Stop this nonsense. Nobody is angry that they have modified the digital material. That is a straw man because you cannot openly defend the real reason for your anger. It would be interesting to hear your real arguments, and to be able to refute them if necessary. But all this loss of value bullshit just isn't credible. And besides, it is noise for nothing more than wasting time. It is so absurd that you seem like a parody of yourself.
I can only speak for my self but I have argued for archival of older versions and I even have issues with other sites/services doing away with archives or access to older builds/versions. (Namely steam with older builds and organizations changing away from gplv(2/3) and removing public access to old code)
Retaining multiple versions of the ruleset is a terrible idea from WotC's point of view. It's never going to happen, never was an option.
Not the point. They stated noone was upset they modified the digital version well I am cause of no archive.
But keep using WOTC as a toxic dismissive hammer to try and make me shut up and leave(you remind me of TSAsuperman from the Xbox forums who would use M$ viewpoint as why we couldn't just install any 2.5 in HDD in your 360)
How is it not the point? I understand you would have liked archived versions of the previous text whenever errata are applied, but that's a terrible business idea for WotC. Not because they're toxic or dismissive of your concerns, but because it genuinely sends the wrong message to potential new customers. You don't have to believe me and you don't have to agree with me and you certainly don't have to stop posting your opinions, but that's a two way street - the exact same applies to me and everyone else.
I was calling out this false statement " Stop this nonsense. Nobody is angry that they have modified the digital material. That is a straw man because you cannot openly defend the real reason for your anger."
The word nobody implies 0 persons. Or are you saying it is a true statement and I'm not human, I'm not a person
Let's not overreact. What I'm saying is that the "lost value" argument is highly unsustainable. in fact it really is the other way around. Having content that updates itself is the added value of buying the material on D&D Beyond. Your manuals at D&D Beyond will always be up to date.
The feeling is that this argument is used because it is a less compromising position than others. That is to say, it is a straw man, a decoy, a puppet, which is used to divert attention from the real discussion, which I strongly suspect is another.
And of course I am not saying that because a person really thinks that their manuals have lost value, they cease to be a person. That is another argumentative fallacy. I have not said that. I haven't even hinted at it. And there is no way to understand that from my words. But, just in case, I am going to clarify that you have not stopped being a person for thinking that your manuals have lost value. You can be calm about it.
Wonder what would have happened and what sort of forum thunder would have resulted had WotC just say, "You know what, Volo's is our most problematic text mechanically and flavor ... so rather than doing interminable errata we're just pulling it from the market. Warehouses are being emptied as we speak and the extant copies will be pulped and turned into construction materials for affordable housing. We'll be publishing M's Monsters of the Multiverse in its stead, with three times as many races and rewrites of the monsters profiled in Volo's more reflective of our current editorial direction. Online marketplace owners of Volo's will find it gone and a copy of MMM in its place, tomorrow."
I mean folks, are sort of acting like that's what happened anyway, so...
[Secret hope some BolS misreader sees this and starts a rumor firestorm]
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Is this errata "outrage" the DND equivalent to the red Starbucks Christmas cup outrage a number of years back?
Seems like it.
It's exactly the same thing.
Well, that's unfortunate. Perhaps some are sick of the pandemic and are trying to stir up stuff to take their mind off it.
Nah, stuff like this has been happening way before the Pandemic. That Starbucks Christmas Cup "controversy" was before the Pandemic, as well as the similar "War on Christmas" whining that people have been doing for a loooong time now.
There are few things that the Internet excels at, but some of the main ones are miscommunication, misinformation, and misinterpretation. That's exactly what both this recent errata controversy as well as the one over that Starbucks Christmas Cup came from. A company miscommunicating their reason for a change, people misinterpreting that to spin it in a way that virtue-signals to their "base" that they're "Anti-Woke", and spreading misinformation around the reason for that change.
It's not because of the pandemic, but that certainly hasn't helped make people less likely to spread nonsense like this.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
The TL;DR is a few lines of text have been removed that people find important. Which exact text is so important, no one can really say, but they can say that they are mad as hell that it is gone.
