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Eberron was the only good thing about 3.5
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Feb 20, 2016 04:25
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Sage Genesis posted:I think supplements such as the Complete Book of Elves also weighed in on this, explaining the various sub-races across all game lines with an evolutionary chart or something? Saying that they all came from the same original stock, something like that. I believe the writer of the Complete Book of Elves later apologised for that mess, with an explanation that they were pretty much winging the whole thing.
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Feb 20, 2016 06:57
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Bieeardo posted:I believe the writer of the Complete Book of Elves later apologised for that mess, with an explanation that they were pretty much winging the whole thing. Colin McComb did indeed apologize, it was a stretch goal for Shadowrun Returns.
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Feb 20, 2016 07:00
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Captain Foo posted:Eberron was the only good thing about 3.5 Now I'm just imaginging the darkest timeline where Burlew won and Baker went on to create a popular webcomic using clay animatronics.
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Feb 20, 2016 07:17
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Lightning Lord posted:Colin McComb did indeed apologize, it was a stretch goal for Shadowrun Returns. He actually did two videos on it, as I recall.
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Feb 20, 2016 07:53
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Kurieg posted:Now I'm just imaginging the darkest timeline where Burlew won and Baker went on to create a popular webcomic using clay animatronics. Incidentally I was just sitting here wondering why they did not do another setting search for 5th Edition since the last one was so popular, then I realized they likely do not have enough staff to even read through that much material anymore. 
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Feb 20, 2016 08:52
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We will literally never know what Burlew's setting was.
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Feb 20, 2016 09:05
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Even Burlew himself is forbidden from divulging the details. But judging by his early writing style in OOTS (and in one of his articles he mentioned it has no less than 5 elven subraces) I'm imagining/fearing it would be a setting where it points out all the fantasy tropes as dumb but begrudgingly goes along with them anyway. Whereas Eberron was more "Genre conventions? Yeah, those are neat, you know what's even better? More genres!"
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Feb 20, 2016 10:06
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Dr. Quarex posted:Incidentally I was just sitting here wondering why they did not do another setting search for 5th Edition since the last one was so popular, then I realized they likely do not have enough staff to even read through that much material anymore. Alternate theory: This edition was marketed to dads with the promise that it contained no scary new things and everything looked like D&D when you were twelve. Any new setting would torpedo that, no matter how retro everything else was.
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Feb 20, 2016 13:26
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moths posted:Alternate theory: This edition was marketed to dads with the promise that it contained no scary new things and everything looked like D&D when you were twelve.  ) without ever once caring whether an adventure was set in Greyhawk or Mystara or whatever, but clearly at a later point some people decided to wank themselves silly over the Forgotten Realms and treat that as the essential heart of the D&D mythos.
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Feb 20, 2016 22:17
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Payndz posted:At what point did specific settings become such a big deal in D&D, anyway?
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Feb 20, 2016 22:21
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Payndz posted:At what point did specific settings become such a big deal in D&D, anyway? As far as I can tell, the early to mid 90s. This is the era when 2e released Dark Sun, Planescape, and Birthright. Also Ravenloft as a whole setting of its own instead of just an adventure. It was the era of metaplot, and White Wolf had shown that people just loved the notion of factions. Just read the various cliques in WW material (vampire clans and such) and then compare them to the Planescape philosophy clubs. You could easily port an adventure from Greyhawk to the Realms or maybe Dragonlance. But Dark Sun or Planescape... not so much.
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Feb 20, 2016 22:46
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While the 90's might've been their peak, they were always popular - and it was a popularity that caught early TSR by surprise. Gygax never considered people would buy someone else's setting, but when people begged for him to sell a book about his Greyhawk setting, he shrugged and did so, only for it to sell far better then anticipated.
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Feb 20, 2016 23:02
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Dragonlance was big one that really set the tone of "big setting which is as much a place for people to write novels about as it is a place to play games in," and a lot of TSR's efforts went to trying to recreate that effect with mixed success.
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Feb 20, 2016 23:49
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I've honestly never read a setting campaign beyond the Gazeteer that had Orks of Thar in it. Homebrew campaign settings were the standard from the very beginning of my D&D experiences (early 1980s) and I've never particularly wanted to play in someone else's. I've had some contact with them, of course. The D&D MMORPG was (good lord, still is) set in Eberron, I played Baldur's Gate (which setting is that in, again?), Neverwinter Nights 2, and I've seen a little bit of Dark Sun stuff on these forums. But to me, the popularity of the big characters in those settings always confused me a bit, because like: I play D&D so it can be about my characters and those of my fellow players, I don't give a gently caress about Drizzt or whoever. But I guess it was mostly due to the novels? I don't think I've actually read a D&D novel all the way through, either. I genuinely can't remember anything that would distinguish Dragonlance from Greyhawk from Forgotten Realms. To me they're all Generic D&D Setting.
