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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8486734" data-attributes="member: 7032025">Cool.My take is that it's not really monoculture, since the settings were not profoundly modified. My take on it is that because 3e did a really nice job of rationalisation of basically everything, they left only one racial template per race in the PH, but knowing that the culture would come from the setting.On the one hand, I can understand how you could see it as being back to monoculture, but I don't think it's sustained at all from the rest of the publications.My take is that it's because 3e did a lot of crunchy splat books which were supposed to be generic so that they could be used across settings. But if you crossed this genericity with the settings which did not suddenly become monocultural, I don't think it's a problem, or rather I think it comes from the combination of the ever-growing generic ruleset of 3e that still had to be combined with even more setting books, so you needed a lot of stuff to see past the monoculture. But it was not, at least for me, the intent.For that, I think you might need to blame popular culture and the LotR movies, actually, rather than the game itself. Because D&D is generic, the PH has to avoid cultures, otherwise it might create conflicts with the forthcoming/continuing settings. But culture cannot be left out to describe a race, especially when you want to relate to the popular culture tropes so that beginners can make the link to the cool things that they might want to play.So, don't you think that this apparent reversal to monoculture in each new edition is not anything more than a return to genericity at the start of a new, and therefore simpler edition ?</blockquote>

Verification