D&D 5E Listened to latest "Lore you should know" and......

[DEFCON 1]

I have never heard of anything so ridiculous as wanting to stop people caring about your setting.

You mean wanting to stop the 17 people caring about your setting. The 17 people for whom having Current Year up-to-date "setting canon" actually matters, and for whom the previous 30 years worth of Forgotten Realms setting material isn't good enough. For those 17 people, yeah, Mike and the gang have left them out to dry. But I have a feeling they're probably okay with it. They can't save everyone with every edition, so they take the path that'll save the most they can.

If you want to try and argue that WotC is worse off now with how they're running the Realms like [MENTION=6776548]Corpsetaker[/MENTION] tries to do... best of luck with that. But the rest of us know that it ain't true. D&D is just as prosperous (if not more) than ever, and that's even with them changing how they handle the "canon" of the setting.

 

[MNblockhead]

The problem with Perkins is FR is not his thing, never has been. There are plenty of authors with years of experience on the Realms who would gladly take up the torch. The Realms is basically just being used as a corporate marketing tool because of it's popularity and it's notoriety. It's fast becoming like today's music business.

What they don't seem to realize is that what made the Realms so popular is the attention to canon and history as how it tries to stay constant.

But the FR is used as the setting for stories taking place in so many different media. In the last Lore You Should Know they discussed the difficulty in determining what is canon in this environment. You have the adventure paths and setting books, the novels, the streamed games like Acquisitions Incorporated, and--soon--a movie.

To capture all of that and put it into a setting book...well, that book would have to be HUGE. Few DMs are going to want to take it on. 5e has been a great success in bringing old players like myself back into the fold and also in attracting a new generation. It does this because it offers a solid set of modern, streamlined rules that are pretty easy to pickup, yet retain an old-school flavor, and then you can buy adventure paths that make it easy to prep and play a 6-8 month campaign.

Throwing something as weighty as the realms into this doesn't seem like a good fit. I realize it would be a lot more work to create a new realm for 5e, but are there not other realms they could have brought back that would come with less baggage? Greyhawk probably would suffer from the same issue.

Seems to me that they wanted it both ways. They want a well-fleshed out campaign world with lots of cross-marketing opportunities, but at the same time, they decided to hit the reset button to force a large, well-rounded Realms peg into a tight 5e square and then say, "don't worry about making it fit, just play with it however you want!"

Which, ultimately, is what i'll do if I ever play with any of the APs set in the Realms. I will ignore nearly everything outside of the AP book and make up the rest as I need to. I would never DM for a Adventurer's League game because there is no way I'm going to be able to put in the time to know the FR as well as a fan who might play in my game.

This issue is another reason why I'm turned off by Star Wars, Star Trek, Fire Fly, LoTR, and Doctor Who rpgs. I would gladly play in them, but would never DM them.

This is also why I like to use home-brew campaigns--I don't have get into arguments about Canon with my players when it is my own world. Yeah, I probably put in as much or more work making my own world than just learning enough about FR to run games in it, but the former is a fun act of creation. The later feels like homework.

 

[MNblockhead]

They've made it pretty clear metaplot is dead, yup.

What? Sorry for being thick, but what does this mean, who are "they", and where have they made it clear?

I'm not being snarky. Fancy terms like "metaplot" interest me as does news and gossip about 5e. So, please, do tell more!

 

[MNblockhead]

The problem is they seem to be trying to create a version of the Realms for people who really never cared or liked the Realms to start with.

This.

But, this also seems to be a successful strategy. It is helpful to have some nice maps, some fluff about the various regions and cities and a brief time line. But, no, I doubt most players and DM care much beyond that.

 

[MNblockhead]

Not by choice though. If they buy the AP's then they are using FR by default. That's not the same thing.

The number of people that are buying the material because they are big FR fans is likely a small fraction of those who are happy to FR "light and re-imagined." WoTC want the game to be accessible and they have succeeded at this.

 

[MNblockhead]

That is like wanting to have a Car but not wanting to do the irritating things like filling it up with petrol, checking the oil, taking it to be serviced. Yeah why would you wast money doing any of those things?

I have never heard of anything so ridiculous as wanting to stop people caring about your setting.

I think that it is more that they realized the most people don't care much about setting canon. They want an enough easy to digest background material to run a game and enough space to make it their own.

 

[Parmandur]

What? Sorry for being thick, but what does this mean, who are "they", and where have they made it clear?



I'm not being snarky. Fancy terms like "metaplot" interest me as does news and gossip about 5e. So, please, do tell more!

"Metaplot" is a...complex...topic, but essentially what we are talking about WotC deciding not to do: have an internally consistant ongoing canon set of stories, that crossover from RPG modules to books and other media, such as the Time of Troubles in FR. Earliest example I suppose would be the DL modules, but in 2E that really became the going thing.

 

[Shasarak]

You mean wanting to stop the 17 people caring about your setting. The 17 people for whom having Current Year up-to-date "setting canon" actually matters, and for whom the previous 30 years worth of Forgotten Realms setting material isn't good enough. For those 17 people, yeah, Mike and the gang have left them out to dry. But I have a feeling they're probably okay with it. They can't save everyone with every edition, so they take the path that'll save the most they can.

I did not realise that only 17 people are playing the new adventure paths set in the Forgotten Realms.

I guess if Mike and the gang are happy with those numbers then good for them.

 

[corwyn77]

I did not realise that only 17 people are playing the new adventure paths set in the Forgotten Realms.

I guess if Mike and the gang are happy with those numbers then good for them.

Again, not what he said. There are plenty of people playing/running the APs that don't give a damn about the Realms canon or meta-setting. Anecdotally, I know plenty of people through encounters and I would estimate that the number of them who care about the canon is a number approaching 0.

 

[Shasarak]

Again, not what he said. There are plenty of people playing/running the APs that don't give a damn about the Realms canon or meta-setting. Anecdotally, I know plenty of people through encounters and I would estimate that the number of them who care about the canon is a number approaching 0.

I presume you at least asked those people to find out if they cared or not? Or is the chance of that, as you say, a number approaching 0.