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The thread about a 4e Greyhawk got me to thinking about which is more important to preserve, the continuity and canon or the feel of a setting.
It made me wonder if the 4E Forgotten Realms might not have been better accepted if they had taken a different approach. They advanced the timeline so far as to relieve the burden of canon and yet still maintain it, while simultaneously making sweeping changes through huge world changing events to remold the setting to account for the idiosyncrasies of the new rules set. What if, instead, they had chosen to reimagine the setting to fit 4E, simply throwing out the canon that isn't to be specifically reincorporated and attempting to recreate the feel of the previous iterations, in essence attempt boil it down to what makes the Forgotten Realm, the Forgotten Realms. So say, instead of creating a world shaking event to include dragonborn, just treat it as a fresh start and write them in as through it were a new campaign setting without it having to go through some traumatic happening. Rather than killing off NPC's, change their level to make them less overshadowing, that sort of thing.
So in short, which is a better way of handling a setting when editions change? Advance the timeline with events accounting for changes, or reimagine it to conform to new rules while trying to maintain the general shape of what came before?
Reading my post I'm not sure, I'm being entirely clear but hopefully the general idea will get across.
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I think I would prefer it if settings didn't advance, mostly because I hear people talk fondly about old versions and think they might have been on to something.
Rather than killing off NPC's, change their level to make them less overshadowing, that sort of thing.
I think that's missing the point.
Elminster isn't a problem because of his high levels. (He wasn't nearly optimized in 3e either. Lower-level parties could beat him easily, if it wasn't for the ridiculously-over-the-top Elminster's Evasion.) He's a problem (along with several other high-power NPCs) because of the way they're portrayed in novels, being nearly omniscient and far more powerful than rules-based characters are; there's no good reason why he isn't solving your problem.
Amazingly enough, WoW did at least one thing better than FR; not only did they give the high power heroes realistic flaws, they also let you know what they're doing! And made them an active part of the setting. Why can't Varian help you? He's leading the fight against the Lich King, that's why! He'll appreciate any efforts you make towards weakening the Lich King, as that helps his goal, but he isn't going to help you directly. And you don't need to come up with an excuse as to what he's doing.
(Not that WoW is perfect in that regard. Dang red dragons!)
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So in short, which is a better way of handling a setting when editions change?
Depends on the setting. How much change does the setting need? A setting like Dark Sun (bring back those dead sorcerer kings) or Forgotten Realms needs a lot more change than a setting like Eberron.
Reimagine: Capture what is great about the setting without being bogged down by all the detail that has accumulated. Also provide a new perspective on the setting.
This gives all fans the best of all worlds: fans of the old version can use material from older editions, fans of the new version have something shiny and packrats get new material for their gaming dollar rather than a reprint of information they already purchased for previous editions.
I'll repeat my opinion that some settings--namely, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance--can't be reimagined for business reasons. The big backlist novels give the impression of being a golden goose, and too many of them depend on continuity to the point that re-envisioning one of those settings would risk wringing said goose's neck.
OTOH, WotC has been seriously trimming both the new novels and backlist over the past year, so maybe this isn't as much of a concern as I would think.
Personally, I prefer re-imaginings, so long as the people involved understand what actually made the property awesome in the first place (the Batman Begins series), or know how to take a flawed original execution and respin it to be totally awesome (Battlestar Galactica).
However, I do understand the needs of multimedia fans for continuity and products that rely on that continuity (like all the FR novels), so I'd say that it's something that needs to be carefully examined for each individual setting. For example, until they elected to reprint the Dark Sun novels, I'd have absolutely been of the mind that a re-imagining would be the only way to go because there weren't other DS products in print. Now, I think they need to think about keeping connections to those novels... but I still think re-imagining is the way to go with that setting.
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Originally Posted by (Psi)SeveredHead
(Not that WoW is perfect in that regard. Dang red dragons!)
In defense of the Red Dragonflight, they are singlehandedly defending Wyrmrest Temple from the Blue Dragonflight and any other threats (the other Dragonflights have ambassadors there, but no actual troops) and trying to reclaim the Ruby Dragonshrine from the Scourge (who is raising their own dead against them), and whatever they're doing at Grim Batol. They are stretching themselves perilously thin.
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Last edited by The Little Raven; 16th July 2009 at 03:42 AM..
The thread about a 4e Greyhawk got me to thinking about which is more important to preserve, the continuity and canon or the feel of a setting.
