D&D 5E Why FR Is "Hated"

[Lanefan]

To put it in perspective, Japan, from Kyushu (not counting Okinawa) to Hokkaido is about 1000 miles. Ansalon, Tyr, Primeval Thule, all are not a heck of a lot bigger than Japan. And Japan's got a pretty decent amount of myth and history. I don't need anything bigger.

Fair enough.

Where lack of setting size gets in the way for me is that sometimes I want to run adventures in different climates - an arctic adventure, a jungle adventure, a desert adventure, a forest adventure - just for the variety, and that's kind of hard to do without either lots of plane-hopping or the base setting having a north-south area about the same as North and Central America.

I also want to be able to incorporate into my games the various cultures these climates historically* produced - Norse, Greek, Celtic, jungle tribes, Persian, Sumerian, etc. - which again needs the right types of places to be able to put them.

* - incorporate not in any accurate sense; my most common interaction with historical accuracy is to cheerfully wave at it as it passes by in the distance.

How I handled this with my current setting is to design and map out just a long north-south sliver, from about the arctic circle to near the equator but only covering about 30 degrees of longitude at most. The rest of the world consists thus far of a scrap-of-paper map buried in my files somewhere, along with some vague ideas not written down anywhere yet.

Thus far, other than one or two adventures that wandered off-plane, 9+ years of gaming has stayed within that area...with large parts of it still unexplored and unvisited.

Lan-"thus far my players have yet to adopt the slogan 'where the map is blank, we'll go', which I've seen happen in some other campaigns"-efan

 

[Aldarc]

You're talking to someone who ean a game from the same village the PCs started in.

Level 1 they rescued a sheep.

I am exceptionally curious in this adventure. Sheep are my fiancé's favorite animal, and I know that she would find a way to kill the Lady of Pain if it meant saving just one sheep (or lamb). So as someone interested in potentially stealing your plot idea, I'm curious what you had your players do.

 

[Zardnaar]

I am exceptionally curious in this adventure. Sheep are my fiancé's favorite animal, and I know that she would find a way to kill the Lady of Pain if it meant saving just one sheep (or lamb). So as someone interested in potentially stealing your plot idea, I'm curious what you had your players do.

Goblins were stealing sheep, PCs tracked them and discovered a Goblin zepplin and Grud the worlds best Goblin fisherman.

 

[Hussar]

He spends part of The Temptation of Elminster doing that, yes. And he wasn't the only one. Mystra has her Chosen do that frequently to keep magic from becoming monopolized by the powerful and selfish, to spread it more widely.

Oh crap. I thought you folks were kidding. This is actually a thing??!?!?

 

[Mirtek]

Oh crap. I thought you folks were kidding. This is actually a thing??!?!?

unfortunately yes. Although i am not sure whether Ed put this in the novels just to troll us

 

[Maxperson]

Took a bit of time to step back and cogitate. Something that I do realize, and this is purely a personal preference, and is certainly not limited to Forgotten Realms, is that I really don't like big settings. And FR is BIG. Bloody ginormously big. I don't just mean the material associated with FR, but, simply geography. The setting is freaking huge.

Now, my group doesn't tend to reuse settings very often. In the past ten years of gaming, I've never played in the same setting twice. Heck, I'd have to go back to almost 2e before I played multiple campaigns in the same setting. So, for me, a setting with that much geography doesn't really offer anything. I'm never going to use it, even if I wanted to.

And, more specifically to FR, a lot of the setting guides are pretty high altitude. They detail out the country in question, maybe talk about its history and some of the big movers and shakers, but, at least from the supplements I've seen, there's very little at "street level" in the supplements. So, it really doesn't appeal to me that FR gives me dozens of different countries. I prefer setting guides that are far more local. Things like Ptolus, or Freeport, or even modules like the old Isle of Dread or, heck, going all the way back to Keep on the Borderlands is all the geography I really need to run my campaigns.

This is why I adored the Curse of Strahd module. The entire campaign takes place in an area, what, 100 miles across? Is it even that big? My current campaign that I'm running is in Primeval Thule. The entire setting is only about 1000 miles across and a good chunk of that is water. And, really, the campaign will likely hit 10th level in an area maybe 300x300 miles. And that's stretching things. Dragonlance, if you only deal with Ansalon, is only 1200 miles across. It's TINY compared to even the Sword Coast.

Again, I'll just repeat myself here, this isn't specific to FR. There's a reason I haven't really used Greyhawk in a very long time. Sure, I ran the Savage Tide AP, which is set in Greyhawk, but, I only ran the first five or six modules (until the end of their time on The Isle of Dread) and three of the modules are set on the Isle of Dread. Outside of Sasserine, and the trip to the island, the PC's never saw more than a tiny sliver of the setting.

Great post.

For me, the size and information it offers is perfect. I do reuse settings, so with FR being so large, it affords me the ability to pick different sections to start and run campaigns from. One setting gives me several different flavors of campaigns. Also, that macro information you mention above is something that I use like an outline. Then I fill in the details I need at the street level and wherever else it may be lacking.

 

[Sadras]

unfortunately yes. Although i am not sure whether Ed put this in the novels just to troll us

That is absolutely horrible.

Wonder if Ed was getting pointers from Lucas the weekend he decided to include that little gem of excrement.

 

[Maxperson]

That is absolutely horrible.

Wonder if Ed was getting pointers from Lucas the weekend he decided to include that little gem of excrement.

He probably wanted to use magichlorians, but was told no.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Yaarel]

Unfortunately, the statistics from WotC no longer seem available, but it was something like 55% use the homebrew setting, 35% use Forgotten Realms setting, and 10% use one of the other official settings. Whatever the precise numbers were, most players create their own homebrew setting (thus are "doing it right" according to Gygax who was shocked that some players would rather mimic his setting than create their own setting). The Forgotten Realms setting is a minority of players, but still it is more popular than any other official setting.

So the main tension is between the majority of players who homebrew, versus the minority of players who use Forgotten Realms.

The problem is, baking in *Too Much Information* in order to flavorize the Forgotten Realms makes D&D books less usable for the majority of players who homebrew. The homebrewers need to throw away, unwrite and rewrite, more and more. Consulting D&D books becomes more-and-more annoying when confronting ubiquitous unwanted flavor baked into rules, descriptions, and explanations.

It may be, most gamers like flavorful text, but this added detail is only beneficial *if* a gamer happens to enjoy exactly that flavor. Otherwise, the unwanted narrative flavor text is a burden.