D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

[KYRON45]

Using an well known setting is shorthand between the DM and the players at their table. If I want to run Dark Sun, that conjures up to anyone who knows the setting visions of the Sorcerer-Kings, of oppression, slavery, and secret rebels, of deserts, of psionics.

Taking a well known setting and tossing out parts and changing parts not only loses all that, but actively can confuse players expecting staples of the setting. "Waterdeep? Nah, I don't have any big cities in my Forgotten Realms - it's my setting to do with it what I will".

By all means make up a homebrew - that's what I do for every campaign I run. But mucking heavily with a well known setting is just asking for the DM and the players to be out of alignment about it. And that's a lot more work for the DM, or just problems ongoing in the campaign.

So sure, you can change it however you want. Doesn't mean that doing so will improve the experience around the table.

There would be little reason to change things unless they improve the experience for us.

 

[RedSquirrel]

... Greyhawk is an interesting setting IMO but as someone who doesn't have history in it, I'd be uninterested in seeing it reprinted without something new in it. ...

Out of curiosity, if you have no history with the setting, how would you know what "something new" is?

 

[Reynard]

Original D&D is psionic. AD&D is psionic. 3e is Psionic. 4e is Psionic. 5e is Psionic.

Psionics a core of D&D.

Psionics is authentic D&D.

I have never seen Eldritch Wizardry. Did psionics in that look like they did in the AD&D PHB?

Also as an aside: weren't psionic pretty much directly stolen from some popular fantasy novels of the time?

 

[RedSquirrel]

I sometimes think we all have a different idea of what we're talking about here. Greyhawk isn't a historical setting in any sense that I understand it.

It's just one of those things gleaned from a lot of other points ... Gygax wrote historical fantasy in his games and books, because he came from historical wargaming. So, a lot of people see the nuances in his work which influenced his other writing and whatnot, so they put it together piecemeal, to get the impression of Greyhawk being historical fantasy.

There's nothing that officially says, like, "GH is based on historical periods of ... blah-blah.", etc. It's just something people see from reading his larger opus of work.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Maybe not technically, but it incorporated a lot of misapprehensions based on a 1960s Hollywood view of the medieval period.

That makes it fiction, not history. It can still be fiction.

 

[MGibster]

Maybe not technically, but it incorporated a lot of misapprehensions based on a 1960s Hollywood view of the medieval period.

So what? I don't ask that to be rude or flippant, but so what? It's not a historical setting, so what does it matter if its not accurate?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

About GH, not every setting, needs every thing.

Greyhawk's thing is that it's the core rules setting. It's the baseline that other settings may deviate from. That's what it's always been.

 

[Parmandur]

It depends. The value of a setting is entirely dependent on how shared it is. If only the DM actually knows anything about the setting, then they should change whatever they see fit, and just use the parts of the setting that they deem useful.

But if several players know the setting well, then making broad changes loses the "shared imagination" shortcut that a well-known setting is supposed to facilitate.

Yeah, the only time I have experienced that is with the Wheel of Time RPG back in the day, and it was a disaster.

 

[Belen]

That was one small personal experience I decide to share, not cool to lock onto it and ignore the rest of what we've been saying.

About GH, not every setting, needs every thing. And especially not carbon copies... that sounds super boring. I'd much prefer settings were things are actually different. I don't want all the races in Greyhawk because they don't fit the world, just like I don't want FR in my DS, or whatever. That's what makes the different setting interesting, they are different.

This.

I never run games that include all the options in the PHB. Dragonborn are a variant of Lizardfolk in my current campaign, for example, and they are very rare. I may, at times, work with a player on an option. For instance, if there are no Tieflings, then they will need to craft a backstory to incorporate into the campaign.

I always provide the players with allowed options before the start of a campaign. I have only had one person insist they they deserved to play whatever they wanted and I advised them to find a group that would be a better fit.

 

[Yaarel]

I have never seen Eldritch Wizardry. Did psionics in that look like they did in the AD&D PHB?

Also as an aside: weren't psionic pretty much directly stolen from some popular fantasy novels of the time?

Tashas psionic feats pretty much cover the 0e and 1e versions of psionics. Still waiting on a Psion!


Also, psionics is part of the 5e 2014 core books, especially the Monster Manual.