I Can't Play it Alone

It's over, again.

5E is packed up in my eight plastic storage crates, and in the closet, it is too big a game to play solo. The combination of the online character sheets, digital purchases, character sheets a dozen pages long, and all the rules is just too much for me. My brain can't handle it, especially for a party of characters.

I love Tales of the Valiant. This is guilt-free 5E for me, and the best of the 2014 rules.

It is just too much game.

First through third level, fine, I can do that. Any higher? Forget it, I would rather run a party of GURPS characters, it is less work on the character sheets. It works for a while, but by the sixth level, with four characters, it feels like a massive slog for no great benefit, and by the eighth level, with four characters, it dies.

5E is a better game with a group to manage the complexity, just like Pathfinder 2E. 5E may seem an easier game, but that is very deceptive, since complexity ramps up steeply past the 6th level. I love my ToV books; they are the perfect version of 5E, but the complexity as a solo player kills my enjoyment.

I only play solo.

So I end up not playing.

And 5E loses hard at this point; I can't deal with it as a solo player at all. It is not worth the complexity or constant, too detailed, overly complicated character builds. If all I play for is a story, I am better off with a simple game, such as a 2d6 game like FTL Nomad, or a solid BX game like Old School Essentials.

My 10th-level 5E character has a character sheet 16 pages long.

My 10th-level OSE character is half a page, and not terribly different than a 1st-level sheet. This is a clear win for me. I can solo a party of four to even eight with no problems. With 5E, eight characters require 30-50 sheets of paper, at 4 to 6 sheets per character. It only gets worse as they level, and at level ten, it could be over 100 sheets of paper for that same party.

Versus eight half-sheets that are no more complex than a level one sheet.

There is a point for the solo player at which a game becomes unplayable.

And if you find BX characters boring or lacking abilities, you are not playing BX right. Are you a bard? Roll CHR to do most of the other things that 5E locks behind feats and subclasses. And there are plenty of hacking guides for training and character options in BX, the amazing On Downtime and Demesnes, and the Carcass Crawler zines are prime examples of BX expansions that will make the game incredible and give you the customization you are looking for.

BX characters are infinitely more flexible and customizable than 5E characters since you gain abilities through your story in the world, and you just "add them to your character sheet" as you gain, train, or collect them. Cursed by an evil statue and gain a demon tail? Write that down, and it may be useful, cause negative reactions, or you can figure out a way to use it to pickpocket someone or grab an item, make a DEX check.

No feat expenditure needed.

No subclass choice.

No $80 Kickstarter books.

No new shelf is needed to store all these books.

No digital purchase on a VTT.

There is no hoping the online character designer supports the option.

You just write it down and have it.

If you don't have the imagination to play BX, and you need every rule laid out for you as if you were some computer compiling code, you should probably be playing a computer game and not a tabletop role-playing game. Games with depth and rules are fun, but D&D is not D&D anymore.

OSE is closer to what I remember.

And I don't need "rulesy rules" like Shadowdark to create fear and tension. I love Shadowdark as a board game, but it isn't the game I played, nor do I need torch timers and rules for what happens in the dark to make a dungeon scary. That is all in my head. A great BX referee can turn any dungeon crawl into something terrifying, just like the Tomb of Horrors.

Six rooms, goblins, a giant spider, one trap, a puzzle, and a carrion crawler? That is my Tomb of Horrors. BX turns that environment into a nightmare. My thief has 3 hit points, and the fighter has 5. One hit could kill either of them. Death is permanent. No death saves. You or the monsters can choose if your attacks are subduing or not, and what they want to do if they subdue you? That is terrifying.

When you get to AD&D, you begin to realize where we started to go wrong. AD&D is the beginning of the road that got us here. Too many rules, a rule for everything, and too many pages of the game. AD&D is the best game ever written, but BX is simple, expressive, does everything, and handles any situation clean and fast. With AD&D, I begin needing more books and rules again. I am locked into rulings. I am flipping through pages of rules to find something. Not knowing a rule could kill my character. While OSRIC, ADAD, C&C, and DCC are incredible games, I am tied to the books.

BX frees you from the books.

They are there if you need them, but for the most part, you don't.

The rule system is simple and invisible.

Things are resolved in a natural, consistent, and logical progression of rulings.

As things come up, rulings outside the rules are made, and the bare minimum of a rules framework handles the hard parts. Combat, spellcasting, light, and other factors are covered. The most important parts. The game then gets out of your way.

