Trainz said:
Maybe, but if I have to do half the work to have a complete setting, than I would rather do a whole one BY MYSELF, which is what I did. Else, I want tools, not concepts. Concepts I have a dime a dozen. As much as someone else's concept might be interesting, buying a setting is for those that don't have the time to create one. If I don't have the time to create one, I sure as hell don't have the time to map half of it.
You also have to realize that your position is subjective. That doesn't mean that your point is not valid, I quite agree that it comes down to matters of personal taste.
Funny. I, for one, don't want new feats, spells, or prestige classes in a purchased setting. I want those to be published in generic splat books. If a player gets used to a feat from a setting, and then you make him play in a different setting, he might feel that the new setting "sucks" simply because he lost access to the feat. As for prestige classes... once again, I must fall back on Scarred Lands (sorry NIghtfall). I feel they over did it with the paladin prestige classes, while mostly leaving the other classes behind. It's sloppy.
I want my money back from buying Scarred Lands, and I can't.
You must have awesome talent at drawing maps and hours to spend making them, but if I think about the majority out there, I doubt they ALL have such ability and/or time. I think delivering the goods would be more helpful.
I have
no skill drawing maps. Every last ounce of artistic/creative talent I may have is devoted to the writing. I can't draw a straight line with a ruler, and I don't even think visually, I think descriptively. Nor do I have hours to make them.
But I also don't feel I
need a map for every location. Unless the precise locations or distances are
vital, such as a very complex dungeon or battleground, my players and I both prefer a less rigid approach. You don't need a map to know the Temple of Whatis is next to Whosit's Castle; you just need to know it, and possibly make a note of it. The largest of my own homebrew campaigns, a world called Selion, has been the setting for four full-length (defined as six months to a year in this case) campaigns over the past 10 years. In all that time, I think I have made use of
maybe 12 maps. More than half of those were dungeon/or building maps. One is the map of the continent. Only
two were village/city maps; one of them proved unnecessary, and the other I simply stole from the inside cover of the old Bard's Tale computer game, and changed the names.
Thing is, even if I did feel I needed maps, I still wouldn't want campaign settings to focus on them. To me, a campaign setting is about the world--and what makes a world different from any other world is history and culture. Frankly, IMO, you can swap out maps. Just make a small note as to what this or that building is, and you could use the same map for a village in Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Scarred Lands, Shadow Branch, or almost any setting. But I don't think anyone would claim those settings are all the same, because the histories and cultures and stories are all very different.
So far as crunch, I think world-specific feats and magic items really add flavor; some special abilities
should be limited to particular cultures/areas. A feat like, say, Combat Charioteer would fit very well into a Greek or Roman setting, not so much one based on the Renaissance. And honestly, I think PrCs should almost be
restricted to campaign-specific books only. People trying to create too many "general-use" PrCs is why we have so many out there that get so much flak. A PrC is best used, IMO, to fill a particular niche in a particular setting.
Again, not telling you that you should change your mind. But there's more than one way to view a campaign setting, and more that one approach to world-creation. To me, leaving out maps isn't "making more work for me," as long as the most important ones are there. Stinting on history and culture,
that would be more work, because then I have to decide for myself what the people and places of this world are like in even the broad strokes--and if I wanted to do that, I'd make up my own setting. (Which, most of the time, I do; I actually don't play in published settings very often. But I buy them frequently to mine them for ideas--like historical events, story seeds, and cultures.
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