Jester of the FoS wrote:D&D is bigger than one company, one edition, or one person's preference in monster lore. It's hard to find any common ground. You're not going to alienate a fan by not changing lore, and you're not going to gain sales by changing lore, but you're are going to piss people off and possibly lose sales by changing lore. It should be done carefully.
I think we're looking at it from different perspectives. Glass half full and all that. You're assuming that a change will piss people off, I'm assuming that a change might have a beneficial effect. Sort of "Oh, that's cool, they should have done that from the start" sort of idea.
Jester of the FoS wrote:I like the idea of a progenitor elf race that lives in faerie. That's cool.
I dislike making that a core race under the assumption that having two types of elves is confusing.
And I dislike Eberron and the Realms suddenly having to retcon all grey elves (or moon elves) into being eladrin and being able to teleport.
So you're more against the teleport ability than the race itself, if I understand? Fair enough. The retconning thing I can understand as being annoying; I always thought of it as a "price of doing business" sort of thing. It's change, and no one said change was easy. Ravenloft went through a similar bit when it went from 2E to 3E. Maybe not quite as drastically as some of the 4E changes, but they were definately there (see my note before about Paladins).
Jester of the FoS wrote:Elves were always split into wood elves and grey elves. Way back in 1e they had the split. Heck, when explaining the game to new players I say there's the Elrond type elf and the Legolas type elf.
The problem is assuming having Subraces is complicated and that people will pick the wood elf and try and play a wizard.
Now we have Subraces back (yay) but will still likely have eladrin. I think they'll work better without having to be too elflike, and we can make them faeries plus. We need a good Oberon & Titania magical fae race in D&D.
It's actually a bit more than that, though Jester. For elven subraces we had: elves, Aerenal elves, aquatic elves, avariel, drow, moon elves, painted elves, snow elves, star elves, sun elves, Valenar elves, wild elves, wood elves and more besides. And the way they were presented, they weren't subraces (though they were called that). They were flat out different races. Mechanically-speaking. So if you look at it like that, it might seem complicated to a new player.
But there's another whole question beyond whether it was too complicated: Was it necessary? Are the differences between Wild and Wood elves that much, that we needed a whole separate race for each one? I'm actually really a fan of 5E's way of handling the races, in that you choose "Elf" and you get some abilities. Then you choose your subrace, which doesn't seem to affect the previous choice of "Elf" at all, and it gives you one or two more abilities to make you different from the other subraces. It allows you to show that this subrace is different from that one, while at the same time, showing that they are all "Elves."