Kugelfisch wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2023 7:16 pm
Oh no, the terrible act of wanting complex rules and intricate lore in your ultra nerd hobby!
On a more based level, it's basically him saying he thinks that women and black people are too dumb to play
normal D&D
Le Redditeur wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2023 5:57 pm
I wonder how their MtG division is doing. Because I'm willing to bet that the Blaragorn fiasco didn't do them any favors.
Apparently they
still managed to increase their sales for MtG (must be all the licensed gimmick shit), but their WotC branch managed to almost cancel out all that sweet profit.
If I'm not mistaken sales for MtG increased by 20%, whereas WotC as a whole only made a +2% profit.
And their D&D sales are mostly down 'cause they pretty much fucked up their books to the point that fewer and fewer people give a toss:
Campaign settings
The 5e renditions of old campaign settings have been joke. Everything's gone tame and soft af. They shit all over the original lore. Every setting feels the same because the current writers hate restrictions and allow
all races and classes in every setting. Then there are the dumb controversities, created either out of sheer stupidity (turning Ravenloft's Not-Gypsies from a
negative into a
positive stereotype) or on purpose to gaslight people (turning Spelljammer's space monkeys into a thinly-veiled allegory for black people so they can claim the setting has always been racist).
New settings aren't anything to write home about, either. Their attempts to release MtG planes as D&D campaign settings has kinda fizzled out after Strixhaven (aka
Faggy Potter and the Starbucks of Magic).
Then they had this Radiant Citadel, which isn't even a real campaign setting (as it was released as an adventure anthology) and is basically just a Planescape clone crossed with a questionable socialist "utopia".
Then they did a book about the setting used by Critical Role, which is not only not their idea, but has already been done before (and apparently
better).
Adventure modules
A bit of a mess. A bit too much of a focus on the Forgotten Realms early on, then we got those lame woke adventure anthologies, whimsy shit (especially anything related to Strixhaven), and of course watered-down versions of famous adventure modules to go along with the watered-down versions of the their respective campaign settings.
This is probably the part of their portfolio that has hurt them the most in the long run (aside from pissing off fans of certain campaign settings). A steady output of consistently good-ish adventure modules is the lifeline of D&D and related games. Fuck, their biggest rival Paizo is essentially using their D&D fork as a means to sell their Adventure Paths.
Though I guess all those diversity hires had to do
something...
Other Fluff Shit
Of course the various bits of creature lore in their Monster Manuals have been gutted, removing any "problematic" content under the pretense of allowing the DMs more freedom of how to use the monsters.
Which is bullshit, of course. DMs have always been free to just ignore the default monster lore, and D&D has been around so long that quite a few critters are effectively meaningless without their implied culture/background. If a race of assholes are no longer
slavemongering assholes, why should I pick them over the better-known assholes like orcs?
Then there's shit like the book about the Deck of Many Things, which is just an excuse to push someone's Autistic Black Lesbian Paladin Self-Insert OC.
Crunch-centric splats
More races, more class archetypes, more spells, more
everything. WotC has loved cranking the splat books out ever since they got the license, and even TSR got a bit crazy with that during the end of AD&D's life span.
Now while having more characters options is nice,
too much character options can start to sour people on the game line.
- Option paralysis
- Options that are clearly shit
- Options that are clearly broken (especially if you combine them with options from other books for unintended synergy)
- Options that might be nice, but are skipped over because you know they won't get any more support outside of this one splat book (admittedly not quite as bad in 5e as they've focused to make everything an archetype of a core class, instead of making a whole new class like 3.X loved doing)
- New races that are mostly samey (the current D&D writers hate giving out fixed stat bonuses/penalties based on race 'cause that's like bioessentialism or something)
Now 5e actually
does do something about the option paralysis and broken combos. If you indulge in their organized play aka the Adventurers League you are only allowed to customize your character with shit from
one other book besides the core Player's Handbook.
Though this does raise the question of why you should get a new book if you're already set up with what you have?
And with the way this new anniversary edition is just turning into a 5.5 edition, they'll probably try to sell you all this shit all over again. Most likely digitally-only.
Autism attracts more autism. Sooner or later, an internet nobody will attract the exact kind of fans - and detractors - he deserves.
-Yours Truly
4 wikia: static -> vignette