Why does WOTC keep ruining settings?
>Faerun
>Ravenloft
>Spelljammer
>Planescape
The only one they didn't completely bungle was Eberron and I think that was largely because the original Eberron guy came back for it.
Why does WOTC keep ruining settings? >Faerun. >Ravenloft. >Spelljammer. >Planescape
>the only thing they ruin is settings
It’s just the natural cycle of a product. Everything you ever like that’s a product will eventually kill itself
What happened to Planescape and Spelljammer
don't know about Planescape but Spelljammer books were really bad, they were small and had very little crunch in them generally on topics like how to navigate using Ships(which is rather important in Spelljammer) or ship combat and not much Lore in them either but it's probably mostly well for the flying money race thing
Hasbro's a corporation and that's what corporations do: butcher futures for the appearance of short term profit.
Because they recognize that only the most unimaginative of dregs run in “official” settings, anyway, so it makes the most sense to market to the lowest common denominator.
Because the majority of their writers were never good in the first place and many of them never cared about RPGs until 5e became popular and working for WotC became one of those east coast nerd prestige jobs.
Explain to me how they ruined each setting in question. Be specific.
Well I mean if you want Forgotten Realms
While the second sundering wasn't great, it wasn't terrible
The handling of the aftermath of it however was very haphazard, with more or less randomly deciding what was retconned back to 1st edition FR and what wasn't.
Combine this with a general lack of explanations to questions such as
>What the frick is going on now that Bast and Zandilar are two separate people again?
>How does Zandilar being back affect the elven race?
>Where are all of the thunder blessed dwarves from that abortion of an idea that 3e/3.5e introduced?
>What did the nations that got stuck on abeir witness and bring back with them when they returned to Toril?
>Does Abeir still exist or did someone realize that was a really stupid fricking idea as well?"
And so on.
Then you see the adventure books, such as the two in waterdeep are not only blatant reprints with slight edits of previous books (namely the Undermountain books for 2e), but they're such a sloppy job that they got things wrong.
I'll ignore the random race/gender-swaps because let's assume that was on purpose and let's assume that doesn't change anything.
But then you have shit like the bastard pretending to be a little boy doing so with his potions of longevity... which don't work in 5e the way they did in 2e, yet he has still aged 100+ years since 2e, so he should have died of old age by now.
But assuming you don't really care for the narrative side of things, there's also some basic essentials.
>You no longer need the gods to work divine magic in Faerun
This was a staple of the setting since it's inception, even when AD&D said you could work divine magic by just worshipping the spheres themselves, Faerun said "No, you must have a god backing you."
1/2
>This was a staple of the setting since it's inception, even when AD&D said you could work divine magic by just worshipping the spheres themselves, Faerun said "No, you must have a god backing you."
This one sounds like a legit improvement, heard that whoever didn't worship any gods back then got shafted hard, just became bricks for one when they died.
Not worshipping didn't get you shafted.
Actively being a militant atheist (like burning down churches, decrying every god, etc) did get you shafted, because an evil god decided it should get you shafted and since he's only damning the souls of those who have utterly disrespected EVERY god, the other gods decided "not my problem."
>What the frick is going on now that Bast and Zandilar are two separate people again?
>How does Zandilar being back affect the elven race?
I literally had to look up who the frick these even are. One was a nobody dead god from a forest in bumfrick nowhere and the other is the Demigoddess of prostitutes.
Who gives a shit about either?
>Who gives a shit
People who like the setting.
>Who are they
Bast is the egyptian demigoddess of cats, women, etc, kind of surprising you had to look that up.
She like many egyptian gods got ported into the FR when (IRL) TSR demanded the setting have an egypt analog to plug desert adventure modules into, and (in-setting) when real world egyptians got kidnapped through a magic gateway and their gods followed.
Zandilar is the elven goddess of sex who got fricked (unclear if it was rape or not) and brutalized by the Drow god of Men's Rights Activists, and left for dead.
Bast found her but the only way to save her was to fuse.
Bast wanted to leave the thumb of the egyptian pantheon anyway, so she saw this as a win/win, thinking she would join the elven pantheon.
Their fusion led to them becoming Sharess, the human goddess of hedonism, cats, and women's shelters, and she's one of the more influential goddesses in southwest Faerun, with either growing influence in the north (AD&D) or loads of influence all over (3.5e).
While a relatively minor goddess in the grand scheme of things, the sudden reintroduction of a goddess of wanton sex and fricking around to the elven pantheon would influence elves as a whole.
The majority brothels and clubs losing their patron who gave them the ability to cure diseases (and high level followers of Sharess could even swap people's genders, breaking cursed belts of masculinity/femininity in the process) would also have a major impact on the setting.
Then you have questions about more important deities, like Lathander and Amaunator being different people, then the same person, then who knows what the frick they are now.
>fricking around to the elven pantheon would influence elves as a whole
Elves already frick anything and everything anyway.
Not really.
