Charles Ryan on Flavour and Rules

[Ranger REG]

If you want something written like a legal document, get into Starfleet Battles, first edition Rolemaster or perhaps Advanced Squad Leader.

Well, I have read and played two of the three above games. In my opinion, 3e reads more toward them than toward, say White Wolf's Vampire (pre-Requiem). For a game that pride itself as an entry-level RPG, it tries to cater more toward gaming veterans than newbie customers.

You can argue that by saying, "Well, that's why WotC are putting out D&D Basic Game." It only reinforce how 3e is written. I mean, you might as well reinstate "Advanced" prefix to the Dungeons & Dragons title.

And what about the bigger picture, i.e., d20/OGL? The Basic Game have 10 levels worth of play. Now, unless you're going to play D&D like a video game (i.e., every night), sure after the tenth day, they'll buy the Player's Handbook. Otherwise, it'll be awhile for the newbie customers to be exposed to a wide network of d20 System products.

It'll be interesting if they revise the current trademark license to include the Basic Game as requirement.

 

[Pants]

I think that 3E tends to put most of the crunch in the core books, and leave the fluff for the campaign setting book. This is a wonderful idea IMO; it makes the core stuff as generic as possible - but if you want a heap of fluff you just have to go and choose the campaign setting which is more suited to your tastes.

Unfortunately, the Core books don't really do that. The Core Books have a really basic assumption in them, such as, orcs are evil, elves fight orcs, dwarves fight giants, etc. But.. in every campaign setting are orcs evil, do elves fight orcs, do elves always train with rapiers, longswords, and bows, do dwarves fight giants?

I really think that the Core Books should be as Generic as possible so that people can easily fine tune them to their own games. Greyhawk can then be publised as its own CS and not be stuck in 'default' land anymore.

 

[coyote6]

But they weren't Greyhawk's established deities...

Sure they were. Lolth was all Greyhawk when she first appeared (in an adventure set in Greyhawk), and to quote Dragon #60, "Evil elvenkind have nothing to do with the gods of the Seldarine. [...] Lolth, the demon queen of spiders and spiderkind, is an infamous example of a lesser divinity who takes much of her power from the worship of evil elvenkind, particularly the Drow."

Ergo, the Seldarine were clearly meant to be the gods of Greyhawk's elves. The same follows for gods of the dwarves & gnomes.

That was in 1982; FR was merely the framing fiction for Ed Greenwood's articles.

Moreover, the 3e Manual of the Planes explicitly mentions Clangeddin Silverbeard (it first calls him a "dwarven hero", but later talks about "the deity"; it's obviously slightly confused. ).

So the mother of the dwarves was Berronar; but now, with Races of Stone, it's Mya (apparently, the mother of dwarves sings R&B). They couldn't simply reuse the name Berronar?

I wouldn't mind Hanseath being an additional dwarf god associated with war; but to leave out Clangeddin entirely is annoying to me.

I presume the changes were to avoid mix-ups with the FR versions; of course, they still have Moradin and Laduguer in common . . .

There are times when Wizards makes a conscious break from past continuity, and I don't think that it's always a bad idea.

I agree. (For instance, changing most of the dwarven pantheon from greater gods is fine by me.)

However, some of the stuff in Races of Stone was just annoying.

The gods are fairly minor; Berronar, Mya, whichever; the basic idea is fairly similar. Hanseath can coexist with Clangeddin (though avoiding having an army of dwarf gods might be a good idea, one or two more won't break everything).

But, good golly -- Races of Stone claims that the dwarves cremate their dead. Whu-huh?!? Sure, in a D&D world full of undead, cremation sounds like a sound practice. But c'mon. What the heck are all those dwarven tombs and sarcophagi populating all those adventures full of? Heck, Forge of Fury had a nice sized room full of 'em . . . But Races of Stone says, "No other monument or marker is typically given or left in remembrance."

Bah!

Heck, the freaking web enhancement for Races of Stone is an adventure to a dwarven crypt! Full of despoiled tombs whose corpses were tossed in a trash heap. So the new flavor text disagrees with the adventure associated with the book.

Bah!



(The goliaths are cool; but after the dwarf section, I could only skim the gnomes. And I skipped 2e, and so missed anything from any Complete Book.)

 

[Alzrius]

I think breaking with past continuity is fine if you have an in-game reason for it (which, essentially, makes it flow with continuity). Beyond that, why ignore the pile of material you already have in favor of having to go and make something altogether new?

 

[Arnwyn]

Beyond that, why ignore the pile of material you already have in favor of having to go and make something altogether new?

Indeed. Sounds like wasted effort for little benefit to me.

 

[qstor]

Sure they were. Lolth was all Greyhawk when she first appeared (in an adventure set in Greyhawk), and to quote Dragon #60, "Evil elvenkind have nothing to do with the gods of the Seldarine. [...] Lolth, the demon queen of spiders and spiderkind, is an infamous example of a lesser divinity who takes much of her power from the worship of evil elvenkind, particularly the Drow."

Ergo, the Seldarine were clearly meant to be the gods of Greyhawk's elves. The same follows for gods of the dwarves & gnomes.

That was in 1982; FR was merely the framing fiction for Ed Greenwood's articles.

Moreover, the 3e Manual of the Planes explicitly mentions Clangeddin Silverbeard (it first calls him a "dwarven hero", but later talks about "the deity"; it's obviously slightly confused. ).

The demi-human gods came in late to the picture. Rodger Moore developed them mostly in Dragon for any setting.. The gods were used in 2e Greyhawk supplements too like Carl Sargents work. So they do have a place in Greyhawk. I dont think you can say they were 100% Realms or Greyhawk.

Mike

 

[NewJeffCT]

Personally, I prefer fluff over 'crunch' every day. I am almost 38 years old now (yikes!) and have a young daughter. I do not have a lot of time to game, and several in my gaming group are in similar situations. Reading over flavor text / fluff to get a general feel for a different region on the map and the how & why of dwarves relating to elves in that region is a lot easier on me than learning 3 new prestige classes for dwarves & 2 for the elves in that region, as well as some new rules specific for that region, and then keeping all the new rules straight and worrying about whether it fits in to my campaign or not. I know that's not for everyone, but that is how I prefer it.