D&D 5E Why FR Is "Hated"

[Demetrios1453]

And if we dislike that sage because he doesn't "do" it for us, didn't like how the sage was used in previous works, and feel like they are wasting our money devoting references to said disliked sage...

Then don't use him. The characters in the groups I've run have bumped into a total of like 3 - 4 times (usually when they seek him out for advice, and even then he isn't always available) over the course of dozens of games in the Forgotten Realms since I started DMing late in the 2e era.

If I may return the question to those who keep bringing Elminster up: Why do you feel that a Forgotten Realms campaign must use Elminster (or Drizzt, or whoever)? In what way would a Forgotten Realms campaign "fail" in your eyes if such characters weren't used (or even didn't exist at all, which is certainly within the DM's remit, and has been the case for some FR games I've been in as a player over the years)?

 

[prosfilaes]

That makes no sense. Stories are only written about Elminster and Drizzt because they did things.

There's a key problem with this whole post. Elminster didn't do anything. NPCs don't get high-level by adventuring; they get high-level by someone writing a number in a field. I see nowhere it says they have to have an adventuring backstory, and one of the 20th level characters in ECS was 11 years old, so it's not something Wizards always followed.

And the point of all this is that some people don't like settings that feel like they're all about other people's characters. Your perception that there must be a certain number of high-level characters in a setting is wrong; there are many settings that don't have them, whether or not you find that realistic.

No, it doesn't say that at all. It implies that he's the sage telling the story in the book you are about to read. Because, you know, he's the sage that tells stories.

Are you the author? You speak with amazing certainty about the text. As for me, I can only speak about what it implies to me, and I've never seen any other book start with a huge block of text explaining how the sage telling the story has this ridiculous set of abilities and magical items. Page 3 says that Elminister is the sage telling the story in the book; page 7 says that Elminister is totally badass and it's very important the book, right up front, needs to give you his stats.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

8th level really isn't high enough to be making stories except in rare circumstances. It generally takes a Beren and Luthien, or Elminster, or Mordenkainen. 15th level is about where those kinds of stories start.

See, to me, this is very much a Forgotten Realms perspective. 8th level isn't high enough? To me, that's a setting I'm not interested in. If I need to be 15th level before I'm famous (and every famous person around is 15th level), that's too high powered a setting for me.

I guess that's why I've always had a soft spot for Dragonlance. Virtually no one in the setting is that high level. Eberron always caught my eye for the same reason. Scarred Lands and now Primeval Thule for exactly this reason.

 

[prosfilaes]

If I may return the question to those who keep bringing Elminster up: Why do you feel that a Forgotten Realms campaign must use Elminster (or Drizzt, or whoever)?

I don't. But when you say Forgotten Realms, that's what comes to mind; that's what colors everything to come. I'm not sure anything you can do can really avoid that. You've invoked a name with a lot of connotations along; you can't really pick and choose which ones come.

 

[billd91]

Selling more then one setting is no more dividing the market then selling Coke and Diet Coke or World of Warcraft and Diablo is dividing their markets.

Well that depends on the market and the product, doesn't it? The investment required to produce or consume a Coke, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, or Diet Coke is extremely small and the potential market extremely large. Neither of those apply to RPG campaign settings. Coca-Cola can produce gallons of these products in seconds, I can consume them for well under a dollar and in a few minutes time and there are hundreds of millions of people like me. Yet would you believe that until Coca-Cola actually invested substantial research and then test marketed this, they were actually worried they would split their market? It's true.

WoW and Diablo cost substantially more to product and consume, the markets aren't as large as for Coke, yet they too aren't all that difficult for their users to play as consumers. Yet, even so, I'm sure their relative costs have an impact since they are also more expensive. Chances are there actually are some people out there willing to pay for one but not both and that's more noticeable than with all of the choices available in sweetened drinks.

Now let's look at RPG settings - MUCH more expensive to produce (relatively speaking) and by smaller companies and directed at a market orders of magnitude smaller. They take hours to read, prepare adventures in, and play. Not just a few minutes as in drinking a soda and not with such easy prep and cleanup as a computer game (though those too may take hours to fully play). And that investment generally has to come from multiple people at the play end, compounding the time I'm spending as a consumer. Those factors are probably going to lead the analysis in different directions than for Coke. Moreover, that analysis was done, as I pointed out, when WotC analyzed TSR's problems as part of their due diligence in deciding to buy the company and save D&D from years of bankruptcy limbo. It may be that WotC could credibly support more than one setting (though I really doubt they could support the same number as TSR did) but they have apparently decided the business case for doing so isn't strong enough for them to do it... at least not yet as far as we know.

Ultimately, you can't just look at strongly different products, assume they don't split the market, and then assume the same applies to the RPG industry - even the biggest dog in the industry. And you really can't just brush off the analysis they conducted, using the data they were able to collect, by doing so.

 

[Zardnaar]

Well that depends on the market and the product, doesn't it? The investment required to produce or consume a Coke, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, or Diet Coke is extremely small and the potential market extremely large. Neither of those apply to RPG campaign settings. Coca-Cola can produce gallons of these products in seconds, I can consume them for well under a dollar and in a few minutes time and there are hundreds of millions of people like me. Yet would you believe that until Coca-Cola actually invested substantial research and then test marketed this, they were actually worried they would split their market? It's true.

WoW and Diablo cost substantially more to product and consume, the markets aren't as large as for Coke, yet they too aren't all that difficult for their users to play as consumers. Yet, even so, I'm sure their relative costs have an impact since they are also more expensive. Chances are there actually are some people out there willing to pay for one but not both and that's more noticeable than with all of the choices available in sweetened drinks.

Now let's look at RPG settings - MUCH more expensive to produce (relatively speaking) and by smaller companies and directed at a market orders of magnitude smaller. They take hours to read, prepare adventures in, and play. Not just a few minutes as in drinking a soda and not with such easy prep and cleanup as a computer game (though those too may take hours to fully play). And that investment generally has to come from multiple people at the play end, compounding the time I'm spending as a consumer. Those factors are probably going to lead the analysis in different directions than for Coke. Moreover, that analysis was done, as I pointed out, when WotC analyzed TSR's problems as part of their due diligence in deciding to buy the company and save D&D from years of bankruptcy limbo. It may be that WotC could credibly support more than one setting (though I really doubt they could support the same number as TSR did) but they have apparently decided the business case for doing so isn't strong enough for them to do it... at least not yet as far as we know.

Ultimately, you can't just look at strongly different products, assume they don't split the market, and then assume the same applies to the RPG industry - even the biggest dog in the industry. And you really can't just brush off the analysis they conducted, using the data they were able to collect, by doing so.

This. 1st thing they after the buyout was kill all the settings apart from FR.

 

[Hussar]

That's not entirely true. We've had Eberron for one.

 

[Zardnaar]

That's not entirely true. We've had Eberron for one.

Never claimed they would never make another one. There was a 7 year gap from the TSR worlds dying and Eberron.

 

[Hussar]

But that also ignores 3pp. 3e has a bucketful of settings.

 

[Mecheon]

... Didn't 3E have Living Greyhawk? I mean I'll be honest, I do forget when 3E stopped and 3.5E started, but I know one of them had it