Best d20 Setting?

[Dundragon]

FR is nice because there is so much there to experience and the support from WoTC helps a lot. I don't think its more munchkin-promoting than any other setting that uses the PHB as a base, because PrCs, new spells, and anything else is still DMs choice to include. Yes, the PCs become uber-powers in their own right, but I guess its safe to assume that the mortality rate for adventurers is pretty high in the Realms...seeing as how they face NPCs that can do the same things they can.

I posted a thread about countering paranoid munchkin-play...seeing as how I'm not very good at it yet.
http://www.enworld.org/messageboards/showthread.php?s=&threadid=673

 

[Kichwas]

Kalamar:

It's the ONLY published setting that doesn't have ALL of:

Silly geography that makes NO sense.
Uber author-sex-fantasy-alter-ego NPCs.
Silly oversized inconsistant pantheons.
No ethnographic cohession.
No logic to it's historical patterns.
Illogical trade routes.
Improbable status between power groups.
Improbable status between humans/demihumans and 'humanoids'.
A meta-plot so huge it changes every DMs game every 3 months.
More house rules than you can shake a stiff kobold at.

...

In fact... Kalamar has NONE of these 'features'.


Instead it offers a place.

A place that is built with a physicial world that holds up to logical ideas of climate and geography.
A place that has cultures that show a natural pattern of change and migration to match the history provided them and the people they have been forced to deal with.
A place full of potential plot hooks that are left for the DM to use rather than taken away after being shown off and resolved by the metaplot.
A place with a million different flavors depending on where you go. Rather than one simplistic and illogical theme.

But at it all, it stays a place. A setting. Like it claims.

Not an overgrown novel or module.

So yeah... when it comes to published settings only Kalamar even comes up to basic par in my book.

 

[Holy Bovine]

I agree with everything that Arcady has posted above.

Yup.

100% Agreement here.


Just change 'Kalamar' for 'Scarred Lands'



Seriously the only setting you are describing that has all of the above problems is FR. Please don't dump on other (very excellent) settings just to grind your axe.

 

[Psion]

I agree with everything that Arcady has posted above.

Yup.

100% Agreement here.


Just change 'Kalamar' for 'Scarred Lands'

LOL!

Or dragonstar (only 12 deities there... no big E, either. ). Or Rokugan. Need I go on?

Seriously the only setting you are describing that has all of the above problems is FR. Please don't dump on other (very excellent) settings just to grind your axe.

What HB said!

 

[Kichwas]

Seriously the only setting you are describing that has all of the above problems is FR. Please don't dump on other (very excellent) settings just to grind your axe.

Scarred Lands has all but two of those problems. And given it's latest two suppliments it may or may not have those two as well soon.

Nearly every other setting in the list is about the same. FR is hardly unique in it's flaws.

While there is a bit of an exageration in my post above with words like 'all'... Most RPG settings suffer from a very large list of flaws much like the ones I mentioned above but to varying degrees.

The strength of a setting comes from how well it holds up to the 'this place feels like people could actually live there' (this is especially true for a magical world where you need to capture that as well as make it feel magical) as well as how much freedom a DM/GM has to use it as such rather than being roped around.

 

[Tsyr]

...While those of us who could care less that the west winds wouldn't clear the mountains and thus hamper the growing seasons of the east-Yakisbull corn harvest, or that the peoples of the southern plains of Boredumb would have more likely migraded upstream than downstream, or that the village of Hayfarm wouldn't likely trade with the city of Deepwater because of conflicting growth patterns continue to enjoy many campagin worlds, somehow, despite our ignorance of how inferior our campagin setting is...

 

[Holy Bovine]

Scarred Lands has all but two of those problems. And given it's latest two suppliments it may or may not have those two as well soon.

Nearly every other setting in the list is about the same. FR is hardly unique in it's flaws.

**grind, grind, grind**

Keep trying, maybe you'll convince me of how terrible Scarred lands is.

But don't hold your breath.

On second thought....

 

[jasamcarl]

Arcady.....

I've been subject to this anti-FR polemic from you before, arcady; this seems like as good a time as any to offer some counterpoints to a 'consistent' if unimaginative condemnation of that setting.

You hold 'consistency' up as both the making of a setting and an objective mark. The problem with that argument is the fact that in order to make any number of discrete facts 'consistent', an observer or author automatically brings to the fore certain assumption of how things work, what are real historic agents, etc. But what seems like a 'real' line of thought to you is often irrelevant to others; historians and anths do stick to a consistent line for the most part in their individual research, but they are also apt to admit its filled with very real complications.

On a critical level, the paradigm you are using seems to be very 'modernist'. Its simple and workable. I personally have a problem with this strict construction, given it always seems to fluid, i.e. bland, removing the verisimilitude that great histories, musical and literary works strive to create. On a similar note, this is why i like the realms; the fact that it was subject to so many contributors, and , with the latest edition, given a bit of cohesion through editing, makes it feel more 'real', more diverse, more (should i say?) democratic.

Just some thoughts. I know i tend to ramble.

 

[Reprisal]

On a similar note, this is why i like the realms; the fact that it was subject to so many contributors, and , with the latest edition, given a bit of cohesion through editing, makes it feel more 'real', more diverse, more (should i say?) democratic.

This is the reason I don't like Forgotten Realms simply because there are too many cooks in the kitchen. I took a look at the book, and to me, it seems to try to do too much. I mean, the FRCS is superbly presented and all, but as it has been said before, too much of it doesn't quite suspend my disbelief.

This is why your post stuck out as I was reading the thread. Forgotten Realms never seemed real to me at all, it never lived, it never breathed, it was just a collection of ideas that were neat, but didn't have that (finished-product) cohesion I sought...

There are obviously other reasons why I don't favour Forgotten Realms, but at this point, they are all linked to subjective tastes...

As I've stated on that other Setting Thread, I prefer Kingdoms of Kalamar. But I freely admit that I found what I liked fairly early in my search, at that time I had only read through the Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms campaign setting books...

 

[jasamcarl]

Well....

Leaving aside the subjective nature of 'real', i will say that the realms, in all its convoluted glory strikes me as true insofar that it is not clean or neat. The diversity of the terrain, of power groupings, of culture (probably the only setting to really present an intersting portrayal of fantasy NGOs), etc. insites greater empathy than the centralized, 'concept' settings that some prefer. I understand your stance though; consistent for a material determinest (if i'm not mistaken).