How did we go from this

It's almost like lands become more organized as time progresses

You're complaining that there is predictability and 'sameness' to the modern case, but old school rpgs are just as bad. This is a function of how good your GM is not the system or the set dressing.

You realize you're free to use any rules for any setting and that nothing at all forces you to use default 5E Faerun just because you're playing 5E rules, right?

The old books tried to make the world look dangerous/unexplored/mysterious: for example, the surroundings were often shrouded in fog

>ignoring peculiar things about the old setting like firearms existing

So a setting necessarily has to become more boring as time goes on? And it's not even that - nothing has really changed; but by the tone of the books, everything seems more tame.
It's AdventureFunLand instead of DangerousAdventureLand

By using our imaginations to ascend to greater heights of interest than your pleb mind could ever even comprehend

Also nostalgia

lolin at Discount Guardians of the Galaxy there. I like how you could almost write generic personalities and quips for each of these characters based on this picture alone.

>When FR used to talk about firearms existing and how they would eventually take over warfare.
>When FR used to talk about the invention of the steam engine and how people were trying to figure out applications for it
>When FR used to talk about the printing press and how people are becoming literate and it's bothering a lot of the churches/wizards
>When FR used to refer to the fact that wizardry by its very nature is something literally anyone can do if they have the proper training/knowledge, and its basically just the paranoia and power hungry nature of wizards that keeps the common man from learning this

Sounds like you are projecting your shit writing skills

"I'm the charming rogue who is completely irresponsible but also the leader for some reason!"
"Hurr I'm the big hulking warrior with a sensitive side--don't tell anyone!"
"Grrr I'm the angry little guy! Don't underestimate me!"
"I'm the serious competent girl forced to play mother hen to this crazy gang of misfits. Get me out of here!"
"WIZARDWIZARDWIZARDWIZARD JUST CAL ME DOCTOR O-O-RPHEUS!!!"

>Clothes
>Barbarian

It's a well established fact that they shouldn't wear clothes

How can he be a barbarian if his society allows for someone to specialize into metalworking? Sounds like some agricultural society shit

Pigeonholing classes and roles into set, specific limits that they're not supposed to stray out of - and adding pressure to have one of each flavor in your party regardless of whether that makes any in-universe sense. Focusing on specializing character builds to each do one thing and only that thing results in adventuring parties always getting stuck with the same handful of characters mechanically with different faces glued on.

>WIZARDWIZARDWIZARDWIZARD
I'm fucking dying here at the idea of a wizard screaming this as he casts spells at people, I fucking love it

You're talking about old D&D, right?

What's that ?

The answer if Final Fantasy 7.

WotC didn't want DnD, they wanted Final Fantasy. The bought it just for the name. Hasbro wants Final Fantasy. Each of those games makes a hundred times over what each edition of DnD does and costs pennies after development to distribute v hardback books and is in major retailers.

Our desires are insignificant to them.

If I was going to have just one tabletop RPG forever, I would rather have Final Fantasy than D&D.

D&D is nothing like Final Fantasy

>Second Image:
Ew

First Image:
FUCKING GROSS! Second trash please if those are my only options!

>This is how we got there.

You are hating on WotC very incorrectly.

Because I want to play a game with my friends, not write a novel.

And none of my friends wanted to play "Everyone is John The Barbarian".

to actually answer the question 2e was the turning point. it seems silly now but the satanic panic was real shit and dnd was in the crosshairs.

old school dnd was morally gray. there were no good and evil alignments and the design implied very amoral mercenary PCs.

i'm not sure exactly where the quest paradigm came from. probably dragonlance. but the heroes on a quest to save the world paradigm is i think the biggest thematic difference between the two eras. if you judge them by modern standards, most OSR adventurers would probably be evil.

Parkinson died. That's how.

Was it... you know?

Hell, AD&D1e FR had adventures like
>You're a bunch of kids shipwrecked on an island. Survive by killing all of the assholes who live there.

>You're a bunch of mercenaries/try-hards who just learned that the king of some land is dying, and after having a vision in his dreams decided he'll pass the throne onto the champion with the most gold medals in the olympics. FUCKING GO FOR IT.

>There's a pyramid with treasure inside, fuck sacred burial rites

>An antique salesman hires you to hunt unicorns for him

>An ice wizard teamed up with frost giants just stole your horses and kidnapped some folks you know. Bet you're too much of a pussy to do something about it. Bitch.

