• fae/faer or they/them

fae otherkin in the streets, anthro red chocobo in the sheets


Lavender-Fae
@Lavender-Fae

my first tabletop RPG was D&D second edition. Well, it was the first one I owned or read. I didn't play frequently or seriously until 3E, but 2E captured my imagination hard as a kid. I had the revised books, the ones with the black-framed covers, and they are still the first things I think of when someone mentions a tabletop RPG.

I still play D&D. (and 13th Age and many other systems.) And I still like D&D because I'm a messy high-fantasy bitch and having a decently lengthy campaign doing magic stuff and slamming a trident into things is still fun. I haven't played Pathfinder, because it does the stuff I do like (huge variety of fun options and character generation ideas) but it also does a thing I like less which is that it's upped the crunch in ways I find kinda cumbersome. I'd probably like it, and I'll probably get to it one of these days, but it really isn't a high priority.

I do have some problems with 5E, sure. I'm not necessarily out here to go in hard on defending it-it serves its purpose but I'll always be happier with something a bit more rules-light and a bit less combat-oriented. (for my money I'm a big fan of Unknown Armies, a lot of PbtA games, and I really like how Daggerheart's shaping up, so far.) But I still have fun playing it, and my little yuan-ti storm sorc eats up more of my brainpower then is necessarily healthy, even when we're not playing!

so it gives me no pleasure to observe this copy of the 2024 Player's Handbook, that has fallen off a truck onto my hard drive. why am I not deriving pleasure? it stinks

first and foremost, structurally, the book is a bit odd in its layout. by this I mean the introductory What Is This Game And How Do You Play It chapter is also the combat chapter. not like an overview, not like an example of combat flow in gameplay, it is the entire combat chapter. I feel like going "what's this all about?" directly into "aaaaaand this is how temporary HP works!" is basically all that really needs to be said about the priorities of the people designing D&D.

and it's not bad info, it really isn't. it gets through the rules pretty clearly and it flows okay. if you're new it'll get the job done, but damned if it doesn't establish what they expect you to do, and what they expect you to do is murder shit. which, if that's the campaign you want? sure cool welcome.

it is my experience most people are not necessarily here for that. lotta people want to have character moments or engage in local intrigue in ways that don't involve bashing a dude's face in. nobody I know who follows Dimension 20 or Critical Role or any other AP does it because they're purely excited to listen to combat rolls.

and I'll say this: the actual bits of it that actually talk about how the game works are pretty good! art of people gesticulating at a game table while their characters match their movement behind them, actually neat. Art of tabletop groups with mixed physical attendance and people on video call, sure-you understand how people actually play your game. suggestions to go watch people play online to figure out the style you want (albeit without actually saying the words "actual play" which might be helpful, presumably because they might lead people to APs of other games), useful info to the newcomer actually. surprisingly limited hawking of their VTT.

the art's inconsistent. good, on the whole, but stylistically mixed. there is a really realistic picture here of some guys fighting a wyvern.

their names, a caption happily tells me, are caramon and raistlin.

this brings me to my first issue:

this is weirdly nostalgia-fueled in a way that makes little god dang sense

it's all over this book and it's been all over recent sourcebooks for regular style 5E: the published campaign setting Wild Beyond The Witchlight is full of references to the early 1980s action figure line and the cartoon series. it's one thing when it's just, like, a little easter egg in the maps, which that book does fairly well; it's another thing altogether when the book's entire climax hinges on going Look At This Guy! He Was A Toy Chris Perkins Had As A Kid! and the emotional twist is that one of the characters is secretly Tasha, from lore.

the 2024 DMG's cover prominently features Warduke, a character who was in one episode of the old cartoon, who has also gotten a very nice Neca figure recently. He looks like a fourth-string He-Man character, but they are pushing him. that's him, atop this post. look at 'em. he's silly. he isn't the boy you hang your franchise on. Vecna and Strahd are all over their recent stuff, and this PHB's samples of play are all explicitly from Curse of Strahd for some reason. but also: all these people come from forty-year-old media.

it feels, in a lot of ways, like they wanna Marvel this, like they wanna Star Wars this. like they wanna have a Boba Fett or a Thanos they can point to. like they have realized they don't have any specific marketable stuff and they want a breakout from names they already have out there. they want people to get excited for their little branded blorbos, in a game explicitly about making your own people and worlds, because they want you to buy Vecna merch.