As it should be.

The D&D Collapse

Wow, I have never seen such a total collapse of a YouTube community before, and D&D YouTube is getting absolutely savaged right now, with creators quitting and ending their channels.

It is like they did the numbers, and wrecking your health trying to keep the plates spinning for a dying game is not worth it anymore, and going into the workforce and competing with AI for jobs is a better idea than D&D YouTube.

It is sad.

But the game in its current form can't support that much D&D content, especially when everything has been talked to death. Seriously, there are so many advice videos on prep, DM-ing, and other topics - much of the information is terrible - that nobody cares and everybody has had enough of being told how to play a game that should be easy to play. With the amount of advice out there, one would think 5E is the hardest game ever written in the history of gaming.

My shelves are full of 5E books, none of which I have time to play with. I find myself gravitating back to easier games, FTL Nomad for 2d6 science fiction gaming, and even games like OSE for dungeon crawling. I have no clue what 5E is these days, except for a version of BX that takes forever to create characters, takes five times longer to prep and play, and you need to pay loads of money to create online character sheets. The books are heavy, take up six shelves, and one small book replaces them all.

At this point, it feels like my "big games" are all dying with D&D.

I don't have time anymore.

They aren't interesting. They take up too much space and playtime.

And the communities are dying, especially 5E.

Downsizing feels like the clear winning strategy here. Play small games, enjoy focused experiences, and simplify my gaming life.

Clan, Family, and Lineage

Modern gaming feels almost entirely divorced from the notion of family, home, clan, and lineage. You don't find these concepts in gaming these days, with the focus being more on personal power than protecting one's home and kin, dealing with family issues, blood feuds, heritage, and continuing the family lineage.

Heritage and lineage have been radically redefined in modern gaming to the point of being hilariously wrong, and the phrasing smacks of an anti-family bent.

A lot of the writers of these newer games ignore family, to the point where the writing feels detached, alone, and sharing the misery of a life spent without close family connections, a homeland, a deep and storied lineage, and that essence of the fantasy story where who you are, who came before, and who will come after.

All that matters.

All of these concepts are core to the myth and essence of storytelling.

And these new games lack these concepts to such a degree that older games feel more real than the newer ones, and this is that "magic something" that is missing. This is an indictment of the writers and creative teams of these games; either they chose to willfully minimize the strong societal glue of family and homeland, or the writing reflects their own lives and experiences, which lack that crucial concept of kin and blood connection to a home and people.

And 101 special race options from every point and place in the planes make the entire concept worse. These silly, colorful marshmallow shapes are ultimately meaningless character options that have the net effect of isolation and loneliness. If I only have the four classic race options: human, dwarf, elf, and halfling, I am forced to make clan, kin, homeland, and connections to kingdoms and peoples.

If I am a fire elemental, well, who cares? I have no connection to anything, and I can forego any connection back home to the plane of fire, the clans, and the nations of the fire-home. I don't even need to think about it. I am the "wookie" of the group, have a silly voice, and am the constant outsider without a connection to anyone or anything. With a group of special races, the entire group becomes outsiders in a relatively normal fantasy world, and can just sort of skip across the surface of the pond like a rock, never needing to involve themselves in local issues of blood and nation.

We end up with the "party of complete outsiders," and those connections to the world become meaningless. The outsiders are constantly forced into the middle-person role in any conflict. They always wander into a strange town. They are forever strangers in town. They have no connection to anything, and they are essentially nobodies in the game world.

Too many aliens in science fiction also do this. It is always a strange foam-rubber creation with no connection or meaning, the silly shape of the week, and none of them have any meaning or reason to be there other than being background filler.

I would rather play a game like OSRIC 3.0, with very limited race options, and have each one be richer and more meaningful. Even if you add the Drow, Centaur, and other special races from Adventures Dark & Deep, I still have a far more focused and limited set to work with. I can work with these. I can world-build with this set of special races.

You start adding in aliens, like plant people, mycanoids, elementals, void creatures, dragonkin, and other special races - you start to get into entirely alien societies in the traditional fantasy mix. It becomes almost impossible to worldbuild. Layering on the concepts of kin, clan, and family is a huge reach for building a world like this, especially with alien societies thrown in there. How do mycanoids gather in "pods" or "clutches" and how do they see the concept of land and ownership? Do they even? Are they communal? How would they react to a dwarven kingdom taking their caverns and land? Would other kingdoms, like elves and humans, even see the mycanoids as familiar enough to care about, or are they utterly monstrous and alien to traditional society?

