Dragonlance

Intellectual property rights. Weis and Hickman are reluctant to let their baby go and so it languishes in obscurity.

They're That Guy bait because they read that it's a race of thieves that nobody is allowed to get mad at.

What they miss is the part where Kender have no sense of money or property, so the things a Lender would want to take might just be useless trinkets, and they might accidentally leave their own money in return. And of course, a That Guy playing a Kender would also never return something they took.

A Kender can be played well. It's just the sort of race that attracts the worst players, like Kitsune or Tieflings.

Reading the setting they have not only That Guy but Mary Sue (lolsocuterandom but literally everyone loves them unconditionally because they are to damn kawaii) written all over them.

Too curious for their own good
Stupidly fearless
No sense of other peoples property
Askstupidquestionsonerightaftertheotherknowwhutimean?
Expect everyone to coddle them

Basically your typical PC party, dialed up to 11.

Yeah, but I'm sure game play wise it would have been easy to balance them

Really? In the books people couldn't stand the kender and Tasselhoffe was really the only kender portrayed in a positive way.

A lot like naive children rather than a real people

Would giving it over to WotC mean no longer being able to write about it? I though Weiss stopped writing for the IP awhile ago.

Same reason they hate Dragonlance; Greyhawk is at least partially not their IP, so they'd rather focus on FR which Greenwood signed away all rights to decades ago.

Not sure, but they just really don't want WotC shitting up the setting for marketing reasons.
If WotC got ahold of Dragonlance we'd suddenly see the Heroes of the Lance show up literally everywhere doing literally everything because they're the most notable and well-known characters in the entire franchise.

>it's another IP rights ruin customer experience episode.

Every time

I don't ever recall Kender being loved. Mostly everyone usually just sighed and asked for their things back while doing their best to distract them and get them to leave. They're annoying, but mostly harmless.

They're That Guy if you ignore how they actually behave, and they're Mary Sue if you ignore all their flaws.

There are a shit ton of named and developed characters in the DL franchise though. I don't really know what exactly WotC would do with that. Like, make them do things in published campaigns?

Really my only complaint about Krynn is the pantheon.

And they'd all get stripped down and Flanderized with the majority of the screentime devoted to the "main cast." Hell, look at Faerun; it's simultaneously autistically filled in AND bereft of major power players except the handful known by everyone and their dog.

>If WotC got ahold of Dragonlance
Unfortunately, they did.
The animated movie is about as bad as you'd think it is.

youtube.com/watch?v=0reHLHGyQnM

Because it's a world so boring it makes Faerun look good.
Because there was only one worthwhile story/adventure to tell, and they've bungled pretty much every telling of it after the initial adventures - including the novels.
Because there's nothing particularly unique about the world in a worthwhile way.
Oh, and because one's a big-tittied barmaid, and the other's an 'indian princess' who somehow looks like Daryl Fucking Hannah.

>turned
Kender can be played..."properly". In theory.

When played properly, they won't foment party dissent or fuck things up in-game with NPCs constantly. ...in theory.

This happens, maybe, MAYBE 1% of the time. The other 99% is pure That Guyness. Enough so that the race is pretty much poisoned in perpetuity within the hobby. Understandably so.

What? Kender are probably the most hated race in Krynn, next to gully dwarves, that aren't evil pawns of the Dragon Queen.

They're immediately thrown out of most businesses they set foot within, towns organize posses to chase them out of said towns, on sight. Topknot bounties are a real thing that exists within the setting.

The number of people that will actually tolerate a kender in any given city could probably be counted on one hand.

The only reason Tasslehoff was tolerated/befriended by most of the group (the ones who actually had a history with each other, so not counting Goldmoon and Riverwind) is because he literally helped raise and support Caramon and Raistlin (and Kitiara, to a lesser degree) after they were orphaned (along with Flint), was Flint's friend (and Flint was basically Tanis' savior), accepted and showed kindness to Sturm's mother and himself when he was a child (when most people ostracized them for being Solomnians), was an uncle-figure to Tika after she, herself, was orphaned.

They put up with him because he literally helped raise or showed great generosity and kindness to almost all of them during their childhoods (or was a friend to their closest friend). Even then, most of them were perpetually frustrated, annoyed, and dismissive toward him, "tolerating" far more than "loving".

I do seem to recall that the playtest tried to give them some sort of "everybody likes them deep down!" effect, but it was highly inappropriate, and completely out of character with the race's history as an entity.

