I had a shit morning and am cranky. Let me try to organize my thoughts here re: D&Ghibli

First up: I apologize for being antagonistic. I realize that this is an emotional burden on the creators behind that product, one that I did not want to put on them.

But more details below:

So far, nobody I've seen has actually anything bad to say about the creators, or even their quality of the product for that matter.

However, the reality of D&D's role in the market and within our community cannot be ignored. Even if there's a wonderful new book by good people,

it's still a fact of life that it strengthens the brand of a problematic game made by a problematic company, one that indie devs have been trying to step out of the shadow of for decades. That doesn't mean that there is any ill intent behind the creators of said book, but the

pain and frustration of indie folx seeing not only D&D grow further, but also mainstream geek media jump on this while continually ignoring all the great non-D&D products (even with the exact same premise) is definitely real.

Now I get that as a creator, it hurts when your

product (or even just the context your product is published in) is being critized, even for factors that don't actually have anything to do with you directly (market position, branding, problems inherent to the system framework). Which is why I won't make any further posts about

this in the future, after this thread.

Lastly, I don't know how much I need to touch on the main point of "D&D is a bad system for this story". I stand by this point, but I don't think I'll be able to convince anyone who thinks differently. If you like, we can certainly open

that discussion up as well, but it's not what wanted to use this thread for.

I respect that new creators might use the big brand to get a foot in the door of game publishing.

But it shouldn't be that weird that people with a lot of reasons to avoid D&D will react to that.

Some of the reactions were hurtful. I want to again apologize for that.

But I hope you see that the criticism goes beyond "oh I just don't like D&D". It's about deeply rooted problems in the game, support of a problematic company, and most of all, the frustration of being

consistently ignored by media and fans while putting out an infinite amount of high quality products, just because they aren't D&D.