Would dragonkin be seen as the allies of evil dragons and trusted? They would just be "large kobolds" to some people, and more of a threat since their bloodlines run with the evil winged beasts of lore. A "red dragonkin?" Would they even be trusted if all red dragons are chaotic evil?

I have no time to think about kin, clan, and family, since I am dealing with how 101 alien societies are trying to interact with one another, how they see each other, and how fundamentally alien societies are trying to co-exist in a world too small for all of them. The easiest way to handle this is to ignore it all, and most games tell us to do just that.

So if I ignore this all, the shapes become meaningless. I have no distrust of dragonkin. I have no communal mycanoids. I have no clans or kin among the dwarves. The star elves are there because they just are. Every race thinks and acts like each other; they are just "special character shape selections." Oh, I can write strong family stories between them, now, even though the rules say nothing about it.

But I lose something with too many random fantasy races. I lose meaning and conflict. Everything becomes too cosmopolitan and modern. The planar norms apply. The mystery and wonder of a magical world are gone. Entering a fantasy world feels like walking into a giant airport with connections to every part of the world, each a different plane of existence.

It is an impossible task to worldbuild here other than to throw up my hands and give up. Are there wars between planes? Migration? Do they know about each other? Are some planes conquered by demons? Is there a planar military or police force? Do angelic planes run crusades on evil planes? Are some planes filled with infectious organisms or hazardous and invasive biological life? Are some planes entirely dragon-based life? Are there modern and science-fiction worlds in here?

It is easier to ignore it all and assume "nobody knows about anyone except the players."

It is a cop out.

It ruins my worldbuilding.

These special, anything goes race selections remove more than they add.

I can tell better stories in more grounded worlds with fewer options. My worldbuilding improves significantly with a limited palette of choices. I can make family, kin, and clan matter much more. This is why classic games feel more real to me. Even if the rules are exactly the same, the original games were written in a different time, when who you are as a person, who you are related to, and who will come after really mattered.

The special shape you choose does not immerse you in the world; it insulates you from it.

Today's writers and creative teams just cannot deliver what they have no concept of. These games mirror a transient, aimless, side-hustle, and temporary state of life for the modern artist and writer. They have no concept of history, homeland, family, or future. The most important quality is not performing acts of goodness; it is the acquisition of power in an increasingly shrinking world - at any cost and by any method. Alignment is gone, so the game won't even judge your vile deeds to achieve your goals.

All this choice in modern gaming is a fallacy.

Modern gaming reflects a fake and aimless life.

And it shows.

A Brush with Disaster

I had an issue where I nearly had to evacuate the house last night. So I got my clothes, computer, and other necessary things packed and ready to go. Thankfully, it turned out to be nothing but a big nothing, but it was scary. All is well, and I unpacked, having survived a brush with disaster.

But my 2d6 games were in my travel bags, again. If I were to "lose it all," then my 2d6 games would be the bridge that gets me through. I wanted GURPS, but I would need to have a bag ready with GURPS, since there were way too many choices to make when throwing things in a travel bag and packing in a panic. The 2d6 games? In a small mini-tablet bag, and still ready to go.

The biggest advantage of 2d6 games over GURPS and even 5E is that no software is needed to play, and all you need are commonly available six-sided dice. I should be hauling GURPS and possibly OSRIC 3.0 along, but the 2d6 games are just enough for an emergency, given my state of mind. The polyhedral dice set would need to be pre-packed, since sorting and choosing one in an emergency would take too much time. That is easy enough, but I always have six-siders in my travel bags.

Not needing access to computers or character design software clearly gives you an advantage when carrying around a simpler, fast-playing, no-software-needed game. My 2d6 games fit that role, and OSRIC 3.0 also does. Shadowdark would also work. OSRIC would be a bigger, heavier book, but you can get a lifetime of gaming out of that. With GURPS, all you need is the two core books, but needing software puts the game at a disadvantage for portability.

OSRIC 3.0 is brought up here because it is a self-contained, complete implementation of the original 1E rules and the best version of the greatest role-playing game ever made. The PoD book from DriveThru is a single, softcover volume that would travel well, but be a little bulky. It replaces all of 5E and every OSR game ever written, so there is a value to choosing that game as my champion to grab when I am rushing out of the door and into oblivion.

