Birthright??

[Celebrim]

Birthright was in some respects the best setting D&D has ever had. In a more important aspect, it is a miserable failure and that underlying flaw is the reason it didn't take off.

Over the years, I think I've gotten pretty good at recognizing the difference between a well-written and interesting game book and a well-written and interesting game. Not everything that is well done is in practice gamable.

Birthright presents a really cool setting with an interesting twist. The problem with Birthright is that it doesn't present a clear picture of how to turn its mechanics and setting into a social, interactive, gaming session.

Compare this with vanilla D&D which presents a very clear picture of what a gaming session is like - you journey into an unexplored place where you work together to overcome monsters and traps in order to obtain treasure - but very little clear picture of the larger structure of the setting and society. People have over the years continually pointed to the latter as a terrible flaw, but they've failed I think to appreciate just how important what D&D does well actually is.

I think Birthright failed to gain acceptance because its not very clear what you do with it. I think in practice what you do with it might seem something like what we actually did with 1e D&D after obtaining 'name level', but they idea of everyone being a lord from the start seemed to preclude the simple, understandable, gamable and widely appealing model of D&D.

 

[Lord Captian Tobacco]

60% Bad marketing.
10% Language/pronunciation problems.
10% Time.
20% Failure of consequence.

The first two have been covered, so I'll hit the other last two.

Time. Not time to play, but time for preparation on the part of the GM and the March of Time for the character. Any game involving kings will take a great story arc and lots of planning to cover the changes made by the passage of the players. Wars. Births. Inventions. Demographic shifts. All WILL change with the actions of any movers and shakers in the world; this is all too static in FR and Greyhawk. Yes, I know that timelines are included in both settings but how often are they used? With a quick show of hands we know how many GMs track the weeks it takes to travel from one part of the map to the other but rather than breakingsession and saying "Winter passes and with spring approaching; you set out to cross the Mountians of Icy Death." That is unless you want to run a winter game.

Failure of consequence is the inaction of other regents tword the players plans and activities. If each country and provence is its own entity the players will soon be faced with the same things that they are doing.
If the player agitates a neighbor, others should do the same to the player.
The building of forces should invite a spoiling attack.
Embarking a quest to retrieve a powerful item may return to find that a theft has occoured at home.
When the PC ruler had declined to marry the person the king has decided they would; you have earned the disfavor of a king. Your land WILL suffer as a result.
Or not if the GM does not consider Sir Issiacs law about equal and opposite reactions.

This is what I think caused the game world to be less popular than it could have been...

 

[Panzeh]

I find that Birthright had some goofy things about it but most of all the problem was that it was a huge game bolted onto an already complicated DnD 2e system. It was a mess in that regard. The setting works pretty well for Burning Wheel, actually, moreso than most other games as you have to plan differently for characters that control organizations in a real way.

 

[mattcolville]

I think the issue is a little more complex. But only a little.

That there were too many settings is, I think, both accurate and obvious. I don't mean obvious in a pejorative sense, I mean "looking back, it was clear."

Also, the 90s were a bad time for D&D as TSR had no real idea of what people were playing, what they were spending their money on, or what they wanted. A lot of gamers were trying other games.

The setting was not designed for D&D, it was the setting for a novel, and D&D was grafted onto it and, I feel, it showed.

The idea of running a kingdom is a great idea, in fact it's part of the original endgame for D&D. But the reality is; not everyone is interested in that idea. A lot of gamers hear that and their first reaction is "sounds like a lot of work." A lot of work that doesn't directly relate to killing things and taking their stuff.

The rules for running a kingdom were *incredibly* complex in play. On paper, it made sense, but having each province in every country have 4 different *categories* of faction fighting over them, and then different organizations *within* each faction was, I felt, unplayable as written. It had to be mostly ignored. It reeks of "a computer should do this" which is to say, bad design.

In other words, for those who haven't played it, you might have a Kingdom, which you were in charge of, with 11 provinces. Each of those provinces had

1: Several Thieves Guilds competing to see who'd be the dominant Guild in the province.
2: Several Churches competing to dominate.
3: Several wizards competing for the provinces magical energy
4: Possibly different Lords competing to control the martial resources.

Made sense, especially back in the AD&D2 model of 4 classes. But in play? Are you kidding? I suspect most GM's never used this, at all, and then a few used it a little.

Then, on top of all of this, there was Warfare. Running a kingdom was it's own thing, and fighting a war was its own thing. And not a lot of fun. It breaks a lot of rules I don't think any D&D game should break and at the end of the day, there are a lot of players who don't *want* to wage war. Who don't think it's cool.

