Whizbang Dustyboots said:
Actually, no, I am big into the storytelling. I just can't imagine a scenario in which the desperate battle for survival against the Shadow from the North pauses for a discussion of the cosmological implications of his exile in the mortal realm. Now, if my player characters were a noble band of refugee cosmologists, maybe, but I just can't picture my players preferring that route over more standard sorts of heroes. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect for the vast majority of actual games, it simply doesn't come up.
Why? Why is a setting where there's no teleportation and little divine magic available required to spend inches explaining why? Either a group buys into the setting and wants to play there, or they don't.
Simple. Because there are records in the world of what life was like before the Sundering. People in the setting are aware that this sort of thing used to be possible. They've even got old gods that just don't answer prayers anymore.
There's even an implication that one "big story" to tell in the setting is to undo the Sundering or moderate its effects some how. For instance, the Witch Queen (who's an
8,000 year-old elf) might be capable of being elevated to divine status - giving Aeryth a goddess to counterpoint the dark god. Or maybe an epic adventure to bring a couple more outsiders down to counterbalance Izzy's evil. Or maybe you could restore access to the Ethereal plane. All of these things are put there as potential plothooks for a DM.
The book also goes into a fair amount of detail explaining the differences between
Midnight and a typical D&D setting because it's targeted at
people who are used to standard D&D. Any setting book does that. They have to explain the ways in which the setting deviates from the Core Rules.
Midnight introduces new classes, a new method for casting magic, and lots of other new rules. But it still uses the D&D spell list. Not all of it, but the D&D spell list is key to the game. They disallowed certain spells that didn't fit the setting and they gave an in-setting rationale for that decision. Choosing that in-setting rationale led to some other implications, and the resulting flavor makes for a very compelling setting. I have no problem with a design process that goes:
1) We want a setting like Middle-Earth if Sauron won.
2) That means we need a dark god on "earth" and no way for other gods to interfere.
3) We also want to disallow certain D&Disms, like planar travel and teleport.
4) There's a lot of problematic spells on the Cleric list.
5) Hey, what if the dark god was cast down to the Prime and sundered it from the other planes as his revenge, cutting it off from the other gods in the process?
6) That would mean no cleric spells and no spells that rely on the other planes.
7) Hey, that would mean spirits are stuck on the Prime.
8) etc.
And I have a feeling that that's how the setting evolved to what it is.
Whizbang Dustyboots said:
Does Dragonlance need a long discussion in the rule books about where the heck the halflings are to "help define the distinction between Krynn and out-of-the-box D&D?" I suspect most Dragonlance-aphiles would say no. "They're not there, have a kender, move on."
No, but when it WAS the case, it used to have a LONG discussion about what happened to the gods and why there were no clerics in the setting. And don't even get me started on the different orders of High Sorcery.
That's because when you change races, people go "eh." When you restrict the available classes or change fundamental rules systems (like magic), you have to explain why. Like defiling magic in
Dark Sun, for example.
I get the impression that you don't like
Midnight. Fine. But that's no reason to trash it for reasons that make perfect sense to people who do.
