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Megazver posted:I, too, am shocked that a movie based on a franchise tries to lean into the elements of said franchise that are unique to it. I think where it loses me is that neither I nor any of the people I've ever played with have ever been really super excited about any existing D&D settings. Obviously we've had our favourites, and some have sparked more joy than others, but generally the things that stick in my mind as best memories about D&D haven't been "that time Drizzt was namedropped" or "omg we met [iconic monster] in [trademarked location]!" If we've cared about a big name monster appearing, it's mostly been because it's had abilities that we know would've proven a challenge to work around or survive, not because someone had the Displacer Beast wallscroll and Beholder gunpla on their desk at home. For me the lasting memories have always been about the actual players and what was around the real-world table(virtual or otherwise). The time the dice turned a normal situation into a hilarious clusterfuck. The time an unintended reading of the rules resulted in something the developers had absolutely never expected, but which we ran with because it was funny. The time someone came up with an amazing character, idea or description that I can still look back at years later and go "lmao, did they really write that? wild." even the bad moments like "oh my loving God, Tim did that poo poo again. AGAIN. Why did we keep giving him chances?" are the ones that stick with me. The parts of the game that we made, not the parts of the game that Wizards of the Coast made. And like... outside of Mazes & Monsters, pretty much any big-budget media that engages with D&D or roleplaying games completely ignores that dimension, you really only see it in fan projects(not sure how well they hold up these days, but I remember enjoying some of them like ten or fifteen years back) where the GM occasionally bickering with the players, players attempting to steal the limelight, curveballs thrown by the dice, etc. are actually part of the whole package. To me that dimension being visible pops up in pretty much anything written by an actual TTRPG player, while it's missing from anyone who just sees the branding.
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Mar 13, 2023 14:55
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PurpleXVI posted:To me that dimension being visible pops up in pretty much anything written by an actual TTRPG player, while it's missing from anyone who just sees the branding. Well have I got the movie for YOU! The scene with the dead guy and asking 5 questions that was in trailer that looks like it walked out of a tabletop game? It goes a lot longer, has some more jokes and the final joke is in the credits.
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Mar 13, 2023 15:01
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Some folks I play MTG with invited me to go see it and since I haven't seen a movie in a theater with other people in a couple of years I'm gonna do it. Looks a bit cookie-cutter from the trailers but watchable, and I like the cast. It won't be as good as the original D&D movie, but few things are.
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Mar 13, 2023 15:07
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I hate Forgotten Realms so much. Worst dnd setting and it's getting all the media.
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Mar 13, 2023 16:10
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And not just that, almost everything published for it is about this one stretch of northwestern coastline. The Extremely Well Remembered Region.
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Mar 13, 2023 16:34
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My theory as to why Forgotten Realms has been so front and center for every D&D related in the 5e era is because of how far back Wizards scaled their publishing output at the start of this edition. While I don't know the exact details offhand, when they took over the D&D license I know Wizards either brokered or inherited a very weird deal with Ed Greenwood that they had to publish a minimum quota of Forgotten Realms material per year or the rights to the setting would revert to him. With them only putting out a supplement or two a year at the start of the edition, they kind of had to make everything they published a Forgotten Realm product in order to meet the weird quota to retain the rights. This ended up leading to a situation where Forgotten Realms has ended up being forced into the role of "default" D&D setting, which it is really poorly suited to. Like I REALLY don't care for the Realms as a setting so that's going to shape my perception of this situation, but I don't think this is a particularly good setup even for dedicated fans of the setting since a lot of the edges kind of have to be sanded off in order for it to work as the default which doesn't seem to jive well with what the actual fans typically engage with. Then, of course, you couple that with our modern intellectual property landscape where media properties can't just be stand alone works anymore, they have to be part of a larger brand. With the Realms having to serve as the face of D&D for legal reasons, they're now being sort of pushed as the face of the D&D brand in the same way The Avengers are used as the face of the Marvel Brand. The problem with this is, while the Realms has its own dedicated fanbase, they're a relatively small segment of the broader D&D consuming public and are much more engaged with the lore and minutia of the setting rather than engaging with the Realms as brand identity. Basically Realms fans aren't really the sort of demographic that's necessarily going to be receptive to The Realms as generic product branding, and the segment of the fanbase that does engage with product branding does so way more with the general concept of D&D as a game rather than with any of its individual settings.
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Mar 13, 2023 18:13
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That clip in the arena is excellent. The Displacer Beast effects are exactly how I imagined they would be.
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Mar 13, 2023 22:04
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sebmojo posted:https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1496621153426755592
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Mar 13, 2023 23:05
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MonsieurChoc posted:I hate Forgotten Realms so much. Worst dnd setting and it's getting all the media. Agreed it hits this weird blend of being both incredibly generic and also overly specific in different parts that I find incredibly annoying
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Mar 13, 2023 23:25
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Forgotten Realms has been the iconic D&D setting for like 30 years at this point
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Mar 14, 2023 00:43
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Yeah, while it may not have been the technical "default" for 3E, it was definitely the setting they were putting out material for and where most games I played were set. I think the exceptions were exclusively pre-3E Greyhawk modules ported over.
