The More Things Change

The forgotten realms setting is there for me to steal things out of for my own game.

In my world there are legendary characters, those of my creation and the retired characters of six or eight players over the years. Some are even gods.

I think settings need these types of icons as something to aspire to when those highest levels are so far off and the trip looks daunting.

Even in 3e I prefer slow leveling. To me the lower levels are the most grounded in reality. Upper level play ( 13 and up) have a lot of issues with lack of content disruptive spell caster issues, ineffective monsters when the party nears 20.

God killers I call them. Although an army of slaadi gave them pause. And a demon prince earned XP from them when, as a group, they refused to oppose him. There might have been a forest full of dark elves there too, though.

I never had a problem with the iconics. I never used them in my games and I always played campaigns where whatever they did in their stories never impacted the games I ran. It's not like the campaign settings were written that the DM should use them as Mary Sue's to rescue the player characters or do their job for them.

WotC Golem said:

The Forgotten Realms is rife with great characters -- Drizzt Do'Urden, Elminster,...

Click to expand...

And Star Trek had Wesley Crusher. But I'd hardly put him on the intro paragraph of a puff piece.

My gripe ia the all this talk of change, I prefer when D&D campaign settings don't suffer at the hands of meddling writers (Time of Troubles, Prism Pentad. Faction War, Grand Conjunction, etc).

Al-Qadim handled it well, I now just use the original boxed sets/book for all the classic campaign settings (for FR, good old grey box, for Dragonlance, Dragonlance Adventures hardcover, Greyhawk, original yellow/red boxed set, Dark Sun, the sweet original boxed set, with all the cool Brom art, and so forth).

As for FR iconics, Drizzt is currently working as rough trade on the streets of Calimport in my FR.

I like that there are NPC adventurers.
Even high level NPC adventurers can be awesome. Just look at the grandeur of any high level villain.

What I don't like is being forced to play second fiddle.

I don't think that needs to be the case with Forgotten Realms. It is possible to play with those characters without having them be DM pets (i.e. susceptible to death, failure, not being predetermined adventure plots, and so on).

My real issue with the Realms is it is too publicly defined. It lacks mystery for us as players to explore and discover through play. It would be better served with only lightly defined, inspiring areas for DMs to personalize so that later discovery can still take place for players who read the book.


EDIT: Thinking about it more, this might be an issue of just how many high level characters there are. Demographics, especially in starting play areas, really matters in terms of how important players feel their characters are to the goings on of the world.

Choosing to pal up with a Ranger Lord who has his or her own missions is one thing when it is your choice. It's leveraging your assets. Having every potential ally you bump into more powerful than you can be disheartening. 1st level fighters are veterans, we begin as potential heroes. I'm not playing to identify with the bootlickers of the world.

Neonchameleon said:

And Star Trek had Wesley Crusher. But I'd hardly put him on the intro paragraph of a puff piece.

Click to expand...

And Star Wars has Jar-Jar.

If you've got popular stories (and the article is mainly about the novels, anyways) you're going to want to mention those characters people want to read about.

Just my two cents.

I think the forgotten realms are probably a great campaign setting, very rich and detailed.

However, by the virtue of being so rich and detailed it is a hard barrier to break into. I started playing DnD with 3e and I occasionally happened to pick up or read FR books. With the simple, basic stuff of even the campaign setting book it was far too much to break into. It gave me too many nations and factions to try and figure out where my players worked. The scope of what they gave us in a very simple campaign book was overwhelming.

So I'm all for people who love the setting and want to play in it. I'm not saying they can't. But I think it is a poor idea to make FR the default setting for the newest edition, just as it would be for Eberron or Dark Sun. They are interesting settings and they certainly have their place but making them the default just imposes too much history on what could otherwise be a simple game.

I know some people are also going to bring up Greyhawk as it was the default of 3e, but outside of the gods (and minor planar stuff) it really wasn't much of a default at all. It wasn't until 2008 I even heard about Iuz, for example. If they keep the game at this most basic veneer of a setting then that is fine, but the more campaign level details they introduce the harder it is to weed those details out of the core game. I mean I never used Red Wizards of Thay for just that reason.

variant said:

Drizzt, Elminster, and the rest of the 'iconic' characters need to go the way of the dodo before Forgotten Realms could ever be seen as viable in my eyes.

Click to expand...

That may be true, but it's never going to happen - those characters sell novels in large numbers, and the value of those novels vastly outweighs that of FR as an RPG property. Heck, they probably outweigh D&D as an RPG property!

Stormonu said:

I don't think I've heard anyone complain about Luke & company in a Star Wars game, for instance.

Click to expand...

Actually, the presence of Luke etc (and Tanis and co. for Dragonlance) can be something of a problem when running games in that setting. If you're running in the Rebellion era, there's always that problem that the big story is the one that's happening over there, and that doesn't include your PCs. At best, they can be involved as bit players.

Yes, there are ways around this (with the most obvious being to use a different bit of the galaxy and/or a different bit of the timeline), but for gaming in the 'classic' universe, it isn't ideal.

The problem with the FR is its great and involved characters. It's 1/2 the point of playing the Forgotten Realms.

You cant get them out of your head. Leave them in and you feel like the second fiddle. Take them out or ignore them and it just feels wrong. Like you miss the point.

It's like playing the 3rd installment of an action game and ignoring the very much alive and well hero and all the stuff happening to him or her.

Stormonu said:

I don't think I've heard anyone complain about Luke & company in a Star Wars game, for instance.

Click to expand...

I've heard that complain often in Star Wars. That's why most games I know do not play during the Rebellion, because everything that is important is going to be resolved by Luke. It's a common complaint, in my gaming circle at least.