D&D 5E Mike Mearls interview - states that they may be getting off of the 2 AP/year train.

[Oofta]

Please spare us the snark.

If they do exactly this everybody would be happy. The crucial thing is to reprint "only" the things that remain relevant (75%? 90%+) and not reprint the factoids which have been rendered obsolete since.

I think by everybody you really mean you.

I personally don't need another splat book for FR, if I really wanted to delve into it I'd pull out my old books or download an older version.

WOTC has done a lot of surveys, and I'd be surprised if they didn't have a much better idea of what would sell than you or I.

So please spare us the condescending "I know what's best for everybody" attitude.

 

[PMárk]

I'm glad it's gone, the focus should be on the characters at our table, not Ed Greenwood's.

Vampire had to do the same thing with a version change, the metaplot was strangling what could happen in games, because anything of a certain level of visibility would be 'dealt with' by characters of far greater power than the players.

I'm frankly just bored of all things Faerun. I want bonkers crazy worlds. Not the diluted bloodline of a Tolkien homage.

I know it's a frequent viewpoint on these boards ( as in "no settings, no metaplot, please"), from certian people, but I disagree. Detailed settings and ongoing metaplot might be more restrictive (not necessarily), but it provides a lot of stuff for making one person interested in the game and setting.

WW is recently planning to bring back the metaplot in the new edition of WoD. Before that, when Onyx Path planned the new edition, they wanted to move on the metaplot and setting, from the metaplot-agnostic point of the 20ths. NWoD, with all its glorious sandox-iness were never as successful as CWoD, never got as big a following base and the latter maintained a lot of it even during the times when it was cancelled and only NWoD was runned.

Metaplot also provides stuff for ancillary products, like novels, video games, comics, etc. and a lot of people were came to the game from those. How many gamers could we thank to the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale Series? To the Dragonlance novels? For the sake of the flying spaghetti monster, to Drizzt??? I know they did a LOT to got me interested in FR, just as Dave Gross' novels did a lot to won me over for Golarion.

Sandbox is good and all, but it's not the ultimate saint grail of rpgs. Neither is ongoing story. They just scratch different itches and different people like them differently.

And yes, old books are good, I like them too, but no they aren't an ultimate substitute for new content, especially, when supposedly a lot of stuff happened between editions.

Also, TSR might overdid the settings and novels, but honestly, it was a much better time to be a D&D fan from my standpoint (although I came into it during the 3e era, but a lot of novels I read and other stuff came from that era, like the aforementioned computer games) because we've got great setting material and novels. Conversely, their recent publishing model just got me increasingly more and more uninterested in the game, despite my initial enthusiasm for the system itself. The cancelling of the novel lines was the last drop, until that changes, honestly a new adventure book, or even a hardback Unearthed Arcana won't get my attention.

 

[Mistwell]

Please spare us the snark.

If they do exactly this everybody would be happy.

Oy, speak for yourself. I don't want them wasting precious limited resources on that.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Nope. Sometimes a little snark is necessary and deserved. And I consider asking WotC to waste their time reprinting relevant text into a new book that they've already printed before in a previous book just because some players don't want to look through them... especially considering it seems as though WotC has no desire to make or worry about any Forgotten Realms "timeline canon" anymore... deserves a little snark. ;P

How would it be "reprinting relevant text" when the world has undergone a catastrophe since the last campaign setting was published? Much of what was in the 4e setting book is now obsolete, and virtually all the information from pre-4e products are now a century or more out of date.

When it comes to settings such as Greyhawk or Eberron, where the timeline has not significantly advanced and there hasn't been any shake-ups (either physical or metaphysical) since previous edition products, it's easy to simply adapt older stuff. When it comes to the Forgotten Realms, where a substantial portion of the world has been ripped away and both gods and entire nations have both disappeared and have been reborn, it's definitely not so simple.

Sent from my VS987 using EN World mobile app

 

[PMárk]

How would it be "reprinting relevant text" when the world has undergone a catastrophe since the last campaign setting was published? Much of what was in the 4e setting book is now obsolete, and virtually all the information from pre-4e products are now a century or more out of date.

When it comes to settings such as Greyhawk or Eberron, where the timeline has not significantly advanced and there hasn't been any shake-ups (either physical or metaphysical) since previous edition products, it's easy to simply adapt older stuff. When it comes to the Forgotten Realms, where a substantial portion of the world has been ripped away and both gods and entire nations have both disappeared and have been reborn, it's definitely not so simple.