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Mar 14, 2023 00:50
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3e was definitely the point where FR could most accurately be described as the face of the brand, what with the runaway success of the Driz'zt novels and the Bioware RPGs, but even then it didn't feel like it was treated as being synonymous with the D&D brand as a whole in the way it feels like WotC is trying to push it these days. Of course I'm admittedly looking back on this as someone who didn't really get into D&D until 4e, so my interpretation is likely not reflective of what was going on with the fanbase at the time. And it's interesting, because come 4e they sort of walked things back: That edition had its own assumed setting in the core books in the form of the Nentir Vale and, while still supported as a setting option, The Realms were presented as their own thing with separate supplements rather than the setting the core books assumed most tables were going to be playing in.
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Mar 14, 2023 01:05
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In fact during 4e they rotated setting for their weekly encounters adventures. So one campaign was DARK SUN.
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Mar 14, 2023 01:17
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FR was the setting for the main ongoing organized play campaign in 4e, while in 3e it was Greyhawk. I’m not sure that’s terribly meaningful, though, since WotC never seemed to care as much as Paizo does about OP.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:00
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Honestly, now that I think about it, D&D has always kind of struggled with its own brand identity to a certain degree, especially in a post-Pathfinder landscape. They're trying to find iconic, marketable things about the game to build a brand around and are finding that a lot of the most iconic things about the game aren't really things they can claim ownership of in the way that, say, Disney can claim ownership of The Avengers. So they're looking to the settings they can claim ownership of as a company and trying to tie those more directly into the idea of D&D as a multimedia brand. The only problem with this is that D&D means so many different things to so many different people that there's not really a singular brand identity that they can forge that isn't going to exclude a fairly large chunk of their audience. I think a thing that really demonstrates this is the stuff in D&D that's actually trademarked by WotC and can't be used by derivatives: It's all very specific things like Beholders and Mind Flayers, but so much of the product's identity is considered so open-ended that it couldn't be trademarked (Rolling a d20 to hit things) or cribs so heavily from other sources that they can't claim sole ownership of it (Vancian casting, any of the 100 billion fantasy tropes and monsters they've borrowed from).
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Mar 14, 2023 03:54
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They just need some good heroes and villains. I've forgotten what the party names were from the movie yesterday - it's just Bard, Barbarian, Sorcerer and Druid, with a GM insert Paladin. All the actors are memorable, but I still know the ranger from the cartoon was called Hank and that's about it. I think?
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Mar 14, 2023 06:56
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, while it may not have been the technical "default" for 3E, it was definitely the setting they were putting out material for and where most games I played were set. I think the exceptions were exclusively pre-3E Greyhawk modules ported over. I was a huge mark for setting lore at the time so I obviously gravitated towards Forgotten Realms, since that was the one with all the novels and the video games and the supplements. Greyhawk was this weird kind-of-generic thing that only seemed to exist in the back of the PHB and the sourcebook for the organized play thing I obviously couldn't attend, living in the boonies across the ocean. I honestly don't understand why they decided to make Greyhawk the "default" when they would go on to axe pretty much everything but the Realms to make room for Eberron. Maybe they didn't realize how untenable trying to support all the legacy settings was until they'd already released 3.0? No idea.  I'm sure someone's written a book on this era, I should look it up. KingKalamari posted:I think a thing that really demonstrates this is the stuff in D&D that's actually trademarked by WotC and can't be used by derivatives: It's all very specific things like Beholders and Mind Flayers, but so much of the product's identity is considered so open-ended that it couldn't be trademarked (Rolling a d20 to hit things) or cribs so heavily from other sources that they can't claim sole ownership of it (Vancian casting, any of the 100 billion fantasy tropes and monsters they've borrowed from). Like you point out, their original monster designs are one of the few actually copyrightable features of D&D, but sometimes it feels like WotC only protects that out of some kind of corporate habit. It's difficult to imagine "a beholder" is somehow a meaningful competitive advantage in this era of fifty million fantasy RPGs.
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Mar 14, 2023 07:34
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Siivola posted:I honestly don't understand why they decided to make Greyhawk the "default" when they would go on to axe pretty much everything but the Realms to make room for Eberron. Maybe they didn't realize how untenable trying to support all the legacy settings was until they'd already released 3.0? No idea.