It made me wonder if the 4E Forgotten Realms might not have been better accepted if they had taken a different approach. They advanced the timeline so far as to relieve the burden of canon and yet still maintain it, while simultaneously making sweeping changes through huge world changing events to remold the setting to account for the idiosyncrasies of the new rules set. What if, instead, they had chosen to reimagine the setting to fit 4E, simply throwing out the canon that isn't to be specifically reincorporated and attempting to recreate the feel of the previous iterations, in essence attempt boil it down to what makes the Forgotten Realm, the Forgotten Realms. So say, instead of creating a world shaking event to include dragonborn, just treat it as a fresh start and write them in as through it were a new campaign setting without it having to go through some traumatic happening. Rather than killing off NPC's, change their level to make them less overshadowing, that sort of thing.
So in short, which is a better way of handling a setting when editions change?
I think they should have made a new setting that was tailored to the idiosyncracies of the 4e rules and their flavor assumptions and restrictions rather than taking a prior setting like FR and changing it to the point of effectively having a new setting. The former would have been cool (and even if I didn't play it, I'd have enjoyed reading it), the latter just angered a lot of people who liked FR.
But between the two options you asked about, it really depends on the scope of the rule changes and any default flavor assumptions a new edition of the game pushes on settings. With 4e there are such a slew of changes to the rules and its base assumptions that the more organic 1e->2e->3e evolution isn't really possible if you want to assume that everything 4e core -must- be a part of a 4e FR, which clearly the design team was going for.
A reboot would have been less damaging to the setting. It still would have fractured the fanbase, but likely much less than the current situation.
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I vastly would prefer a reimagining of a setting than a timeline advancement of any kind. A campaign setting is defined by various overarching plot threads, themes, and organizations. As long as you hold onto those defining traits, you can freely tweak the details without impacting the feel of a setting. On the other hand, advancing the setting in order to maintain continuity poses a great risk of changing the central aspect of a setting for the sake of the less important details.
I think it should depend on the setting. Dark Sun, Greyhawk, and Eberron strike me as settings that don't need to be continually advancing. On the other hand, a large part of the appeal of the Forgotten Realms is the ever-changing world.
I think WotC had a decent balance in 3rd edition when they had Greyhawk (a bare bones sketch of a world with no advancing plot), Eberron (a much more detailed world but with a static timeline), and the Realms (a detailed setting with a continually advancing timeline, although the frequency of Realms-shaking events got a bit much at the end). A selection like that allows gamers to pick and choose what they want in a world. I don't see any reason why the game should conform entirely to one play style over another.
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This is a tough one for me, and to some extent depends on each setting.
I think I'm much more in the "keeping it largely the same, just update the rules" camp for most settings. 4e Forgotten Realms didn't interest me at all. However, 4e Eberron is looking to fit what I thought was my ideal, but when considering the new campaign guide, I'm looking at all of the great 3.5 Eberron setting books they made and am wondering if the 4e book is worth it or not. (The setting book, not the Player's Guide. That one is great because of the new crunch.)
So I'm torn. On the one hand, I don't want them to massively change the settings. But on the other hand, when they don't massively change the setting, I see little point in buying the new book (only given my gaming budget is much tighter than it used to be). However, I may buy it anyway just to show support for Eberron because I love that setting, I just find it harder to justify those kinds of purchases recently - especially with so much great setting material still unexplored by me from 3.5.
It does change a bit when looking at the older 2e settings however. Now this is personal preference only but I'd love a Planescape that is perhaps advanced to some degree, but still true to canon. But with Dark Sun, I could give a rat's tooshie about canon and would love a dramatically reimagined setting that was truer to the spirit and mood of Dark Sun than to any of the existing canon. Same thing with Spelljammer (like that would ever happen anyway!). Forget everything that came before and make a great new setting from scratch that fits the overall theme and don't worry about setting history. As for any settings beyond that, they wouldn't interest me so I don't have any opinion.
Looking at the 2e settings, I think my opinion of "stay true" vs. "reimagine" is directly proportional to my knowledge of the existing canon, unfortunately. I know Planescape very well and would hate to see any of it jettisoned. However, for Dark Sun and Spelljammer, I just know the basics and the "feel" of the settings and am more interested in those. So it's just my personal biases.
But, for me, the stay true vs. advance a lot vs reimagine debate definitely has a different answer for every setting.
Certain ones ,like FR & DL which have strong ties outside the P&P game, I think benefit from the major overhaul/advance (EDIT- I say this from a gaming perspective-the dread canon baggage issue that crops up)
Others I think would benefit best from a re-set (Greyhawk, Mys..err..The Known World).
Others like Planescape, Dark Sun, and Ravenloft probably don't need much work- and Eberron didn't really either.
However, I think shoehorning everything into the 4E cosmology and "world system" is not a good idea (despite that fact with few exceptions I love 4E's re-imagining of said cosmology and "world system").
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Last edited by JeffB; 16th July 2009 at 05:09 AM..
