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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ourchair" data-source="post: 5456872" data-attributes="member: 85362">I absolutely do not get how the OP's discussion of the shortcomings of WotC's notion of campaign support is makes him/her one of the "people who continue to post these types of threads" about edition wars, unless you were addressing Moleculo's remark about how 4E don't smell like DnD.And even then, the OP's post provided solid well thought-out theories and constructive ideas, so I hardly think the thread he started was fanning new flames into an Edition War.Back on topic, I think it's important to emphasize that when the OP says, "why 4e is not as popular as it could have been," he may not necessarily mean "why 4e is not popular" or "why 4e is less popular than previous editions," but rather strongly making the case for how campaign settings support has helped shore up the sales of previous editions.In which case, I totally agree. I'm a newbie GM and I found that as someone who had no hands-on experience with DnD itself prior to 4th Edition, the setting books were really sparse. I think that there's certainly merit from the direction that the Heinsoo/Collins team wanted -- less book dictated fluff, more GM fiat --  but between players who know the setting and GMs looking for more guidance, it's not necessarily the only approach they should have taken.One could even say that the reason why 3E Eberron acquired setting popularity comparable to (if not equal to) the Realms is that they put out a hideous amount of splat books, ensuring that it was fleshed out enough for GMs to not just be attracted it as "The New Shiny." It guaranteed that older setting-omniscient GMs had something to draw from when their players asked for Eberron. But that's not the main point I'd like to make in this post.Rather, I'd like to point out that it's all well and good when Internet GM advice sites and forums say, "Forgotten Realms should always be YOUR Forgotten Realms" or "Don't pay attention to what novels made canon," or even "Who cares if the Ford Klingons were contradicted by Trek canon, use em if you like em," but it's another thing entirely when you've got people opposite the GM screen expecting your version of a setting to conform to their idea of the setting.Granted, I'm not suggesting that GMs be complete pushovers about their control and authority over the game world they're running. What I'm saying is that the lack of setting support means that there's no well-established hook to put 4E on, unlike say, Shadowrun (a setting/system I love) or nWOD (a setting/system I loathe) which possess well-developed worlds create the logic you can hang their rules upon but don't preclude a GM's ability to make the game their own.</blockquote>

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