Because Dragonlance stopped being good/interesting after the 2nd book

That shit was so bad the fucking Dwarf willed himself to die

I also can't forgive them for shitting on Sturm in his last moments

Eh, only jarring part about that film was the CGI, the opening movie music is good and is even on youtube, and it's a good adaption of the first 3 books, and the only thing they modified was presentation of our Dragonlord cleric fellow, which was for the better because the books had him do absolutely nothing, they actually characterized him more.

Kender aren't nearly as annoying as you think, that's a PC issue of people who play them wrong, the guy in their party would only pickpocket people to give them their stuff back anyway on ocassion and would often keep random tidbits in the adventure that actually proved to be useful later on.

At best, Kender are a mild nuisance that don't understand the concept of personal property, but they don't steal to keep, it's usually just for curiosities sake that they take things if they can. I'm gonna post an oldr quote now.

>as I've been reading it and whathisface with the glasses only does mildly irking things.

Kender, when they are done well, have the player remember that the 'No real sense of property' goes both ways. A Kender is the first to offer to give something to someone who needs it more than they do and should be more interested in...well, interesting things than valuable ones.

Kender Society is more or less 'Communism if everyone was actually naive enough to not game the system' mixed with the usual halfling sense of community. Tools and equipment is something that anyone uses, if they need it. After all, it makes no sense for that hammer to just be sitting in the workshop if someone else needs to hammer in a nail.

A decent short story for the Kender perspective is one back during the years of the Kingpriest with the half-kender son of a Knight trying to apply to become one. He's shitty at the rules part and does stuff like 'Borrow the good parade lances (After blunting them) to help replace the training lances that were broken by some other students' as he doesn't understand having them sitting about in the armoury if they haven't had a parade in decades but he's genuinely got the heart of a knight.

He's eternally willing to stand up to the bully among the trainees for the others because they are his friends and family, even if he gets beaten down every time because that's what you DO for other people. He also holds to the Oath better than most of the others as he's idealistic to honestly believe the idea that swearing 'My honor is my life' is something to be part of your life, even if others are not watching.

He does end up leaving as even he admits that he can't understand the purpose of so many rules in the Measure and ends up becoming a Cleric.

Mind you, the number of people I've seen play Kender without just using it to justify being a dickass thief who takes valuable things because 'lol random theft is in character' I can count on one hand.

Yeah, it seems to be a PC related problem. A better prerequisite to Playing a DL campaign is to provide PC's with the option of Reading the first books up to the death of the first Dragonlord, or to watch the kinds badly animated film that at least got most of the stuff right, and the voices down I guess.

The Wizard going "Oh god, I just sent a Kender BACK IN TIME." Was fucking hilarious though.
>The Wizard going "Oh god, I just sent a Kender BACK IN TIME." Was fucking hilarious though.

The story about the knight has a similar moment. A Knight pondering his son's intention to join the Clerics of Istar, imagining just how much chaos it was going to cause to those assholes and just laughing long and loud. Afterwards he goes and writes a long and glowing letter of recommendation, saying that the pointed ears are because he's half-elven.

Any player whose Kender responds to an accusation of theft with denial isn't playing a Kender. The proper response is "you must have dropped it, I you should be more careful," or "no, that's my , but you can borrow it," or some kind of cute denial of responsibility and return of the property in question.

Moreover, any player whose Kender steals something based on value is not playing a Kender. Kender care about how interesting something is, not what it's worth. A character's starting trinket is much more likely to be of interest than a pile of boring old gold. Other races care about that stuff.

...the hell, someone copied what I wrote then? I'm honestly surprised.

This, they've got to pick up things that look interesting from description alone, or are in places hard to get solely because they wonder what justifies the reasoning for the concepts of security and ownership it's for curiosities sake, not for personal gain.

A kender's that one party member you notice has hoarded random crap that somehow becomes useful ages and ages later because it didn't seem important to use at other intervals when it might have been the main idea to do so. I get why people say they're a race of PCs, because I sometimes do that in videogames with Items I never figured out were useful until later and have immense fun with.

Is this that book series with that homo skinny mage and his warrior brother? I remember reading them when I was a kid. Was it originally a game?

No, it's a book series and a D&D campaign setting.

Also raist is straight, he's just a massive ammoral cunt with hourglass eyes