Today?
The Forgotten Realms feels like "tourist Europe" with little danger, settled bucolic hamlets everywhere, and a sense of Ren Faire peace and happiness across the land. Everyone and everything has magic. Fantasy races of every shape live together in harmony, and even the orcs, goblins, and gnolls have settled into civilized lands, misunderstood "good folk." The spawn of dragons, the Dragonborn, are seen as noble helpers of civilization. I remember when dragons were feared. Even the misunderstood spawn of the Devil, the Tieflings, wander around with puzzling Russian accents, and have no taint of Hell in their blood, and are this generation's Drizzt emo-PC character choice.
The "D&D reality" is essentially a corporate "Disney reality," which is messy and dated. It is a strange "Disney Princesses" version of fantasy, its own genre, honestly, and it infects every game it touches. Even D&D clones like Tales of the Valiant, Level Up, Daggerheart, Draw Steel, and Nimble 5E can't escape that D&D zeitgeist. If you enjoy it, great! But, don't let it become your only idea of what fantasy can be, nor that other genres or ideas are "lesser" in any way.
Too many fantasy races lead to terrible world design and storytelling. It isn't fantasy anymore; it is a meaningless spectacle with no apparent meaning or direction. More and more are seeing this as a problem, and this isn't some metaphor for the current-day anything; it is just muddled confusion and the sloppy buffet-like world design where "more of everything is better."
I call out kitchen sink fantasy for this reason.
Your ideas should come first.
You shouldn't be forced to accept every class, race, option, power, monster, spell, and idea from "that other game" into "your game." Clear, focused, limited world designs are superior. Even if the world just has Dragonborn and Tieflings, and no other races, that is a superior world design than these modern ones, where the designers are afraid to remove choices.
Shadowdark does a lot with just the basic six races. That is an excellent example of a focused game. Books that keep adding races to Shadowdark don't do much for me, as they confuse the game with too much choice. I see them as net negatives to the core system.
While it is nice to "have options" and "all the work done for you," that should never come before your ideas. John Carter of Mars is a fun, imaginative, unique, and compelling setting that has nothing to do with kitchen sink fantasy. This is another IP that Disney ruined, and the best we have today of something similar is Goodman Games' Purple Planet series. Good fantasies and compelling stories can be found outside the kitchen sink fantasy genre.
I love the Dungeon Crawl Classics rule, "only one monster of each kind exists." This is the way. The ogre is one monster; come up with another brute if your campaign needs another. Commoditized, fantasy factory, stamped out clones of monsters, leading to stagnation and boredom.
The classics that inspired D&D are precious, special, and the products of vivid imaginations. We will never have new ideas if we only recycle old ones and continually regurgitate 6th-generation clones of original ideas in our games. The classics were, in fact, recycling of biblical stories, but we have not had a level of pop-culture recycling so hard, so systematic that the genre develops a culture of its own.
I call it out to put your imagination first, and avoid the corporate colonization of the idea of "what fantasy is" from being co-opted by these ideas. Once you accept the D&D reality, it's akin to a religion, and you might as well give up playing every other game and log into D&D Beyond to consume digital goods that align with that worldview. You will be happier there, rather than trying to "fight the system" aimlessly in clone games.
Strong, compelling, good-versus-evil, character-driven fantasy is not dead.
Sadly, for me, having been there from the start, the Forgotten Realms is to me. Greyhawk is, despite the efforts of historians and those who write for the game these days. I love both settings, but I can't unsee what we had, and the repackaging of these settings as something that D&D 5.5E speaks to.
If I ever revisit this setting, it will be in GURPS as a deadly, gritty, low-magic setting, like the one we first played. The ones on the first two covers of the boxed set.
The "serious D&D" setting.
The one that was supposed to showcase the original AD&D game, and was a reset from the Monty Haul and power-gaming Greyhawk games we had grown tired of, and one that 5E has turned back into. A world where characters mattered, kinship and family were who you were, and life was short and violent.
Easy raise dead or resurrection? You had to roll resurrection survival each time, as there was a hard limit on the number of times, and finding a cleric high enough to cast it was nearly impossible (a 9th-level cleric and a 17+ WIS required). You had to make death saving throws to survive being polymorphed and returning to your original form. Oh, and there were only two named clerics described in the gray books that were high enough level to cast this spell: one was the leader of an evil cult, and the other one was dead.
If you wanted it, you had to be able to DIY your own resurrects, and then retire that character as a pocket cleric and hope they weren't assassinated. Evil factions would target clerics who possess such power, so you never advertised you had it. What? My character is targeted by evil because they have a spell? Yes, you helped the good guy side. That level of power made you a target of cults, demons, and evil gods. That never happens in 5E, since power is a guarantee and so widespread that everyone feels like they have it.
There should never be a "resurrection in every temple" in the world. The idea is stupid, lame, and comes from trash video games, not fantasy.
Even the NPCs in my world were careful, and they didn't "ride in to save the day" like they did in many campaigns that I have heard about. Elminster was not immortal, and probably had only a handful of resurrections remaining. He was thoughtful, careful, and conservative in his use of power. If there was another way, he would take it or send someone else if he could. He knew he was a target, too.
Characters used to be part of the world instead of feeling like they logged into an MMO.
Stories used to matter here.
Factions were deadly serious.
Evil existed.
The world used to matter.
Your character used to matter.
No NPC was immortal or more important than the characters.
Magic used to be special.
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