Erriku gave the link. People's problems with it seem to book down to:
1. Something was changed without their conscuous consent.
2. Drow not being exclusively black degrades the experience.
3. The removal of explicit alignment guidance degrades the experience.
1 is a bit murky. They did buy the content prone to those kinds of changes, and it was in the Ts&Cs. On the other hand, the powers were probably assumed to only be used to make changes to actual errors, and not to fundamentally change the product itself.
3 I'm partial to. It's a small thing, but really, ilI feel that WotC needs to be doing more, not less, to help DMs create developed worlds for tgeir players. Alignments aren't a major thing, it's just a step in the wrong direction, IMO.
2 is...incomprehensible to me.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Honestly the only part's I don't like are the drow and the gnolls and it's not even that their not all evil it ( at least for the drow) makes sense, it's just seems like a really big recton to do then sweep it along with the rest, I mean if i'm understanding their part right, this means the drow were never normal elves who joined the dark gods and when lost were pushed into the underdark, they were always there. They've gone from a mostly evil society to one that's mostly good, cause the new text mentions only a few cites have fallen to Loth, which doesn't make much sense since all but one of the drow gods are evil so it doesn't matter if the others aren't under Loth, I don't know sort of just seems to make Eilistraee and Dritz pointless now, there's so many good drow that they really shouldn't have to struggle now.
Please of course if I'm miss reading anything here anyone please respond.
You're misreading things, which is honestly to be expected when you look at an extremely short statement about something fairly complex. Lolth worship is not a thing in realms (IOW, settings) where Lolth is not canonically present - basically, Lolth hasn't corrupted drow cities outside the Forgotten Realms worlds of Oerth and Toril. There are drow in Eberron, there are drow in Exandria, there are even references to drow in Krynn (Dragonlance) although those were later contradicted. There's no Lolth in those settings though. In the Realms drow were not dark elves at first, they became drow when they lost Corellon Larethian's grace - nothing was retconned about this. Lolth's involvement in that is a long story, and nothing about that was retconned either. In other settings drow had other origins, so the whole "used to be regular elves before falling to darkness" schtick can't apply to them. Basically the errata says "some of this info we presented for Drow in general was really info for Drow from the Forgotten Realms and isn't true for Drow from other settings, so we're removing the FR-specific stuff from the general info". That's it. There's no real retcon, unless we're talking handlebar 'staches or grayscale settings for skin colour (which, retcon-wise, are silly things to argue about). Drow history wasn't changed.
a good post.
this may be from old lore but its my understanding that in DND lore the real world (earth and its universe) exist. That it is one of many universes with no magic and no gods across the multiverse.
So it makes sense that similar races from similar realms might have differences. The Forgotten Realms is but one of many universes (or whatever)
Erriku gave the link. People's problems with it seem to book down to:
1. Something was changed without their conscuous consent.
2. Drow not being exclusively black degrades the experience.
3. The removal of explicit alignment guidance degrades the experience.
1 is a bit murky. They did buy the content prone to those kinds of changes, and it was in the Ts&Cs. On the other hand, the powers were probably assumed to only be used to make changes to actual errors, and not to fundamentally change the product itself.
3 I'm partial to. It's a small thing, but really, ilI feel that WotC needs to be doing more, not less, to help DMs create developed worlds for tgeir players. Alignments aren't a major thing, it's just a step in the wrong direction, IMO.
Honestly the only part's I don't like are the drow and the gnolls and it's not even that their not all evil it ( at least for the drow) makes sense, it's just seems like a really big recton to do then sweep it along with the rest, I mean if i'm understanding their part right, this means the drow were never normal elves who joined the dark gods and when lost were pushed into the underdark, they were always there. They've gone from a mostly evil society to one that's mostly good, cause the new text mentions only a few cites have fallen to Loth, which doesn't make much sense since all but one of the drow gods are evil so it doesn't matter if the others aren't under Loth, I don't know sort of just seems to make Eilistraee and Dritz pointless now, there's so many good drow that they really shouldn't have to struggle now.
Please of course if I'm miss reading anything here anyone please respond.
