D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

[AstroCat]

No, that's running the game. It's something you do whilst the game is in progress, not yet another thing you need to do before you even start.

The point here is to strip it down to it's basics, to make it accessible to people without experience, unlimited time, and education (a common consequence of being 12 years old).

That means striping away all the layers of mystique people seem to want to build up about the activity.

I gotta say your games sound like the most boring generic thing possible, is it even a game, do they go anywhere with a name or naw, that's too much? Seriously why even play d&d, why not just do something else and get rid of all that unnecessary stuff, like names and stats and dungeons and dragons. Do the "monsters" if there are any, have any names or just like bad guy 1 and bad guy 2? It's all a barrier to entry, I mean you could just use old school calculators and sit in the same room and do some addition. Who needs all that stupid "flavor" stuff anyway, am I right?

And for the record when were 12 years old we sure as heck liked the "flavor" of the world and games. We'd read the monster manual for fun at night learning all the cool stuff about the monsters, draw battles based on the modules, etc... talk about the different stuff in the worlds we were playing in, without it, we'd probably had done something else.

 

[Desdichado]

That's funny, not everyone else is looking at the same printing of the book that you happen to own.
Look up the AD&D player's handbook "orange spine" printings published the very same year as the one you have. The ones with cover art by Easley.
ASFAIK, the MMII that I reference (1983) never even had the "old art" version, just the Easley one.

Yes, you missed my sarcasm. Since the game itself didn't change, it could hardly have gone from not being a kids game to being a kids game without changing. D&D was neither envisioned nor designed to be a kids game. It was MARKETED (sorta) as one that older kids could still enjoy after TSR became corporitized but that was clearly just an attempt to further "monetize" the brand. And even then, expanding the age expectations and marketing downward in age didn't slide the upper end down. You don't "age out" of being D&D's target market. Or last you never used to, so if you do that's a relatively new development. Even late in the third edition lifecycle they were releasing content as books and Dungeon /Dragon article that were explicitly "rated R" and only for adults.

 

[Staffan]

There isn’t room to do both though. It’s one chapter, not 12.

Sure there is. No matter which order you do them in, the steps are still more or less the same. Village/town, region, city, country, continental region, continent, world, crystal sphere. The zoom-out process is slightly different from the zoom-in process, but the overall stuff you need to figure out at each step is mostly the same.

I also believe you should know the rough shape of the world at large even if you don't know the details. For example, in my list above I mentioned countries... but is this even a world that has nation-states with clearly defined borders? Or is it something like Azeroth, where you have centers of civilization that control their nearby region and have lots of wilderness with the occasional outpost near points of interest in between them?

 

[RedSquirrel]

Yes, you missed my sarcasm. Since the game itself didn't change, it could hardly have gone from not being a kids game to being a kids game without changing. D&D was neither envisioned nor designed to be a kids game. It was MARKETED (sorta) as one that older kids could still enjoy after TSR became corporitized but that was clearly just an attempt to further "monetize" the brand. And even then, expanding the age expectations and marketing downward in age didn't slide the upper end down. You don't "age out" of being D&D's target market. Or last you never used to, so if you do that's a relatively new development. Even late in the third edition lifecycle they were releasing content as books and Dungeon /Dragon article that were explicitly "rated R" and only for adults.

JFC.
Even in the face of specific photgraphic evidence? Really?
"I was only kidding." Right. Classic humor. Just sarcasm. You weren't actually trying to prove anything. And I'm sure you were specifically scanning books for whimsy and humor. And you included all those . Makes sense.

But, yes ... again. If you ignore the facts you don't like, then you're absolutely right.
It's a game that includes kids. Your declaration of what you think it should be is just opinion, not fact.

Your obstinance is just trolling at this point. So ... moving on to the actual topic of the thread.

 

[Parmandur]

True. But most of the adventures don’t use all that space. And almost none of the single adventures come close.

Oh, for sure.

 

[Desdichado]

JFC.
Even in the face of specific photgraphic evidence? Really?
"I was only kidding." Right. Classic humor. Just sarcasm. You weren't actually trying to prove anything. And I'm sure you were specifically scanning books for whimsy and humor. And you included all those . Makes sense.

But, yes ... again. If you ignore the facts you don't like, then you're absolutely right.
It's a game that includes kids. Your declaration of what you think it should be is just opinion, not fact.

Your obstinance is just trolling at this point. So ... moving on to the actual topic of the thread.

Well, since you either straw manned my position well beyond what I said or are backtracking from the most extreme claim made, your photographic evidence was irrelevant. Including kids and being marketed specifically and solely as a kids game are not the same thing. And college kids literally aging out of being the target demographic is an extremely extraordinary claim that any number of "10 and up" blurbs don't address at all.

Besides, I posted photographic evidence too. It was easy since I bought digital copies from drivethrurpg years ago. Open up a pdf and the snip tool and hey. (Contrary to your implication that I went way out of my way to prove a point.) Screen shots of the PHB. Screen shots from BD&D. I could also do screen grabs from the MM and OD&D and the Book of Vile Darkness or the Dungeon and Dragon issues that came out the same month except that... Well, they wouldn't be appropriate for kids. (And I still have physical, not digital copies of those more recent ones.) But yeah, I'm the obstinate one. Sure. I'm the one ignoring evidence. Sure.

