D&D 5E WotC to increase releases per year?

[Ath-kethin]

Depends on the setting, that too is setting specific. It's pretty much explicitly not the case in eberron It's more vague there but not really true in darksun either. Ravenloft delights in taking away & generally interfering with your ability to reach out to them or engage in planar travel like that.

It explicitly wasn't the case in Al-Qadim either, despite "Zakhara being shoehorned into the Forgotten Realms.

I'm sure it will shock everyone to learn that Al-Qadim and Eberron are two of my favorite DgD settings ever.

 

[Faolyn]

That's the thing though, "the default" presented by core books like the phb & mm needs to be more than "in forgotten realms & planescape" or they need to be put out as setting specific books like "xyz campaign setting"

Yes, they should. But I was talking about what they have been doing, not what they should be doing.

 

[Ath-kethin]

Absolutely one of my favorite hooks in the setting.

The gods are real. The creation myths are not whole fabrication.

Disregarding that is one of the worst things I can imagine for how the setting functions.

That's fine. Believe me when I say that I have absolutely no concern whatsoever about things that might be detrimental to the Forgotten Realms. I go so far as to say that stuff that is specific to FR should be in books explicitly labeled as FR, so I can not buy them.

Polluting the general D&D sphere with lore that should be setting specific dilutes the entire experience IMO. Or, as in the 3.5 Monster Manual 3, have separate spaces for relevant monsters that indicate how "in Eberron . . .", "in the Forgotten Realms . . ." etc. Keep the gods-are-just-big-monsters stuff relegated to the settings where there are NPCs of appropriate power to dance with them.

But then, I'm clearly not a fan of the Realms, so my opinion is seemingly in the minority. And I don't think I've ever used a gnoll, an orc, or a giant in a game anyway, so it doesn't impact me directly.

 

[Ath-kethin]

It's not a lazy story, it's just not a story to your liking. Which is fine, it's certainly a change to the "gnoll story" from earlier editions, even though the demon-worshipping part was added in 3E.

One of the reasons (IMO) they did this was that . . . we have plenty of evil humanoids in the game (orcs, goblins, etc) and gnolls were under-utilized. So, they got an upgrade in 3E starting with the Chainmail miniatures game, and that story became popular enough it "took over" gnolls. 5E certainly takes it even further than 3E did.

One of the things WotC, and the gaming community, is wrestling with is presenting classic "bad guy" races without the baggage of racist thinking/language. If gnolls are "people", sentient, capable of free-will . . . and they are all crazed demon-worshippers . . . that's a problem. But if gnolls are demonic creations of Yeenoghu incarnated on the mortal plain, they aren't "people" but "monsters/spirits". Is that better than the old story? YMMV.

One of the more interesting takes on gnolls is from the BECMI D&D era, and the Mystara campaign. These gnolls were related to other dog-headed humanoids like lupin and hutaaka (yes, hyenas aren't dogs), but were as savage as the typical depictions of orcs and goblins . . . . for the most part. There was a tribe of gnolls forced into caverns under the Sind Desert due to an environmental catastrophe, where they met a tribe of elves there for the same reason. The two cultures started cooperating, and eventually formed a shared, dual-culture, Graakhalia. It was pretty neat.

Note that such a take is much easier to pull off when the creatures in question aren't depicted as being the playthings of a demon, who created them explicitly to make gamers leary of moral consequences feel OK about slaughtering them on sight.

I love Mystara, though I tend to use it piecemeal in my own games. And Bruce Heard's Voyage of the Princess Ark had a massive impact on how I design settings and view their presentation.

In a very real sense, 5e's gnolls are positioned to take the place of orcs and goblins as mindless canon fodder. I guess it's easier than creating nuanced worlds and individuals. I call it lazy because it's literally kicking the "always evil" can down the road instead of dealing with it directly. And no volume of mea culpas from WotC brass will remove their presence in the core books, or the company's doubling down on it in the first major 5e expansion (Volo's Guide).

 

[Scribe]

That's fine. Believe me when I say that I have absolutely no concern whatsoever about things that might be detrimental to the Forgotten Realms. I go so far as to say that stuff that is specific to FR should be in books explicitly labeled as FR, so I can not buy them.

Polluting the general D&D sphere with lore that should be setting specific dilutes the entire experience IMO. Or, as in the 3.5 Monster Manual 3, have separate spaces for relevant monsters that indicate how "in Eberron . . .", "in the Forgotten Realms . . ." etc. Keep the gods-are-just-big-monsters stuff relegated to the settings where there are NPCs of appropriate power to dance with them.

But then, I'm clearly not a fan of the Realms, so my opinion is seemingly in the minority. And I don't think I've ever used a gnoll, an orc, or a giant in a game anyway, so it doesn't impact me directly.

No arguments there. A nice clean break where FR is just one of many? No problem to me.

 

[Dire Bare]

That's fine. Believe me when I say that I have absolutely no concern whatsoever about things that might be detrimental to the Forgotten Realms. I go so far as to say that stuff that is specific to FR should be in books explicitly labeled as FR, so I can not buy them.

