WotC... just no

A preview of the 6e PHB dropped on the DnDBeyond YouTube channel. I don't recommend you watch it; it's nearly an hour long. But there are some highlights from 6e that are worth pointing out.

First off, the changes to the mechanics sound like they're going to be more substantial than was previously suggested. Although WotC is resistant to calling this 6e, that's clearly what it is. The changes from 5e to 6e sound much more substantial then the changes from, for example, 1e to 2e. I've seen a few people suggest 50e to highlight the anniversary nature of the game. Whatever you call it, it's a new edition, clearly. WotC being disingenuous about that is hardly surprising though.

As one YouTube commentator said, this hardly seems to resemble the game he remembers from his own youth in the 90s or whatever. Not that he's OSR, because he's not, but it's just that the game is nothing like what D&D used to be. You can see it in the art; very twee and precious, everyone smiling and powerful, while almost nobody is white or male or medieval in any sense. WotC fetishizes big, ugly black sheboons in particular, which is odd because it's not like attractive black women are impossible to imagine, as well as all kinds of other ridiculous things: PCs in wheelchairs, black, trans elves with boob removal scars, and most unexpectedly, orcs as Mexican cowboy/Mad Max hybrids.

What in the world are they doing?

Curiously, nobody had thought about orcs being blacks until WotC suggested it. For DFX, I actually thought that made them more interesting. Orcs as not necessarily evil was probably inevitable since Warhammer included then as armies. Orcs were always my favorite team in Blood Bowl, for instance, through the 90s. Warcraft and even Heroes of Might & Magic 3 ran with the idea that they didn't have to be evil. I thought that made them more interesting myself, but I never thought about orcs as negroes, or any other minority, until WotC suggested it: at which point orcs became a more nuanced problem. Sure, they are less intelligent. They are more violent and impulsive. They are incapable of maintaining high civilization, as a whole. But they're not evil, just incompatible with living among the Hillmen. Except, of course, for the talented tenth.

Thought about in this fashion, orcs become more interesting than just "always bad" goons, or as virtue-signaling cheap shots. You actually have to consider what to do about them when they're causing trouble because neither the woke submissive solution nor the hard genocide solution is acceptable to most players. 

All that said, I dunno. There's a big chunk of folks that haven't cared what WotC has done in years. To them, D&D is either some older version of the rules, or some other D&D-like game, maybe even a retroclone. Others have left more recently after WOTC's bad behavior. Maybe this bizarre turn in the game is actually what what remains of their market wants to see. If so, well, there are more alternatives than ever for those who've had enough of their wokeness. Almost too many alternatives, honestly. Nothing in the marketplace is exciting to me anymore because the market is too flooded.

Anyway, here's some DFX orcs. Most of them are even villains.