There are plenty of TTRPG systems out there. Some of them are much less rules heavy (most of them are much less rules heavy) than D&D. And systems can be combined - we’ve always played with the Claw Law crit tables from Rolemaster. And in the past we’ve used whimsy cards.
(If you want a trippy, no dice, rules light RPG, try Nobilis)
Why must it be “crying to WotC?” Why can’t it be that the publisher, whose job is to put out the best product they can, has listened to customer feedback and adjusted said product?
This doesn’t even do a good job of that. Halflings are still objectively worse barbarians because they can’t wield heavy weapons. Elves still have objectively superior lifespans than goblins. Humans still have objectively inferior vision than 2/3s of the other races. So on and so forth. Somehow “Dwarfs get +1 Strength” is a big deal but “Dwarfs get Darkvision” isn’t.
Unless you’re going to boil down character creation to “All races are actually just humans in different meat sacks”, you’re going to have the same subtext. Honestly, I’d rather they just leaned into and said “Dwarfs get this shit because they’re not small Scottish people, they’re dwarfs. Orcs aren’t whatever nonsense African stereotype you think they are, they’re orcs. That’s why they have special orc shit, 'cause they’re orcs.”
We didn’t need it, but the popularity of DnD has made it such that a lot of other people DO need it. My college age kid is playing with a lot of people who are figuring it out from books yet - they don’t know what works, and what doesn’t. They don’t have the experience to know if pushing on this part of the game breaks it.
They are still at the eight people show up to play and six of them have rolled elven wizards, no one has a cleric stage of play.
And a LOT of them are not neurotypical.
Plus WotC needs something to publish. Use the books, don’t use the books. Its your game. But at the same time, its their game, they get to use the books or not use the books.
I dunno, you’re the one who opened up with “I love listening to the whiners who didn’t like this” so I figured we were just calling people who had criticism of the products “whiners” and “Karens” and running with it.
As I’ve grown older I’ve come to accept a few things. I am no longer the target demographic for many of the things I enjoy. Wizards of the Coast is not going to cater to my wants because I am not their core customer base. And the the truth about D&D is that it’s always changed. AD&D in 1985 wasn’t the same as it was in 1977, it changed again in 1989, 1996, 2000, 2007, and 2014. The audience for D&D changes over the years and the game needs to change with them if it is to remain relevant.
There are a lot of changes I haven’t really liked over the years. I actually liked alignment, I hate that paladins don’t have to be lawful good any more, but they’ve been de-emphasizing alignment for years now to the point where I suspect it will be relegated to an optional rule in the DMG. I don’t even bother checking to see what alignment PCs have these days because it’s almost entirely irrelevant to game play. It’s still a fun game to play though.
Giving feedback to a company which is actively soliciting it doesn’t automatically make you a Karen. Even if your feedback is, “I don’t think any of these things need changing.” That’s the other side of systemic racism, of course. Existing within the system doesn’t make you racist
Whining about policies that de-emphasize outdated tropes which contribute to systemic racism and increase inclusiveness makes you a Karen, yep. Especially when they have zero impact on you personally.
If one finds themselves feeling personally affronted or aggrieved by these zero-impact changes in their make-believe funtimes game, they might indeed be a Karen.
Exactly. These changes aren’t being made for anybody in this thread. They’re for the increasingly younger audience of kids picking up these books. I have a buddy who is running a game for his son and his friends - I think they range from 7 to 10. If those kids never get exposed to the idea that “all drow are evil because some people are just irredeemable,” that is a big. fucking. win. It doesn’t matter if their dad would explain otherwise. If you’re having a ton of fun playing a game and that game presents a set of ideas to you, those ideas will have weight.
The ideas you get from D&D should be about collaboration, imagination, lateral thinking, and laughing until soda comes out of your nose.
“When I do it, it’s feedback; when YOU do it, it’s whining/Karen/blah blah” isn’t as convincing an argument as you probably thought it was.
