WoW Cataclysm VS 4e Forgotten Realms

[Bluenose]

The new design paradigm, however, is more about providing a few interesting details, but leaving most of the things open for the DM. That leaves the root causes and motivations open to interpretation. And perhaps that's not what pre-4e gamers wanted out of FR?

That is a pretty good description of the original FR boxed set, the "Old Grey Box." Some people prefer it that way.

 

[Celtavian]

re

I think it had more to do with the quality and depth of the material. Forgotten Realms had great writers. They knew how to mix flavor and mechanics into a cohesive whole that made the Realms the most developed fantasy world in print.

This tradition goes back to the 2E boxed sets. They did awesome maps and in-depth write ups of various Realms areas that drew you in and made the Realms feel like a living, breathing world.

Then add in books like Faiths and Avatars and Powers and Pantheons that made the religions of the Realms seem real and unique.

Then in 3E this continued with the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide and each individual area book that included tons of crunch and fluff that enhanced the game world, provided an incredible number of options for character building, and really made the Realms that much better and more interesting. The material was so good that was being put out for the Realms that people were using it for their non-Realms campaigns.

Then here comes 4E with their single, weak campaign book. Not nearly the detailed maps of the old Forgotten Realms Campaign Book. Not nearly the detail for each area. All the personalities Realms lovers came to know and love like Alusair, the Seven Sisters, Khelben Blackstaff, and the like were destroyed in favor of a flavorless, weakly written, cheap compared to previous books Realms product.

If you're going to do something like a cataclysmic type restructuring of the Realms, then do it with the same level of detail and love as previous products. Don't sell us Realms lovers garbage and expect us to accept it when we have those beautiful products from 2E and 3E that were worth the money we paid for them on our bookshelves.

Realms products used to be the benchmark by which other world were products were judged. They were that high quality. And producing a Realms product of inferior quality like 4E did and shoving it down our throats is not and should not be received well. It wasn't. It was an inferior product all the way around compared to previous Realms books. It was one of the many disappointments I experienced after the 4E launch.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hmm, according to that theory the best P&P RPG Worlds are those that never change.

I'd say that the best P&P RPG Worlds are those that your characters change.

Even with a slightly increased sense of effect upon the world, a videogame has a limited amount of "fractal chaos" it's willing to shoulder. It has to. It would ruin the user experience if players could actually fail to protect Stormwind, leading to its burnination by a dragon. It has to cater to a broad base at all points.

A P&P RPG is distinct from that. The effects your character can have on the world are literally limitless. That's part of the fun of a analog RPG, its version of the flashing lights and colors in a digital PRG, one of the things it can offer easily that a computer has a very difficult time fixing.

That's where apocalypses (Realms Shaking Events) and story changes muck with the gunk. When you've changed Icewind Dale on your own, it's not great to hear about how some dude who works at an office in Washington State decided that your changes don't matter, it's his that do.

You have a sense of ownership over an analog RPG experience. Its your memories, your dice rolls, your imagination, your version of things, your tables' house rules, your story. That makes it personal when things change without you.

Both the Spellplague and some of the broader 4e changes (like the new cosmology) had massive stumbles because they forgot that groups own their own games. WotC is under the impression that it owns the Dungeons and Dragons game. It doesn't. We do. The company doesn't give it to us, we give it to ourselves. Which means that if you're going to make some big changes, you're going to have to get groups to go along with your idea. And telling them "You're having badwrongfun and this new update will fix that!" is doing it wrong.

 

[Obergnom]

I'd say that the best P&P RPG Worlds are those that your characters change.

Yeah, I should have said "the best published P&P RPG Worlds" or something like that.

I mostly agree with you. I personally keep changes done to the realms in my campaigns done by totally different groups of players over the course of editions. In 1363 DR a demonic incursion destroyed the Monastery of the Red Rose. In 1370 DR Waterdeep was under a globe of darkness and despair. Giants invaded northern Cormyr in 1373 DR and destroyed the city of Tilverton, which is why today Ashabenford is a big city, the capital of the dales and called Bard's Gate... these changes did not even happen with the same groups of players, but I like them and change newer incarnations of the setting accordingly...

Personally I like newer versions of settings and advancing time lines, because it seems like the rest of the setting is changing too, not just the part we play in. And you can always use all these events happening somewhere else to flesh out descriptions in the local game.

And this is where the new realms fall flat for me. The events of the last 100 years are not detailed, most regions are without any significant information etc. All that is left are the parts I advanced myself to fit my version of the realms... that is, the Dalelands, Northern Cormyr, Waterdeep and Damara... the rest feels rather empty.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Agree with just about everything so far.


Also, Cataclysm builds upon the world. The cataclysm is an event that shows us how the world was devastated and changed, and how all the characters we know and love have coped with those changes. Lore changed and evolved.

Forgotten Realms was not so much a change of the world as the destruction of it. Lore was wiped and the world became unknown and arbitrary.


Add to that the apparent corporate motives: for Cataclysm it was a huge update, meant to reinvigorate the world for players. For Forgotten Realms it was a huge culling, meant to reset the world for writers. (True or not, cataclysm seems like it took a TON of work and investment. FR seems like people didn't want to have to worry about "knowing" the setting.)

