Are You Using the 4E Forgotten Realms as a Setting?

[DaveMage]

I'm curious as to how the 4E version of the Forgotten Realms is being used.

(There would have been a poll, but vBulletin has decided it was not meant to be.)

Specifically, I"m curious if you are using it as the setting for your 4E game, just borrowing elements, or not using it at all.

 

[Kralin Thornberry]

Yes

 

[Nymrohd]

How? I may eventually use it but heavily homebrewed and at a different spot in the timeline (I was thinking about 30 years after the spellplague).

 

[Shemeska]

Nope. To be honest the 4e Realms feels like a completely different setting, given the scope of the changes made to it, and the extent that those changes were done to make it so that anything in the core PoL default fit into the Realms. The 4e Realms feel like they were homogenized to fit the 4e core, which seems to defeat the purpose of having unique settings in the first place.

It's really a shame what happened.

 

[Jack Colby]

I'm not using it at all. If I ever went back to the Realms as a setting I'd just use the original gray box set from 1st edition AD&D, regardless of what set of rules I was using.

 

[Alzrius]

Nope. To be honest the 4e Realms feels like a completely different setting, given the scope of the changes made to it, and the extent that those changes were done to make it so that anything in the core PoL default fit into the Realms. The 4e Realms feel like they were homogenized to fit the 4e core, which seems to defeat the purpose of having unique settings in the first place.

It's really a shame what happened.

This.

Also, for me a big disappointment was how generic and sweeping the changes were. The Realms were always the most detailed D&D setting, thanks to Ed Greenwood having thousands of pages of material written for it - plus contributions from other Realms-philes such as Eric Boyd - and it was great to see how incredibly fleshed out it was, making it highly immersive and vibrant. It was like D&D's own version of Middle Earth, in terms of just how much you could dig into it.

Adding a huge disaster and advancing the timeline a hundred years destroyed everything that was previously given in that regard. Moreover, they haven't even tried to provide that same level of detail that they once had. As such, the scope of the Realms has been scaled back to being on par with every other campaign setting out there for a game - a bunch of overarching descriptions for things, with some sporadic details given here and there, while everything else is left blank for individual GMs to fill in.

The 4E Realms has managed to single-handedly dismantle everything that was good about FR. That's my opinion, anyway. YMMV.

 

[megamania]

no.




but maybe later I will borrow aspects of it for non FR games.

 

[avin]

One of my former games was called "Forgotinho" (something like "little forgotten") and was my only enjoyable FR experience.

All my games are planar these days.

 

[Wombat]

Heck, I didn't use it ever as a setting... except when playing Baldur's Gate on my computer...

 

[Arawn76]

No.

But I love this man. In a completely platonic, hetero way....

I'm not using it at all. If I ever went back to the Realms as a setting I'd just use the original gray box set from 1st edition AD&D, regardless of what set of rules I was using.

IF I were to run FR it would have to be using the grey box and the FRPG with a little houseruling to fit the new stuff in less disruptively.