GURPS is far more compelling to me as well, so there is that to consider. Two books for any genre imaginable is a strong prospect, and that promise still holds up. I still need software to play this, so that adds a computer, Internet access, and power requirement into the equation. Arguably, OSRIC is far better with printed character sheets as well, to keep all the numbers straight. The 2d6 games beat them both in not needing much of anything in terms of character sheets or software.

Remember to pack pens, pencils, erasers, dice, a ruler, and a small journal notebook or two! You can grab the books, but you still will not be able to play without the basics. It is best to pre-pack these sorts of things and leave them in your bug-out bag.

The thing that keeps those 2d6 games in my "grab and go" bags is genre support. FTL Nomad and Sword of Cepheus 2nd Edition have tons of tables, charts, world and universe creation systems, encounter tables, and lists of stuff to keep me busy for a good, long time when my mind is in a panic and not thinking straight. With a game like GURPS, I still need to "design it all myself," and with my brain not working correctly due to panic, that's much harder. With the 2d6 games, I can turn my brain off, create a character, and have random chart adventures while I sit in that hotel room trying not to think about home. Even OSRIC fails that test; where the 2d6 games shine is that they are portable "mini-games" and entire universes and adventure-creation engines in a small book.

What a night.

Well, disaster averted, but a few truths were revealed as I rushed to leave behind a history of gaming and had thoughts of seeing it all burn.

What I chose to be left with are my truths.

I can play these 2d6 games with the stationery they supply in the hotel room, and I do not need access to a printer, my library, the Internet, or anything else. And the bags are as big as my iPad Mini, and that travels with them.

Losing Touch With Reality

My SCA experience changed me.

The one thing "doing it all for real" highlights is how utterly childish and fantasy-land D&D and many of these fantasy games have become. We have talking frogs, bear people, planar magics, every class with infinite-use video-game blaster powers, glowing magic coming out of our hands, impossible weapons, combat tactics that would get you killed in the real world, death is impossible, and being able to sleep a night's rest and heal off a shotgun blast to the face.

Today's tabletop role-playing games have turned so silly and childish that I can't really call them games anymore, because part of the definition of the game is "there needs to be winners and losers."

And all of these games tell you outright, "everyone wins."

In Tomb of Horrors? Your character dies, you lose. Just like it was in AD&D. We started to go off the rails with the "too heroic" AD&D 2nd Edition, and the railroad "novel adventures" that defined that game and era, and eventually led to bankruptcy.

Since then, D&D has been defined by two of the most toxic forces in gaming: the MMO and the mobile game. Both of these gaming models turn loneliness and FOMO into profit, and those are harmful to our well-being and mental health.

Bits, bytes, MMOs, and having your face stuck in the digital coffin of a phone mean you will die lonely and alone. You will not have a life. They engineer these games this way because they know that if they provide a "fake answer" to the problems they create, they can monetize the solution.

I found an escape. The SCA. A real place with real people, and no phones. Playing pretend, but doing it for real. No gaming, just the reality of trying to do this all ourselves.

Granted, if you "find a D&D group" that is also an escape, but in the post-COVID era, it is very hard since so much has moved online, and Wizards is turning D&D into a "digital first" experience. The era of the local game store and finding people to play with is ending. Those stores, face-to-face groups, and places will slowly die off like the Detroit automobile. Wizards will kill them all in the search for profits. The character sheets, chat rooms, and best place to find a game will be in the connected graveyard of D&D Beyond, where face-to-face interactions go to die.

D&D (and 5E) is designed to require a heavy backend support model to play. This isn't like AD&D, where you could play on a sheet of school notebook paper. You need thousands of hours of software and web development to ship character sheets, storage services, online systems, portals, websites, backend servers, and support teams just to run a character sheet.

What is this?

It is corporate D&D.

Paid subscriptions required.

5E can't really be played alone, and the model pushes you online. The game is designed to slowly strip away your connection to reality, with too much of the fantastic and not enough to keep it grounded. D&D isn't even fantasy, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance anymore; any connection to history has gone through a messy divorce, with the original creators called terrible things. Those sins caused the game to lose touch with what it was, and today it joins the rest of "fantasy slop" that World of Warcraft, mobile games, and Wall Street push on us like "the next Fortnite."

I need my fantasy games to connect to history and reality. Sorry, that is non-negotiable. The fantastic isn't special anymore when it is commonplace. The planar multiverse sucks and is just a writer's cop-out for not wanting to put in the work or learn the lore. I will gladly pay the company that has a writing and creation staff that cares about the lore, rather than these outfits that "hire anyone out of college" and tell them, "do whatever you want."

