Apparently, there's a big 'event' adventure coming soon for D&D to mark the transition to the 2024 revised ruleset. This adventure features Vecna as the BBEG, and the smart money seems to be on it featuring some sort of quasi-reboot of the setting - something that will give WotC opportunity to jettison any and all of the accumulated lore they want to be rid of (especially any problematic elements), while also allowing them scope to keep anything they want to retain. And then they can sell us all the books all over again.
The big problem with this approach is that 'problematic' is inherently a moving target, so any notion that this might be a one-and-done thing is almost certainly a fool's hope. In particular, there are three elements that they're going to retain that are very likely to come under fire at some point:
- The use of any non-human intelligent species. We're increasingly coming to the point of view that orcs are inherently stand-ins for people of colour and dwarves for Jewish folk. The same analysis generally hasn't been done for other species, but is readily applicable. The problem there being that if orcs are indeed PoC then depicting them as anything other than human is inherently and unavoidably problematic, and needs to stop.
- Religion. D&D has a big problem in that, on those occasions when it features religion at all, the benign religions lift liberally from Christianity while malign religions are based far more often on non-Christian religions. The problem there is obvious. There are also big issues with cultural sensitivity when religion is concerned, as for much of our world culture and religion remain far more intertwined than in the US and the UK.
- Alignment. Basically, having a gam prescribe what is and is not 'good' is massively problematic.
Bottom line: a quasi-reboot to remove all the problematic stuff may buy a few years, but not many. And, worse, it sets a precedent for how to deal with them that I'd really they rather not set.