so we get caramon and raistlin. we get warduke and strongheart. what we DON'T get, weirdly, is...Drizz't. We don't get the guy that actually was a breakout, the guy who still has shooters out there, the guy people named their kids after. there are more "Drizz't"s in the US then there are people with my middle name per the last census. yeah he's kinda a cringe edgelord, but you know what? there's a great many people here for that. if people like Sasuke Uchiha, and I assure you they do, they could've found an audience with their dual-wieldin' drow. I went to a non-anime vegan fest full of local makers last fall and I bought Akatsuki print socks. half the people I know are excited about Shadow the Hedgehog being in a game again; half the people I know main Juri in SF6. people love that chuuni shit.

this kinda leads me to a theory I have: we aren't getting nostalgia in general, here. we're getting nostalgia from the writers specifically. it's Geoff Johns insisting that Hal Jordan has to be the main Green Lantern again. it's JJ Abrams insisting we need to cover a bunch of plot points from A New Hope again. but unlike those two, where Johns actually had a cool idea with the Lantern factions and expanded that corner of the DC universe in meaningful ways, or where Abrams had a full crew of charismatic actors, the nature of D&D is that they kinda can't do much with their trademarked characters. so it's just HEEEEEEERE'S DRAGONLANCE ISN'T THAT COOL and nothing is done with it. maybe we get a Raistlin toy at some point, who gives a shit.

the first paragraph in this book is basically going "one day Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson made a fun game to delight their players with!" which....okay, first of all, huge historical revisionism there, gang, what the fuck. but I think it sets the tone. this is a brand that really, desperately, wants to live in an era forty years past.

but it doesn't, also! it's new, it's hip! it's modernized the rules! and this brings me to my second issue:

they didn't do jackshit this is just 5E again

I think this is the most damning thing here, moreso then any of their business decisions or their baffling tonal choices.

they don't know what this is-or rather, what it is changes constantly depending on what's convenient for them. this is a new edition! they'll say to their contracted writers to avoid continued royalties on old works. this is just a revision and all your old stuff works! they'll say to their fanbase who has already bought in. this is the forever edition we'll update eternally! they say as they cannot make their minds up about whether or not all your old stuff on Beyond will be erased.

well I've read it now and I can tell you what it is: it's barely errata. a couple spells got tweaked, a couple abilities got tweaked, but for the most part: this is such a minor update the fact that they're charging full price for this and acting like it's new is actually kind of infuriating.

mostly what they have done is they've taken stuff away.

now, granted, that's a little unfair. 5E has had a decade of Unearthed Arcanas and Tasha's Cauldrons and so on to expand upon player options. regardless, it's wildly shrunk.

I've observed that Madlin, my 5E storm sorc, couldn't be made in this edition; I thought this was because she was a yuan-ti, who are not present as a playable character choice. but also, neither is storm sorcery. literally no combination of race and class I have made since 5E came out is doable here, it turns out. not a one. for $60 I have the exciting option of using materials I already have or not being able to do anything outside of the most barebones options.

they have changed "race" to "species." I'm honestly not sure if that's better or worse in the ol' bioessentialism camp.

but, then, also, other things are gone. did you like playing an aasimar? they're here. did you like playing a radiant, or a fallen aasimar? nope! just aasimar now. no variants. "what about my cool transformation?" you say, as an aasimar player? well you just sorta pick which one you want. you can be fallen today, you can be radiant tomorrow after a short rest. there is no meaningful choice to be made at chargen. there is no actual soul or meaning to the decision except what's tactically good for you in the moment. the concept of playing a consistent character is not relevant here.

i'm disappointed and also angry

look, I do not often log in to defend 5E except when someone is getting weirdly self-righteous about not playing it. like I said, I have fun with it, there's just a great many systems I think better deliver on what I specifically want.

but god damn. I've heard it argued that 5E is kinda lifeless, and I kinda agree-I think you have to play a little with your options to add any spark to it. (my sorc's magic missile is spectral cannon fire; my death domain cleric uses skeletal chill touch hands to gesticulate and as platforms should she need to get eye-level with the non-goblin people in her party. things like that.) and, like that's the tradeoff for being the infinitely modular Everything System they want to push it as, your world of limitless adventure that you have to kinda meet in the middle here and there. you can't, and don't necessarily have to, paint too many details unto the thing you encourage your players to make their own, in a world where the rules and specifics are gonna be tweaked to their liking.