Sorry, lazy Wall Street holding company, not good enough, no money for you. I couldn't care less about you being a way to pay people in your college clique. Care about the lore, because the "old school players" will be the first you come crawling back to when your new edition fails. And we will be the first ones kicked out the door when you get popular.

We'd better get something from it.

I like ToV and the 5E I built.

It is still inferior to the game and connection to reality and history that we had.

History and tradition matter more than the next big popular "mobile game thing."

Wall Street has that backward, and it will never, ever change.

Society for Creative Anachronism

I attended an event put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) the other day, at a friend's invitation, and I joined the next day. The SCA is a legendary organization, dedicated to period recreations of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is an amazing group of people, dedicated to their crafts, and just an amazing experience to take part in.

But be forewarned, you get out of this what you put into it.

And this is 100% diametrically opposed to roleplaying. While I bet many of their members roleplay, what they do at the events IS THE REAL THING. You are not pretending to be a medieval knight; you are putting on armor, fighting with padded swords, and actually being one. You are not showing up at events and playing D&D, either, since that did not exist in this time period.

You do not roll dice here and play pretend.

You actually do the thing.

Be it arts and crafts, scroll making, being a knight, archery, fencing, cooking, clothier, musician, or any other occupation or craft they did in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, you actually learn and DO THE THING.

You are not pretending to be a dragon boy, wearing a fur suit, putting on pointed elf ears, wearing cosplay Tiefling horns, or swinging around a prosthetic tail; you are taking on the role of a person who "could have existed" in the time, with the skills used during the time, and you participate in the events, battles, court, and other games and ceremonies.

You can't play a wizard, warlock, or other make-believe thing here - if it was real and existed in the world at the time, that is what you do.

D&D and many other fantasy games have this tendency to slip into areas harmful to mental illness. They are far too pretend and make-believe, and they lose touch with reality. Everyone has magic, every place is planar, every modern convenience has a fantasy equivalent, every race is a special magical animal or planar being, and you get into this one-upmanship and insane power curve that just reeks of childish "nuh-uh, I am more powerful than Godzilla" sort of "my pretend character is better than you."

In modern games can suck, you can have a number on your character sheet and magically not suck. You can walk around, say "my father is Odin, so I can..." and tell people how you do stupid, impossible things.

In the SCA, if you can't bead, craft, cook, sew, or do something of value, you suck, and no number on a character sheet will say otherwise. Spend time, learn, get better at the real skill in the real world, maybe make some money with the skill you have now - and NOT SUCK.

And you can't say you are Merlin, Gandalf, or some real-world historical figure.

You are who you are, and you do the real thing.

Guess what, if you spend 100 hours "learning the thing" on the character sheet, and have that skill, that is 100 fewer hours of playing pretend and learning a real trade or craft. You get the satisfaction of learning how to fire and glaze clay pottery or figurines. You get the skill to know how to sew period clothing, sing, or play music. You get the skill in melee fighting.

You get to do the things.

And you never pretend to, using dice and numbers on a sheet to cheat at real life.

And not one person at the event I went to yesterday had their face locked to a phone. They were all pretending to be "the persona they adopted," and since phones were never available at the time, nobody got them out, nobody used them during the event (except to take pictures), and nobody was locked into death-scrolling and ignoring the world around them. There were hundreds of people, dressed in period clothing, all speaking face-to-face, none of them on phones, and I felt like I was back in the 1980s.

While these games are fun hobbies, never, ever pretend they are a replacement for the real thing. Again, I am sure many members enjoy historical role-playing games, but none of them hold a candle to actually going out and doing it for real. Until you are there, doing it, at an event, you just don't know.

It was an amazing day.

And it made me see how modern "role-playing games" have lost touch with reality.

Tales & Battlezoo = My D&D

There is an innocence and clean implementation of Tales of the Valiant that I really appreciate. This is the best "generic 5E" you can get, and unlike D&D, I don't have to keep telling myself excuses to justify playing the game, despite all its baggage from Wizards.

I grew tired of the constant virtue signaling in the art, the absolute disaster of the OGL, them telling an entire group of players they could not leave fast enough, and all the terrible, negative, hurtful things they did over the years. The warning labels on the older books were like those on cigarette cartons. The disrespect thrown at the game's original creators.

