Felon said:
4e did what so many folks had been begging for for oh-so-many years: it put a lot of the sacred cows out to pasture. The Seven Sisters and Elminister no longer run around making everything all right. Drizz't is still around, but he never had the kind of world-hopping juice that made people wonder why low-level heroes were ever needed to handle a big crisis. Lots of gods got wiped too, which was less necessary, and probably did more to ruffle feathers. I, for one, am glad Mystra bit the big one. Something as important as magic doesn't need to be lorded over by one god with a good or evil agenda.
Basically, this fell into the same trap that, I think, 4e in general did. The squeaky wheel got the grease; they responded to the criticisms.
What they didn't do so well was provide a reason for someone who was already chugging along just fine with the game to update.
The fine line between killing the sacred cow and shooting the faithful dog was, perhaps, crossed too often, and 4e FR, I think even moreso than 4e D&D in general, alienated the previous fanbase.
You're going to alienate SOME of the fanbase no matter what you do, and hopefully you'll bring in enough new people to make up for it.
What 4e in general, and 4eFR specifically, didn't take into account as well is the idea that the best way to attract new fans is to keep the old ones -- those dedicated fans are what bring in new players, so you should be careful not to alienate what is, ultimately, your best recruiting tools: people who like the game they play.
This is coming from someone who wouldn't play in FR if it wasn't for those changes. Of course, I won't play in FR
with those changes, either (with the exception of the campaign I ran in 3e specifically exploring what kind of ramifications those changes would have, mostly as a lark). I mean, why do I need to play in FR? I don't really care about any of the characters or things that go on there. The people who do -- the fans of the setting, the fans who bring in new fans -- are going to care about it. They're easier to chase away.
Eberron dodges this bullet on a few levels. It doesn't need a big shake-up. A lot of its assumptions are also 4e assumptions. The fanbase isn't nearly as rabid or, probably, as loyal as the FR fanbase. It doesn't have the same deep roots.
So, in many ways, it's harder to screw up Eberron than it is to screw up the Realms.
I don't think WotC will be able to really nuke Eberron like they nuked FR. The worst-case scenario is more of a gradual shift full of rules that 4e Eberron players ignore if they don't like 'em, probably more like the shift to 4e in general. There will, almost assuredly, be some changes to the world that I will facepalm at, but they probably won't affect daily campaigns in Eberron the way that the FR changes affected daily campaigns in FR.
I'm honestly more scared of what they'll do to Dark Sun, which is my wager for the 2010 setting. While there might not be as many fans to irk as there was with FR, the possibility for 4e's good-intentioned hell-paving "everyone can use everything" philosophy for leaving only a palette-swap game where you fight different monsters in different-looking dungeons is very high, and the potential awesome that would be wasted with that approach would be almost criminal.
Eberron won't be blown up (at least, not as badly). But you do have cause to fear for those updates to 2e settings that they're likely to do.
Still, maybe the Eberron CS books will show that they're starting to change tactics with their setting books. One can hope.