but here, that genuinely feels like the design ethos. bland it up. care less. $60 gets you a picture of Tanis Half-Elven and a stat block for Magic Missile and fuck you.

genuinely, at the end of the day, though? setting aside the business practices, which I'm not dwelling on here because a great amount has been written about them by people who are smarter then I am (but which are also awful and should be enough of a deterrent): this is just not a good book.

this is just a shell. this is the Marvel Movie of tabletop RPGs: it's weirdly grey and lacking in character but Ronan the Accuser showed up that one time you remember him? this is a Youtube UI update that has dropped off a tiny bit of functionality but a department had to keep the lights on so we all have to deal with it.

but we don't! we don't have to deal with it! you have the power of choice here, and I ask you to love yourself enough to please choose something else, anything else. this includes normal 5E! at the end of the day this is an edition that exists for the shareholders and no one, and I mean no one, but the shareholders.


Hexagon
@Hexagon

Games such as DnD and Pathfinder have always been poor choices for low or no combat games. They are mechanically focused on tactical combat and are pretty terrible at anything else. I feel like wanting such an experience from these same tired old trad systems is folly but we all fall for their trappings anyways, myself included.

DnD at its core is about killing monsters and taking their stuff. It's that aspect I prefer, actually. Once I was asked my favorite thing about video games I replied: "killing monsters that represent real evils. symbols of events, leaders, and systems that i cannot defeat alone in real life. the satisfaction of imagining a world in which i can." This is a small hyperbole. Not all games I enjoy do this for me. Digital or Analog. But it is a common occurance in both realms of gaming I quite enjoy.

My love for char-op has never waned from my 3.5 days. I will proudly quote the stormwind fallacy whenever someone goes off about any tired argument along the lines of "min/maxing ruins the game". I love excellent roleplay just as much as optimization. The best DnD players are those who are good at both!

I hate 5e tho. Like REALLY FUCKIN HATE 5e. It puts a lot of weight on the DM. that is the whole philosophy. Its approach to game design comes across as "we don't want to make the game, so you figure it out" If your DM has a good enough grasp of game design to make the game good, then you will have a good time and I might recommend it. If not, just play something else. Literally anything else. And while I do not condone piracy, at the very least don't give WotC your money.

I also disagree that 5e is a "rules lite" system. It is not. The rules are there it is just up to the DM to make them. The core PF1 rulebook is about the same page and word length as the 5e PHB + DMG and contains the same sort of information. The difference is things like:

you can make a perception check while asleep at a -10 penalty

vs

if your character is asleep the DM gets to decide whether you can make a perception check at all.

If your prefer the latter, fine by me. I simply cannot stand it. In PF1 I feel a lot more safe from bullshit GMs might pull as it clearly defines what a player can and cannot do. 5e is a lethal drinking game in which you take a drink whenever you read the phrase "at the DM's discretion." Bad GMs are not gonna make any game fun, but at least I can tell em to fuck off if they try to unfairly screw me over like the old days.

I once joked about DMing a 5e game, and whenever the system wants me to make something up I shall simply open the PF1 core rulebook and use whatever it says. I bet that game would be decent.

Hearing that this new edition of DnD is only a slight revision of 5e rules does not surprise me. In fact, when I read OP's wonderful explanation I immediately began referring to it as 5.5e. Because I find that funny. I was really surprised to hear about this nostalgia fueled aspect of it. But I shouldn't have been.

People will buy DnD from brand recognition alone and so long as experienced long-time returning players stay involved there will always be enough people willing and skilled enough to put in the effort to make the system playable. It's a cheap corporate product. It really is the MCU of fantasy TTRPGs. So nostalgia-jerking really is the next step. Getting the olds like myself hyped up on nothing more than just recognition. DnD sucks. WotC sucks. Play something else.

Sadly, Paizo management is not any better, and in some ways it is worse. But the workers at least have a union. I recently saw a post about "why pathfinder fans like prewritten campaigns more than homebrew" and it chalked it up to organized play, which is part of it. But the real reason is writting. PF stuff has excellent writing; a cohesive and fascinating setting; interesting and enjoyable characters. I don't think there's much nostalgia-fuel but there definitely is some. Now, if only paizo paid its freelancers better, because last I heard it was dogshit pay compared to other publications.