There comes a point where you prove the company is unworthy of carrying the legacy forward, and Wizards has done that over and over again. And I don't really trust "the new guy" since these people come and go every few years. I saw this with the D&D 3E, 3.5E, 4E, 5E, and 5.5E teams and creators. Nobody stays at Wizards for long. In a few years, it will likely all be run by AI anyway.

Tales of the Valiant has a no-AI pledge, and the company needs this game to be their lifeline should 5E get dumped into the dustbin of history by Wizards, and make no mistake, that day is coming. They say 5E is evergreen, but history proves that a new team will make something new, and that will be the next, new, official thing.

The 5E "platform", just like the Linux "platform", is a solid, workable, good system. Just like there are some Linux vendors I can't stand, there are some 5E vendors I refuse to work with. One of them is Wizards, despite my memories, nostalgia, and history. I support the 5E platform, not D&D.

ToV was written as a beginner's game, and it was criticized for offering only two subclass choices per class; this was later addressed in the Player's Guide 2. Then again, for a beginner's game, I only want two subclass choices per class instead of D&D's four per class. The book gets too big for new players to grasp; there are too many choices, and those entering the hobby will walk away with choice paralysis.

Two clear choices are better than four for a starter game, and the ToV ones are very clear, offering "A or B" choices that support new players, and don't leave me feeling "did I make the wrong choice?"

ToV feels like old-school Labyrinth Lord back in the day. The "no baggage" and "clean support" version of BX that introduced me to the OSR. I have my original BX books, but I still chose LL over that. LL had the support, community, and love of its creator to drive interest. There is no "product identity" in here lying in wait as a trap, so I can't share content; if it is in the Black Flag SRD, it is pretty widely supported everywhere.

ToV's designs are close to the original 2014 standards, and all the "roleplay" powers are bept intact. A clear example is the ranger. The D&D 2024 version of the ranger feels like a combat-only class that focuses more on tactical battles, and the nature and roleplay powers were stripped out, likely because they were harder to support in a (now defunct) VTT.

Tales of the Valiant's ranger preserves the nature skills and abilities, and it aligns closely with my ideas of what the "5E ranger" is all about. I want a design closer to 2014 than Tasha's or 2024, and ToV hits that nail on the head. ToV keeps the best parts of the game, fixes all the problems, and creates a "clean room" version of 5E that can be supported forever.

D&D 2024 will only last as long as it takes Wizards to pump out a new version of D&D, and the life left in 5E as "the D&D system" is on a short clock. If the 2024 version failed, it would trigger the official D&D 5E support's sunset phase.

I would rather have a system that will be around a long time. And that is Tales of the Valiant.

The Battlezoo books complement the game perfectly, adding all sorts of all-ages fun while preserving the innocence of the core game. These are my "expansion books" that fill in a bunch of thematic gaps, and add a wealth of new options for dragons, monster training, and a rich assortment of other backgrounds to play.

If I am going to invest in a Battlezoo campaign and the hardcovers, I am going to invest in a 5E system that won't be replaced a few years down the road.

And there are all sorts of fun things to play here, and so many adventures to be had with all of these wonderful books. The Roll for Combat team "gets it," and they keep their books family-friendly while overdelivering value and creativity. These are fun books meant to engage your imagination, 5E system-neutral, and highly compelling, delivering enjoyment.

If I wanted to play a dragon, I could play a dragon.

Instead of promising adventure and delivering virtue signaling, these books expand what is possible and deliver amazing potential and infinite stories. They stay out of politics. They stay out of the online culture wars. I want an escape from this world, and they deliver.

ToV does the same; it doesn't insult old-school players by removing orcs and goblins from the bestiary. If I want them, they are there, just like they were in 2014 D&D. Nobody is making that choice for me; I make it. D&D 2024 feels the need to make these choices for us, and it rubs me the wrong way, like the designers are making a value judgment on me and how I play, and that is no place for them to be.

Sometimes the best thing a designer can do is stay out of my game.

But these days, I only want positive influences and happy games that don't trigger hurtful feelings or memories. I don't want to see the war on the Internet all over the pages of a game I use to escape it. I want something suitable for everybody, without hidden sex coding or demon fetishes all over the art.

If I want mature concepts or the sensitive topic of devil worship, I will add them myself. My choice: stay out of it, agenda-driven design team. A family-friendly game that avoids prejudging old-school players gives me the room to make that choice.

All of this works together so well, and the Battlezoo books are the last reason I keep 5E around on my game table. Highly engaging and worth the money.