>A dude with far too much money hires you to kill his daughter's fiancee because the dude is fucking trash.

i see what you did there...

...

the only thing I don't like about this is the liberal SJW aesthetic

>muh wrong generation

>There is nothing wrong with the pic but I will hate it anyway because I am a smelly moron.

Nigga, the first people to ever be named barbarians by anyone knew how to work iron.

I fucking love you. Made me laugh out loud at the bar

December tends to bring out the loneliness in people. Of course the /v/ermin will shit post

>How did we go from this.... to this?
Cultural influences: the FR campaign set with that illustration was published in 1987. In those years the 'Conan the Barbarian' (1982) and 'Conan the Destroyer' (1984) movies defined the default style of the fantasy genre: an east 'mongolian horde' style meets a west 'viking warriors' style.

As other anons have pointed out the second illustration is tied to our present cultural influences (guardian of the galaxy and such), so, no wonder is different.

If you are impliying that the first is better than the latter i concurr with you but thats is our opinion biased by our tastes.

We are entiled to say that if one likes the second illustration more tham the first then such person has shit tastes, but that came by accepting that the same person has the right of addesing us as nostalgic grognards

>t. classic butthurt liberal immediately resorting to ad hominen

Holy god damn shit, that's my party in d&d right now

>liberal SJW aesthetic
I'm going to ask you to define what that even MEANS instead of throwing around buzzwords that make no sense.

One thing I observe in newer art is a greater focus on individual heroes as the subject. Rulebooks depict them as comic book super hero teams, complete with magic flames and token minorities. I think this is reflected strongly in the rules, where the most important decisions you make in the game is how you customize your character.

OP depicts a horseman at rest with fantastic (but believable) gear. He looks like he's from a specific place. That could be your character, or a villain, or some random lvl2 bandit you encounter. His eyes are shadowed, and his ethnicity ambiguous. The weird pillars on the ground make the environment unearthly in a subtle way.

Ugh I know right? Who the fuck got the terrible idea that character design should confer personality?

>boring_generic_fantasy
Heh.

This affects us on the purely miniatures side of things too. Too many "Americanised" generic fantasy depictions, not rooted in history like how Tolkien tried.

I guess all you can do is stick to the manufacturers and publishers that depict fantasy in the way you like.

Definitely someone who couldn't write characters with any more depth than skin deep.

He means there is a black person in it

>Critizice art with “muh fucking SJW art” rather
>Someone points out this is basically the equivelant of an ad homine attack
>muh stop doing ad homine, you’re probably a butthurt liberal

The irony of accusing someone of ad homine followed by an ad homine attack is satisfying to my bitter old soul.

By aiming for younger and wider audience in pursue of profit grow and futile quest to save themselves from stagnating reputation and image.
The funny quirky party audience will also whine when marketing inevitably swing to something just as difference as those two images are.

Well given that the artist has chosen to represent the characters visually, rather than in writing, his ability to write said characters does not really figure into it, does it now?

That's true, the ability to make good characters does not matter if you don't actually try to make characters out of them.

Oh fuck. DreamWorks Eyebrow has managed to jump franchise. Nothing is safe from infection.

>By aiming for younger and wider audience in pursue of profit grow and futile quest to save themselves from stagnating reputation and image.

I wonder, how many of Veeky Forums posters are quite young of age and discovered roleplaying after 5th e was release?

Personally I'm somewhere in the middle, introduced to rpgs on early 2000s, mid-late 2001. I can neither sympathize with grognards who play 1st-2nd ed ad&d nor the newcomers who were introduced to the game with 4e or 5e.
Come to think of it, it will be almost a decade since 4e was released, man maybe I'm more close to grogs.

Nothing wrong with character illustration, but note how the newer art depicts the super crew in a blank gray cave.

Early game art has more ambiguous characters, placed in interesting environments. To me, the OP picture is about mystery, while the second is about wish fulfillment (look how cool these dudes are!!).

The only mystery in the OP is whether the fuck those white things are weird mushrooms, weird rock formations, or weird insect nests.

So you can only make something characterful in writing?

I was introduced to RP with 3.5. It was shit then and it's shit now.

I can give a character a lot more character in writing than I can with any image, even if the image isn't ultra generic like in the example.