For the record, I don’t give a serious care about the changes. I think they’re dumb and unnecessary and fail to even achieve their nominal goals but I’ve been tweaking shit for decades and have no issue telling someone “Here’s the new rules” if I want to stray from the text. But since someone made a thread to talk about it…
Oddly enough, I am fine with a lot of the changes even while I disagree with the reasoning behind them. Thanks to games like World of Warcraft, Skyrim, and others, millions of people have grown accustomed to orcs, minotaurs (Tauren), goblins, undead, and other “monstrous” races as playable races. It makes a lot of sense to me that D&D would move towards a system making it explicit that these races are playable. Especially in the case of the drow as they appear as a standard playable race in the PHB. But I admit it. When I hear the younger crowd complain of racism and imperialism I think they’re being a bit histrionic.
I’ve noticed that, even among older players, there’s not a lot who were with the game from 1e or earlier. Pre-Covid, I played/ran a lot of Adventurer’s League and would regularly see middle-aged or older players but they weren’t old timers in a “Back in my day, women capped at 17 Strength and we have ‘Magic-Users’ not wizards and they cast one spell then threw darts and that’s how we liked it!” sense.
True that. In some ways, I find it more fun since it’s more streamlined and we can get more actual playing done. And, honestly, many of the tropes that people deride as lazy or “bad roleplaying!” don’t bother me because they service moving shit along. When we have two hours before the comic store closes, let’s not waste a bunch of time trying to suss out the orc’s life story and explore where his life went wrong and he turned to a life of banditry and if he could have been redeemable with enough love and attention before shooting arrows at him. He’s an orc, if he’s a special orc the DM will let us know and, failing that, bring his hit points to zero and get on with stuff. Him being an orc and orcs being bad guys isn’t some racial statement, it’s a signal that we can roll initiative. Is that “lazy”? Maybe, but it’s also fun. We find our role play elsewhere in the game.
I’ve no issue with the races being playable. 5e had a bajillion playable races, including monster ones, since forever. I disagree with the “Everyone’s a human in a costume” school of character design where we’re afraid that giving a race [mechanical attribute] or [general culture notes] is going to make America’s youth into racists.
I have a lot of good memories from playing 1st and 2nd edition AD&D back in the day, but I’d rather use a cheese grater to shave my ass than run a game using those particular rules again. I don’t think my group ever used the strength cap for women, we certainly never had girls in our group so this was purely a theoretical problem for us, but we routinely ignored a great many rules including level caps for demi-humans.
That’s kind of where I am as well. I’m playing a game. That orc is no more important to me than a pawn in chess. I don’t really care about the wider implications of the socio-economic system that forces that poor pawn into dying at the behest of the king. I’m just playing chess here.
I think there are too many playable races. And as the game currently stands, it really doesn’t make a difference whether a character is a dwarf, human, or dragonborn in most published adventures. I dislike their recent decision to divorce attribute bonuses from race. Oddly enough I was fine when they decided to divorce attribute penalties from race.
True that. Although, for AL games it doesn’t matter because those are just rote “Get out of the house and roll some dice” adventures and no one gives a shit about your Lizardfolk’s tortured past. For homebrew games, I just decide what half-dozen or so player races exist in the world and let the players know when I make the game available to join. If they had their heart set on playing a cat-dude and my world ain’t got no cat-dudes, they can adjust or wait for another game to join.
I’ve been playing since I was eight and found the Blue Book at a yard sale (“Honey, I don’t think you want that,” the mom at the sale told me, but I gave her my three quarters and walked away not realizing how my life had just changed).
The new Tasha’s rules are advice which shapes the hobby. It’s entirely for the good, IMO. While I’m happy for folks who prefer the original editions, they’re chock-full of ugly stereotypes and gross preconceptions, and it’s heartening that WOTC is slowly moving away from those.
I dunno how I feel about this. On the one hand, racism is bad. OTOH For me, part of the fun is knowing we’re the good guys and orcs are the bad guys. Paladins don’t have to be LG now? I disagree with that strongly. Paladins have a rod up their ass, and it gives them lordly might. Dragon did publish an article on what ‘paladins’ of other alignments were like. None were like the holy knights who are LG.
I haven’t read a lot of Ravenloft material. But, I had a problem with the Vistani. IMO The Vistani seemed to be g*psies from old horror films.
