#systems are not what got them interested - 5e is. so you gotta work with what you’ve got

[givemaycoffee]

You can very much be familiar with D&D 5e and not know this, though. I only happened to have heard of the Thri-Kreen (named specifically in the comments of this post) because a friend played as one in a campaign I never heard anything else about.

Bug folks are not part of PHB, so if you’re entry level and buying books, you won’t find them there. And then if you’re someone who likes to find stuff online, the Thri-Kreen were only added to the D&D Beyond list of races very recently (when they revamped all of them and gave them new art). And on the WikiDot they aren’t listed on the main page either - you have to specifically click on the Spelljammer races to find a sublist that they are on.

I think it’s fair to say that entry level D&D players wouldn’t have had any reason to be aware of this. I’ve been playing for 4ish years now and don’t know anything about spelljammer because we haven’t played from that book and I don’t own it. My experience with non-PHB comes purely from what I found via D&D Beyond and the wikidot. I don’t think that’s a totally unheard of approach.

As a technical writer I'm usually not prone to falling into the trap of that xkcd comic about the geologists who think your average person knows the chemical formula for quartz, being as "accurately assessing the probable prior knowledge of a given audience about a given topic" is literally one of my professional skills – but then I start talking about what I consider to be extremely entry-level tabletop RPG stuff and I'm met with shocked exclamations of "wait, back up – there are RPGs where you can play as BUGS???".

[churchyardgrim]

Apologies if this is dumb but in the intro to the Uquiz you mentioned you have some Opinions about the subject of 5e Ravenloft (or at least that's what I got from that); can I inquire about said opinions?

yes u can! i'm always down to talk about shit so u don't gotta be nervous asking hghdf

so i have mixed feelings bc i was introduced to ravenloft through CoS, so my first impressions of it are of the 5e versions of things. and i liked the 5e versions of things!

but then i got to reading the older material, the Gazetteers and 2e and 3e modules, and i realized that there's so much more there! i've only ever played 5e so i'm really attached to that system mechanically speaking, and on its own i really like all the stuff in the new VRGR book, but when compared to the older material it feels very.... lackluster, tbh. like it's bigger and smaller at the same time, like they forgot to salt the water.

like CoS has, on the one hand, a very detailed campaign full of interesting npcs, but they also just chucked half the country of Barovia into the sea and made the map a lot smaller physically, even if there's more in it.

and VRGR itself; i like a lot of the changes they've made, making at least half an effort to scrub some of the more problematic elements from the old material, and making the darklord roster a bit more gender-balanced, it works. but at the same time, it's one book trying to cover, what, twenty-odd domains? where the Gazetteers had three to five domains per 100+ page book? they can't give each domain the space it needs to feel like a real place, and by extension the space the darklords need to feel like impactful and complex people.

so what we end up with is the versions of them that have more to draw from, more details and context and supplementary information, are the versions from previous editions. but man i'd give my left arm to play in a campaign that combines old with new in interesting ways, there's so much you can do with all of it!

so tldr, overall i prefer the older material to the 5e material, mostly for reasons of volume and complexity, but in my ideal campaign world i am scavenging the best bits of 5e lore and jamming them in wherever they'll fit into the old stuff :>