You're misreading things, which is honestly to be expected when you look at an extremely short statement about something fairly complex. Lolth worship is not a thing in realms (IOW, settings) where Lolth is not canonically present - basically, Lolth hasn't corrupted drow cities outside the Forgotten Realms worlds of Oerth and Toril. There are drow in Eberron, there are drow in Exandria, there are even references to drow in Krynn (Dragonlance) although those were later contradicted. There's no Lolth in those settings though. In the Realms drow were not dark elves at first, they became drow when they lost Corellon Larethian's grace - nothing was retconned about this. Lolth's involvement in that is a long story, and nothing about that was retconned either. In other settings drow had other origins, so the whole "used to be regular elves before falling to darkness" schtick can't apply to them. Basically the errata says "some of this info we presented for Drow in general was really info for Drow from the Forgotten Realms and isn't true for Drow from other settings, so we're removing the FR-specific stuff from the general info". That's it. There's no real retcon, unless we're talking handlebar 'staches or grayscale settings for skin colour (which, retcon-wise, are silly things to argue about). Drow history wasn't changed.
a good post.
this may be from old lore but its my understanding that in DND lore the real world (earth and its universe) exist. That it is one of many universes with no magic and no gods across the multiverse.
So it makes sense that similar races from similar realms might have differences. The Forgotten Realms is but one of many universes (or whatever)
Current lore holds that elves originally came from the Feywild. If this is true for drow too, they probably originated in the Feydark and the differences evolved naturally as they spread out to different worlds on the Material Plane.
Also, this is just random, but in my head canon Earth is one of many worlds on the Material Plane. It exists in its own crystal sphere kind of like our real solar system. I never read it, but there’s an old 2e product called Masque of the Red Death that talks about playing D&D in Victorian times, plus there are some other old historical sourcebooks. I used that general idea as inspiration for my version of Earth in the D&D multiverse.
Watching WoC trip all over themselves trying to be PC is almost worth the price of admission. I literally did a spit-take when I read about Drow skin color being "of many hues." roflolol. Soooooo glad they issued that "correction." :)
That's ok.....WotC has the backbone of an earthworm, so I can't wait to see the "errata" when Anti-Woke replaces Woke as the dominant PC belief. Won't save Wiz from "going broke" though - that's a fate they have richly earned by injecting Leftthinkism into D and D. I am looking forward to the day someone with a spine acquires the rights to D and D, so we can get all the political nonsense out of the game. I don't play games to be indoctrinated into a political belief, I play them to escape the political toxicity in America today.
But what about the people, on these forums even, who have personally talked about how the portrayals of things in D&D have harmed us and how the changes are positive? For some of us, we don't have the luxury of being able to call something "just" political, because it affects our day to day living. It's a nice privilege to be able to be unaffected by something enough to think that it's just some sort of power play and not a real, life impacting thing.
I can provide links to personal testimonies from real people here on the forums if you're interested in learning.
Watching WoC trip all over themselves trying to be PC is almost worth the price of admission. I literally did a spit-take when I read about Drow skin color being "of many hues." roflolol. Soooooo glad they issued that "correction." :)
That's ok.....WotC has the backbone of an earthworm, so I can't wait to see the "errata" when Anti-Woke replaces Woke as the dominant PC belief. Won't save Wiz from "going broke" though - that's a fate they have richly earned by injecting Leftthinkism into D and D. I am looking forward to the day someone with a spine acquires the rights to D and D, so we can get all the political nonsense out of the game. I don't play games to be indoctrinated into a political belief, I play them to escape the political toxicity in America today.
D&D is doing better in sales now than it ever has before.
WARNING: All assertions in this reply are opinions, one point of view by one person alone.
The alignment system is a bit whack—too restrictive in one sense and too vague in another to be useful in roleplay, but the blunt removal of it also removes a chunk of the cultural heritage, the cultural history.
Rather than simply remove it, I'd rather they just change it into an anthropologic blurb without bringing alignment into it.
Why? Because most D&D stories are about the exceptional, the exceptions to the typical. When there is no normal, there is no exception.
Still, its absence doesn't mean it's gone. It just means it's no longer up to the official sources to define. There is a lot of established lore on the histories of the peoples that we can still use.
EDIT: I chose the I'm happy option because it's not the end of the world and I welcome some changes.
