D&D (2024) No Dwarf, Halfling, and Orc suborgins, lineages, and legacies

My point is that when players will barely pay attention to the elevator pitch of a campaign, trying to give them more information isn’t going to make any difference.

Playing a Candlekeep Mysteries campaign where it’s a deep dive into Forgotten Realms lore and investigation? Let’s make Feywild native characters who have zero knowledge of the Sword Coast. That way we don’t have to have any actual connection to anything in the campaign.

Again it’s the endless stream of Man with no Name characters. Because why bother reading a setting document? That’s a whole four or five pages long. Ain’t got time for that.

Heh. But I’m not bitter at all. :p

I would hasten to add that this is hardly an edition thing. This has been my experience with DnD since day 1. Years of this across far too many players.
oh, i realised that you must've interpreted my original post as 'player has a premade character that they adjust as little as possible to be viable for the GMs campaign' where i had intended it as 'player asks what the GM wants to run and designs a character to actually fit that theme and the proposed circumstances'.

but yeah you're right, there's too much focus on their own characters rather than give any attention to the world they're being put in.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

player asks what the GM wants to run and designs a character to actually fit that theme and the proposed circumstances
Heh. If this actually happened, I think I'd fall out of my chair.

I do honestly wonder if it's an artifact of online play to be honest. Where I don't play face to face, and haven't in a bajillion years, I think that perhaps people approach the game differently. In a face to face game, at least, as my fuzzy memory of those days remember it, it was easier to ... display? the campaign to the players. You could lay out the map, the setting stuff, maybe some goodies that you made that they could see and you could see them seeing. Made the communication easier.

When everything is done through forum posts and email, I find that players simply ignore it much more. I have gotten better though. My campaign guide writeups are MUCH more draconian than they used to be. I just flat out list stuff that I will not compromise on, list a bunch of "if you sell me the idea" things and then a (hopefully) long list of stuff that's groovy without talking to me first.

Then again, the past three campaigns I insisted that we make characters as a group and not once have the players actually come to the table without characters already made.
 

The answer is no because even WOTC didn't attempt a watered down DS.

Some settings, genre/style combos, and worlds just aren't money makers as "fully compatible with 1st party content" content without an IP propping it up.
I think DS wasn't attempted due to a mixture of its un-PC lore and its unfriendly mechanics. The amount of work needed to even get 4e DS up to 2024 standards probably isn't worth it.
 



One could always hope that some time in the near(ish) future, WotC might actually bang out a new setting. But, again, that's extremely unlikely since they are always going to tie products together. Sure, it might be the "multiverse" but, it's always going to be a very familiar part of the multiverse where you can drop a Purple Dragon Knight fighter into it.

It is what it is. 5e D&D has been molded around a very specific set of material, and they just aren't interested in abandoning that material. Frankly, it's pretty unreasonable to think that they should. Why bang out a product that doesn't tie into everything that came before? That's not a sound business decision.

Which is where 3pp does get to step up.
 

Absolutely.

There is a version of Dark Sun that can be salvaged. It's going to look like the 4e version at minimum and undergo the same level of revision as 5e Ravenloft. The question is: is there enough of a market for this Nu Dark Sun amongst players who weren't fans of the OS DS, because you're going to lose them to the purity test.
"Athaspace" - which became "Doomspace" in the final version of 5e Spelljammer - almost certainly gives us our best look at a 5e Dark Sun, and it would certainly have been very different from previous incarnations. I also recall DS fans on these very boards - to include 4e fans - being rather upset at even the notion of Doomspace overwriting the old Dark Sun. So yeah, it wasn't going to work. (And it seems the designers only realized this very close to publication, considering the aforelinked preview image.)
 

One could always hope that some time in the near(ish) future, WotC might actually bang out a new setting. But, again, that's extremely unlikely since they are always going to tie products together. Sure, it might be the "multiverse" but, it's always going to be a very familiar part of the multiverse where you can drop a Purple Dragon Knight fighter into it.

It is what it is. 5e D&D has been molded around a very specific set of material, and they just aren't interested in abandoning that material. Frankly, it's pretty unreasonable to think that they should. Why bang out a product that doesn't tie into everything that came before? That's not a sound business decision.

Which is where 3pp does get to step up.
WOTC can bang out a new setting.

But they won't make a setting that doesn't match the desires of their main audiences.

And 3PP can't afford to pursue niche subgroups of D&D.

Some stuff will only be financially neutral passion projects.
 

WOTC can bang out a new setting.

But they won't make a setting that doesn't match the desires of their main audiences.
Yes.

And 3PP can't afford to pursue niche subgroups of D&D.
Why?

D&D has huge audience. Even a niche within the audience is still a decent audience.


Some stuff will only be financially neutral passion projects.
Probably. It depends on "match the desires of their main audience".
 


Remove ads

Top