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Mar 14, 2023 07:44
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FMguru posted:My recollection was that they liked Greyhawk because WotC owned it 100% (and didn't have a weird licensing agreement like with FR and Greenwood) so it made a better long-term base for their 3E plans. And they had big plans for Greyhawk in 3E - it was going to be the core setting for the RPGA Living Campaign and it was also the setting for the D&D Minis Game (which they had hopes of battling Warhammer with). Well, the Living Campaign stuff more or less died when Dancey left, and the minis game belly-flopped, and I'll bet when they started producing FR sourcebooks they outsold the Greyhawk products by an order of magnitude. So WotC just shrugged, and shifted to cranking out FR books by the pallet-load. When and where did Dancey go, out of curiousity? Did he start up Paizo and start doing adventure paths right away? Edit: I went to look at 3.0 supplements and lmao I'd forgotten WotC's second Oriental Adventures, which crossed over with Legend of the Five Rings. Incredibly weird licensing stuff going on back in the day. Siivola fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 07:53
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It's a shame that WOTC has mostly given up on Greyhawk as a setting as it definitely works better at being the "generic" D&D setting than Forgotten Realms ever has Also for something that only got about 17 pages of fluff in an abortive version of Chainmail(plus a couple Dragon Magazine articles) that lasted about a year, I still think the Sundered Empire/Godwar subsetting of Greyhawk was one of the more interesting setting concepts that WOTC has ever come up with, for one thing it's probably the least humanocentric setting an official D&D related product has ever had(aside from maybe some of the more out there Gazetteers and Creature Crucible supplements that got released for BECMI era D&D) as of the 7 major factions of the Godwar only one of them is a Human controlled faction(though one of the other factions is led by a formerly human Undead and the few members not also undead are of a primarily human death cult) and even the expected Human, Dwarf, and Elf factions have some twists to them to freshen things up a bit
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Mar 14, 2023 10:47
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drrockso20 posted:It's a shame that WOTC has mostly given up on Greyhawk as a setting as it definitely works better at being the "generic" D&D setting than Forgotten Realms ever has As someone who hasn't read that subsetting, mind sharing the core details of it?
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Mar 14, 2023 10:53
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drrockso20 posted:It's a shame that WOTC has mostly given up on Greyhawk as a setting as it definitely works better at being the "generic" D&D setting than Forgotten Realms ever has Honestly? Nentir Vale all the way for me - or possibly Exandria if you want something bigger. (This isn't to say I don't love Eberron, but it's not trying to be generic) Greyhawk was great as a default setting in the 1970s but the default assumptions don't fit modern D&D at all; it's far too human-centric and trying to be low magic and modern PCs tend to be ... flashier and more diverse. That said, not saying it doesn't work better than the Realms - but that's not that hard.
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Mar 14, 2023 11:38
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I think there's definitely still space for low-magic settings. I absolutely loathe super high-magic settings like Eberron and Forgotten Realms, since I always felt like scarcity of magic was what defined the D&D I liked. You can still be flashy even without having a dozen fireball wands jammed up your rear end. Gimme something like Birthright or Dark Sun instead.
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Mar 14, 2023 11:41
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I lol'd a bit when I looked into Greyhawk and it was "population: humans, but there are some rare demihumans: dwarves, elves and even a few halflings". I think Exandria and Radiant Citadel are definitely closer to what most 5e players are interested in and there's all sorts of OSR for the low-powered, low-magic, all-human flavor of D&D. I wouldn't mind RC becoming the default setting for 5.5, tbh.
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Mar 14, 2023 12:16
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WotC made rather a big deal about Greyhawk in the 2e-3e transition as I remember. They were still riding high as the "saviors of D&D" and using Greyhawk did two things - 1. There was a perception that TSR had basically abandoned and/or warped Greyhawk, which... Yeah, fair. So many other settings, and the later Greyhawk poo poo got real weird. 2. It was an additional way to prove 3e's bonafides as a true continuation of D&D, because what could be more D&D? I also remember talk about how D&D has an implied setting even if you never talk about it - and that'd be the first one - you know, Greyhawk.
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Mar 14, 2023 13:31
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dwarf74 posted:WotC made rather a big deal about Greyhawk in the 2e-3e transition as I remember. They were still riding high as the "saviors of D&D" and using Greyhawk did two things - Well, I think the marketing behind Greyhawk was the kind of 'back to the dungeon' type marketing they went to for that edition, and what better setting than the one that started it all? This is in response to the previous 2e stuff being all over the place as d&d tried to branch out to be other kinds of games.
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Mar 14, 2023 13:44
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dwarf74 posted:WotC made rather a big deal about the Forgotten Realms in the 4e-5e transition as I remember. They were still riding high as the "saviors of D&D" and using the Realms did two things - It's like poetry. It rhymes.
