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There was a lot of responses to my piece of sexism in D&D art, published last week.  People responded in the comments, my inbox, and on twitter.

One of the more frequent counterpoints was that cheesecake art was a part of the history of the game and a convention of the genre, that D&D has always had the cheesecake art and underlying tone of sex. Which implies the two are one and the same, that you cannot have D&D without the thin piecrust of sexism and objectification lurking underneath. Or that by making D&D sexless you’d be removing some subtle or ineffable part of the game.

I disagree. Completely.

Condemn Not Condone

The American South had a long history of oppression and racism. Plantations and humans as property were such a large part of the culture and it was difficult

This is not an old discussion. It was discussed very well by Dread Gazebo here and others wrote here and here. I myself dicussed it numerous times such as here and here and a little here. It even came-up as a topic of conversation on the DM Round Table podcast here. But I was reminded of this again recently, during a forum discussion.

To very briefly summarize the core of the conversation, one side was saying that the eventual 5e should further emulate and draw inspiration from video games while the other side was concerned about drawing too much inspiration from video games. In full disclosure, I was arguing on the latter side.

Bad Inspiration

Let’s start with one clarification: I do not believe video games are a poor source of inspiration and are not to be emulated

At the time of this writing there are 3045 feats in the Compendium. Compare this number with the 2500 from core 3.5. There are a metric tonne of feats, and more published each and every month.

Feats received a very minor tweak in D&D Essentials: no longer having tier as a pre-requisite and instead more often improving as level increases (a very good idea) and being grouped by sub-type.

So, with that in mind, I’d like to look at feats, at what they do vs. what they should do vs. what they could do.

Origins

Feats were introduced in 3e, the big change and addition of that edition. Skills were comparable to the proficiency system of 1e/2e and the various class abilities were nothing really new, just tweaked. But feats were different. Some replaced the more potent proficiencies (like

The recent GenCon announcement that Ravenloft, my all-time favourite campaign setting – official or otherwise – is the 2011 campaign setting has sent my imagination into a tizzy resembling a hummingbird on a Red Bull and crystal meth high. One of my favourite parts of the campaign world was that monsters were not standardized  and were often break-the-rules powerful.
Now, in 4e, non-standardized monsters are the norm. Every monster is a special exception. Part of what made the original Castle Ravenloft adventure so interesting was that it broke the rules of 1e D&D and defied the expected behaviour of boss monsters: all vampires were identical and boss monsters happily waited in their lair at the end of the dungeon for you to come and thwack them. But Strahd did neither. He wasn't

Everyone in gaming should be familiar with Nodwick. The archetypal henchman of a 1e D&D adventuring party that used him to find traps and could somehow manage to carry an impossibly large pile of loot. A spoof on the expendable yet inexorably loyal followers of earlier edition who were primarily employed as a justification for how the party was transporting an entire dungeon's worth of treasure. A result of the cruel, unforgiving mistress that was encumbrance: the hard cap on how much you could carry before being weighed-down.

While henchmen have been removed from the game and traps are no longer carefully avoided or negated by sacrificing an NPC ("You killed the hireling? Okay, that's one success.") encumbrance is still in the game.

Earlier Editions

1e actually tracked weight by gold pieces.

So what would a 4e D&D video game look like? Well, hopefully alot like D&D and probably fairly similar to other D&D games of time past. But there has been a healthy variety of D&D role-playing games from combat-heavy to combat-lite, real time and turn based, or dungeon crawls vs. story-heavy epic tales.

But what type of game would do 4e the most justice?

Real time or Turn based

4e is a turn based tabletop game that relies on giving players a choice of something interesting to do every round. While there's still a market for turn based RPGs, most of these come from Japan. The epitomical team-heavy turn base is the Final Fantasy Tactics series, last updated in '08 through a sequel, although an updated port of the original game was released for the PSP in '07.

Turn base has its problems. It

There have been many D&D video games in the past but are currently no new releases or announced games in development. The first time in a long, long while where there has been no expected D&D computer or console game.

This is a little odd given the cries of how much 4e compares with a video game.

Looking Back

The first few D&D video games were for the Intelevision system of the very early '80s, followed by Final Fantasy as the first itineration of that gave is very much a D&D video game complete with Vancian spellcasting.

But the golden age of D&D video games was the reign of SSI (Strategic Simulations, Inc.) from 1988 to the mid-90s. The venerable SSI produced no less than a reputed 30 D&D video games including five for the Forgotten Realms setting, three for Dragonlance, two for Ravenloft