Point of Light

[Kae'Yoss]

Forgotton Realms can hardly be described as sancrosanct anyway - it's been through so many changes, and still always ends up being pretty much the same anyway.

Not changes like this.

Personally I might actually look at the setting again if they wiped out the uber-npcs (especially Drizzt)

The funny part is that Drizzt stays (not that he's "the" über-npc in the Realms, anyway). They "just" erase a bunch of stuff that, in my opinion, was a big part of the Realms' identity.

I guess if they had set out to lose as many old fans as possible while winning as few old detractors, they have succeeded (I'm sure the irrational Drizzt dislike is one of the big turn-offs for many)

 

[Piratecat]

Err - Kae, the 4e FR setting hasn't been published yet. How can you legitimately decry its downfall when you haven't actually read it?

 

[Silent Cartographer]

A better "points of light" setting is <...> Earthdawn's core premise.

Wow! Good catch.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Err - Kae, the 4e FR setting hasn't been published yet. How can you legitimately decry its downfall when you haven't actually read it?

Extrapolating. They took less than one page to turn the Pantheon into a fourth-rate soap opera and from the little stuff they let out, we already know that "The old world has ended", the Weave is gone, the cosmology has been changed (yet again, after they made their own thing in 3e. Last time, they didn't have to kill a dozen gods), they are weeding out gods like mad, and while they told the Eberron fans that they listen to them, they told the Realms fans that they don't care what the fans like, the Realms are going to be altered, love it or leave it. And there's a time jump of at least 10 years.

A lot of the stuff is already going on that in retrospect is clearly a prelude to 4e.

I like nothing of what we know of the changes. I have the feeling that it's not just a statistical anomaly and that actually, everything else is awesome (which would have been necessary for me to pick up more WotC stuff than is absolutely necessary).

 

[buzz]

How can you legitimately decry its downfall when you haven't actually read it?

Piratecat, meet the Internet. Internet, Piratecat.

 

[buzz]

And WotC's decision to push for just one style of play...

The "points of light" concept is a world design paradigm. It's got nothing to do with "style of play."

If anything, it's more of a publishing mechanism. If they plan to publish a new campaign setting every year, it's probably easier (both on their end and ours) for such a product to detail a "point of light" as opposed to entire planet and cosmology, which is the current model. From our side of things, that means that multiple "points" can be combined in the same campaign world.

Honestly, it's much closer to what we had back in the 1e days (see above comparisons to KotB). It also fits D&D way better than the current staple of macro-level setting encyclopedias.

 

[Arnwyn]

Err - Kae, the 4e FR setting hasn't been published yet. How can you legitimately decry its downfall when you haven't actually read it?

Because a bunch of changes have been published (and that's not even reading all the comments, in writing, from WotC designers).

Why would you assume than an entire setting needs to be published before one can be unhappy with just the changes that have already been revealed?