These days I find I can judge my like or dislike of a system by its paragraph on selecting gender at character creation, or lack thereof.

DnD 3.5 PHB pg 109: "Gender: Your character can either be male or female"

This was like 1999. Straightforward but lacking any nuance.

DnD 4e PHB pg 30: "Age, Gender, [etc]: These details are up to you."

The only comparable mention of gender during chargen in the 4e PHB is in a legend explaining the character sheet. I love its simplicity. It does go on a bit about age tho.

The PF1 Core Rulebook has no such paragraph. However, it does tell you to select the height and weight of your character based on gender and race, which were present in 3.5 dnd as well. PF1 loves its silly pointless charts. Most players ignore that kinda stuff but some liked randomizing almost every aspect of their character and it exists if you so choose.

DnD 5e PHB: "Sex: You can play a male or female character without gaining any special benefits or hindrances. Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior. For example, a male drow cleric defies the traditional gender divisions of drow society, which could be a reason for your character to leave that society and come to the surface."

Why won't anyone think about the poor male blackface elves? goddamn this paragraph makes me feel gross.

PF2 Core Rulebook: "Gender and Pronouns: Characters of all genders are equally likely to become adventurers. Record your character's gender, if applicable, and their pronouns on the third page of the character sheet."

This is pretty good. a bit too wordy imo but I almost feel like this is a deliberate response to the 5e paragraph without being completely hands-off like the 4e and PF1 approach.

I am very curious about what is in this new "5.5e" PHB just for a laugh. Maybe it is decent but... I don't have my hopes up for anything WotC's filth has touched.


Lavender-Fae
@Lavender-Fae

hey hello I might gotta roll up my sleeves and wade back in here:

so this shot above is from the end of the character creation chapter, the last paragraph before we move into rules for advancing levels.

that's it, that's the gender. give a lil' gender think there, as an afterthought, as a last detail. that comes up after the part where you should name the character, actually.

there's a couple tables here you can roll on, too, for your personality traits! y'know, if you didn't have anything in mind, and you can roll based on stats or alignment.

this is something I should've brought up in the first post because it's spiking my blood pressure actually.

so, let's say you're neutral, you have picked one of the neutral alignment. the book gives you a 1d4 roll for your traits, you neutral person! these are "selfish, disinterested, laconic, pragmatic." (this is very funny, because "neutral good" is described as "a kindly person who helps others according to their needs!" so yeah enjoy that and "selfish and disinterested" right next to one another.) If you have a high constitution score you can be "energetic, hale, hearty, stable."

Now, look. I have been trying to think about this book from the perspective of an Absolute Newcomer, a person who doesn't have years of roleplaying experience, a person who maybe just got invited to a game at their dorm or office or in one of their Discord servers. Me, myself, Lavender: I am a dramatic who spends a lot of time thinking about characters and I kinda know what I'm going for well before I start chargen. I was gonna play a country singer over in Unknown Armies and between "learning there was something called The Star" and "opening a character sheet" I listened to a ton of country. (I recommend this, honestly. The genre's very different from the stereotype if you venture out through Bandcamp tags or even just past what the racist fucks running things in Nashville insist on giving airplay-it's a massively varied and passionate genre of music!)

But a lot of people, honestly most people, honestly just about all but one person...they ain't me! That's fine. And for someone who has a different approach or lacks the experience, you know what? sure, honestly. fine, good. throwing a few keywords out there as prompts isn't the worst idea. Ain't everyone going to have a character in mind when they sit down in session zero.

However, here's the thing: ain't nothing happens in a vacuum. And this is part of a trend:

this don't matter, ain't none of this matters

I hit on this with the aasimar. It feels genuinely and sincerely weird to me that the subtypes of aasimar are all just one thing and you can swap between the perks when you use them. "It's okay," I say as I hit my transformation. "I'm gonna get the creepy devil wings and intimidation check and necrotic damage today. I'll go back to my noble holy protector after another short rest."

D&D can be argued as a predominantly combat game, sure, but even then, it's hard to say anyone plays it entirely as such. But this book genuinely, truly, sincerely, seems to expect that. None of the other shit is relevant, here. Of course you can have all the potential perks at once depending on what's tactically appropriate. Why wouldn't you? Why would you worry about a consistent character? They might get killed, babey! Don't worry about that, just pick your numbers and roll your to-hit dice!

