Quote from: Mishihari;1128875Thanks for providing the quote.  I worried that I had misremembered something, but that's exactly what I remembered.

I don't view it as saying "play what you want" (everybody already knows that anyway) but encouragement to play LBWhatever characters.  And if the game authors are pushing a political agenda I object to, they don't get my money.  No big deal, there are plenty of other good games out there and 5E didn't much appeal to me anyway.  So no, I don't think it an overreaction at all.

It does not read like pushing LBwhatever. Just pushing that you can play whatever. Which while a little ham handed. Is pretty much the only entry in the book that has anything like that. Its another throw-away entry. Note that they dont say there you have the right to play these characters or that you must. Only that you can. Or at least potentially can.

Which is still the perplexing thing with 5e. The staff mouth off platitudes and declarations to fake divesity. But the books themselves do not. There is usually one or two representations. But 95% so far have been meaningless and easily missed.

Quote from: Omega;1128928Kickstarter certainly threw wide the gates for indie publishing of all sorts.

Crowdfunding is one of the most self-empowering and liberating elements of the information age. It has brought us from an era of being completely reliant on parasitic middlemen to an age where anyone with a computer can be their own publisher or pitch their own product, whatever that may be, and if they can get people interested they can sell it directly without some corporate overlord giving them their blessing and demanding a huge cut.

The biggest obstacle to crowdfunding is the mob of self-entitled lunatics who could potentially try to get your product taken down, which I've seen happen in crowdfunded comics. Not sure how pervasive it is in RPGs. Kickstarter, unfortunately, has also denied some people from their service based on politics alone (not even the content of their books, just wrong politics, like it happened to Richard Meyer with the Jawbreakers comic, IIRC). So while crowdfunding services are more flexible than traditional publishing there's still an element of having to rely on the whims of a middleman.

Quote from: Omega;1128932It does not read like pushing LBwhatever. Just pushing that you can play whatever. Which while a little ham handed. Is pretty much the only entry in the book that has anything like that. Its another throw-away entry. Note that they dont say there you have the right to play these characters or that you must. Only that you can. Or at least potentially can.

Which is still the perplexing thing with 5e. The staff mouth off platitudes and declarations to fake divesity. But the books themselves do not. There is usually one or two representations. But 95% so far have been meaningless and easily missed.

I tend to fall closer to this perspective when it comes to that particular entry, because it's kinda innocuous, the only one in the entire book as far as i can tell, and I've always been pro-LGBT anyways (my only issue with them being pushing puberty blockers and hormone treatment on children, but none of that appears in the book). But I can sorta see why people might take some issue with it, given the Culture War and how if you give them an inch they'll take the mile. I just don't think that that entry in the 5e PHB is a particularly egregious example.

Though, that part about some elves being made in Corellon's "image" (who is sometimes portrayed as androgynous) almost made my eyes roll out of their sockets. I never liked D&D gods, other than maybe (kinda) some of the dark elf stuff, but with passing editions I've only grown to like them less and less. I never even liked elves having a male god as a chief deity cuz they always seemed to me like the type to have a Mother Goddesses instead. But now it seems like the freaks have taken over the elves and started projecting their weird gender non-conforming nonsense onto them.

Quote from: Basic Rulebook for 5eSex
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.

You don't need to be confined to binary notions of sex
and gender. The elf god Corellon Larethian is often seen
as androgynous, for example, and some elves in the
multiverse are made in Corellon's image. You could also
play a female character who presents herself as a man,
a man who feels trapped in a female body, or a bearded
female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male.
Likewise, your character's sexual orientation is for you
to decide.

Just an addendum to this.....

Some of us, myself included, found that the addition of something so obvious that we had been doing it since we started playing tabletop RPGs, to be a pretty ham-fisted way of saying that RPGs were rainbow friendly (which when it was introduced, was what it was lauded as). That implication has been taken to the extreme of "RPGs were bastions of xenophobia and homophobia and misogyny until D&D 5e came along", which is a lie. Tabletop RPGs have always been open and welcoming to Players regardless of minority status - people really only gave a shit if you are an asshole at the game table.

Quote from: Omega;11289292: re-roll currency is nothing new. Its been around since at least the 80s and was introduced into AD&D with the Conan modules which had luck points. By the 90s a couple of games had some variation on a reroll point system. Not sure if any RPGs used it before that. And it was not used in mainstream D&D till much later.

Well, from one point of view, re-roll currency like "luck" points are a foundation of the hobby.  Generally, war games were designed so that units could avoid destruction from a successful attack by rolling to "save" the unit (hence a "saving throw" of the dice).  Special units were awarded more capacity to handle damage by making you hit them more than once; i.e. hit points.  So, hit points were already a mechanism to avoid the loss of a unit (and by extension, a player character) from a single poor roll.

To me, the bigger issue is the modification of this currency to change the direction of features other than your own character's survival.  Now you have games where players can spend points to give themselves rolls towards the sequence of events (normally the sole province of the GM), along with their expenditure then opening up additional powers for the GM.  The restriction of the GM's powers until a player spends metacurrency is something alien to older roleplaying games.

I play different games than many here, so I have a different perspective:

1. Ars Magica 5th edition ended around mid 2016. The game hasn't had any new supplements since then.

2. Exalted 3rd Edition game out in 2016. Release schedule has been slow, but books are high quality.

3. Shadowrun had 5E come out 2013, and 6E come out in 2019. Never played it, but some friends have.

4. D&D on TV and YouTube got huge. D&D with Pornstars, Critical Role, (Youtube) and on TV (Community, Stranger Things).

5. Fantasy Flight lost the Warhammer RPG license, so no more Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Only War, Deathwatch and Black Crusade RPG supplements.

6. An Xcrawl Pathfinder edition came out in 2015. Think WWF and Running Man meets D&D.

7. Kickstarter is now huge. A 5E 3rd party supplement made by Critical Role raised 2 million dollars.

8. Mutants and Masterminds 3E came out, they're releasing a supplement or two a year.

Also, I found some stats for the current game sales/activity.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/icv2-reports-23-growth-in-rpgs-in-2019.671113/

https://blog.roll20.net/post/188703613190/the-orr-group-industry-report-q3-2019-here

Neither are anywhere near perfect, but something to look at, if nothing else.