What would be really nice is if more designers considered heavily stylized or more abstract art styles in their games. Lotta folx chase a "Realist" or "Painterly" art style and like if that's what you arrive at after a lot of thought, cool, but the art in your game is a tool

More than almost anything you write, the images you include in the book tend to sell the world and the setting. Using realistic style art helps to sell this as a world the players might inhabit, but limits the expressive power that the right style could have with your game

i kinda suspect the reason its the dominant art style in games is due to D&D's use of expensive, prestige illustrations, but that's a topic for another time

what i guess I'm trying to say is that the TTRPG industry has a mistaken belief that Good Games look a very specific way, influenced largely by the dominant voice in that industry, and it's an attitude that artificially limits what games can be and look like. Break it.

Semi Related this thread by @MelloMakes kinda touches on this from a different angle. Making everything look like D&D is the same as making everything sound like an Epic Movie Trailer. It's limiting on so many levels. https://twitter.com/MelloMakes/status/1249822724572286976

@CDGuanzon your thing about Hearing the Art made me think of this