August 2012--Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue
The Realms are HUGELY popular and there's a big faction of people who are kind of unhappy with the original setting books for 4E, nevermind those who were also unhappy with the time-jump and spell plague.
The sudden FR focus is basically WotC trying to win that (sizable) audience back to 4E, in the form of massive product goodwill, despite the initial statement that they wouldn't revisit settings after putting out a player's guide and a campaign guide.
Simply put, they're already having a hard time retaining their audience for 4E -- which saddens me -- and having a pretty slim set of unsatisfying offerings for Realms fans wasn't helping. Putting out new FR products that meet the current standards for design is pretty much in their best interest.
And I say this as someone who really really does NOT like The Forgotten Realms.
As it is, I kinda wish they would do the same for Eberron. Perhaps a 'Stormreach Campaign Setting' book and 'Heroes of Eberron' which introduce new Eberron-flavored builds for existing classes and themes similar to the 'adventuring archetypes' mentioned in the various Eberron splatbooks (i.e. Dragonmarked Scions, Inquisitives, Magewrights, etc.)
I would also love an Underdark box set, though the Underdark supplement was pretty great, really.
This is pretty much spot on, at least for my group. Essentials basically destroyed my campaign group when it came out, because out of the six people who played regularly, only one didn't absolutely hate the rule system and what it did to the original classes. Since nothing new was coming out on the campaign front (we normally play in The Forgotten Realms), the Essentials change was the nail in the coffin that said that we also had nothing new for rules and classes that could be used anymore either.
The group still gets together every week, but I think the last time we played a game was September and that was an attempt to start a World of Darkness game that failed horribly. Now it's a poker night or just hanging around drinking beer and bitching about work.
I legitimately think that revisiting a campaign setting that we all know and like could help revitalize the group and get us back into things a little more. I don't hold out any hope that the Essentials style rules will go away and be replaced with old school ones, but at least I can run the non-Essentials classes and use some new resources and fluff that people haven't seen before.
UngeheuerLich
Legend
What exactly prevents you from playing without essentials? Not to mention, that every single change was for the better?
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Yeah, that was my question. Especially considering all the chicken little "there will never again be support for non-Essentials classes!" doomsaying has been amply disproven (and I notice WotC got zero credit for doing exactly what they said they would and continuing to support everything). Beyond that lumping everything that happens to use some sort of Essentials-like power progression together seems odd to me. There's a pretty decent range of different classes within that 'box'. It seems hard to me to lump the Thief, the Warpriest, and the Mage together, they're all rather different and even if some players dislike the 'on rails' style of the Thief and Slayer there's no reason to dismiss the Warpriest at the same time, which has a lot more options.
I don't think the vast majority of the audience really cares that much one way or the other about Essentials. The game I started last month has a Cavalier, a Mage, and 2 PHB1 characters in it (ranger and rogue). I notice that the Cavalier's lack of a daily option seems a little limiting, but the person playing the character seems perfectly happy with it.
I'm not sure EXACTLY what WotC said about settings, but I kind of doubt they ever said they would never ever again ever provide the slightest support for, or set new products in, any of the currently released settings. All I remember them saying was that each setting would have 2 books and an adventure. Maybe somewhere someone said that would be IT absolutely and without exception nothing else, but I kind of doubt it. FR has always been a rather heavily supported setting in any case. It probably IS pretty popular and given how 'kitchen sink fantasy' it is it doesn't seem surprising at all to me that they would use it as a backdrop. There's a lot of depth of history and background in FR, so it makes a pretty good place to put more story-intensive products like Neverwinter. They could have used PoL and recreated a whole lot of background to support all the conflict and whatnot involved, but why would you if you could just leverage decades of existing lore in FR?
I don't see where it particularly shows some kind of desperation to use your existing IP assets efficiently when you make up new stuff. Everyone around here likes 4e pretty well. I kind of think it has a different kind of audience than previous editions where pretty much everyone would just switch eventually though. That probably does make WotC nervous. Lots of people seem to play 3.5 happily, but IME they also play 4e and all I ever hear about it is "Oh, 4e, that's a great game to play that's different from 3.5." which is kinda true. Aside from a couple of FLGS grognards nobody seems to care one way or another about it. I think 4e is seen more as an alternate take on D&D perhaps than as the linear evolution of the game. Maybe that's a bad thing (for WotC), but I'm not sure. I think there is just always going to be a kind of equilibrium between 3.5, PF, and 4e, and maybe other D&D variants. Essentials might not have really been enough of a variation on 4e to have mattered much, but it seems odd to me to say that it 'wrecked' anything.
UngeheuerLich
Legend
It at least increased my purchases from 0 (besides ddi) to nearly every book since then... so one more customer
give me the cancelled multiclass book, together with a book of rituals (maybe using themes) and i am very happy...
maybe a dungeon builder/random encounter/random drop guide and i am fine.
IF neverwinter is really that great as a start for campaigns, maybe i will get that too... maybe even menzoberranzan... i can´t see any desperation, but just a sensible reevaluation...
i really think, you can´t blame wotc for both ignoring and and adapting to customer demand...
IMHO they have found a good balance right now, showing in some posts, that give tem credits... maybe someone will always complain... and maybe even that is for the better...
give me the cancelled multiclass book, together with a book of rituals (maybe using themes) and i am very happy...
maybe a dungeon builder/random encounter/random drop guide and i am fine.
IF neverwinter is really that great as a start for campaigns, maybe i will get that too... maybe even menzoberranzan... i can´t see any desperation, but just a sensible reevaluation...
i really think, you can´t blame wotc for both ignoring and and adapting to customer demand...
IMHO they have found a good balance right now, showing in some posts, that give tem credits... maybe someone will always complain... and maybe even that is for the better...
Matt James
Game Developer
UngeheuerLich
Legend
:d
^^