I didn’t have a problem with Drow being evil. Lolth rules the Drow. If you fail her tests you are killed or become a Drider. Lolth views things like empathy and compassion as flaws.
Oh, and I have no problem with house rules. A DM once let me play a doppleganger after I came to him with an interesting take on them. What if, most dopplegangers were not actually evil? They were made by demons or mad wizards originally. But, what if the average doppleganger really just wanted to live their life in peace? But, nobody trusts them and when they are discovered everybody assumes they are evil? What if the halfling village down the road is actually composed entirely of dopplegangers pretending to be hobbits so they can be left alone?
That I can get behind fixing. I can also get behind changing stuff like “The only black-skinned races (Drow) are forever evil”; not by making each Drow their own special case but by having canonically dark skinned races that aren’t the children of some dark goddess and/or making Drow less “black” (purple, whatever).
When it turns into “Halflings getting +2 Dex is stereotyping and subtextually imbues racism in the game” then it gets a bit eye-rolly in my opinion.
I’ve long felt that the best way to dilute the “racial/ethnic stand-in” issue was more humans. If you think your gnolls might be stereotypical of aboriginal or indigenous tribespeople, obviously go ahead and remove blatant stuff but also add some actual rounded human tribespeople in there. Make clear that the gnolls aren’t Native Americans in disguise, they’re gnolls. That they have a nomadic tribal lifestyle is secondary to the fact that they are not humans, they’re gnolls. Totally different thing; came from different places (probably literally in a ‘gods created the races’ way), have different motivations, don’t think like humans. They’re gnolls just like if aliens landed on Earth, they’re not humans even if they wear shiny pants and have a language.
So, look, OD&D defined Orcs are evil, and even Tolkien seemed to think that way.
Orcs, in D&D are evil creatures that live to attack human villages, killed and maybe eat them and loot what remains.
Now, do we have a issue with saying, for example- Nazis are evil?
It is perfectly Ok to have a dungeon full of mostly evil monsters, that the players are out to kill and loot.
It’s also perfectly OK to have a more open type campaign, where you cant assume that humanoids are evil based upon their races.
Both are fine, both are fun.
D&D is a game, games are supposed to be fun.
The only wrong way to play is to accuse others of having badwrongfun.
The difference is between “evil by blood” and “evil by choice.” One is similar to Nazi ideology, the other condemns Nazi ideology.
I’m rereading Tolkien to my kids. Man writes some lovely prose and amazing action scenes, but damn, does he ever believe in noble blood and inferior blood. It’s repellent.
That said, I’m okay with certain variants of “evil by blood”, when it manifests as “red in tooth and claw.” Creatures evolved from sharks may have a predatory attitude toward other sentient species that comes across as evil if you’re human; but human propensity to organized warfare may come across as equally appalling to the shark-people. A hill giant who sees itself as tyrant of its domain is evil to the hapless farmer who lives nearby; but the hill giant sees the farmer who hires the giant-slaying adventurer as a horrific colonial invader. The Jana’ata in The Sparrow farm and eat other sentient creatures, yet are well-explored by the author, not just slavering monstrosities.
OD&D defined Orcs as evil. That’s boring and has historical ties in racist fantasy literature. I love that we’re moving away from that.
You know, I’ve been playing D&D since 1984 and I can’t remember ever killing orcs for no reason. Killing orcs who were attacking a village, or who were holding hostages, or were working as minions of the Big Bad? Sure, but I never killed orcs just for being orcs. I’m the hero, damn it. Heroes don’t do that shit.
They couldn’t remove that, because it was never there. It might be true that most sentient races tend towards evil (I’ve never counted them up), but the rules have always been clear that the mortal races are all redeemable, and even if good individuals are less common, they’re still always possible. Wherever people are getting the idea that some races are irredeemable, it wasn’t from the rulebooks.
And yes, it’s OK to kill the orc bandit who’s attacking the caravan without looking into his whole life story. But that’s because he’s a bandit attacking the caravan, not because he’s an orc. You’d be equally justified to kill a human bandit.
So what did the “getting woke” consist of?