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Feb 20, 2016 23:59
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Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale are set in the Forgotten Realms...if I recall correctly you can beat up Drizzt in BG and steal his stuff...which might go some way to explaining Forgotten Realms' rise to prominence as the D&D setting in a lot of peoples' minds, because it has novels and several well-remembered video games. Eberron got some novels but never really got any video games of note, there was a real-time strategy game so utterly forgettable that nobody even remembers it exists and then the D&D MMO which is thoroughly mediocre in most respects, its biggest accomplishment being clinging to life as an F2P game.
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Feb 21, 2016 00:05
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Leperflesh posted:I've honestly never read a setting campaign beyond the Gazeteer that had Orks of Thar in it. Homebrew campaign settings were the standard from the very beginning of my D&D experiences (early 1980s) and I've never particularly wanted to play in someone else's. That's not to say that I don't like settings (Greyhawk, Eberron, Glorantha, whatever) per se, it's just that I'd feel zero obligation to follow their 'future' timeline. Want to kill that Elminster guy? Sure, go for it!
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Feb 21, 2016 00:13
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Leperflesh posted:I played Baldur's Gate (which setting is that in, again?)  Really getting the most out of that setting, huh?
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Feb 21, 2016 00:27
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Payndz posted:That's always been my feeling as well. I don't like someone else's NPCs taking control of the story because a plot point has been reached, and I especially don't want that happening when the person dictating the story isn't even at the table. (If I'd been playing RPGs in the '90s, I sure as hell wouldn't have been playing any White Wolf games or anything else with a publisher-dictated metaplot where my character could be hosed over just because I made the 'wrong' choice of faction to follow.) This was actually one of the best things about Eberron (and one of it's selling points); zero metaplot. The setting's timeline was permanently locked at two years after their equivalent of World War I, which each kindgom secretly prepping for the inevitable World War II. This, plus the lack of flagship characters and the fact that the tie-in novels were all officially non-canonical, made it the best supported setting for just playing around in.
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Feb 21, 2016 00:39
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Even Keith Baker himself says that there's never been any secret canonical explanation for major mysteries of the setting like what caused the Mourning or who the Lord of Blades really is.
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Feb 21, 2016 00:56
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Payndz posted:At what point did specific settings become such a big deal in D&D, anyway? I played B/X and 1e (well, a bastardised version of 1e that was really just B/X with more classes and spells 4e and 3/.5 were both very setting agnostic. 5e isn't because the entire point of 5e seems to be to raise interest in the secondary media. Their actual active staff on the D&D team is maybe four or 5 people. They aren't actively working on any player information books because they can just outsource a bunch of adventure modules and since everything is set in the Forgotten Realms then they've increased the market for all their books and the inevitable movie that they're going to (try to) make.
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Feb 21, 2016 01:36
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The Crotch posted:Forgotten Realms, due south of Neverwinter. That strip of shoreline has been the main setting of pretty much every god drat Forgotten Realms computer game. This also doesn't include Pool of Radiance et cetera. There was a whole other generation of FR computer games.
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Feb 21, 2016 01:50
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If we're being super technical there's also the Demons Stone game that was a 3d beat-em-up.