I'd still like to have at least a little historic social insight for player characters to be found in the sources rather than the wikis. A little blurb on the people's history—a harsh, impartial window into the past—would do wonders to set a person in a mindset for roleplay.
There's a writing technique where an author doesn't just start writing a character. The author creates an outline of a character's life story first to help the author make decisions that make sense to that particular character even if it is mindboggling to everyone else in the moment. I feel confident that most of us are not professional writers. Having a foundation to set us up would go a long way to help—something that the sources are supposed to do: help us play and roleplay. (Note: I typed "help" and not "dictate".)
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
WARNING: All assertions in this reply are opinions, one point of view by one person alone.
The alignment system is a bit whack—too restrictive in one sense and too vague in another to be useful in roleplay, but the blunt removal of it also removes a chunk of the cultural heritage, the cultural history.
Rather than simply remove it, I'd rather they just change it into an anthropologic blurb without bringing alignment into it.
Why? Because most D&D stories are about the exceptional, the exceptions to the typical. When there is no normal, there is no exception.
Still, its absence doesn't mean it's gone. It just means it's no longer up to the official sources to define. There is a lot of established lore on the histories of the peoples that we can still use.
EDIT: I chose the I'm happy option because it's not the end of the world and I welcome some changes.
I'd still like to have at least a little historic social insight for player characters to be found in the sources rather than the wikis. A little blurb on the people's history—a harsh, impartial window into the past—would do wonders to set a person in a mindset for roleplay.
There's a writing technique where an author doesn't just start writing a character. The author creates an outline of a character's life story first to help the author make decisions that make sense to that particular character even if it is mindboggling to everyone else in the moment. I feel confident that most of us are not professional writers. Having a foundation to set us up would go a long way to help—something that the sources are supposed to do: help us play and roleplay. (Note: I typed "help" and not "dictate".)
Watching WoC trip all over themselves trying to be PC is almost worth the price of admission. I literally did a spit-take when I read about Drow skin color being "of many hues." roflolol. Soooooo glad they issued that "correction." :)
That's ok.....WotC has the backbone of an earthworm, so I can't wait to see the "errata" when Anti-Woke replaces Woke as the dominant PC belief. Won't save Wiz from "going broke" though - that's a fate they have richly earned by injecting Leftthinkism into D and D. I am looking forward to the day someone with a spine acquires the rights to D and D, so we can get all the political nonsense out of the game. I don't play games to be indoctrinated into a political belief, I play them to escape the political toxicity in America today.
I would argue that the commitment of WotC to implement these changes despite the face-pulling from people such as yourself demonstrates more than a little backbone. Unless you are arguing that people in your camp are nothing to be afraid of, which I would absolutely agree with. As for waiting for “anti-woke” errata, I would not hold your breath. WotC is going to outlive you, you can count on that. Empathy is not political and to say otherwise is scathing commentary on that person’s character.
WARNING: All assertions in this reply are opinions, one point of view by one person alone.
The alignment system is a bit whack—too restrictive in one sense and too vague in another to be useful in roleplay, but the blunt removal of it also removes a chunk of the cultural heritage, the cultural history.
Rather than simply remove it, I'd rather they just change it into an anthropologic blurb without bringing alignment into it.
Why? Because most D&D stories are about the exceptional, the exceptions to the typical. When there is no normal, there is no exception.
Still, its absence doesn't mean it's gone. It just means it's no longer up to the official sources to define. There is a lot of established lore on the histories of the peoples that we can still use.
EDIT: I chose the I'm happy option because it's not the end of the world and I welcome some changes.
I'd still like to have at least a little historic social insight for player characters to be found in the sources rather than the wikis. A little blurb on the people's history—a harsh, impartial window into the past—would do wonders to set a person in a mindset for roleplay.
There's a writing technique where an author doesn't just start writing a character. The author creates an outline of a character's life story first to help the author make decisions that make sense to that particular character even if it is mindboggling to everyone else in the moment. I feel confident that most of us are not professional writers. Having a foundation to set us up would go a long way to help—something that the sources are supposed to do: help us play and roleplay. (Note: I typed "help" and not "dictate".)
