D&D 5E (2024) Preferences in a New Official 5.5e Specific Setting

[Scribe]

Sword and Sorcery Rant:

IMHO, Sword and Sorcery is about the protagonist dealing with personal and local wins and losses which can be ugly or costly. This is easy with warriors because they typically don't scale that fast outside the local as quickly. Skill users are based on author scale.. But isn't not impossible with spellcasters.

D&D stops being local and personal after level 7 or so. Especially post 3e. You can force it by limiting goes to material plane monsters and limiting magic spells but it gets boring

This is because it's hard to make the mechanic part of sword and sorcery interesting it gets stale because you personalize everything and does you limit the lot louder options your characters have and eventually you will repeat yourself. Therefore you end up either doing things outside of the books or you require a skilled DM/GM to craft story that keeps the excitement up in lieu of the stale mechanical play.

This is why sword and sorcery are not popular game settings for RPG play when there's any competition. The only worked back in the day when there weren't as many rules and rule sets to compete with that style of setting. The second another style of setting appeared sort of sorcery became unpopular.

And that's the rub you're not going to make any money with sword and sorcery if the only playable style of characters are low complexity warriors and "thieves". You must allow spell casters or technology users or some kind of advanced martial arts or skill system in the game in order to spice it up as the game goes.

Because you're not going to sell many copies if a game setting where everything is personal if the persons are mechanically boring. Because if all of the interesting parts or outside of the game then they don't need to buy your game.

Man, I could not disagree more, across the board, top to bottom.

 

[tetrasodium]

Sword and Sorcery Rant:

IMHO, Sword and Sorcery is about the protagonist dealing with personal and local wins and losses which can be ugly or costly. This is easy with warriors because they typically don't scale that fast outside the local as quickly. Skill users are based on author scale.. But isn't not impossible with spellcasters.

D&D stops being local and personal after level 7 or so. Especially post 3e. You can force it by limiting goes to material plane monsters and limiting magic spells but it gets boring

This is because it's hard to make the mechanic part of sword and sorcery interesting it gets stale because you personalize everything and does you limit the lot louder options your characters have and eventually you will repeat yourself. Therefore you end up either doing things outside of the books or you require a skilled DM/GM to craft story that keeps the excitement up in lieu of the stale mechanical play.

This is why sword and sorcery are not popular game settings for RPG play when there's any competition. The only worked back in the day when there weren't as many rules and rule sets to compete with that style of setting. The second another style of setting appeared sort of sorcery became unpopular.

.

While I agree with most of that, it's 5e design choices that derail it not the local focus that details things. it's entirely possible but requires players to need things from the world at regular enough intervals that they can be considered eager agents of powerful fractions. You can look at the section in forge of the artificer about having multiple villain/bad guy factions that the players kinda need to hook their wagons to.

By not having any needs like past editions where magic item churn is expected to varying degrees players become wild cards with no reason to care about building any allegiance or trust from NPCs. Frustratingly though the gm pretty much needs to just shrug and have the NPCs lay down on the tracks for a party of PCs they know will immediately double cross them at their earliest most convenient opportunity. The gm needs to betray any logic and sanity like that because doing otherwise makes it pretty hard to run a game if NPCs won't interact with players.

 

[Minigiant]

While I agree with most of that, it's 5e design choices that derail it not the local focus that details things. it's entirely possible but requires players to need things from the world at regular enough intervals that they can be considered eager agents of powerful fractions. You can look at the section in forge of the artificer about having multiple villain/bad guy factions that the players kinda need to hook their wagons to.

By not having any needs like past editions where magic item churn is expected to varying degrees players become wild cards with no reason to care about building any allegiance or trust from NPCs. Frustratingly though the gm pretty much needs to just shrug and have the NPCs lay down on the tracks for a party of PCs they know will immediately double cross them at their earliest most convenient opportunity. The gm needs to betray any logic and sanity like that because doing otherwise makes it pretty hard to run a game if NPCs won't interact with players.

That's more or less what I'm saying.

5e was designed with DM Empowerment in mind in such a way that the game works without forcing the DM to include many things that would be personally in the hands of and in the whims of the world. But removing those ties to the world, removes those personal ties and local links to the world which are material. It becomes purely story.

And pure story is a harder sell for gameplay in a game. Pure stories are for books and movies. A game needs game.

You have to make the gameplay fun and not stale. And that is the tough part of Sword and Sorcery. It's often more fun as a story than gameplay. The characters as gameplay entities are boring and its biggest fans fight making the gameplay gameplay interesting in the base rules.

 

[tetrasodium]

That's more or less what I'm saying.

5e was designed with DM Empowerment in mind in such a way that the game works without forcing the DM to include many things that would be personally in the hands of and in the whims of the world. But removing those ties to the world, removes those personal ties and local links to the world which are material. It becomes purely story.