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Feb 21, 2016 01:55
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That map implies that pretty much none of the realms are still forgotten. Like, they're all remembered realms, basically. Why is it called that? For that matter, is there any dragon lancing in dragonlance, at all? Like is there at least a mounted, lance-wielding dragon-slayer prestige class? Payndz posted:That's always been my feeling as well. I don't like someone else's NPCs taking control of the story because a plot point has been reached, and I especially don't want that happening when the person dictating the story isn't even at the table. (If I'd been playing RPGs in the '90s, I sure as hell wouldn't have been playing any White Wolf games or anything else with a publisher-dictated metaplot where my character could be hosed over just because I made the 'wrong' choice of faction to follow.) My experiences with DMing D&D (which I've done more than playing, actually) is that 97% of the effort you put into developing a grand sweeping campaign setting is totally wasted. Your players will never visit the vast majority of what's on the map, and those places that they do visit, they inevitably ask questions that aren't answered by your notes or the book. Whether or not Elminster exists is irrelevant to a 3rd-level party exploring some loving cave full of kobolds. OK, maybe they find a scroll and instead of Generic Flaming Bolt of Annoyance it's Elminster's Flaming Bolt of Annoyance. Yay! I didn't need to pay for a book to make that up for me. Naturally I had to learn this lesson the very hard way: by spending countless hundreds of hours detailing my own settings, only to have most of that work remain irrelevant. I'm about half-convinced, now, that the real purpose of a campaign setting is to entertain GMs while they sit on the toilet. e. I mean, I do get that cool, different campaign settings introduce cultures, locations, and plots that I might never have thought of, and that can come together to give a setting a unique flavor. But I don't think that sort of thing needs to be system-specific, and the impression I get is that the major D&D campaign settings, while providing that stuff, also spend a ton of time laying out maps, locations, items, spells, equipment, and NPCs in glorious detail, the vast majority of which the DM will never actually need (or get) to use. e2. Undoubtedly my perception is heavily colored by never having gotten to play in a regular, weekly game that lasted for years, which might be atypical for D&D players. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Feb 21, 2016 |
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Feb 21, 2016 02:08
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Leperflesh posted:My experiences with DMing D&D (which I've done more than playing, actually) is that 97% of the effort you put into developing a grand sweeping campaign setting is totally wasted. This holds true for basically every RPG in my experience, and it happens on both sides of the GM screen which is one reason why I quickly fell out of the habit of writing big extensive backstories for characters in games I played, because it never once actually mattered in any meaningful sense more than a brief character sketch and one or two standing plothooks would have. Really, I think there's been a lot of time and effort spent convincing both players and GMs that they need to do way more prep work than they actually do to get an RPG off the ground which is maybe one reason why people view TRPGs as a laborious process. quote:I'm about half-convinced, now, that the real purpose of a campaign setting is to entertain GMs while they sit on the toilet. Campaign settings work best imo when they're basically a big tome of inspirational material that you can zoom in and focus on a small chunk of, using that as a springboard for a game. This is something I feel that Eberron does rather well. The default assumption in Eberron isn't that you run a game dealing with the setting as a whole because the setting as a whole is full of so much different stuff that trying to cram all of it into a game sounds like it would be an exhausting and frustrating endeavor. It's better (and simpler) to decide that you're going to run a noir-ish game centered in Sharn, or a game of skullduggery and shifting alliances in Greywall along the border between Galifar and the monster nation of Droaam. Or raiding tombs in Xen'drik, or exploring the Mournlands, or something with a bit of focus. You can bring further elements into the game later organically as the need arises, but Eberron is meant to inspire and support a variety of types of campaigns and so it's best approached that way instead of trying to digest it all at once. It also helps that there's much less emphasis on detailing the lives and times of big mover and shaker NPCs and reams of fictional history and metaplot as opposed to "hey there's some cool poo poo over here, I bet you could work an adventure around that."
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Feb 21, 2016 02:20
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Leperflesh posted:For that matter, is there any dragon lancing in dragonlance, at all? Like is there at least a mounted, lance-wielding dragon-slayer prestige class? In the case of Dragonlance, the name of the setting comes from Important Items That Exist in the setting. There is lancing of dragons with dragonlances, which are . . . lances that do lots of extra damage to dragons, and are wielded primarily while mounted on dragons.
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Feb 21, 2016 02:22
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homullus posted:In the case of Dragonlance, the name of the setting comes from Important Items That Exist in the setting. There is lancing of dragons with dragonlances, which are . . . lances that do lots of extra damage to dragons, and are wielded primarily while mounted on dragons. That kind of sounds like the dragons are working against their own interests there.
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Feb 21, 2016 02:24
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Kai Tave posted:That kind of sounds like the dragons are working against their own interests there. Dragons are hella racist against dragons.
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Feb 21, 2016 02:56
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Kai Tave posted:That kind of sounds like the dragons are working against their own interests there. Metallic dragons and chromatic dragons are Not Friends in the setting, and have fought before. In the original presentation of the setting, evil chromatic dragons steal and hold hostage the eggs of the good metallic dragons, and promise to return them after they are done conquering everything. During said conquering, which features never-before-seen dragonmen among the enemy, the heroes find out that the chromatic dragons have been ritually perverting the good dragon eggs into these draconian troops. The good dragons are enraged and enter the war, and the heroes rediscover the things needed to forge dragonlances. The colored dragons get shanked. The original books are mediocre-to-acceptable 80s genre fiction with some good parts. Setting elements like the central mystery above and the Chaotic Neutral kender are fine for books, but are less good as a playground for PCs.
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Feb 21, 2016 02:56
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My favorite setting is actually the default 4e setting it's got just the right amount of background to give you ideas but no big lists of history and junk that even ebberon has that bogs the game down for me.