 

[Celebrim]

Most players experience of WoW is about as deep as a mud puddle. Relatively few WoW players are really into the setting. Mostly its about the team work and getting the phat l00t. Sometimes its about the social experience, but generally speaking WoW is not primarily targetting a setting emmersive experience.

By contrast, a table top setting only sells to people who care about the setting. That's all its got.

But perhaps even more importantly, 'Cataclysm' for all its talk about being 'cataclysmic' really isn't. 'Cataclysm' represents a small evolutionary change in the setting's story line much of which had been foreshadowed by bits of lore introduced far earlier. 'Cataclysm' is really only another chapter in the story and any mechanical changes had very little setting impact (and generally speaking, mostly ended up being buffs and such). That isn't to say that I'm happy to have lost 'Armorsmithing', but on the whole nothing truly 'Cataclysmic' has happened. On the contrary, I now have 310% flying in old Azeroth, which means that your experience is of a great deal of liberation and new freedom. And, after the 'Cataclysm' there is basically just as much detail as before, just as many NPC's, and just as much things to do and see and much of it done in greater detail and to higher standards.

Contrast that with what happened to FR in 4e and you should see the problem. What happened in FR wasn't an evolutionary change based on what had happened before that advanced the story somewhat but otherwise left things mostly intact. No, what happened to the FR was that they had a new mechanical system that was incompatible with all previous ones and they needed basically to come up with something that wiped away all that old lore that was so intimately tied to system. Moreover, what you got from that mechanical change wasn't the greater degree of character freedom that FR had always been known from, but reduced character freedom. Moreover, what you got to replace the old lore wasn't done to the same high standard.

 

[Dedekind]

Both the Spellplague and some of the broader 4e changes (like the new cosmology) had massive stumbles because they forgot that groups own their own games. WotC is under the impression that it owns the Dungeons and Dragons game. It doesn't. We do. The company doesn't give it to us, we give it to ourselves. Which means that if you're going to make some big changes, you're going to have to get groups to go along with your idea. And telling them "You're having badwrongfun and this new update will fix that!" is doing it wrong.

Respectfully, I think this is mostly wrong. I can't even imagine what a FR would look like if it were designed by committee. Maybe would have a lot of drow rangers!

The design goals appear to have been:
1) Make the material accessible to someone who knows nothing about the Realms. (Ex: A large pantheon creates barriers for new player entry.)
2) Make enough new material for people who have the old material. (Ex: The Spellplague changed some areas fundamentally.)
3) Make the material suggestive, but not exhaustive in detail. (Ex: Earth motes have appeared and they have these properties, but we'll leave the history and purpose to the DM.)

These goals in the end backfired since it meant:
1) Making sweeping changes that are bound to step on some toes.
2) Taking away the pleasure of just reading about a subject with no in-game use.

In the game, I think the 100 year jump is what differentiates the FR change from the WoW change. The events of WoW happened to the players, at least nominally. The FR changes are mostly remote and the world is "new."

 

[Saeviomagy]

I think the big difference between the FR change and the cataclysm change is this:

The cataclysm change was free.

The FR change cost you money.

Now, while that's not going to be the entirety of the matter, it sets a pretty big differential in terms of expectations.

 

[Dyir]

What I've never understood about the changes made to the 4e version of FR is why Wizards just didn't create a new campaign setting, rather than radically altering the FR. If you were someone that enjoyed the level of detail and the involved NPCs, why couldn't they have just left the FR alone for them. Given the limited amount of detail that the FR books provided, would it have been that difficult to make a new campaign setting with the same degree of detail? It seems to me that way you could get the best of both worlds: those players that prefer limited detail and “points of light” as the emphasis would have this new setting, and those players that liked the greater detail would have the older FR.

And if you point out that they did it because the mechanics didn't match, I cry shenanigans. When they converted from 2E to 3E, there was no “world changing event:” stuff that didn't match simply had always been that way. Drizzt had always been a multiclassed Fighter/Barbarian/Ranger, the Simbul had always been a Sorcerer, and so forth. And I thought that was a pretty simple and easy way to handle it, without obliterating everything that had come before. Surely the same could have been done for 4E, especially given it's new philosophy that the game rules are more of an abstraction of the game world, rather than a physics engine.

 

[Nagol]

What I've never understood about the changes made to the 4e version of FR is why Wizards just didn't create a new campaign setting, rather than radically altering the FR. If you were someone that enjoyed the level of detail and the involved NPCs, why couldn't they have just left the FR alone for them. Given the limited amount of detail that the FR books provided, would it have been that difficult to make a new campaign setting with the same degree of detail? It seems to me that way you could get the best of both worlds: those players that prefer limited detail and “points of light” as the emphasis would have this new setting, and those players that liked the greater detail would have the older FR.

And if you point out that they did it because the mechanics didn't match, I cry shenanigans. When they converted from 2E to 3E, there was no “world changing event:” stuff that didn't match simply had always been that way. Drizzt had always been a multiclassed Fighter/Barbarian/Ranger, the Simbul had always been a Sorcerer, and so forth. And I thought that was a pretty simple and easy way to handle it, without obliterating everything that had come before. Surely the same could have been done for 4E, especially given it's new philosophy that the game rules are more of an abstraction of the game world, rather than a physics engine.

I suspect the main reason they wanted to change FR was to keep the brand active. To leave the setting as it was in 3.Xe would be abandoning the brand and the brand pulls in a lot of revenue from sources other than the game.