D&D 5E Yes to factionalism. No to racism.

[Marandahir]

Was Ravnica sort of like this?

It was supposed to be, but Wizards delivered the book and then 2 adventures and left the rest of it to DM's Guild.

Meanwhile the Realms get book after book after book and even Eberron gets continuous love. I guess Ravnica just didn't catch fire in a bottle enough to be an ongoing setting.

 

[Marandahir]

Excellent analysis. That's why goblinoids have proper nation-states in every world I build.

They also had proper nation-states in 4e's assumed setting. Heck, the Iron Circle league of nations in the southwest of the world was dominated by Hobgoblins!

Nerath League - Humans, Dwarves
Iron Circle - Goblinoids, Tieflings
Karkoth - Undead, Dragonborn?
Vailin - Elves, Yuan-ti?

 

[Minigiant]

Has any RPG ever done what you're asking for? Serious question, because if such a beast exists I'm buying it.

I don''t think so.

Most RPGs are not "make your own setting" focused. And the ones that are are usually very lore light in the same"Make up everything. I'm not helping" you fashion.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don''t think so.

Most RPGs are not "make your own setting" focused. And the ones that are are usually very lore light in the same"Make up everything. I'm not helping" you fashion.

Yeah the closest I can think of was the "build-a-setting" disaster that was Aria (and trust me, that doesn't reflect on this idea at all, Aria was just completely insane).

Most other RPGs, particularly fantasy RPGs, have a very specific setting (or a number of them) and that's part of their charm.

D&D is fairly unique in how it's got this implied setting, but it's also quite keen that you build your own setting and is trying to be basically capable of supporting a really large number of settings.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don''t think so.

Most RPGs are not "make your own setting" focused. And the ones that are are usually very lore light in the same"Make up everything. I'm not helping" you fashion.

And sadly, this is why I dont see WotC pulling it off, and am placing my faith in other publishers. WotC is a decent company, but the one thing I'm sure they can't do is something no one else has ever done.

 

[Marandahir]

The key thing I think is that I don't want GURPS in my D&D.

I want D&D with dials and bells and whistles but GURPS just leaves me not knowing what to do with the rules. There's no archetypes, only building blocks.

 

[Bolares]

The key thing I think is that I don’t want GURPS.

 

[Fenris-77]

I believe there's a palliative cream for GURPS, something with some steroids and a little itch relief. Anyway, look into it.

 

[Faolyn]

Which is why we should go back to the qualifiers like 3E had. Even orcs were only "frequently" evil. Or say that orcs that follow Gruumsh are evil.

The alignments listed in the MM are explicitly supposed to be just the default, it should have been made much clearer.

Achtually, they were only frequently chaotic evil. Which means that the books weren't there's as much a chance of one being lawful evil as there was of one being chaotic good. So this was less "some orcs are good" than you might think.

Not that these alignment possibilities were ever really used by the books. Even Obould Many-Arrows, who is well-known for uniting orcs, making allies with non-orcs, etc., was still chaotic evil. At least according to the FR Wiki.

 

[Faolyn]

If I were going to set up a kitchen sink campaign, the world would be some kind of crossroads world or a magical Bermuda triangle destination. There was a time when there were no civilized lands or only ancient ruins of a long lost people. Then groups from entirely different worlds just started appearing, and continue to appear today. Sometimes it's one individual, sometimes it's a thousand. After a period of initial war and bloodshed, the races started banding together after realizing they were all in a strange land. Nowadays? Nobody looks twice at a race they've never encountered before except maybe to ask if their people have registered with the bureau of resettling yet.

GURPS Banestorm? Well, Banestorm without all the problems that stem from having the humans come from the real world.

Take Hobgoblins (and for the sake of discussion, we can put to one side the way they are clearly coded using east Asian stereotypes, at least in 5e). We have here an entire species that is described as lawful and militaristic. Organized militaries take a lot of resources! Volo's tells us the following

To be fair, it's mostly the clothing that codes hobgoblins as Asian. And that one picture of the not-ninja in the not-kung fu pose. If you stuck them in western armor and gave them western hairstyles but kept everything else the same, I don't think they'd have any Asian feel to them.