I'm sorry, but you can't say "full stop" when Curse of Strahd exists. It may not be exactly what you want, but it's not the Forgotten Realms.
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D&D 5E Is there any indication that WotC will launch a new setting?
- Thread starter BTsam
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CapnZapp
Legend
But that doesn't mean Greyhawk is particularly likely to show up.
It only means those characters are part of their "D&D setting" now; the kitchen-sink Realms.
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CapnZapp
Legend
Sure but that's speculation.
What's increasingly like cold hard facts is:
There is no setting support at all for any setting during the first FIVE years of 5th edition, except Forgotten Realms, and even there the support is pretty minimal.
The conclusion is: We won't get campaign gazetteers any more. They don't drive sales of toys and board games.
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CapnZapp
Legend
How many years are the gaming community willing to just take their word for it, I gather.
I find it increasingly baffling how people are simply going along with this. I would have thought WotC would have been buried under an avalanche of complaints about lack of setting support by now, so very many years after release.
I sure hope you all won't be upset when WotC, in just a few years from now, announce 6th edition (or 5th edition Enhanced...) and the cycle starts over again.
I'm amazed how accepting you lot all seem to be of the fact D&D is mostly there to make Hasbro money on movies, toys and games... With the actual rpg as a sideshow run on the cheap with just a handful of devs...
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I don't think the community is - the majority (probably vast majority) are just playing the game in the settings provided or in their own worlds (be that continuations of older settings or pure homebrew) and couldn't care less if WotC ever released more setting info, that would of necessity conflict with their own campaign's internal history. All my previous long term campaigns, even those in 1ed and 2ed had so diverged from FR or GH lore by the time they got half way through as to make any published information near worthless. The map and culture gazetteer level was about all that mattered not the detail.
It is slightly frustrating that the FR gazetteer info is being spread across several APs but really they are just updates to 2ed, 3ed and 4ed setting lore, waiving a hand and saying a century happened, there were some cataclysms, some names have changed. It's nice to have the locations there ready for the AP to be played though, so I' not complaining. Frankly if you want to keep up to date on FR lore, don't wait for a setting book, just google the wiki. Now an official licensed wiki for setting lore for the revered settings to impose strict canon would be nice but I'm not sure how they make money off that unless they license it to third parties - which may well be the way they'd go for pure setting support anyway.
The bottom line is we don't need setting support, and as a representative of part of the player base I'm not going along with WotC's plan, I fully endorse it.
As to 6ed why would they when their business model is to slow burn the support material across multiple media to raise D&D's profile to make a full budget movie practical and then use that boost to push, because Hollywood and box office 'endorsement' is where the big bucks are.
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It's simple. Campaign settings are unnecessary. And for the people for whom they are necessary... we're competent DMs who can use all of our older setting books to develop our own rules and run games in those places using 5E.
Only those lacking imagination or are unwilling to put in the work believe Greyhawk games don't exist so long as there's not a Greyhawk setting book with 5E on the cover.
Why would they, when most people use a homebrew setting?
Hells. When people asked me to start a new game up, I just did a google search on different maps from different things and other games (not even D&D), and took that, made it the whole world, noted where different races lived, and ran with it. There's one celestial god per cleric domain (minus Life and Death), there's only archdevils and demon lords for dark gods. Took me twenty minutes to come up with everything, and we're off and playing.
Now, not everyone can do that, but it remains a fact people tend to run things on their homebrew settings. Even if someone wants to use an official setting, or steal someone else's setting... its the freaking digtal age. How many settings out there have wikis, or even just a web page? I got a lot of my planescape information from just google searches, back when I did that.
Dead tree setting books are rapidly losing their value
IchneumonWasp
Explorer
It is simply not true that we haven't had non-FR support. They've been slowly developing and creating crunch material for Eberron and other settings (psionics etc.) in UA and we know from a fact that they are using UA to playtest new material before it gets published (Xanathar's Guide to Everyone is a good example of this).
They've been making pdf's available for all of their past campaign settings. What more could we want? It's sad to see that publishing 'campaign setting books' isn't profitable anymore, but I like how they flesh out parts of settings through the adventure books.
They've been making pdf's available for all of their past campaign settings. What more could we want? It's sad to see that publishing 'campaign setting books' isn't profitable anymore, but I like how they flesh out parts of settings through the adventure books.
Jester David
Hero
*cough* Ravenloft *cough*
Also worth remembering that only the Realms was supported for 3.0e and for all of AD&D there was the 1980 World of Greyhawk folio until 1987. That was 9 years with only a 32-page summary of places as the only world lore.
Right is the point.
The majority of DMs run in homebrew worlds, or leave the setting in the background. And while a large percentage run the Realms, I'd bet a high number are just using that because it's the default of the published adventures.
The reason there's no outcry is that only a small minority of D&D fans have strong feelings about past settings. Doing any published setting will be releasing a product the majority of players have no interest in, and only targets a fraction of that minority.
Keep in mind that people who are fans of Ravenloft and Dragonlance and Mystara and Al-Qadim and Planescape and Spelljammer are *only* people who played during 2e. The 1e fans who skipped 3e will have had little experience with those worlds, and anyone who played 3e and onward will likely only have heard of the Realms and Eberron. Or maybe Dark Sun after the 4e book.
Given how many 1e fans skipped 2nd Edition, how many fans 3e and 4e brought in, and how many brand new people are lured in by 5e... is it any wonder campaign settings seem like a super niche product?
5e is still selling well. It will take a prolonged dip in sales followed by an unsuccessful attempt at boosting sales before they think about 6e. And even then, it will take a couple years to make a change.
Let's see, if it started now it would have to be a year of slow sales at least followed by a change in tactics that would take a year to make. That takes us to 2019. Two years to make 5e Revised or 6e. That's 2021, making 5e's lifespan a mere 7 years. Longer than 4e and the same as all of 3.X.
But right now things are going strong so they're not going to rock the boat and risk the continued sales of the PHB. And that seems like it's going to continue for another year or two. There's good odds 5e will pass 3e's lifespan and maybe even challenge 2e's 11-year mark.
Brace yourself Zapp.... D&D has always been about making money. Gary wasn't giving the books away. It wasn't a charity or free ruleset. He made it a business.
D&D was always just one piece of the business model. TSR regularly released board games and other RPGs and tried to branch out into other "hobbies", such as kitting.
WotC has just become smarter and realised that releasing a whole bunch of side RPGs just competes with D&D. And that if they put the D&D brand on other games, they have a built-in audience rather than having to stand alone.
The D&D team has been growing the last couple years. They've just moved them to licencing and brand management and the like rather than the RPG. They're purposely not expanding the number of people working on the RPG. At this point it's probably a very deliberate choice not to release more books for D&D.
It is the exception that, as they say, proves the rule. There non - adventure supplements so far. One is about the Forgotten Realms and the other two are branded with FR characters. From what I've read of SCAG and Volo's, there isn't one sentence in either that isn't compatible with The Forgotten Realms. I suspect the same will be true with Everything.
With 5e we've seen the incorporation of elements formerly set on other worlds. Most recently, we saw the assimilation of the formerly unique to Mystara Tortle move to the Realms.
When Forgotten Realms has everything, there will be no need for other worlds.
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