Shasf said:
Woot! . . .
One of the better things to come about from 4th edition. I say this because I simply do not like 3.0 and 3.5 edition Forgotten Realms setting.
This will make it easier to justify why there are adventurer's in my opinion, how so some might ask. The answer is, with the removal of so many high level NPC's (which I hope many of them are removed) and quite possibly the chance that the Deities of the Realms will be less inclined to "walk the earth" so to speak, the players will feel like they actually achieve success on a grand scale rather than feel like they just cleaned the rat infested cellar of the town's inn since it was too beneath the high level NPCs who turned up their nose at the prospect of actually doing anything similar. Also, the emply spaces created by such a renovation could also lead to the characters created by new players to fill that now present void.
And this is precisely the sort of selfish and shortsighted perspective that has so many people in violent opposition to the 4E Realms. You don't like the NPCs, the deities, the depth of the setting - then the setting isn't for you, and another one likely is. The problem with that point of view, is that in changing those aspects of the setting, they've changed a lot of what the biggest supporters of the setting
did love about it. To satisfy the people that weren't buying the Forgotten Realms products, they've sacrificed what the people that were buying wanted, and jeopardized the entire product line in the process.
Just to go at the points that you've chosen against it: If your biggest problem with the setting is the number of high level NPCs stealing the thunder of the PCs, then you or your DM has a bigger problem. It's not the job of the setting to keep its NPCs in check, because, gasp, your party were not the first adventurers to walk the continent, and they aren't the only ones, either. Those NPCs have other matters to attend to, other places to be, and often enough, different motivations from what the party has. If they're stepping on the toes of the PCs and wrecking suspension of disbelief, someone is sabotaging their own game, and it's not the setting's fault.
As for the deities, that's been part of the setting's flavour since, at the least, the Time of Troubles. And I've got some bad news for you: Killing off 120 gods won't do anything about the other 30 still being featured prominently in the novels as characters in their own right. If anything, it's likely to get worse, because Mystra's death was purely to cue up a new Cyric plot arc where he escapes from the 1,000 years of divine imprisonment a few centuries (nine, in all likelihood) early. But ultimately, even that is irrelevant, because to quote Ed Greenwood when A Grand History of the Realms came out, "Those aren't my gods". Your problem there isn't with the setting - it's with WotC's writing staff. Guess which one is still very much part of the setting.
Now, as many people know, I loathe the Forgotten Realms setting for many reasons, and while I do take some measure of morbid gratification from what's been done to it, I also loathe how WotC has decided to treat one of their largest fan bases. The Realms were a huge seller for them, one of the biggest selling product lines they had, and it was successful because it had history and background. Slapping your customers in the face is a bad move for a company, no matter who you are or what edition you support. Worse yet, so much of the changes made have been arbitrary and completely out of character for the NPCs and deities involved, that they don't even make sense from an internal perspective.
Have fun with whatever Edition of D&D you're comfortable with, and if you're going to compare one edition to another please do it just on rules instead of fluff.
Unfortunately, WotC has made that impossible to do (especially as it concerns a free-form community like this), by committing so much of the old flavour text into hardlined rules and using the new edition to mangle one of the topselling settings in their catalog. This is the heart of the problem with the changes: In many cases, what used to be flavour has been turned into rules, and those rules are often contrary to the original flavour that has existed for up to 30 years. So, yes, the new edition will cause problems between existing players, and new players who only know 4E, because 4E players won't know what the hell players of old editions are talking about.
The Eladrin are no longer exemplars of benign freedom of self, no longer fey-like celestials that had a unique place in the system; now they're just another PC race with advanced examples that can do things your PCs can't (a trend that goes beyond Eladrin, I'll add). Archons and Guardinals don't even exist at this point, and with the opinions of the WotC staffers as of Worlds and Monsters, never will. Angels... yikes, no longer universally good servants of the benign gods, winged humanoids meant to be wholesome and beautiful representations of real world myth; now, they're faceless servants of any deity, because "the Evil gods didn't have any servants of their own". Bollocks.
Devils went from being the exemplars of tyranny given flesh, to being a race of fallen angels that slew their own god; y'know, because the Catholic church doesn't mind having their mythology plundered by a game that their fundamentalists already decry as Satanic, especially when they now let the devils win. Demons are no longer scheming and intelligent foes (so long Graz'zt, we hardly knew ye... except that we did... for 30 years); they are now mindless destroyers that can't manipulate unless it's through fear (oh, wait... they don't use that, either according to 4E). Slaadi are no longer embodiments of chaos; they're just as destructive as demons, without actually being demons, making them utterly superfluous and pointless to the 4E cosmology that so readily picked them up. And the Yugoloths... alas, the Yugoloths, are no longer even a manipulative race of fiends of their own, but mercenary demons that are more interested in coin than in rampant destruction.
That's just out eight out of ten planar exemplar races. The Modrons were effectively dead thanks to 3E because someone "Thought they were too goofy" (not saying they weren't, but they still had history to them, and were far better examples of LN than the Formians or the Inevitables). The Rilmani won't get converted, since Neutral no longer exists. And I'm not going to even bother with the contradictions they've caused to freeform environments like ours using material plane natives.
There are many, many reasons that myself and others have said "4E is not D&D". The flavour is just as valid as any other, because without the flavour, it's just a game called Dungeons & Dragons, which can be anything as long as you own the trademark and copyright for it.