There's been a lot of yammering by the worst, most boring people online about lifting alignment restrictions over time. That they're defying Gygax's vision of racial biotruths by saying an orc can't be evil. But the truth is, this doesn't feel like the reason why that was changed, right? it feels like they just make universal options in case you wanted the orc traits where you can dash as a free action and pick up a little temp HP in the process, without any concerns for ever needing to roleplay anything.

Now, I wanna be clear: removing alignment restrictions, throwing out "all these people are EVIL" is a good thing. Unconditionally so. But I don't think they came to the decision in the same way you or I might come to the decision that this is a good idea. I don't think they observed the bioessentialist undertones are ignorant and bad. I don't think they wanted to buck tired fantasy tropes. I don't even think they realized this was already how most people play Dungeons and Dragons, ignoring those restrictions in favor of any number of things (player freedom, general variety, worldbuilding ideas, etc.). No, I think they came to it from a far worse place.

this book is written by goddamn COWARDS and it is for no one in particular

this is the crux, I think, of why I am so mad about Dungeons and Dragons 2024.

in the day or two since I got really mad at this book initially, there was a lot of grousing about a picture in the book over on the hellsite. (I should get off the hellsite, I know, but if I loved myself enough to do that I wouldn't still have this 2024 PDF on my computer.)

The picture had a bunch of adventurers around a feast. It's example art for a spell where you....summon a pile of food.

This prompted a bunch of the world's biggest crybabies to break down, as usual. They whined that there isn't art of combat and high adventure and there's nothing there to actually inspire heroism, that all D&D art is just people sitting around in taverns. (This is a lie, for what it's worth. The PHB has tons of art of characters fighting stuff or exploring ruins or just solo shots of people casting big flashy spells. For all the things I hate about it, "all the art is of people sitting around" is just factually untrue about this book.) They whined that the food in this feast didn't fit their uninformed ideas of what medieval food looks like. This was the fault of the women and gays, they said.

Meanwhile, though, on the flip side, the progressive I followed were picking it apart for other reasons. That the Asian features on a character whose entire fit screamed "English druid!" or that another character just had random "idk they're indigenous?" signifiers slapped on arbitrarily. That this art, evidence of the womminfolk ruining D&D, had exclusively male characters. That it was slapdash and not great. (I'm not sure it was for-sure spotted as AI or not. I only stick my hand in the deep fryer that is twitter for yay long at a time.)

And that's the microcosm of the whole book. It is for absolutely no one.

If you're a grognard, you're gonna be mad about the not-evil tieflings and orcs and you're gonna be mad about the sole picture of a character in a wheelchair because for some reason every reactionary weirdo gets so mad about wheelchairs specifically. And the thing is that's a grand total of like five pages out of the book. If you're a reasonable person you're going to notice that they do nothing with any of that....and that they're weirdly fixated on nostalgia references....which they do nothing with. They don't actually really work Warduke into the lore any, he's just pasted all over the promotional stuff, same as they don't reference the wheelchair, they just slap it into the book. Lip service to two different sorts of player, two different boxes to check before quickly moving on.

This book is simply lobbing olive branches half-heartedly at every piece of discourse you've ever seen and then cowering in the corner.

The genuine truth is, I would have a thousand times more respect for this book if it doubled down on the old trash. If it said "here's drow! ...no they're always evil those are the rules." Because as it stands now, "drow" is nothing more then "your darkvision has double range."

I mean, I have made a ton of yuan-ti characters and I will make more yuan-ti characters, I like snake people, and the rules yelling at me for doing different alignments wouldn't make me feel particularly like they approved of my style of play, sure. But the thing is? As it stands now? It sure as shit doesn't feel like that, either. They have thrown out enough things outside of the very core concepts that it's pretty clear they aren't advocating for any variety or diversity.

There's a little info box in this book that argues you should try and make a party of the original four 1E classes because that's the best party comp. This isn't the work of someone advocating for doing anything outside of the most barebones traditional mold.

This book stands for nothing, cares about nothing, is for no one.

Even Gygax, for as many negative things as I have to say about him (infinity. infinity negative things). Even he stood for something, cared a little. The soul of his creative output was rotten, but at least it existed.

