New Forgotten Realms designed by FR haters?

[Obryn]

Since you seem to be insisting, the most often-quoted example is in one of those early 4e preview books ("Worlds and... something" and the other one). Says something along the lines of "If you're doing x, then you're not having as much fun as you could." A reasonable person could interpret this as one example, as per genshou: "that the 4E designers are Superior and my gaming style is BadWrongFun."

Wait, so this is still going back to the marketing? Aren't we to the point where the game can be evaluated on its own merits and the stuff in the actual books, rather than based on some people who weren't marketers trying to pretend they were marketers like two years ago? I'm confused as to why this would still be relevant?

Some evangelists have tried to defend that clear error by claiming it's "hyperbole to make a point" or being "cute" or some other such nonsense, but it's pretty much undefendable without looking foolish. Not necessarily a big deal, but it's an easy target and example of one of WotC's early marketing mistakes, and it does bother a number of people - legitmately so, regardless of whether one "disagrees" that said people should be bothered or not. Supposedly they're getting better, though, such as in the most recent Heinsoo interview.

I don't think one has to be an "evangelist" to think it's silly to take offense at that. I mean, "indefensible" is a pretty strong term. I can understand that it bothers you, but I don't have to agree that it should bother anyone at all.

Once again, this isn't anything in a rulebook. It's basically some thing some guy said.

Honestly, I place little weight on what the designers say, and don't know why I should... They wrote the books, so their part is basically done - and whether or not they succeeded is a question that's answered by whether or not I can have fun playing the game; not based on an old interview or press release which was (basically) a gamer geek gushing about something he's proud of.


So basically... I'm still looking for stuff in the actual rulebooks where it calls play-styles out as being badwrongfun, or - that if you're having fun in some way other than the designers intended, you're doing it wrong. Like I said, I really don't see it. The 4e DMG always encourages groups to find their fun, but it doesn't tell them there's stuff they shouldn't find fun. Quite the opposite, in fact.

-O

 

[Bacons]

I remembered this offending material, so I looked it up. It's from the 'Races & Classes' marketing book.

"But when's the last time you saw a PC make a Profession check that had a useful effect on the game? (Hint: If it was recently, your game is probably not as much fun as D&D should be. Sorry.)"

The bit in parenthesis was a stupid joke that shouldn't have made it into publication. I think, given the material surrounding that bit, that the people who wrote and edited it thought they were being funny about having to put ranks in Profession skills all the time if you wanted to stay current for a relatively esoteric check. Obviously, it offended people more than it amused, but I don't think it's particularly ingenious to decide the whole system is talking down to the players and dictating their fun based on a lame joke in a promotional book from before said system was even published.

 

[Shazman]

In Races and Classes they did say that if you used profession or craft skills in your games, then your games weren't fun. I don't remember the exact wording, but that is basically what they said. So they were implying that if you had enough immersive roleplaying in your games that you actually cared about your PC's background skills, then you were having badwrongfun. Obviously, their preferred playstyle of mindlessly slaying everything their PC's came into contact with was so much more fun than games with a significant amount of roleplaying. Those types of comments are not something to be defended. They should have never been printed.

 

[Cadfan]

I remembered this offending material, so I looked it up. It's from the 'Races & Classes' marketing book.

"But when's the last time you saw a PC make a Profession check that had a useful effect on the game? (Hint: If it was recently, your game is probably not as much fun as D&D should be. Sorry.)"

The bit in parenthesis was a stupid joke that shouldn't have made it into publication. I think, given the material surrounding that bit, that the people who wrote and edited it thought they were being funny about having to put ranks in Profession skills all the time if you wanted to stay current for a relatively esoteric check. Obviously, it offended people more than it amused, but I don't think it's particularly ingenious to decide the whole system is talking down to the players and dictating their fun based on a lame joke in a promotional book from before said system was even published.

Its arguably a technically true statement, using profession as written. All it can do for you is earn you a trivial amount of gold. The only thing an actual profession roll accomplishes per the rules is earning you 1/2 your check result in gold pieces. Assuming a level 1 character, maxed ranks in profession, +4 intelligence modifier, and rolling a 20, the best you're going to earn is 14 gold pieces.

The rules also mention, in the retry section, attempts to accomplish a specific task. It is not clear what this means, as no other section of the rules include using an actual skill check to accomplish specific tasks. No DCs are given, no guidelines suggested, and in fact the only references to anything other than earning a weekly income are references to knowledge you possess as a result of being trained in the profession skill.

Of course its entirely possible that your game uses the profession skill to roll other homebrew things that have meaningful effects on your game. Or you might have a game in which a dozen gold pieces is actually important (I'd like to run a game like that, actually). In which case, kudos. But by the rules, all it produces for you is an amount of gold that at low levels is only slightly relevant, and at high levels is absolutely trivial.

