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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 4465255" data-attributes="member: 7635">Which makes Ravenloft a fun place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Much like Midnight, a setting where you cannot win, just merely do some good before you die is fun for a while, but eventually unsatisfying to me.Much more the point: Ravenloft as a setting required a certain amount of vulnerability. 2e Ravenloft did this in three ways: 1.) making everything that wasn't mundane shunned and feared (and making a great deal of the mundane suspicious as well). 2.) Attacking a PCs weaknesses (fear, horror, madness, curses) and 3.) changing, corrupting, or outright removing PC options and powers that would otherwise give them a position of strength (divination, druids, paladins, spell-changing, familiars!)This all added up to a setting where the PCs were constantly behind the 8-ball; the simple comforts of safe haven, reliable magic, etc. It basically said "I'm changing the rules so your screwed. If at anytime you think not screwed, you secretly are". Unfortunately, this runs smack dab against the design philosophies of third (options not restrictions) and fourth (all classes should be viable/useful). This is why Arhaus's 3e Ravenloft lacked the same feel as 2e's Domains of Dread; they tried to apply a 3e mindset to Ravenloft and allow more options (some with a cost) that made Ravenloft less "gothic horror hodgepodge" and more "fantasy seen through a darkened lens". Any attempt to recapture the feel of 2e Ravenloft, IMHO, is doomed to fail unless your willing to gut and rebuild the game around it. WotC has pressed a position of "PCs are Heroes, beyond mortal men" that is fine for fantasy but sucks for gothic horror. WotC would be wiser to lean on the Ravenloft that Expedition to Castle Ravenloft used; part of a larger world where heroes come from, but a dark and dangerous corner of it steeped in Gothic flavor, but ultimately closer to D&D with vampires than a different setting.Which, unless WotC suprises me, is what they are going to so.</blockquote>

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