Quote from: Spinachcat;630009Maybe having more child friendly art will help market 5e to a younger audience. Pixar D&D may not be a bad move.

Not a bad move? When I think of what D&D can offer, one type of play that I can't hear enough of is some nice fairy tale adventure. It can't be all about hardened adventurers dungeon plundering. Some damsel rescuing, dragon-slaying, and black knight defeating is good clean fun.

I don't think we have enough reason to believe that's where this is all leading, but "Pixar D&D" as it's being dubbed here would be a different look from past editions, and not necessarily in a bad way.

Quote from: JamesV;630097Not a bad move? When I think of what D&D can offer, one type of play that I can't hear enough of is some nice fairy tale adventure. It can't be all about hardened adventurers dungeon plundering. Some damsel rescuing, dragon-slaying, and black knight defeating is good clean fun.

I don't think we have enough reason to believe that's where this is all leading, but "Pixar D&D" as it's being dubbed here would be a different look from past editions, and not necessarily in a bad way.

And in all fairness, it's only the PCs who appear pixar.  The monsters by and large look great.

They can keep this style, I don't mind.  I would, as mentioned, like to see a few different styles however.  I loved that about TSR D&D in that you had Easley, Elmore, Caldwell, etc all be included as core artists.  I find the same ol' 4e style boring and meh.  Mix it up.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;630100And in all fairness, it's only the PCs who appear pixar.  The monsters by and large look great.

They can keep this style, I don't mind.  I would, as mentioned, like to see a few different styles however.  I loved that about TSR D&D in that you had Easley, Elmore, Caldwell, etc all be included as core artists.  I find the same ol' 4e style boring and meh.  Mix it up.

Very good point about the difference between eds 3 and 4, and everything prior. The art of the 1st and 2nd edition had way more variety in not just artists, but style. The look of the 3rd and 4th edition was more homogeneous, and I think that impaired things.

You could look at the art of the 1st and 2nd edition and envision all sorts of games. You look at 3rd and 4th and see only one type of game.

Quote from: JamesV;630105You could look at the art of the 1st and 2nd edition and envision all sorts of games. You look at 3rd and 4th and see only one type of game.

Muscle bound dragons with lots of spikes and lower jaws much larger than upper jaws, and PCs with mouse like faces.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;630117Muscle bound dragons with lots of spikes and lower jaws much larger than upper jaws, and PCs with mouse like faces.

So true.

Personally I always hated Gnomes, I can't stand the little Gits.  I would much prefer to play an Orc or even a Goblin before playing a stupid Gnome, little bugger's with their discounts on hotels. LOL

Quote from: CRKrueger;628773Note for the Art Director: Do not replace anime schtick with Pixar or WoW schtick.  Two words : Michael Komarck.

Doesn't he do artwork to support Game of Thrones, and other obscure licenses from the dead format of print? Big mistake. Gotta cater to the sensibilities of the videogame and manga crowd. After all, D&D these days is just a quirky offshoot of World of Warcraft, not something that would appeal to the handful of people who read stuff like Game of Thrones.

Quote from: Kaz;628802But that doesn't mean it has to LOOK like a game for kids. I remember being a kid, and being very interested in the awesome looking things geared toward older people (movies for example).

Absolutely. Nothing I hated more as a 10-year-old than stuff was geared to appeal to kids. Because by that age, anything that smacked of even 7 or 8 year olds was lame. Pixar movies are geared primarily at 4-8 year olds. No self-respecting 10 or 12 year old boy is going to clamour to watch Finding Nemo.

If I was 10, I would be blown away by this stuff, not something that looked like it was pulled from a Tangled storyboard.

Quote from: jibbajibba;628956My 13 year old self had a bedroom full of Boris posters. Doesn't mean that I think they are appropriate for a main stream game you can actually sell in shops to kids.

Why wouldn't you want to appeal to today's equivalent of your 13-year-old self?  

D&D was a mainstream game for about 9 months in 1983. It's naive to think 5E will be a game that grandparents buy at Target for their 10-year-old kids. If it's a game that high-school and college age kids play, the 10 and 12 year olds will follow. That's exactly how it worked in the 70s and 80s. D&D became enormously popular before it started catering to 10-year-olds. Heck, the blue-box Holmes set that introduced me to the game said Adult Fantasy Roleplay right on the box. That only made us want to play it more. And frankly, the kind of parents who worry a lot about what kind of pictures their 10-year-old looks at won't be onboard with D&D in any manifestation.

