Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Now your playing with Playtests!

[Nightmarenny]

Oh wow. Eladrin as a 'tiny no-name race'.

They were the inhabitants of Arborea and Olympus and Arvandor. They were like angels and demons and devils, creatures beyond simple classification as a 'race'; they were a category, and in many ways the physical extraplanar embodiments of the chaotic good alignment much as devils were lawful evil and archons were lawful good. They were as much a category as demi-human and humanoid, extraplanar beings who had many different forms and subtypes. Just because the lacklustre 3rd edition barely managed to include them doesn't dilute the fact that they were pretty damn major in their own way.

And were, in fact, the central point of several story arcs. These story arcs are now, as a consequence, rendered invalid. Hell, the settings that they were a part of are also rendered at least partly invalid as a result. Would you enjoy it if some of your favourite stories and settings were completely retconned away by some bunch of people in marketing thinking about what's 'popular'?

In 3.5 the Eladrin are absolutely a no name race.

When you say story arcs do you mean the books? Because I honestly don't care about the way changing the RPG's fluff effects the books but I certainly can sympathize with you if you feel you've lost something there.

At the same time I can say I wouldn't at all feel the same way. For you see I am a comicbook fan. One of the first things you learn in comics is to appreciate a story by itself even if later book decide it "didn't happen"

Your last sentence is somewhat misleading however since it was more likely someone in design going "alright, we can have both these races both be Elves since were trying to cut down on making iteration after iteration of the same creature. What can we call this? Well Eladrin currently isn't taken in our new setting and it sound like it fits them. Lets take that."

I don't get your argument of Pro-Past fluff destroying and introducing new fluff that just fractures the fanbase.

The argument that "at least its new" is a very poor one.

"Transformers may be a sin against art, but hey at least its new from the past series"

Ok well the first thing we need to cover here is that I don't think that 4th editions fluff was bad. It was a bit thin that times but I found I preferred it leaps and bounds over 3.5 which gave me a ton of info none of which I found useful in creating my campaigns.

I liked the Eladrin and the general divide between them and Elves, I really liked the Deva and their connection to the (Tiger head guys, sorry can't remember the name off the top of my head and I wanna sleep) and I like the idea of Tiefling being truly a race instead of a half breed.

That said no I don't think that change is good if its bad change but it is better to at least try. take what worked last time and tinker with what didn't. They did that with the conversion between 2nd and 3 as well.