Among other things, yes. Some things I have seen do strike me as logical tweaks and fixes much like 3.5 was to 3e, but some are clearly attempts at “fixing” PR problems by people who don’t understand why they’re having those problems in the first place. And at least in some cases I expect are personally responsible for said PR problems. It’s kind and like a Three Stooges skit about corporate mismanagement, but they honestly think they’re doing a good job.
I haven’t played that variation, but I didn’t like what I read about it. For one, I like that the races are different. World of Warcraft homogenized the races and later the classes, and it took so much character away from the game. There was no longer a reason to build a diverse party, anything would work. It makes sense for the D&D races to be different and have different benefits and drawbacks, they’re from massively different backgrounds and environments. It makes sense for people to be wary of Loth Sworn Drow, when they’re pledged to an evil spider queen that demands dominion over everyone else. They’re literally evil. Trying to insert real world political concerns into a fantasy game is really annoying to me, especially when I retreat into that game to get away from the real world and all of its concerns.
Yeah, and my personal opinion of the Drow is that you can still have matriarchal spider themed villains and not be “problematic” if you just st officially decannonize all of the weird-ass kinky fetish stuff that Ed Greenwood wrote into their original description. And the same can be said of most “problematic” things in Forgotten Realms, which is the source of a lot of the stuff that many consider to be “generic D&D.”
Seriously, go through the deep lore of FR and you will find a bunch of stuff that reads like it was written by a horny thirteen year old that wants to be edgy and kinky but clearly doesn’t know how fetishes or anything occult actually work beyond involving leather, whips, and bloody sacrifice rituals at orgy parties like a midwestern church granny will tell you happen every time anybody plays Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder where they got that impression from…
Among other things, yes. Some things I have seen do strike me as logical tweaks and fixes much like 3.5 was to 3e, but some are clearly attempts at “fixing” PR problems by people who don’t understand why they’re having those problems in the first place. And at least in some cases I expect are personally responsible for said PR problems. It’s kind and like a Three Stooges skit about corporate mismanagement, but they honestly think they’re doing a good job.
I haven’t played that variation, but I didn’t like what I read about it. For one, I like that the races are different. World of Warcraft homogenized the races and later the classes, and it took so much character away from the game. There was no longer a reason to build a diverse party, anything would work. It makes sense for the D&D races to be different and have different benefits and drawbacks, they’re from massively different backgrounds and environments. It makes sense for people to be wary of Loth Sworn Drow, when they’re pledged to an evil spider queen that demands dominion over everyone else. They’re literally evil. Trying to insert real world political concerns into a fantasy game is really annoying to me, especially when I retreat into that game to get away from the real world and all of its concerns.
Yeah, and my personal opinion of the Drow is that you can still have matriarchal spider themed villains and not be “problematic” if you just st officially decannonize all of the weird-ass kinky fetish stuff that Ed Greenwood wrote into their original description. And the same can be said of most “problematic” things in Forgotten Realms, which is the source of a lot of the stuff that many consider to be “generic D&D.”
Seriously, go through the deep lore of FR and you will find a bunch of stuff that reads like it was written by a horny thirteen year old that wants to be edgy and kinky but clearly doesn’t know how fetishes or anything occult actually work beyond involving leather, whips, and bloody sacrifice rituals at orgy parties like a midwestern church granny will tell you happen every time anybody plays Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder where they got that impression from…