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Feb 21, 2016 03:24
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Kai Tave posted:This holds true for basically every RPG in my experience, and it happens on both sides of the GM screen which is one reason why I quickly fell out of the habit of writing big extensive backstories for characters in games I played, because it never once actually mattered in any meaningful sense more than a brief character sketch and one or two standing plothooks would have. Really, I think there's been a lot of time and effort spent convincing both players and GMs that they need to do way more prep work than they actually do to get an RPG off the ground which is maybe one reason why people view TRPGs as a laborious process. Thing is, if I want to make a game of raiding tombs in Xen'drik, maybe it'd be cool and good if I could buy an 8-page supplement providing some detail about Xen'drik - just enough for me and the players to thumb through in 20 minutes and get a feel for the setting and what's there and why we care that it's Xen'drik and not <Generic D&D Place With Dungeons> and then off we go. Presumably for a lot less money, as well as a lot less time invested. The thing I'd browse to ponder which of dozens of locations in Eberron I'd maybe like to try next would be a webpage advertising the dozens of short, accessible, low-cost, low-effort location products.
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Feb 21, 2016 03:39
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homullus posted:In the case of Dragonlance, the name of the setting comes from Important Items That Exist in the setting. There is lancing of dragons with dragonlances, which are . . . lances that do lots of extra damage to dragons, and are wielded primarily while mounted on dragons. TSR 1982 "Hey, I played this cool arcade game called 'Joust', have you guys heard of it?" -Tracy Hickman
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Feb 21, 2016 03:44
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Leperflesh posted:That map implies that pretty much none of the realms are still forgotten. Like, they're all remembered realms, basically.
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Feb 21, 2016 03:47
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homullus posted:This also doesn't include Pool of Radiance et cetera. There was a whole other generation of FR computer games.
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Feb 21, 2016 03:55
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Leperflesh posted:Thing is, if I want to make a game of raiding tombs in Xen'drik, maybe it'd be cool and good if I could buy an 8-page supplement providing some detail about Xen'drik - just enough for me and the players to thumb through in 20 minutes and get a feel for the setting and what's there and why we care that it's Xen'drik and not <Generic D&D Place With Dungeons> and then off we go. Presumably for a lot less money, as well as a lot less time invested. Okay sure, but that doesn't exist and WotC will never make it, is the thing. I agree that might be nice, but given the constraints of "what is the publisher actually going to do" I would rather have Eberron get the big book treatment than Yet More Forgotten Realms Part LXIX: Drizzt Harder. I will say that back when regular official D&D web articles were a thing that they had Keith Baker do a lot of short, quick "here's a campaign seed/collection of plot hooks for an Eberron game" deals and they were, to my foggy recollection, pretty decent. But of course they deleted all that poo poo and now there aren't even any official D&D forums because that stuff takes too much effort, along with going to Gencon and making supplements.
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Feb 21, 2016 03:57
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I think the Gazeteer series done back in... I want to say 2nd edition? Did it pretty well, although even then, each of those was fairly long. I think my dad had the Karameikos one, plus the orcs of thar one, and that's why I have a photocopied-in-the-1980s Orks of Thar recruitment booklet. Which is fantastic and fun and has zero crunch in it, which is perfect. MadScientistWorking posted:Its because its a used to be easily traversible from our earth and we forgot it existed. Oh. Does that mean Earth is canonically part of the D&D multiverse?
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Feb 21, 2016 04:28
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Leperflesh posted:Oh. Does that mean Earth is canonically part of the D&D multiverse? Actually yes, it is. Elminster has a secret portal to Ed Greenwood's house where they get together and drink beer and talk about the chicks they've banged. Not even kidding, this is literally a thing.
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Feb 21, 2016 04:30
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The Gazeteers were a BD&D thing, but they were a good resource. I always found BD&D neat, the boxed sets at least, in that it increased in scope as the characters became more potent. Low level, you just show up at the dungeons and return to Threshold, which I think only gets a name once you're into the mid-level box. From there it's hexcrawling for a bit, and then you've got nations with their own, fairly hefty booklets on local flavour and such.
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Feb 21, 2016 04:32
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Leperflesh posted:Thing is, if I want to make a game of raiding tombs in Xen'drik, maybe it'd be cool and good if I could buy an 8-page supplement providing some detail about Xen'drik - just enough for me and the players to thumb through in 20 minutes and get a feel for the setting and what's there and why we care that it's Xen'drik and not <Generic D&D Place With Dungeons> and then off we go. Presumably for a lot less money, as well as a lot less time invested. I remember thinking a while ago that an interesting way to present an OSR-ish fantasy setting would be via a Gazetteer style series of short books, each with the classes and whatnot unique to that region, then let people get the ones they wanted to use. Then I realized that wasn't exactly a practical business (or design) setup.
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Feb 21, 2016 04:32
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Leperflesh posted:I think the Gazeteer series done back in... I want to say 2nd edition?
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Feb 21, 2016 04:33
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