That’s good as far as it goes, but it brings us to one of WotC’s stated reasons for doing this. They want the races as presented to be setting agnostic. Halfling sun dark sun and halflings in eberron have nothing cultural in common, to say nothing of halflings in FR or in my homebrew campaign. Maybe they’ll start including blurbs about each race in the various setting books. Or maybe not.
Thoygh even then, a halfling from waterdeep and one from some middle of nowhere town will also have very little in common, as far as culture and life experiences. But when you write it down and print it, there are lots and lots of people, new players in particular, who that that is the only, and correct, way to play that kind of character. It ends up being restrictive rather than helpful.
What's interesting to me is that all the 'political' crap is always brought up by self-identified 'anti-woke' folks who claim to want to get away from politics in their gaming. Anyone discussing these sorts of changes in good faith never brings up politics or even thinks of them, because it's not an issue of 'politics' at all. It's simply an issue of consideration and thinking through whether or not there's a way to do something that results in less harm than the way currently being employed. 'Tradition' was simply the first (successful) way of doing something, it has no especial claim on being the best way to do something, and much like scientific knowledge, tradition should be tested regularly and discarded when a better, more useful/less harmful way of doing something is found.
The subject of alignments is interesting. Those of us who are already a little old will remember that before the alignment was really a cosmic alignment. In the original version, the cosmic war was two-way (inherited from Moorcock and Anderson): Law vs. Chaos. And then there were the neutrals, who didn't line up. Later, in 1977, the Good vs Evil axis was added. This scheme was maintained more or less, but little by little it was losing its initial philosophy to become a guide of moral interpretation for the player. As an example, I think it was the 2nd edition, it penalized you if you behaved out of alignment (even making you change physically). And so we come to 5e, where the alignments have lost their reason for being. They have been kept as a vestige, but lacking in meaning and reference. To be honest, it must be said that almost no one used them for anything. Perhaps minimally as an interpretation guide, but little else. So the logical evolution was its disappearance. I'm not going to go into whether or not there are ideological reasons behind it. And besides, I don't care. The thing is, they didn't make sense anymore, and I don't see a problem with removing them. And yes, I know they haven't been removed, but simply no longer suggest alignament to playable races, and only remain for a few specific monsters. But that's the nail that definitely kills them. Sounds good to me, and it is the logical evolution.
That said, I did like the philosophy of the ancient alignments. I understand the problems involved. But, still, I also understand that we are mature enough to understand that this is a game. I liked the concept of war between cosmic forces. And I liked the idea that mortals, whether they want to or not, are also mired in that war. I liked that the alignment had an influence on your character (even physically), and that you were forced to follow it. But that is a personal taste, which does not compromise the game if it is not there.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Is this errata "outrage" the DND equivalent to the red Starbucks Christmas cup outrage a number of years back?
Seems like it.
A good book and a cup of tea.
Homebrew| Bard: College of Composition
Feedback Appreciated!
Let's not overreact. What I'm saying is that the "lost value" argument is highly unsustainable. in fact it really is the other way around. Having content that updates itself is the added value of buying the material on D&D Beyond. Your manuals at D&D Beyond will always be up to date.
The feeling is that this argument is used because it is a less compromising position than others. That is to say, it is a straw man, a decoy, a puppet, which is used to divert attention from the real discussion, which I strongly suspect is another.
And of course I am not saying that because a person really thinks that their manuals have lost value, they cease to be a person. That is another argumentative fallacy. I have not said that. I haven't even hinted at it. And there is no way to understand that from my words. But, just in case, I am going to clarify that you have not stopped being a person for thinking that your manuals have lost value. You can be calm about it.
Wonder what would have happened and what sort of forum thunder would have resulted had WotC just say, "You know what, Volo's is our most problematic text mechanically and flavor ... so rather than doing interminable errata we're just pulling it from the market. Warehouses are being emptied as we speak and the extant copies will be pulped and turned into construction materials for affordable housing. We'll be publishing M's Monsters of the Multiverse in its stead, with three times as many races and rewrites of the monsters profiled in Volo's more reflective of our current editorial direction. Online marketplace owners of Volo's will find it gone and a copy of MMM in its place, tomorrow."
I mean folks, are sort of acting like that's what happened anyway, so...
