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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 8036115" data-attributes="member: 6803643">Here's one vote - Djinn & Giants looks perfectly normal humanoids to me (beyond the supernatural elements that make them Djinn & Giants).  Some cultural choices - Djinn are evoking Middle-Eastern styles of grooming and dress, Giants are evoking Nordic styles, but nothing ugly there, from my POV. I literally have no idea what Maxperson is going off about with those examples. I'd unstand if we were talking Ogres or Hags, but even Jackalwere's look pretty to a specific set of fandom (we live in an era post-Zootopia & Beastars; not my cup of tea, but I know there are a lot of of people into that sort of thing nowadays. And for the record, I'm completely fine with the explosion of therianthropic PC races like Leonin & Tortles).I'm fine with midichlorians because they're just a "certain point of view" way of understanding an essentially unknowable concept; they're like considering Dark Matter or Dark Energy to try to describe the physics of the universe; it's a number to grasp onto in the face of a mysterious thing that in the same context George is writing about Mortis Gods and Wellsprings of the Force and Angels on Iego…).When it comes to eldritch horror, though, yeah. Explaining the ecology of Cthulu strips away the horror. I can still get that the Force is essentially unknowable even as I try to put in in a container of power levels (even DBZ eventually said that the whole Saiyan and Frieza Empire Power Level Scouter stuff was only useful to a certain extent and essentially bunk when characters can be smarter or wiser or hide their ki or power up mid-fight or something). But giving explanation to horror is shining a light onto a dark place: useful if you want to overcome the horror, very much antithetical if you want to mire your PCs in it.Honestly, 4e was able to sidestep a lot of related issues by considering if and where sacred cows should be slaughtered rather than kept, and from my opinion, they came to a lot of innovative ideas that resonate in ways that carryover franchise tropes from the 70s did not. WotC may have overdone it with 4e in the face of a fanbase that was inherently resistant to the slaughtering of sacred cows, which is how we get to today. 5e has a much larger fandom in 2020 than it had during the playtesting phase of 2012-2014, and the folks who were invested in shepherding D&D to it's current edition at that time do not reflect necessarily the state of the fandom as a whole today (it's a lot more diverse a fandom, for example). Where WotC goes from here really depends on how much support there is from current players and from potential new markets for the game to make (or avoid making) changes to the game in reaction to the politics of today.</blockquote>

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