Well, moment of introduction to the hobby does not neccesary means that you have to love first art over second one or vice versa. Second one is just more likely to be found more attractive to the demographic they want to sell their wares too.
>man maybe I'm more close to grogs
You kind of dont really notice these things until you try to connect with younger generation and find out they have totaly different take things from you.

>Too many "Americanised" generic fantasy depictions, not rooted in history like how Tolkien tried.

This, you see it in their Renaissance fairs and how they refer to "Yurop", they don't really have any grounding in a society being anything but a corporate hellhole.

nuGW is a particular kind of bad here. The AoS picture you linked doesn't even look like anything.

Short answer is the influences of weebs (anime/manga) and the widespread popularity of World of Warcraft.

By you buying shit products. Seriously, stop funding this trash and it will go away. Every year there's some kickstarter where a group of guys try get the old school movement going again and it's successful for a few months only for generic trash to get widely promoted again.

What have they done to EQ?

GETfags, most likely. Not too far from 57mil, after all.

>the pauldrons
>the HUEG weapons
>the clothes that somehow manage to look both overdesigned and underdetailed
Yep, that's modern high fantasy alright.

You are no grog my son. I’m 48 and by no means the oldest. Still plenty of the real old timers still kicking around. I started with B/X in 1982 when I was 11. You want to see the real old guard, the founders and orginal players the youngest of those guys is in their 60s. They are at NTRPG Con, GaryCon and Gamehole Con. There are people playing in the same groupsthey started playing with in the late 70s.

Giant weapons and pauldrons started with anime or are we blaming 40k?

Those both look awful

Post your pref bro. The top frame is Keith Parkinson (rip) who was one of the top fantasy artists of the 80s and 90s. Here is one he did for Diablo II (2000).

...

>get the fuck out of our tomb, reeee

THIs Elmore piece for the AD&D 2nd Ed PHB has always embodies the look of D&D to me.

Old school fans are a niche within a niche. We're not "taking back the hobby" in any meaningful way, just doing the things we enjoy.

Funposting aside, his gear also looks
>believable and useful
>like it was created by a specific culture, but not one we immediately recognize
There's certainly more interesting old school art, but everything about the dude in the OP seems like it came from a real place, even down to the horse blanket. He seems more "fantastic" and alien than any of the characters in the second image, even though he doesn't have a fireball over his head or anything else overtly supernatural.

to me Elmore is Dragonlance, Greyhawk-FR etc had products from successor editions, even some FR novel covers were change.

while Dragonlance also had 3rde products the artstyle of Elmore seems to be engraved on my brain with dragonlance.

Just like DiTerlizzi is Planescape, Elmore is Dragonlance. He really captures the romantic (in the literal usage) sense of the setting.

Women are so much better looking in 80s style fantasy

No arguments here m8!

Please provide sauces for each one

>Funposting aside, his gear also looks
>>believable and useful
What gear? His weapon and his shield? He doesn't wear any armour other than a helmet that only protects his scalp, which is barely better than no head protection at all. That fucking belt is not armour. And his lance looks retarded, what's that clump after the tip meant to be? You can barely thrust that an inch into someone, which isn't nearly enough to reliably incapacitate them.

Women used to be so much better looking. It's all skeletons and deformed surgery faces now. The girls back then look more "human" to me, because they have small imperfections, their flaws make them more beautiful.

Just look at this cutie, oh my god.

>fetish corset that exposes breasts
>still have to take it off for sex
That just seems unnecessary.

>dwarf/halfling making the numale face

Maybe if you tried meeting people and didn't assume reality reflects your google image search results for hot women? Just a thought.

Obviously, I was talking about the ideal of beauty, but I forgot user had autism.

I have good news for you user, most women don't fit that ideal and still exist!

>>reddit

>unghhh my nostalgia

>ITT: incels and cucks shitflinging

I wasn't even born back then.
I just think that standard of beauty is better than the ones we have now.

Def has armor on. Helm def has sides and a back. Sword on belt. Your "lance" looks more like a staff to me (or maybe a short spear?). Yup.. gear.

Wow.
You know, I guess D&D5E could have been great if people in WoTC didn't fuck it up

>Women used to be so much better looking.
>Obviously, I was talking about the ideal of beauty!

>black
>female
>full European plate