[Secret hope some BolS misreader sees this and starts a rumor firestorm]
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
It's exactly the same thing.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Well, that's unfortunate. Perhaps some are sick of the pandemic and are trying to stir up stuff to take their mind off it.
A good book and a cup of tea.
Homebrew| Bard: College of Composition
Feedback Appreciated!
Nah, stuff like this has been happening way before the Pandemic. That Starbucks Christmas Cup "controversy" was before the Pandemic, as well as the similar "War on Christmas" whining that people have been doing for a loooong time now.
There are few things that the Internet excels at, but some of the main ones are miscommunication, misinformation, and misinterpretation. That's exactly what both this recent errata controversy as well as the one over that Starbucks Christmas Cup came from. A company miscommunicating their reason for a change, people misinterpreting that to spin it in a way that virtue-signals to their "base" that they're "Anti-Woke", and spreading misinformation around the reason for that change.
It's not because of the pandemic, but that certainly hasn't helped make people less likely to spread nonsense like this.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
What exactly is the errata? I’m a bit lost.
Come participate in the Competition of the Finest Brews, Edition XXVIII?
My homebrew stuff:
Spells, Monsters, Magic Items, Feats, Subclasses.
I am an Archfey, but nobody seems to notice.
Extended Signature
The changes are available on WotC's page here.
The TL;DR is a few lines of text have been removed that people find important. Which exact text is so important, no one can really say, but they can say that they are mad as hell that it is gone.
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
EXTENDED SIGNATURE!
Doctor/Published Scholar/Science and Healthcare Advocate/Critter/Trekkie/Gandalf with a Glock
Try DDB free: Free Rules (2024), premade PCs, adventures, one shots, encounters, SC, homebrew, more
Answers: physical books, purchases, and subbing.
Check out my life-changing
Erriku gave the link. People's problems with it seem to book down to:
1. Something was changed without their conscuous consent.
2. Drow not being exclusively black degrades the experience.
3. The removal of explicit alignment guidance degrades the experience.
1 is a bit murky. They did buy the content prone to those kinds of changes, and it was in the Ts&Cs. On the other hand, the powers were probably assumed to only be used to make changes to actual errors, and not to fundamentally change the product itself.
3 I'm partial to. It's a small thing, but really, ilI feel that WotC needs to be doing more, not less, to help DMs create developed worlds for tgeir players. Alignments aren't a major thing, it's just a step in the wrong direction, IMO.
2 is...incomprehensible to me.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
a good post.
this may be from old lore but its my understanding that in DND lore the real world (earth and its universe) exist. That it is one of many universes with no magic and no gods across the multiverse.
So it makes sense that similar races from similar realms might have differences. The Forgotten Realms is but one of many universes (or whatever)
I agree with your analysis.
Current lore holds that elves originally came from the Feywild. If this is true for drow too, they probably originated in the Feydark and the differences evolved naturally as they spread out to different worlds on the Material Plane.
Also, this is just random, but in my head canon Earth is one of many worlds on the Material Plane. It exists in its own crystal sphere kind of like our real solar system. I never read it, but there’s an old 2e product called Masque of the Red Death that talks about playing D&D in Victorian times, plus there are some other old historical sourcebooks. I used that general idea as inspiration for my version of Earth in the D&D multiverse.
But what about the people, on these forums even, who have personally talked about how the portrayals of things in D&D have harmed us and how the changes are positive? For some of us, we don't have the luxury of being able to call something "just" political, because it affects our day to day living. It's a nice privilege to be able to be unaffected by something enough to think that it's just some sort of power play and not a real, life impacting thing.
I can provide links to personal testimonies from real people here on the forums if you're interested in learning.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
D&D is doing better in sales now than it ever has before.
WARNING: All assertions in this reply are opinions, one point of view by one person alone.
The alignment system is a bit whack—too restrictive in one sense and too vague in another to be useful in roleplay, but the blunt removal of it also removes a chunk of the cultural heritage, the cultural history.
Rather than simply remove it, I'd rather they just change it into an anthropologic blurb without bringing alignment into it.
Why? Because most D&D stories are about the exceptional, the exceptions to the typical. When there is no normal, there is no exception.
Still, its absence doesn't mean it's gone. It just means it's no longer up to the official sources to define. There is a lot of established lore on the histories of the peoples that we can still use.