Some brothels are dedicated to Sune, but given how vain her followers are and how much they tend to see it as a treat that you get to be in their presence at all, even her followers recognized the Sharessin temples/brothels were more attractive to the layman, at least according to the books on the Vast.
But once more this is only a small aspect.
If you want a bigger question, Gond and the ban on gunpowder and how 5e treats guns.
I don't disagree with it being cool, I just think it was implemented poorly and then aborted before anyone could fix it.
We know prior to 3e the Dwarves were having repopulation issues because the dwarves who stayed underground were going sterile, but the ones who went to the surface (or lived in the south) were having loads of big families still.
I feel like the Thunder Blessing could have either
A) Not fixed the sterility issues so that the vast majority of dwarves would be city dwarves who grew up among humans with all the issues that entails culturally.
Or
B) Only affected the most staunch of the mountain dwarves, leading to a boom from negative population growth to massive population growth in the old dwarf holds, causing a schism among the dwarven populations between the hardcore traditionalists being truly blessed vs the city dwellers who have regular families but may feel more distant from their ancestry now.
Sune runs brothels. Even has her personal Chosen start them regularly. It'll be fine, you can still jerk off to the OG coomer setting.
Thunder Blessing is a cool idea. Whenever I play a dwarf I usually have a twin somewhere else out in the world.
It gets worse when you go into Paladins, because it was very specific what gods could have what kinds of divine classes in Faerun, and now all of that is gone in the name of anyone can be anything.
The removal of racism, the fact that ethnic groups no longer matter, and the general recycling of other plotlines in ways that completely frick the timeline just make it seem like they wanted to do a "Faerun's Greatest Hits!" but they also didn't want people to actually look up older books so they shoved everything into this vanilla mesh of a current setting and called it a day.
One could say the gay pride parades in Waterdeep are also a ruination, given that homosexuality was never seen as a bad thing in Faerun and as a result there would be no reason for any kind of homosex pride, but that was just Crawford running his mouth as opposed to an official published thing.
Though Faerun got fricked with 4e, 5e promised to unfrick it and all it did was put the setting on life support.
2/2
D&D as a series of books is mostly run by a skeleton crew supported by freelancers. It's impossible to hire a freelancer, likely on the cheap considering WotC, and then expected them to both intimately understand the source material and/or have excellent mechanical depth and quality writing.
Because WotC is literally Phyrexians.
Ruining other places it's what they do.
Where do you think they found the inspiration for the whole MtG story?
Because they're a shitty company more dedicated to chasing the current "progressive" fads than creating anything worth a damn.
That aside, you can't say anything about it, because all the defenders and fans will get all uppity about it.
It's better to just not wait for the latest pile of slop to drop and just pursue/make what you do want, even if it means you end up solo.
A structure of rules testing player skill or luck is still a game, whether you're in a group or alone, so sticking to said structure makes you yesgames.
Evil cannot create, only corrupt etc etc
I hare people bandying about this paraphrase because they so thoroughly fail to understand that it refers specifically and metaphysically to Melkor and his relationship with the song of Iluvatar.
Thought so, but kinda applies, in context... specially here where people can recognize it.
>nooooo you cant apply universal truths
It isn’t universally true. Look at celebrated artists like Salvador Dali.
Implying he was evil.
Good people don't have families that were tortured and raped by the forces of the Spanish Republic, who were totally the good guys and never did anything wrong, anon.
>defending a fricking commie
It literally means "satan doesn't have the power level to perform a True act of metaphysical Creation Ex Nihilo" and pretentious idiots have been trying to use it as "stop liking what I didn't like" ever since. You illiterate philosophical zombie.
>I hare people bandying about this paraphrase because they so thoroughly fail to understand
Look, bunny, sometimes a quote works on multiple levels.
The basic idea of jealous, spiteful parasites damaging something artistic out out pride and resentment towards their betters fits fine in how the phrase was used.
sperg
Did you miss the interview where they tell the goyim that they were enjoying the game wrong?
Capitalism. WOTC is a smaller but profitable part of Hasbro, which has been bleeding money for years and looking for cheap quick injections of cash to make their investors happy. They have no interest in long term sustainability or brand integrity, only what they can shit out as cheaply as possible that they are sure enough people will buy to make it a profit.
Making a good game was never once a priority in regards to 5e or any of its material. Only making a profit today, and tomorrow is the problem of whoever replaces me after I golden parachute out of here.
Remember when they said DnD doesn't have enough customization based on race and then went with the "You can customize your race racial bonuses as you want, you may be a smart half-orc that gets +1 to int and +1 to wis instead of the usual bonuses" oh my bad, we can't call them half-orcs and half-elves anymore, my bad, you can be a orc with +1 int +1 wis racial bonus.
5e is shit and moronic.
>oh my bad, we can't call them half-orcs and half-elves anymore
They already went all the way with that?
It's like these "social rules" are made up by ayyylmaos, not actual humans.