Sent from my VS987 using EN World mobile app

Well said. I suspect a lot of people who are arguing about how obsolete would be a new FRCG or such product are just don't like metaplot as a thing or FR itself (at least partly because of the existence of said metaplot), so they just don't care and don't want it. Go for Candlekeep and ask what people over there think about WotC's current policy...

I'm on the firm opinion, that when the current cultural fad around D&D will burst (and it will, sooner or alter), WotC will need stories and cool/relatable characters again to bring new people in and maintain long-term interest.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Well said. I suspect a lot of people who are arguing about how obsolete would be a new FRCG or such product are just don't like metaplot as a thing or FR itself (at least partly because of the existence of said metaplot), so they just don't care and don't want it. Go for Candlekeep and ask what people over there think about WotC's current policy...

The thing is, I'd be ok if WotC in the end doesn't publish a new FRCS in the end. Yes, I would definitely like to see one, but in the end it isn't a total necessity for me, and I would understand the business reasons behind that decision.

What gets me, and why I had to respond to the earlier post, are those who claim there is absolutely no need for one simply because earlier edition information on the setting is available, ignoring (or maybe, somewhat more charitably, unaware of) the massive changes that the setting has undergone in the interim. So, while there are valid reasons why we may never see a new FRCS, "you can always get the information from previous edition books" is certainly not one of them.

Sent from my VS987 using EN World mobile app

 

[PMárk]

Oh, I agree. I'd be happy for a new FRCG, but I don't think it's a necessity either, just like you.

However, I do think thank there would be a lot of ways to officially updating the setting (POD/pdfs, for example), besides cramming info into the campaign books (while completely neglecting the parts of the setting untouched by the campaign) and they're doing none of these. I hope the situation about the novels will change soon, because now it is just sad.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

When it comes to the Forgotten Realms, where a substantial portion of the world has been ripped away and both gods and entire nations have both disappeared and have been reborn, it's definitely not so simple.

I believe part of WotC's plans to avoid the whole metaplot thing is not letting people think too much about that stuff, really. In my Realms, the Time of Troubles never happened, but the Spellplague did. Maybe your own setting caters to the most basic paradigm, something like a Grey Box version of the Realms, and that's also fine. If you desperately need to put your feet on the ground and play to the official timeline, the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide helps somehow, but I don't think that this is what they want you to do; they really want people who use the Realms as the setting for their home games to ignore the needs of a complex metaplot, full of world-shaking events, and just use what they believe is funny enough.

Obviously, I'm just trying to guess what their real plan is.

 

[PMárk]

So, in the quest for making it a true generic fantasy dropback setting for home games and not wanting to overwhelm poor new gamers, they killed FR as an interesting living world. Sad.

Because, in my opinion, that was what made FR interesting, the story and characters, the notion of a detailed, living world, with it's own going-ons outside the sacred home game, because without those it's just one of the thousand generic high fantasy settings.

I'm thinking more and more of it as a cyclical thing: people like stroy, so they got metaplot. then, after a point the metaplot got too suffocating, so they want more sandbox. After a while they'd want stories again, to relate and maintain interest, a least the longer-term fans, who didn't just tried D&D once in a while as the new cool thing, but moved on with the change of pop-culture.

 

[robus]

So, in the quest for making it a true generic fantasy dropback setting for home games and not wanting to overwhelm poor new gamers, they killed FR as an interesting living world. Sad.

Because, in my opinion, that was what made FR interesting, the story and characters, the notion of a detailed, living world, with it's own going-ons outside the sacred home game, because without those it's just one of the thousand generic high fantasy settings.

I'm thinking more and more of it as a cyclical thing: people like stroy, so they got metaplot. then, after a point the metaplot got too suffocating, so they want more sandbox. After a while they'd want stories again, to relate and maintain interest, a least the longer-term fans, who didn't just tried D&D once in a while as the new cool thing, but moved on with the change of pop-culture.

That may be exactly it. The story began to overwhelm the game (certainly I find it a turn-off) and so they've done a kind of resest to lighten the load. In my ideal world they would have jettisoned the whole thing and started afresh with modern take on fantasy (more Game of Thrones, less Tolkien) but that was probably a step too far.

But as it is, the sooner my players and I can depart the Realms, and its heavy history, the better.