2024 D&D isn't rotten in that sense. It's a banal rotten. It's a corporate sort of decay that rejects everything it can't put on a happy little spreadsheet. It's a tabletop RPG with the heart and soul of a retail district manager. It's a HR rep telling you how how you matter to the company as they hand you the wrong pronoun pin. It's an email from corporate thanking everyone for their hard work as they announce which employees don't need to bother clocking in the next day.

I have now written close to four thousand words about this book, far more then it deserves. I am done. I curse the name of everyone involved with the direction this thing has taken. And I, again, encourage you to play tabletop RPGs, any of them, even older editions of D&D. Even regular 5E. I'd suggest going outside of D&D and PF entirely, that's just me, do what makes you happy. Just do not let this banal evil into your life.


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in reply to @Lavender-Fae's post:

...they want us to pay 30-50 bucks for Venger and friends and Dragonlance characters? Is 5E the edition of "nostalgia, rehash, remaster"? They just had a massively successful game with all new characters stemming from their Descent to Avernus line in the Forgotten Realms, and now they're trying to appeal to...whom exactly with this Krynn and 80s cartoon references?

Sheesh.

It really is just bizarre and honestly, sincerely does seem like they are targeting exclusively 80s nostalgia-this is a Krynn and Greyhawk house, and Faerun need not apply. I'd argue 5E has always kinda been that, in a way-it really felt like a reactionary "oh shit 4E was weird let's just make 3E again!" from the jump, but this feels so specifically targeted to a specific kinda player (a 40something dude with a "man cave") even as their art shows younger people playing a very different sort of game from what 1E was.

I think you're right. As you pointed out in your post, they've got Vecna and Strahd plastered over EVERYTHING. They're dumping Vecna in everything from MTG to Dead by Daylight. It's always been the nostalgia remake edition, and they're just pivoting even harder with their 5.5 update.

"We want everyone to play, but we want the 40 year olds to remember that you're the REAL players" or something...

To be frank, I don't know why they are putting ANY emphasis on Dragonlance.

A) The relationship between WOTC and the the Hickmans (who made and to my knowledge still sort of own the rights to the setting) is BAD. So bad that the Hickmans fucking sued WOTC for failure to deliver on promises of publishing more Dragonlance content.
B) Dragonlance has a linear story. It's like, done. Many of the adventures have you playing canonical events in the history of the setting. They're SUPER railroady too. You're specifically told to remind players that they have to make canonical decisions.
C) The only Dragonlance product put out during 5e was critically THRASHED as one of the worst products in the entire edition. What's that? You didn't know that there was a Dragonlance adventure in 5e? That's because it was put out there with absolutely no marketing. They also have released 2 novels since, all of which was the result of the settlement of the Hickman lawsuit.
D) It has not been relevant to modern fantasy in decades. When you think "Dragonlance" you think "generic 80s and 90s fantasy". It comes up as a nostalgic thing. And unlike something like Planescape or Spelljammer, it was not a setting that when old player described it made new players go "cool, I wish we could play a campaign there!".

It's not even like the D&D cartoon which falls into some kind of "remember saturday morning cartoons" vibe that makes it cheesy and fun. I realize this isn't an enormous deal to include them as minor references or examples in the PHB. I'm probably overblowing this. But it just heats me up because they have the opportunity to take advantage of a new edition by championing NEW SHIT. I would be genuinely interested in seeing stuff from Radiant Citadel upsized and given proper campaign setting status. I don't need to be reminded that old stuff already exists! I already knew about it!

it's not necessarily an enormous deal in the way it's included, sure-it's art, mostly, references here and there, but not even so much as like sample stat blocks. (Dragonlance IS the first thing in their list of official realms in the multiverse appendix, because of course there's a multiverse involved. it's in there with Eberron and FR and Greyhawk and some other stuff, though, so not really a particularly weird shoutout.)

but there's this very distinct, very constant desire to circle the wagons around a few specific settings. it'd be one thing if it was one book doing references or one line of figures or whatnot, but it's becoming kinda regular, and there are a lot of settings that are being notably omitted.

I remember when I read that more radically different first draft of this that had a lot of neat ideas including the addition of a universal furry character option but...nope that was the first to go because 'It didn't fit into D&D'. Every single playtest packet I noticed the actually interesting little changes they were making were whittled away until...this.

I had some genuine joy with my encounters with those dudes, but it was channeled entirely through being a teenaged goth goblin in a mortuary educational program

the D&D module gave me a cackling necromancer and all three feet of me landed an Intimidation check of like 25