And pure story is a harder sell for gameplay in a game. Pure stories are for books and movies. A game needs game.

You have to make the gameplay fun and not stale. And that is the tough part of Sword and Sorcery. It's often more fun as a story than gameplay. The characters as gameplay entities are boring and its biggest fans fight making the gameplay gameplay interesting in the base rules.

No. It is not "dm empowerment" to loot the gm's toolbox just because it's done while someone says that it's for your own good.

I literally described how the gm is did empowered and you quoted the description telling me it was gm empowerment.

 

[Marc17]

Sword and Sorcery Rant:

IMHO, Sword and Sorcery is about the protagonist dealing with personal and local wins and losses which can be ugly or costly. This is easy with warriors because they typically don't scale that fast outside the local as quickly. Skill users are based on author scale.. But isn't not impossible with spellcasters.

D&D stops being local and personal after level 7 or so. Especially post 3e. You can force it by limiting goes to material plane monsters and limiting magic spells but it gets boring

Well, I don't think that was quite explained in the original descriptions of the setting types. With those you seemed much more hung up on alignment than power level. Even now, I would think the above definition is pretty much void. Sword and Sorcery was offered as an option for a D&D campaign, that implies that it works for all levels of such. I could see arguing that low level is S&S and higher is Heroic in the same setting. (with Epic just being the same setting with a neat adventure path the DM has).

 

[Minigiant]

No. It is not "dm empowerment" to loot the gm's toolbox just because it's done while someone says that it's for your own good.

I literally described how the gm is did empowered and you quoted the description telling me it was gm empowerment.

It's wasn't real DM Empowerment. DM Empowerment for all DMs.

It was DM Empowerment for a certain subset of DMs who didn't want the toolbox visible so they couldn't be compared to.

Well, I don't think that was quite explained in the original descriptions of the setting types. With those you seemed much more hung up on alignment than power level. Even now, I would think the above definition is pretty much void. Sword and Sorcery was offered as an option for a D&D campaign, that implies that it works for all levels of such. I could see arguing that low level is S&S and higher is Heroic in the same setting. (with Epic just being the same setting with a neat adventure path the DM has).

My point is that creating a S&S setting that is only local is a cop out.

Because you are creating something WOTC can't sell.

Or

You are transitioning to Heroic Fantasy... which more or less is Heroic Fantasy.

Because if the setting is Sword and Sorcery from level 1 to level 5, it isn't a Sword and Sorcery setting

 

[Scott Christian]

This is more a description of what you like, rather than the generally accepted definition.

As you can see from just these posts, let alone the broad range of people who play D&D, that there is no "generally accepted definition" of sword and sorcery. And what I posted isn't what I like, it is what is in the mind's eye of many-many people when they think of sword and sorcery. And that was the point of my claim's explanation.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

As you can see from just these posts, let alone the broad range of people who play D&D, that there is no "generally accepted definition" of sword and sorcery. And what I posted isn't what I like, it is what is in the mind's eye of many-many people when they think of sword and sorcery. And that was the point of my claim's explanation.

Micheal Moorcock coined the term, I think he knew what he meant by it.

 

[Hussar]

You want to rule out one of the genre-defining novel series from the genre?!

Wellllll....

Elric was designed, deliberately, by Moorcock, as the antithesis of the Sword and Sorcery character. Physically weak, plagued by doubts, etc. He's the anti-S&S character. As far as Moorcock coining the term, it was actually Leiber that did that. But, in any case, the genre was pretty well defined by that point, even if it wasn't named.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Wellllll....

Elric was designed, deliberately, by Moorcock, as the antithesis of the Sword and Sorcery character. Physically weak, plagued by doubts, etc. He's the anti-S&S character. As far as Moorcock coining the term, it was actually Leiber that did that. But, in any case, the genre was pretty well defined by that point, even if it wasn't named.

More specifically, an anti-Conan. The decadent heir to a decaying civilisation (British Empire with the numbers filed off) he very much resembles a Conan villain. He even enjoys reading poetry!

Leiber’s protagonists fall between the two extremes (Fafhad even catches religion on one occasion).

But I would describe S&S as basically a fantasy Western. They were mostly written for magazines, and therefore short, hence focusing with small scale more personal threats, they were aimed squarely at an adolescent male audience, their protagonists generally ignore conventional morality, rating rugged individualism and physical prowess as "good" and book learning, appreciation of fine art and ceremonial religion as "bad".* Indeed, I will throw this out there: The "Dollars" trilogy of Westerns are much more S&S movies than Conan the Barbarian.

"Class restrictions and wizards who fight with staffs" sounds much more like a desire for 1st edition AD&D than S&S.


*It might be worth mentioning that official 1st edition stats for Elric gave him a Chaotic Evil alignment, whereas official 1st edition stats for Conan made him True Neutral, despite the later being a murderer, rapist and thief.