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Mar 14, 2023 14:42
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Honestly given how adaptation movies go that seems entirely reasonable to be like 'we actually adapted the material rather than begrudgingly slap the name on some failkid's script'. Which is basically what they did with the first D&D movie. I mean hell, it didn't even have clerics in the setting.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:06
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drrockso20 posted:Agreed it hits this weird blend of being both incredibly generic and also overly specific in different parts that I find incredibly annoying Siivola posted:I honestly don't understand why they decided to make Greyhawk the "default" when they would go on to axe pretty much everything but the Realms to make room for Eberron. Maybe they didn't realize how untenable trying to support all the legacy settings was until they'd already released 3.0? No idea. whydirt posted:Forgotten Realms has been the iconic D&D setting for like 30 years at this point
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Mar 14, 2023 15:11
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PurpleXVI posted:I think there's definitely still space for low-magic settings. I absolutely loathe super high-magic settings like Eberron and Forgotten Realms, since I always felt like scarcity of magic was what defined the D&D I liked. You can still be flashy even without having a dozen fireball wands jammed up your rear end. Eberron isn't high-magic, it's wide magic. Low-level magic is common and in use, but high-level magic is extremely icnredibly rare, a lot more than in Forgotten Realms. Probably not gonna change your opinion, but I always felt like that was an interesting distinction.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:23
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MonsieurChoc posted:Eberron isn't high-magic, it's wide magic. Low-level magic is common and in use, but high-level magic is extremely icnredibly rare, a lot more than in Forgotten Realms. In my mind that's still what I'd call "high-magic." I just dislike ubiquitous magic everywhere, at that point there's really no difference whether your train is being powered by "elemental lightning magic" or "electricity." It's rare that it actually matters except to give wizards better job security than engineers.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:24
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PurpleXVI posted:In my mind that's still what I'd call "high-magic." I just dislike ubiquitous magic everywhere, at that point there's really no difference whether your train is being powered by "elemental lightning magic" or "electricity." It's rare that it actually matters except to give wizards better job security than engineers. Oh yeah, I'm not saying you should like a setting where magic is common, but I do think the difference between the two is important.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:26
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Honestly Eberron just had me wanting to make a fantasy setting set with the technology of the early 1900s rather than a bunch of magic that just made it seem like that, but that would require a ruleset other than D&D.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:31
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I generally run my games at around the early 1900s tech level when I'm running fantasy. I don't run D&D, but I'm doing that in WWN right now and it works out pretty well. Really I just want to include trains in anything I can, and I don't care what form the train takes.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:34
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Trains rule, so you are absolutely correct.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:37
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PurpleXVI posted:I think there's definitely still space for low-magic settings. I absolutely loathe super high-magic settings like Eberron and Forgotten Realms, since I always felt like scarcity of magic was what defined the D&D I liked. You can still be flashy even without having a dozen fireball wands jammed up your rear end. Dark Sun is a great setting - maybe my favorite - but it's hard to call it "low magic" when every single character and NPC has psionics. (I never liked psionics in Dark Sun, it always felt like an unnecessary addition.)
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Mar 14, 2023 15:38
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Cessna posted:Dark Sun is a great setting - maybe my favorite - but it's hard to call it "low magic" when every single character and NPC has psionics. I think like a lot of 2e settings, they really wanted to give every setting a mechanical thing, so for Dark Sun, it was Psionics, and trying to actually integrate them. Honestly, psionics in d&d feels like a bolted on magic system designed to be designed in a modern way but they didn't want to change d&d's methodology.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:40
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Also psionics used to be par for the course in 70s fantasy but not anymore so it feels weird to some.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:41
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Cessna posted:Dark Sun is a great setting - maybe my favorite - but it's hard to call it "low magic" when every single character and NPC has psionics. I confess that I usually ignored the "all characters have psionics"-thing when I ran it because, well, about 90% of all psionic powers in 2nd ed AD&D are completely dogshit useless and the player with them will never use them. I call it "low magic" not because it necessarily has less magic than other settings, but because the magic there is more dark and threatening, what with the majority being controlled by immensely powerful Defilers, and the average person not knowing the difference between them and Preservers, so anyone busting out a fireball somewhere populated has to be prepared for a peasant mob hacking them up with stone tools. In general it just feels like a setting where there's a shortage of everything, in most places, magic included.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:42
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Panzeh posted:I think like a lot of 2e settings, they really wanted to give every setting a mechanical thing, so for Dark Sun, it was Psionics, and trying to actually integrate them. It's a super weird artifact of design that seems to come from, originally, a desire to make psionics in D&D reflect the New Age soundbite that everyone has psionic potential, so every class could theoretically be also a psionist. I actually quite like how Dark Sun decided to run with that instead of quietly ignore it, by just giving everyone a psionic power and making the system front and centre rather than having it be awkwardly tacked on in a supplement for a supplement. (It also helps that Dark Sun emphasises differences in magic sources a lot: everyone has psionic powers, clerics draw their power from natural forces or sorcerer-kings, and sorcerers draw their power from defiling the earth.)
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