 

[Roman]

To be honest, I don't even see much commercial sense in it. After all, WotC has another wildly successful setting, Eberron, that does not have the backlog of lore, does not have such high-level NPCs and so on - so they already cater to the market of gamers that prefers that. Even if that market is bigger, wouldn't it also make sense to support, perhaps with fewer sourcebooks if it is not as big as the other market, the market of gamers who love FR and its complexity, lore, characters and so on?

Sorry about quoting myself, but I am wondering if any of the market-minded individuals can go about explaining the market logic of the FR changes given the above? To me it just seems that instead of taking two markets and catering to both through different products (though supporting the bigger market more of course), WotC has decided to take one market only and to split it in two (Eberron and Forgotten Realms). This is obviously a simplification (there is probably significant market-overlap, part of the complexity-loving FR market might have jumped on board anyway, etcetera), but this is what seems to me to have happened in principle.

 

[Arnwyn]

Wait, so this is still going back to the marketing? Aren't we to the point where the game can be evaluated on its own merits and the stuff in the actual books, rather than based on some people who weren't marketers trying to pretend they were marketers like two years ago? I'm confused as to why this would still be relevant?

*shrug* Beats me. You're obviously directing that at the wrong person.

I don't think one has to be an "evangelist" to think it's silly to take offense at that. I mean, "indefensible" is a pretty strong term. I can understand that it bothers you, but I don't have to agree that it should bother anyone at all.

*shrug* I do - comes with the territory of defending foolish statements, actually. But telling people how they should feel doesn't get you very far at ENWorld. Something to keep in mind.

Once again, this isn't anything in a rulebook. It's basically some thing some guy said.

That's something you can continue to argue with genshou about. I simply provided a possible helpful answer because you were asking while (rudely) talking about "cooties". You two can blather about the rest of the details.

Can't help you with the rest of the stuff, I'm afraid. "Rulebooks", WotC books, whatever. I'm not very pedantic. That's for you and genshou to sort out.

Well, I don't know if that is a reasonable interpretation. The designers said that one of the guiding principles in making the new edition was to try and make the funnest game possible, and in each situation when they make a choice, they should side with whats fun.

Don't worry, it is reasonable. But siding with "whats fun" and trying to define it is the rub, isn't it? (Hint: You can't, regardless of what people say.)

*sigh* Only gamers would try to objectively measure "fun". This thread is 3.9 ounces of "fun", BTW.

/hijack [This has little to do with FR, which I'm more interested in reading about.]

 

[Scribble]

Sorry about quoting myself, but I am wondering if any of the market-minded individuals can go about explaining the market logic of the FR changes given the above? To me it just seems that instead of taking two markets and catering to both through different products (though supporting the bigger market more of course), WotC has decided to take one market only and to split it in two (Eberron and Forgotten Realms). This is obviously a simplification (there is probably significant market-overlap, part of the complexity-loving FR market might have jumped on board anyway, etcetera), but this is what seems to me to have happened in principle.

While you might have two groups of customers that would buy your products, you don't have unlimited resources to spend on products to be sold to those two groups. If you market core D&D stuff, and then specialized stuff, you have to split your resources between those two, and end up doing extra work and sometimes double duty as you create a "normal" version of soemthing and then a "specialized" version.

In this case, you're not really "splitting" the market so much anymore. You're really only doing specialized products for 2 books a year. Everything else is designed to be marketed towards the entire customerbase, no matter which specialized campaign book they use (if any.)

So instead of say, a book of new D&D races, then a book of new FR races, and a book of new Eberron races, you just put out the new D&D races, and then maybe an article in dragon about how each race exists in the various specialized campaign settings. Individual groups can decide which ones they do or don't like in their game.

 

[Obryn]

*shrug* Beats me. You're obviously directing that at the wrong person.

You responded, so I'm responding back to you. I didn't realize you were playing Interwebs Metacritic and didn't have a horse in this race.

(rest of post edited.)

-O

 

[Primal]

What else would you count except for everything? Who gets to decide what gets considered "valid" research and what doesn't? No matter what you do, factions of the obsessive collector brigade are going to be pissed off for changing what's been written in some book.

Well, the rule is that if sources contradict each other, newest Realmslore always "trumps" older stuff, right? For example, a Dragon article lists Alusair as FTR 20, but FRCS has a "corrected" stat set which trumps the Dragon article. And it's not the only case in which an accessory or article has updated previously published lore. Now, if I write a new adventure series about Marco Volo, I might change his stats completely and maybe even swap his class to ranger, and regardless of what some "obsessive collector brigade" might say, that would be the new "canon" (if it slipped past in editing; and such slips surely happened often in TSR). Of course, this might be "corrected" later on, but it's what you roll with for some time, unless you want to ignore his new "canon" stats.

I'm not sure I get your point about "valid research"... isn't it quite obvious that you look up which sources (books, novels, articles) may contain information that is relevant to what you're writing? For example, if you're writing an adventure in Cormyr, you might take a look at campaign settings, Cormyr-module, Four from Cormyr, Volo's Guide to Cormyr, Cormyr: A novel, etc. Likewise, if you're including stuff about the Eldreth Veluuthra in your article/accessory/novel/short story, you should take a look at Cloak & Dagger and Champions of Ruin, at least (and in this case CoR always "trumps" the lore in C&D). And so on. It isn't too hard to narrow down the list to sources that have the information you need for the level of details and Realmslore you're intending to use.