EDIT: I chose the I'm happy option because it's not the end of the world and I welcome some changes.
I'd still like to have at least a little historic social insight for player characters to be found in the sources rather than the wikis. A little blurb on the people's history—a harsh, impartial window into the past—would do wonders to set a person in a mindset for roleplay.
There's a writing technique where an author doesn't just start writing a character. The author creates an outline of a character's life story first to help the author make decisions that make sense to that particular character even if it is mindboggling to everyone else in the moment. I feel confident that most of us are not professional writers. Having a foundation to set us up would go a long way to help—something that the sources are supposed to do: help us play and roleplay. (Note: I typed "help" and not "dictate".)
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I totally agree with you.
I would argue that the commitment of WotC to implement these changes despite the face-pulling from people such as yourself demonstrates more than a little backbone. Unless you are arguing that people in your camp are nothing to be afraid of, which I would absolutely agree with. As for waiting for “anti-woke” errata, I would not hold your breath. WotC is going to outlive you, you can count on that. Empathy is not political and to say otherwise is scathing commentary on that person’s character.
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
EXTENDED SIGNATURE!
Doctor/Published Scholar/Science and Healthcare Advocate/Critter/Trekkie/Gandalf with a Glock
Try DDB free: Free Rules (2024), premade PCs, adventures, one shots, encounters, SC, homebrew, more
Answers: physical books, purchases, and subbing.
Check out my life-changing
That’s good as far as it goes, but it brings us to one of WotC’s stated reasons for doing this. They want the races as presented to be setting agnostic. Halfling sun dark sun and halflings in eberron have nothing cultural in common, to say nothing of halflings in FR or in my homebrew campaign. Maybe they’ll start including blurbs about each race in the various setting books. Or maybe not.
Thoygh even then, a halfling from waterdeep and one from some middle of nowhere town will also have very little in common, as far as culture and life experiences. But when you write it down and print it, there are lots and lots of people, new players in particular, who that that is the only, and correct, way to play that kind of character. It ends up being restrictive rather than helpful.
What's interesting to me is that all the 'political' crap is always brought up by self-identified 'anti-woke' folks who claim to want to get away from politics in their gaming. Anyone discussing these sorts of changes in good faith never brings up politics or even thinks of them, because it's not an issue of 'politics' at all. It's simply an issue of consideration and thinking through whether or not there's a way to do something that results in less harm than the way currently being employed. 'Tradition' was simply the first (successful) way of doing something, it has no especial claim on being the best way to do something, and much like scientific knowledge, tradition should be tested regularly and discarded when a better, more useful/less harmful way of doing something is found.
Please do not contact or message me.
The subject of alignments is interesting. Those of us who are already a little old will remember that before the alignment was really a cosmic alignment. In the original version, the cosmic war was two-way (inherited from Moorcock and Anderson): Law vs. Chaos. And then there were the neutrals, who didn't line up. Later, in 1977, the Good vs Evil axis was added. This scheme was maintained more or less, but little by little it was losing its initial philosophy to become a guide of moral interpretation for the player. As an example, I think it was the 2nd edition, it penalized you if you behaved out of alignment (even making you change physically). And so we come to 5e, where the alignments have lost their reason for being. They have been kept as a vestige, but lacking in meaning and reference. To be honest, it must be said that almost no one used them for anything. Perhaps minimally as an interpretation guide, but little else. So the logical evolution was its disappearance. I'm not going to go into whether or not there are ideological reasons behind it. And besides, I don't care. The thing is, they didn't make sense anymore, and I don't see a problem with removing them. And yes, I know they haven't been removed, but simply no longer suggest alignament to playable races, and only remain for a few specific monsters. But that's the nail that definitely kills them. Sounds good to me, and it is the logical evolution.
That said, I did like the philosophy of the ancient alignments. I understand the problems involved. But, still, I also understand that we are mature enough to understand that this is a game. I liked the concept of war between cosmic forces. And I liked the idea that mortals, whether they want to or not, are also mired in that war. I liked that the alignment had an influence on your character (even physically), and that you were forced to follow it. But that is a personal taste, which does not compromise the game if it is not there.