So;

A: A lot of settings. Too many.
B: Of that fraction of D&D gamers who might be interested in Birthright-the-setting, only a fraction of those would be interested in actually running a country. As opposed to just adventuring in Cerilia.
C: Of those who were interested in Birthright-the-setting, AND running a country, only a fraction would be interested in fighting a war. Favoring politics and plotting instead.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff, I ran Birthright for many years and designed and published a couple of warfare solutions for fantasy games. I think D&D4 could support a very robust system for all of this, and one that felt way more D&D4 than Birthright's warfare felt like AD&D2.

But I don't think there are really that many players who care about running a realm and fighting wars.

 

[slwoyach]

Two reasons.

First, it's more complex to run a regent campaign than a standard campaign. You could run a non-regent campaign, but then the players will always feel like their characters aren't very important.

Secondly and more importantly, it came out just as TSR's ceiling came crashing down. It didn't have the time to build support like other settings did before the company went under.

 

[gamerprinter]

While still apples and oranges, I think PF Kingmaker has borrowed ideas from the Birthright concept, just done a bit better, more begin as explorers than build your own country. Still there are some similarities - and Kingmaker is a success, so I imagine a more Birthright direction could work as well.

Not my preference though.

GP

 

[AllisterH]

Some very good responses...

As a setting, I think Birthright wasn't that interesting to players...I always see Birthright as the closest campaign setting to an actual medieval setting and I honestly don't think THAT is as interesting to casual players as the typical "medieval" setting like FR and GH.

 

[FreeXenon]

I loved Birthright. The flavor was very cool too and I normally do not like such massive changes from standard medieval fantasy.

For me the rules seemed to lack clarity or completeness. We played it as best as the rules allowed us to.

.. and yea as others have said it was very complex and I would love for their to be a Birthright computer game. That would totally rock!

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think if you were to re-do a Birthright game, it could be better sold as "rules for playing rulers."

And then have those rules directly affect how your character plays on his adventures.

So, the set-up is, you have a character who is King, but, since he's also an adventurer, he spends most of his time out on the Grial Quest (or whatever), leaving the day-to-day blahbitty blah to underlings. BUT!, it turns out that the adventures you go on directly affect your kingdom.

So, say you go kill some orcs and take their stuff. Now, your kingdom also benefits from taking over the orc's land!

Say, you go kill the Necromancer-King. Now, your kingdom also benefits from not having a zombie plague run across it!

Maybe you discover and explore some ruins on the fringes of the kingdom. Well, the magic you bring back enhances your army significantly, and improves your standing in the world!

As you put down kingdom-level threats as an adventurer, and as you gain more resources, your kingdom advances along with you. Heroic tier, maybe you have a small city or a few farms. Paragon tier, you have an actual kingdom, several cities, a landscape. Epic tier, you're an emperor, with a great world-spanning empire.

It would also have to be group-focused, so that all the PC's worked together. They could be allied nations, forex.

And you could define your nation as you define your character. Maybe the party druid is the ruler of a vast primeval forest, and can call upon dinosaurs and dire animals and treants for assistance, both in and out of combat. Maybe your fighter is the ruler of military city (all THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAA), producing weapons and armor beyond the pale of any other civilization. Maybe your cleric's theocracy means that your god is the Big God of the setting!

The king stuff would be integrated with the adventuring stuff, not separate, not a game of Civ as much as it would be like 300, or the Illiad or the Odyssey, where your hero plays a major role in how the nation under your leadership develops.

And, of course, every once in a while, you get those wicked chancellors and those peasant revolts and those natural disasters that mean you need to attend to adventures at home.

 

[Orius]

I think the biggest problems were that there were already too many settings, and that it came close to TSR's financial difficulties. Maybe the complexity hurt too, I don't have the core material and never played it. I've looked at bits and pieces of some of the domain rules and some of it looks pretty complicated.

The setting itself isn't bad, it's similar to vanilla but a little different, with violently xenophobic elves, and halflings that can enter an alternate plane at will. Humanoids like goblins and gnolls and stuff actually have their own realms and armies instead of just being scattered bands of raiders for low-level PCs to kill. The setting has a fairly deep history (though maybe that's restricting for some DMs), and the concept of bloodlines is great. I think this stuff is good. The awnshelien look like interesting big bads, but there's a downside that many of the more high-level classic D&D monsters are unique big bad types, and that this is a setting that kind of needs a fairly low level cap of around 10th level. That might be a weakness, players want to go off and kill the Gorgon of course, but the setting designers need him around as the main villain.

As much as I like the ideas behind Cerilia, it's a consistant and diverse campaign setting that I wouldn't mind running at all, I think the rules really shouldn't have been tied up in yet another setting. Having a sourcebook that detailed running domains and/or having blood abilities as something that could be added on to existing settings might have been better in the long run. There were a pair of articles in Dragon that adapted the rules to the al-Qadim setting that were very interesting (issues #233 and #240 IIRC), so it could be done. It might have worked better as an add-on for the Realms or something more generic.

Hmm, I just noticed that TVTropes still has an unedited page for the Birthright setting. I think it could use some information (I don't know the setting well enough to do it justice).