Campaign Setting - Pet Peeves

[Charwoman Gene]

2. Celtic-ANYTHING (

Celts, like pirates and ninjas only get better in duplication.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

Mine are:

1) Grim grim dark depressing settings with no hope. And heroes that aren't heroic. No real difference between good and evil.
I detest too many shades of gray - I get enough of that in the real world - I want a campaign setting where the heroes are heroes, and the villains are villains and there is no trouble telling them apart. There can be "little e" evil that tends towards shades of gray, but there are really big Good Guy and Bad Guy stuff; think Star Wars (original trilogy) - Jedi Good Sith Bad. Rebellion Good, Empire Bad. Han was a gray character.

2) Lots of muddled politics. The characters don't know where they stand in relation to other major power groups, the government ect because everyone is playing some sort of cloak and dagger political game.

3) Low Magic, Swords an Sorcery. Magic doesn't have to be a replacement for tech (a la Eberron), or on every streetcorner (a la Forgotten realms), but it is important, and a very big deal in the world.


With those three as the top things I hate, it shouldn't be any surprise that I hated Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Planescape.

I have others but they are mostly outgrowths of those three... but the biggest is
4) No sense of wonder - the world in mundane and so are the cahracters - there is no lost world to find, no hidden land to explore, no way to get to the skies.

Personally I doubt the OP and I should play in a game together.

 

[firesnakearies]

I only have one, and it's a big one:

1.) Not being Dark Sun.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

Personally I doubt the OP and I should play in a game together.

Hehe, well thus why it is a fun question to see how diverse people's likes/dislikes can be

 

[Ulrick]

3. Faux-Europe in generally bores me to tears. Greyhawk gets grandfathered because it's where I started, but you know what? That was in 1981. I've seen vague fantasy europe done about two hundred million times since then. STOP IT.

I still like Greyhawk. And Faux-Europe is the default, but it does get old.

4.. the Forgotten Realms. 'nuff said (Put me in that small category of folk who think the 4e realms books are golden.)

I haven't looked through the 4e Forgotten Realms corebooks. So can't make any judgements there. I just got really tired of pre-4e forgotten realms....especially 2e. Greyhawk may have been a mish-mash of concepts, but Forgotten Realms is just a huge rip off of real world and fictional sources...Very unoriginal.

5. Unnecessary hand-holding. I understand that a modicum of family friendlyness is generally considered necessary in published gaming materials but it grates sometimes. I'm a thirty six year old woman - treat me like an adult just every now and then, mmkay? (One of the appeals of the stuff Paizo puts out is that, bluntly, it doesn't tone things down generally.)

I run campaigns that are rated "R."

7. The same five races, doing the same five things. Thrilling. Seriously, give me at the a thin patina of something that makes *your* elves, dwarves, etc. distinctive and different. Please.

I only allow humans. Elves are legend. Halfings don't exist. etc.

Having said all of the above - things I like in a setting includes factoring the game rules into the world itself, renaisance, bronze age or o'erwise OTHER levels of cultural/technological development, gunpowder and settings based more on the author's imagination than some historical period on earth (to name a few).

The best sort of the campaign that does this is a homebrew, unfortunately.

 

[firesnakearies]

Dark Sun is the best setting ever devised for fantasy gaming. But I like Hyboria, too. Robert E. Howard didn't mess around.

 

[Serendipity]

Celts, like pirates and ninjas only get better in duplication.

Long ago I hit the point of being absolutely unable to take ninjas seriously. With you on the pirates though.

 

[Serendipity]

I still like Greyhawk. And Faux-Europe is the default, but it does get old.
I run campaigns that are rated "R."
The best sort of the campaign that does this is a homebrew, unfortunately.

Make no mistake I'm still a pretty rabid Greyhawk fangirl, though mostly for the older stuff. In general most "generic Fantasy" is pretty much a turnoff for me.
It sounds like we'd probably dig each other's style of game pretty well. My longrunning homebrew started off (some sixteen years back I think) with all of the races recently liberated from centuries of slavery at the hands of the elves (a particularly wicked interpretation of them). It got complicated quickly.

 

[jdrakeh]

1. The tendency for designers to dismiss any need for internal consistency or basic logic due to the presence of magic in a given setting. There are so many things that make absolutely no sense in many fantasy RPG settings, obvious internal contradictions, things almost always dismissed with a wave of the hand and an "Oh, it's magic!" — not because it makes sense to do so, but because it's easier than writing an actual explanation or being accountable for one's own goofs.

2. The idea that an over-proliferation of magic is a necessary ingredient for fantasy adventure, coupled with the tendency of those who hold that belief to consciously eradicate any hint of verisimilitude from their work. I think that many of the old TSR module settings* actually suffered more from this than any whole campaign setting has, though the ideaology does leave its mark on larger works from time to time. This peeve does often appear in conjunction with #1 above, but is not definitively linked to it.

3. Elves, Dwarves, Half-Elves, and other non-human races overrunning a given setting that claims to be centered on humanity. Lots of fantasy RPG settings claim to be about humans or humanity, but very few of them actually deliver. Most D&D settings make this promise and then utterly fail to deliver on it, IMHO (with the possible exception of the earliest Greyhawk folio). If you say that your setting is "human-centric" (or something similar), then the rules and sourcebooks had better back that up.

4. Ridiculous names created by stringing letters from the English alphabet together randomly and substituting "y" for other vowels. No matter how otherwise engaging, detailed, and believable a setting is, if it's populated with absolutely ridiculous place names and people, I'll probably hurl it away in disgust. I freely admit that this is very petty.

*Castle Amber, for example, reads more like an acid trip diary than any contemporary fantasy literature.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

jdrakeh's fourth one reminds me of another one and is also another one of mine.

7) Ridiculous names/Lack of Real Names:

We see in settings names that are hardly pronounceable in a human tongue and yet there is a severe lack of any real names or terms. We do not even see them amongst Humans.