Polluting the general D&D sphere with lore that should be setting specific dilutes the entire experience IMO. Or, as in the 3.5 Monster Manual 3, have separate spaces for relevant monsters that indicate how "in Eberron . . .", "in the Forgotten Realms . . ." etc. Keep the gods-are-just-big-monsters stuff relegated to the settings where there are NPCs of appropriate power to dance with them.

But then, I'm clearly not a fan of the Realms, so my opinion is seemingly in the minority. And I don't think I've ever used a gnoll, an orc, or a giant in a game anyway, so it doesn't impact me directly.

"Polluting the general D&D sphere . . ." Hyperbole much?

Gnolls as demons-of-the-material-world isn't really an FR story, despite it's inclusion in "Volo's Guide to Monsters" (which isn't really an FR book). And, if you prefer the old, classic story, or the Mystaran Graakhaalian gnolls, or something entirely different . . . more power to you.

If you feel that making gnolls demons doesn't really solve the problem D&D has of people we can kill . . . I respect that.

Could D&D come up with a "better" gnoll story? Should they? That's certainly debatable, but the current 5E gnoll story isn't any more or less lazy than any other creature in the catalog of monsters.

 

[jayoungr]

But more books, to me, means bloat.

Depends on what kind of books, surely? They did say they were going to concentrate more on settings, so that shouldn't be too bloat-y.

 

[Reynard]

Note that such a take is much easier to pull off when the creatures in question aren't depicted as being the playthings of a demon, who created them explicitly to make gamers leary of moral consequences feel OK about slaughtering them on sight.

I love Mystara, though I tend to use it piecemeal in my own games. And Bruce Heard's Voyage of the Princess Ark had a massive impact on how I design settings and view their presentation.

In a very real.sense, 5e's gnolls are positioned to take the place of orcs and goblins as mindless canon fodder. I guess it's easier than creating nuanced worlds and individuals. I call it lazy because it's literally kicking the "always evil" can down the road instead of dealing with it directly. And no volume of mea culpas from WotC brass will remove their presence in the core books, or the company's doubling down on it in the first major 5e expansion (Volo's Guide).

There is no can to kick down the road because there is nothing wrong with explicitly evil cannon fodder enemies. The only reason people are side eyeing orcs and goblins being treated that way is because people want to play orcs and goblins -- and largely because of WoW, people playing orcs and goblins is very visible. You may have noticed a lack of concern over the killing of ogres and manticores. There is a reason for that.

Just to be clear: if in the setting in question a species of people are intelligent and free willed, painting that species as inherently evil and worthy of genocide is problematic and harkens back to the worst impulses of the literature upon which the hobby was born. But if the species in question are not free willed, it isn't racist or colonialist or anything else. Having stock enemies is not an inherent moral failure.

 

[Dire Bare]

The only reason people are side eyeing orcs and goblins being treated that way is because people want to play orcs and goblins -- and largely because of WoW, people playing orcs and goblins is very visible.

Well, that's not the only reason, but it's certainly a part of it.

Anytime you describe a fantastical creature . . . like an orc, a gnoll, or a dragon . . . as a person (or having the qualities of person-hood) but also describe them in ways we used to dehumanize real people in the real world, it's problematic. Especially if it's seen as okay to kill them and take their stuff without guilt.

It's not an easy conversation, and, as a community, we're just starting to scratch the surface. There's a lot of pushback from folks who DON'T want to go down this rabbit-hole . . . "It's just fantasy, it's not real . . ."

I started to realize this about dragons a while back, even before I realized this about "evil humanoids". Dragons, in D&D, are usually portrayed as highly intelligent, sentient beings. And not only is a large part of the game's mythos to track these beings down, murder them, take their stuff . . . . but to make clothing and tools out of their corpses!

I made this a plot point in a DragonStar game I was working on, but never actually got to run. DragonStar is an old FFG d20 campaign marrying D&D and Star Wars, essentially. In the DragonStar setting, the galaxy-spanning empire is run by dragons, currently the emperor is a despotic red dragon. I decided that a large part of the reason why dragons banded together and took over the galaxy, is that they were tired of being hunted and made into grisly trophies by the "good" races . . . .

 

[Ath-kethin]

"Polluting the general D&D sphere . . ." Hyperbole much?

Hyperbole all the time!

I suppose I did go a little overboard there.

But I also strongly feel that there is value in keeping different aspects of the game isolated from one another. I understand that the multitude of settings was part of what tanked TSR back in the day, but I also strongly believe that one of the benefits from having all the different settings was that they could be DIFFERENT. I really feel that the current trend, of using Forgotten Realms as a de facto baseline for all the generic D&D material, does a disservice both to FR and the game at large.

Most people these days use the Forgotten Realms, so it makes sense to use FR specific lore as the game default. I don't like it, but it makes sense.

Someone else argued that there's nothing wrong with having standard bad guys, and I agree with this statement 100%. But it would be nice to see the expansionist/colonialist human empire presented as the aggressor and go-to villain for once, instead of always being cast as the hero.