I think it should depend on the setting. Dark Sun, Greyhawk, and Eberron strike me as settings that don't need to be continually advancing. On the other hand, a large part of the appeal of the Forgotten Realms is the ever-changing world.
This is almost exactly what I was going to say. It depends on the setting. FR should advance; DS and Eberron should not (or at least not much).
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I like the idea of going back to the beginning but including the 4E elements. I would have liked to have seen this for FR as well (although I like the new version... except for the map) and I think it was the right choice for Greyhawk. Dark Sun would work better, IMO, if it was reset to the first set. I'm not sure if Dragonlance can be revamped because it really is the one world where all the stories are told (and the gully dwarves and kender prove that someone was channelling George Lucas).
I don't think that dragonborn, eladrin etc... MUST be a part of any revised setting. Sometimes a setting should be about what is left out as much as what is kept in (like Midnight).
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I'm not sure if Dragonlance can be revamped because it really is the one world where all the stories are told (and the gully dwarves and kender prove that someone was channelling George Lucas).
I could write a dozen new Dragonlance novels and still not run out of ideas for stories that retain the Dragonlance themes and continuity. I categorically deny that the setting's worn out and needs to be rebooted, but if it must, I have a pretty good idea how, when, and where to do that. And it still wouldn't invalidate the backlist.
The problem, as always, is that Dragonlance fares better as a fiction line and not nearly as well as a game line. Or, rather, that most D&D players would rather play in another world instead of attempt to play in Dragonlance, even if they like to read the books.
I think this depends more of if you generate more revenue from D&D book sales or fantasy novel sales with that world.
With FR it would be a very daring thing to throw out decades of novels and start over… with Greyhawk not so much.
With that said I want a reboot of Dragonlance… something that would be hugely daring… and thus unlikely.
Neither. Settings are the RPG products that, relatively speaking, are the least reliant on the rules. They're mostly fluff. Once I've read a setting book, adjusting it to a new edition means most of it is going to be redundant no matter which option you use.
I'd issue new settings, designed specifically for the new rules. And, for setting lovers, I'd release small(ish) perfect bound books that give rules updates to the setting, to bring them over into the new edition without having to rewrite the setting, either as an advanced one or as a re-imagined one. If that means Forgotten Realms doesn't really have a place for dragonborn, and they have to be worked in as unusually exotic foreigners of some kind, I'm OK with that.
Keep in mind, though, that I'm not really a setting lover. I don't attach myself to settings. I don't use settings, per se. I read them, and enjoy doing so for its own sake, and then I raid them for ideas and nuggets that I can use in my homebrew. So my preferences are probably a corner case, not a baseline anyone could build a business plan around.
I think I would prefer it if settings didn't advance, mostly because I hear people talk fondly about old versions and think they might have been on to something.
Agreed. I want no meta-plot. I want settings like HarnWorld. HarnWorld's timeline hasn't advanced since the day that it first saw print, despite being one of the most detailed fantasy settings ever.
The problem (as I see it) with many D&D settings is that, back in the day, TSR made the decision at some point in time that each new supplement or novel should actually change the setting (as opposed to potentially changing the setting) and this later evolved into the trap of meta-plot taking precendence over PCs when it came to shaping official settings.
The idea that a timeline must be moved forward (or, indeed, exist at all) in order for a publisher to detail a ficitional setting is balderdash. Likewise, so is the idea that all official products must be viewed as actual events in the setting, rather than as potential events that a consumer can employ as they se fit.
Give me a static setting with a load of supplements that are descriptive rather that prescriptive, and I'll be happy.
The thread about a 4e Greyhawk got me to thinking about which is more important to preserve, the continuity and canon or the feel of a setting.
I think that depends on what works best for the setting. In Greyhawk's case, it seems all the setting's woes came from advancing the timeline too much and making too many changes. Resetting the setting and preserving the feel may work better here.
I also think it depends on whether or not the setting has an ongoing novel line. If it does, then you don't want to upset your novel readers by making their books "invalid." You're better maintaining continuity here.
In Greyhawk's case, it seems all the setting's woes came from advancing the timeline too much and making too many changes.
I think that Greyhawk and other settings suffered not from an advancing timeline, but from poor products. While the 2nd edition area had a lot of gems to it, it also had a lot of garbage. In Greyhawk's case specifically, the powers that be practically made destroying the setting a priority.
A lot of the meta-plots introduced in various settings probably could have worked well with some better production values. I doubt the Time of Troubles would have gotten as much flak, for example, if the modules hadn't been so terrible. Similarly, some of the revelations of the Dark Sun novels might have been better received had the Prism Pentad not also totally killed off most of the cool parts of that setting.
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