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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8249469" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah I wholeheartedly agree.Dark Sun is particularly interesting because whilst it doesn't play nice with standard D&D classes, it does deeply embed some concepts that other settings kept on the periphery - psionics particularly, with both Psionicists and wild talents being very integrated into the setting, and "unnecessary" classes for the setting simply eliminated. It also massively re-jigs Bards, but actually makes them part of setting, rather than "rando jack of all trades dude who can cast massive spells for no apparent reason" (as they were in 2E).EDIT - As an aside, the Complete Book of Bards was utterly amazing because it gave Bards ways to actually be part of the setting, and it made the spellcasting element feel a bit more rational, and gave you ways to reduce or I think even eliminate it if it wasn't part of that vision of a Bard, before 3E came along and made Bards feel arbitrary and weird again. Thanks 3E.Eberron is interesting in a different way, because it's a 3E setting, and did a good job of integrating 3E stuff in a very 3E way. Basically with 3E rules, Eberron works and makes complete sense (arguably 3E is the closest to "generic fantasy RPG" too - I say arguably but I think most would agree). In 4E, the rules changes made you go "hmm" about a few things, but it largely worked, just now things weren't perfectly aligned, and the importance of casters didn't make quite as much sense. In 5E, whilst it's absolutely still possible to run the setting in D&D, and run it well, things are way wonkier, because 5E doesn't map well to what Eberron was intended to do in 3E. The "no feats" mandate in particular caused an absolute car-crash of design, where instead of the neat way dragonmarks were done in 3E and 4E, with feats, they had to create pointless subraces of most of the "basic" races to allow them to have dragonmarks.I think the same story is true for a lot of settings, like they integrate the classes in a way that makes sense to that one edition (Dragonlance and 1E, Forgotten Realms was 1E, but elaborately re-embedded classes with 2E's Godswar, and kind of tried the same thing with less success with 3E and 4E and then half-arsed it with 5E), then people want to move on. However, in 5E you can also see the bending and stretching of D&D to try and use it as a "generic fantasy RPG" even with official settings, thanks to the MtG settings. Most of them align extremely poorly with D&D conceits about magic and classes. But they work well enough - the classes aren't really integrated, but people overlook it.But yeah, if it was up to me, I'd say all settings should integrate the classes/archetypes that they want to use - then leave it up to individual groups/DMs if they want to bring in other stuff (and how much they integrate it).I think there's also a case to be made that instead of:A) Re-hashing old settings.andB) Attempting to jam non-D&D fantasy settings into D&D-shaped boxes.Each edition should get new settings, which properly integrate that edition. Or at least one setting like 3E did with Eberron. 5E has no settings like this. All 5E settings are box-jamming or revivals/continuations of settings for other editions. It works okay, but with full integration it could be Earthdawn levels of cool.</blockquote>

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