As for the changes, and people being upset, I know a lot of people were p****d off at the design team for not following up on such 2E plot hooks as the Manshoon Wars or the Rise of Iyachtu Xvim (Xvim and his followers were a major threat in my group, and we were not happy about Bane just popping back into the Realms with a parlor trick) -- that didn't prevent them from playing in the Realms, however, because it didn't change things a lot in the big picture. Sure, they dropped the ball with the best hooks, and introduced others that made little sense to many, but at least it was still more or less the same Realms.

Change isn't bad, if it is logical; the events of the Spellplague are not, at least by my standards. You see, I think they took the "lazy" option in it all, saying: "Let's reboot everything with a huge magical catastrophe,and let's leave the details out... well, we don't need to think too hard about it, because it's *magic*, after all". When people started to point out inconsistencies on the message boards, they replied: "We're not retconning anything, because as far as we're concerned, it always was that way." Sure, I wonder how SW fans would feel if Saga 2nd Edition removed the Light Side of the Force and rendered all Jedi powerless ("Look, the Dark Side is a power of its own, separate from the "Good" Force, and that's why the Sith still have their powers... as far as we are concerned, it was always that way!").

As an aside, Eberron's only been out for 5 years, while FR has existed since the tail end of 1e (87? 88? so over 20 years). And FR was the flagship setting for the bulk of that. If the two have the same amount of "quality" lore, than maybe FR deserved to get blown up.

Yes, FR was the flagship for TSR, which practically meant that a lot of products got the FR logo slapped on them ; some didn't have anything to do with FR (such as the Great Khan Game), while others were more or less succesfully "Realmsified" ("Hey, we could publish that adventure in the Realms... hmmm... what's that country? Cromyr? Kormar? Something like it. Yeah, that's what we are gonna do!"). More often than not, the products contained contradictory lore or were clearly just dropped into FR without necessary research and changes.

And this publishing policy and sloppy editing/attention to internal consistency resulted in holes a Netherese city could fly through; which meant that such authors as George Krashos, Eric Boyd, Steven Schend and Ed Greenwood has their hands full in trying to patch it all up in the final years of TSR (and they did a remarkable job). Most of the 3E stuff is "decent enough", and anything done by the Lorelords mentioned in the previous sentence is excellent in quality (by my standards). As far as I'm concerned, most of the AD&D stuff published by TSR does not compare to their work or Eberron stuff (based on what I've heard from friends who run Eberron). Now, the last I counted Eberron had something like 40+ or 50+ accessories published so far, plus quite a many novels and Dragonshard articles, to boot. That's a lot to read, surely, but if I wrote an article on House D'Cannith, would I really need to read *all* of them? And even if I did, I think it's not much less than reading the most popular and up-to-date FR accessories and articles.

Anyway, I don't think an occasional "bad" article or book merits "blowing up" the setting -- especially if later on the published stuff will be "corrected" (such as in the case of many inconsistencies in FR).

 

[Spatula]

I'm not sure I get your point about "valid research"...

You said:

I still stand behind my point that Eberron has thousands of pages of quality lore (at least that's what my friends playing in Eberron say) vs. a similar amount in FR; of course, if we count *everything* that's ever published for FR (including all the material that was later corrected/"retconned" by FR Lorelords or outright ignored by fans), it's different.

...which I read as saying that writers should only look at the "quality" lore and ignore the rest.

It isn't too hard to narrow down the list to sources that have the information you need for the level of details and Realmslore you're intending to use.

With over 20 years of published material (including novel lines and Dragon articles), I don't think it's so simple. Also, information about topics tends to get spread around; it's not enough to simply look at the stuff that is supposed to be focusing on the subject. I see this a lot in Eberron, where information on the structure of the Church of the Silver Flame can be found in the ECS, the Eberron Player's Guide, Sharn: City of Towers, Five Nations, and Faiths of Eberron (some of it contradictory). And there's probably other details added in other books that I don't own, as well... It's not as simple as saying, "Oh, Silver Flame, I'll grab the ECS and Faiths of Eberron and I'm good."

Change isn't bad, if it is logical; the events of the Spellplague are not, at least by my standards. You see, I think they took the "lazy" option in it all, saying: "Let's reboot everything with a huge magical catastrophe,and let's leave the details out... well, we don't need to think too hard about it, because it's *magic*, after all".

No argument there. I think they could have achieved much of the same results, with less outcry, simply by advancing the timeline far enough and retconning the edition differences (in much the same way as sorcerers were retconned in and specialty priests retconned out with 3e).

Now, the last I counted Eberron had something like 40+ or 50+ accessories published so far, plus quite a many novels and Dragonshard articles, to boot.

Unless I've simply missed a ton of WotC's marketing, that number looks to be at least two times too large.