Besides this is topic appropriate. Why use an old setting that the kids don't connect with is only a relevant question if you assume that WotC only wants to sell to kids. The very fact that they're ignoring that logic is strong circumstantial evidence that the idea that D&D is and always was a kids game is patently false and patently ridiculous. Retro callbacks to stuff that's two generations or even more old is what you do when you want to market to people who are old enough to remember that, or there is a strong nostalgia vibe among the kids for that material. Greyhawk will mostly appeal to generation Jones or X or possibly Y. Nobody younger than that will care much about Greyhawk.

 

[Faolyn]

See, I'd much rather they took the Moldvay/Winneger approach to world building. Where do those characters come from? They come from the town that you're starting in.

That's certainly an assumption. I don't think I've played a D&D game ever where every character came from the same town. One of the games I'm in right now has someone from a different plane (a gith). Or possibly a different planet, I don't know, since it's Icewind Dale and there's a spelljammer involved and the character has a connection to it (no spoilers, please). My upcoming game is city-based--a big city--and I still had two players who wanted to be from outside of it. I'd wager that unless you really force the players to have their characters come from this single area, that probably a majority of games are going to have at least one PC from somewhere far off.

And then you have other problems. Even if everyone is from the same town or village, where did the wizard study? If the answer is anything other than "I found a book and studied at home," suddenly you have to think about things outside the home area, like wizard schools. If you have a monk, do they have a monastery, and if so, where is it? If you have a paladin, do they belong to an order, and if so, where is it? Where did the warlock meet their patron? If it's here in town or its surroundings, what does it mean for it that there's a way for townsfolk to come under the sway of this eldritch being?

Just thinking about these things, which Moldvay and Winneger didn't have to do because they had far fewer options back then and they were still working under Gygax's assumption that nonhumans would be incredibly rare, means that the world is going to be bigger than just this one town.

Gods? Don't need 'em. You're a cleric? You tell me who your god is.

Another big assumption here. Several, really. Because the nature of the religion is going to have a major impact on the world and the way the players are going to act in it. The world is going to be very different if you have D&D polytheism, more accurate polytheism, monotheism, dualism, spiritualism, animism, multiple different types of religion, or no religion whatsoever. It's probably better to have big things like religion spelled out up front so that everyone is on the same page.

And if you haven't decided on the gods and religions, there are a lot of elements that you might have trouble justifying later on. For instance: healing. Can the players hope that a cleric might be able to cast cure wounds or lesser restoration on them? Can they hope that there's alchemical versions of these spells? Or is all healing purely through mundane treatment and rest? Or undead? Do they exist? How can they be defeated? Are they natural or unnatural? Both of these things will likely need to be addressed eventually, even if nobody is playing a divine caster.

But yes, I agree that the players should chime in and help build the world. The players (most of them) worked with me to develop the city, the tech and magic levels, the basic shape of the religion, important themes and flavors, and most importantly, the types of adversaries the players wanted to fight.

 

[Minigiant]

Besides this is topic appropriate. Why use an old setting that the kids don't connect with is only a relevant question if you assume that WotC only wants to sell to kids. The very fact that they're ignoring that logic is strong circumstantial evidence that the idea that D&D is and always was a kids game is patently false and patently ridiculous.

The choice of Greyhawk is nostalgia bait for older fans and IP implantation for new fans.

Strixhaven, Eberron, or Nentir Vale are strictly better choices for an introductory setting and teaching material for a setting.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I guess a new world for every campaign. But I've only did one fully home-brewed world in the 10 years I've run games since getting back into the hobby with 5e. After a year or several years of running a campaign, I'm usually looking to do something very different for the next.

That would explain it then. IF every campaign is a new world, it is much easier to just pick what you need for a campaign, and then leave the rest. But when you run multiple campaigns in the same world, you have a much harder time doing that. Not only if you have players who will remember what you did before, but I find it irksome as the DM if I go to put a big threat somewhere where I already placed a different threat. And if you have canonically had something before, then it becomes a fact of the world, and unless every troll is a unique being, one troll means that the species "trolls" exist on your world.

I'll admit to being a bit precious with my homebrew D&D setting and have gotten very negative reactions in threads when discussed things like character limitations. It is very much an example of enjoying the secondary hobby of creating and curating a setting for players to experience. I know it isn't something everyone would enjoy, but my players enjoyed it.

Not exactly something I want to get into again, but my main issue is never the concept of limitations. Sure, I have world-building level issues with it sometimes because of internal logic for myself, but that isn't the main thing that tends to drag me into the hissing and screeching debates.

It is when the idea of "what if your players don't like that" gets floated and the response feels like "Well screw them, this is what I want. If they don't like it, they can play with someone else." And that just rubs my entire philosophy of the point of being the GM the wrong way. Especially since, from where I am sitting, it always seems so trivially easy to keep the flavors close, while offering the different options.

 

[Chaosmancer]

These a matters for individuals, not societies.

I don't disagree with you in general, because I agree that for many people (I am a weirdo and exception) that top-down world-building is way too much.

However, I will disagree with you here. Having a society-wide like or dislike is a very, very easy way to build a culture quickly.