Why I feel so abysmally let down by the "Ravnica" news...

[Parmandur]

I wonder if the art books will continue after this? The Ravnica book is most likely full of art from the cards + plane shift style crunch.

There is a Ravicna Art book coming out,and Wyatt is saying in Twitter that this book is acting as the Planeshift for it. He says the block-art book-Planeshift triad is still the plan moving forwards.

 

[Parmandur]

I hope not. Settings that don't give any actual lore on the setting are a waste.

Not saying there will be no lore, but this is a crunch book designed to compliment a fluff book rather than replace it.

 

[flametitan]

While I had my initial disappointment on Monday about the book (more because I thought the spelljammer references and them highlighting it in interviews would mean more than what it turned out to be than for Ravnica itself), I'm mostly over it and curious to see what it adds though.

I do have concerns about the MSRP, specifically if the weight listed on Amazon is accurate. The weight is less than that of the SCAG, and closer to that of HotDQ (implying it'll be beween 96 and 160 pages), but the MSRP is the same as pretty much every book except the SCAG, HotDQ and RoT. I'm really hoping that the amazon weight is wrong, as I'm not keen on paying the price of a 256 page book for something barely over a third the size.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Too bad, sorry sorry for ruining your boycot, but I can't resist it, I'm so getting the Ravnica book on day one, I've wanted something like that for a LONG time, please sir more gruel, more gruel.

(The Eberron pdf, I'll just wait until it is complete and I can get it POD. If SAO Abridged taught me anything, is never pay for open Beta)

Hehe...not a "boycott" so much as a "I'm not interested yet..." There's always hope that they'll put something out I will buy, but so far they're batting zero. Hey, why don't you buy two? Make up for my lack of interest and purchase's...

Eberron is a "not interested...but...". It's one of those things that I really don't think I'd like because, well, reasons I'm not getting into here. That said, it's not that I KNOW I don't/wouldn't like it...I have been surprised before by an RPG or supplement I bought on a whim. Maybe Eberron is that? I don't know. If/when I'm itch'in to buy some RPG stuff, maybe I'll pick up a POD of it. Crazier things have happened!

Ravnica? ...er... nope. No interest what so ever.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Jester David]

Not saying there will be no lore, but this is a crunch book designed to compliment a fluff book rather than replace it.

I'm not saying the two won't complement each other, but needing to buy two $50 books to play the campaign setting seems like a problematic design. If the book doesn't contain enough information to run the campaign setting independently, it's a bad campaign setting.

 

[AtomicPope]

That's a fair critique of the claim, but only as a rhetorical point.

More practically, the case in question is more like the chef promises a perfectly-cooked, mouth-watering steak, and the diner thinks, "I bet it's going to be a shark steak. It's got to be a shark steak. He used the word 'watering' which I think gives it away. Also, somebody on the Internet posted a photo of a seafood truck on this street the other day. I really really really hope it's a shark steak because I love shark steaks. Besides, it would be terrible business to serve a beef steak, because that's what all the other restaurants do. Yeah, that confirms it...it's a shark steak."

When a perfectly-cooked, mouth-watering prime rib shows up, the diner feels utterly betrayed.

What edition is the prime rib?

 

[AtomicPope]

Ravnica does bear a lot of similarity to something that longtime D&D fans would love: Planescape and the city of Sigil. It isn't, however, Sigil. In fact, its existence forces one to ask, "where is the design space for Sigil now that Ravnica is being released?" It seems to me that the existence of Ravnica makes an official Planescape product less likely, as so many of the concepts that would have been covered in a Planescape product are now being covered by Ravnica. It's like WotC spent months building up the idea of Curse of Strahd and instead gave us Curse of Innistrad.

What you're describing is category competition. WotC is selling two products that will compete with one another due to the nature of their content. This is not like Mordekainen's Tome and Volo's Guide. Both of those, while belonging to the same category of D&D product, complement one another. Two "endless city campaigns" does not. They're stand alone products. They could be very similar in content, as least similar enough to warrant one being used and another ignored. At this stage we're just speculating. The best we could hope for is two campaign supplements that are rich enough to plunder.

 

[Ratskinner]

Nothing they are putting out is "new" or "interesting"...it's all "been there, done that". But Hollywood is on the same line..."Well, Product X did really good 20 years ago...lets do that, but diversify it! We can't loose!"

I'm not sure if my position is more or less cynical than yours...but with regards to plot, premise, setting, etc.

NONE OF IT is new. Even the stuff you think is new (or as having been so), isn't. I've been repeatedly surprised at finding direct precursors or antecedents for virtually everything. All there is is clever (sometimes accidentally, so) rehashes of previous ideas. The "creative" fields aren't about generating fundamentally new ideas, they are all about the details of the execution and presentation of the current instance of an idea.

Like it or don't like it, but lets not kid ourselves about originality being the issue.

 

[gyor]

Planescape and Ravnica are two very different settings. The central core areas of Planescape is Sigil, but it also includes the inner, outer, Astral, and energy planes, Sigil is mostly home base and an area where adventures cam occur. Planescape is no more only Sigil, then FR is only Waterdeep.

Ravnica on the other hand is both the name of the capital city/metropolis, the name of the world/Ecumenopolis, and the plane.

I don't think Setting goes beyond the Ecumenopolis of Ravnica, so no trips to the plane of fire normally (well you can in the D&D version, but then you've left the Setting for the metasetting).

In fact that is a good way to explain the difference between Planescape and Ravnica, Planescape is a metasetting, the connective tissue between other Settings, Ravnica is a Setting, and the Forgotten Realms is a hungry setting that devoured enough other setting and elements that it's evolved into a Metasetting (regions in Faerun, like Old Empires, Cold Lands, Lands of Intrigue, Moonshaes, Moonsea, Swordcoast and the North, Unapproachable East, Utter East, Western Heartlands, Shining South, Chult, The Vast, The Upper Underdark, Lower Underdark, Middle Underdark, FR Feywild, FR Shadowfell, FR Domains of Gods, The Great Rift, Evermeet are basically their own Setting functionally, that interact, then you get to actual official subsettings Kara Tur, Maztica, Zakhara, and possibly in the future Abeir).

 

[Tony Vargas]

What edition is the prime rib?

The popularity of Prime Rib goes back to the industrial revolution. So we're talking "Little Wars."