Quote from: jibbajibba;628956My 13 year old self had a bedroom full of Boris posters. Doesn't mean that I think they are appropriate for a main stream game you can actually sell in shops to kids.

Why wouldn't you want to appeal to day's equivalent of your 13-year-old self? D&D was a mainstream game for about 9 months in 1983.

It''s naive to think 5E will be a game that grandparents buy at Target for 10-year-old kids. If it's a game that high-school and college age kids play, the 10 and 12 year olds will follow. That's exactly how it worked in the 70s and 80s. D&D became enormously popular before it started catering to 10-year-olds. And frankly, the kind of parents who worry a lot about what kind of pictures their 10-year-old looks at won't be onboard with D&D in any manifestation.

Quote from: RPGPundit;629624Then I doubt you'd have bought it in any case. Seriously, what's next? People boldly stepping forward to declare that the typeface they're using means they'll Never Buy A D&D Product Again?

The joke of the thing is how shallow and obvious an excuse that is to cover up a prejudiced decision right from the very start.

I don't know, call me crazy, but the reason I wouldn't buy 5e is if the rules as a whole suck ass.  I think pretty much any other reason besides that would mean that you never actually even considered buying it in the first place, and you're just using your situation to loudly justify your hatred for a game that isn't even out yet.

The artwork of an RPG does influence my attitude towards it. It conveys the feel and attitude of the game world. The artwork of some games (Midnight, the Savage World of Solomon Kane, The One Ring, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay) helped sell me on the games. The artwork for others (Pathfinder, D&D 3E and 4E) contributed to my wariness.

I know when I present a game to my group, it shapes how they feel about it too. We're more of an immersion-oriented group than rules crunch group, so this stuff matters to us. And judging by how much of their budget RPG publishers spend on artwork, they clearly recognize that it affects the opinion of a lot of people.

Yep, when A/D&D was at its height of popularity (c. 1981-84) it was selling tons of copies to kids between about 9-14, but a big part of how it was able to do that was by appearing as if it was a game geared towards and intended for "adults" (or at least high school-college age). The notion that they were reading and playing something age-inappropriate both served as an ego-boost ("I'm only 11 but I play this 'adult' game") and also gave it a level of "forbidden fruit" coolness and cachet - especially when combined with the mass-media Satanism scare (that anyone who actually read or played the game knew was complete nonsense). For nerdy 'tween kids in the early 80s, playing D&D felt like a form of rebellion and an expression of individualism and non-conformity, even though the truth was that tons of kids that age were doing the same thing and the actual adult players were almost certainly the minority (which is to say there were probably about the same number of them there had been in the 70s).

It's ironic that TSR's attempts to blunt the BADD-type criticism (by removing demons and assassins and nipples in the art and such) and to more directly court the younger audience (through increasingly simplified and sanitized introductory products - black box, First Quest, etc.) managed to undermine and destroy what kids had found appealing about the game in the first place, and turned something that was really a hobby for nerdy kids but looked and felt vaguely dangerous and illicit and therefore cool into just a hobby for nerds, full-stop.

Well a particularly cunning way to handle the art would be to have the Basic set illustrated mostly in the more cartoony Pixar-ish style and then have the Standard and Advanced versions feature progressively more quote unquote adult style artwork, but they'd have to have the strength of will to ignore forum dipshits whining about how the pictures they like aren't "core" or whatever.

Quote from: YourSwordisMine;628669The only problem I have with that picture is that axe... just. to. big...

If the axe is made of mythril, it wouldn't be too heavy for a man of that size to wield. But that's being persnickety.

Quote from: T. Foster;628670The size of that axe-head pretty much single-handedly eliminates any potential interest I might have had in 5E. Luckily I still have my 1974-85 era stuff.

Seriously, your interest is hanging by such a thread as to be chopped by a single axe?

//Panjumanju

One of my reactions to the art was "Oh wow.... realistic, tasteful swords YES! But those axes, oh my...."