lore and 90's metaplot.

 

[Micah Sweet]

OK, so Eberron was apparently a bad example. Let's try another - SCAG. Ignoring the clear disappointment folks had with the amount of detail in the book, it's neither a reboot like Ravenloft or Spelljammer, nor a copy-paste from 2E or 3E etc. with only updated mechanics. Instead, it makes some mild retcons, and largely just advances and continues the previous lore (even incorporating 4E). Like Eberron, this struck me as the winning move for mass appeal (unless you were a hardcore fan of the 4E Realms). But was that a bad call, to some of you veteran fans? Do you really think it would have been better as just a book of updated mechanics and lore copied from, say, the 3.0 Realms book?

SCAG was fine as a lore continuation; it changed the past very little if at all, and that's what I care about. Of course, it was their first supplement, long before they decided to change their design direction, and it wasn't a great book in other ways, as you noted.

 

[JEB]

SCAG was fine as a lore continuation; it changed the past very little if at all, and that's what I care about. Of course, it was their first supplement, long before they decided to change their design direction, and it wasn't a great book in other ways, as you noted.

OK, so you don't need lore frozen in stone at some arbitrary date to be happy with a 5E adaptation of a classic setting; you just want continuations that are lore-compatible with the material that came before, rather than reboots that start the setting over from scratch. By that standard, SCAG and Eberron are fine (though both meet that requirement in different ways), Ravenloft and Spelljammer are not.

When you said you agree that they should "copy-paste the entirety of the older setting books", as @Levistus's_Leviathan and @Remathilis asked you about, it sounded like you wanted no changes at all from some ideal-to-you version of the setting. A treatment, I should add, which was not how the major 2E settings were handled during their runs. (For example, 2E Ravenloft added to 1E Ravenloft, and 3E Ravenloft added to 2E Ravenloft; none took the older edition lore as is and stuck strictly to the previous status quo.)

 

[ersatzphil]

What I'm wondering is that WotC has data. I was under the impression that their one true in-house full setting book (Eberron) in 5e was successful. Is there a reason why they did not try to imitate that success with other settings and instead went back to adventures with setting lore within, or am I mistaken in the Eberron setting book being successful?

That’s what I wonder - they’ve shown us they can write good campaign setting books. Eberron seems to have been quite well received, and (with some grumbling) so was Ravenloft.

 

[Micah Sweet]

OK, so you don't need lore frozen in stone at some arbitrary date to be happy with a 5E adaptation of a classic setting; you just want continuations that are lore-compatible with the material that came before, rather than reboots that start the setting over from scratch. By that standard, SCAG and Eberron are fine (though both meet that requirement in different ways), Ravenloft and Spelljammer are not.

When you said you agree that they should "copy-paste the entirety of the older setting books", as @Levistus's_Leviathan and @Remathilis asked you about, it sounded like you wanted no changes at all from some ideal-to-you version of the setting. A treatment, I should add, which was not how the major 2E settings were handled during their runs. (For example, 2E Ravenloft added to 1E Ravenloft, and 3E Ravenloft added to 2E Ravenloft; none took the older edition lore as is and stuck strictly to the previous status quo.)

That is correct. I want lore compatible with what came before, and no reboots.

That is most definitely not WotC's current policy, and that's why I can't support it.

 

[JEB]

That’s what I wonder - they’ve shown us they can write good campaign setting books. Eberron seems to have been quite well received, and (with some grumbling) so was Ravenloft.

Yup, Eberron is currently #8 in Amazon's D&D category, despite being out for three years, so they clearly did something folks liked. (Ravenloft is currently #41.)

 

[Zardnaar]

In in no reboot mode as well. Spelljammer is really only SJ in name only.