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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3908962" data-attributes="member: 18549">I don't mind that sort of thing in a game like Earthdawn, where the setting is a major selling point for the game.  But D&D isn't that sort of game.  The selling point is the rules.  What differentiates 4th edition from 3rd edition will be the differences in rules and how they affect gameplay.  We already have tons of settings, and the majority of players will keep playing in them.  This new setting seems kind of tacked-on at the last minute so that there will, in fact, be an inherent setting of some sort.  It also sounds like it was written by game designers rather than by writers, if you know what I mean.Now, I don't have any problem with the setting.  I won't use it, but I'm glad that there's a kind of "starter package" for DMs to get their games going with.  I agree, however, that the mechanics in the PHB, which ought to be compatible with at least the major published settings, shouldn't be inherently tied to campaign-specific fluff.Take a look at the example someone brought up: Clerics & gods.  Now, you'll notice that in the 3rd edition PHB, the section on gods is basically a page with some holy symbols and a brief description of what the gods are about.  Hardly any fluff at all.  And, the section is segregated from the section of the book on clerics, which contains a brief list of the gods available in the implied setting.  Now, imagine if the section on clerics had three or four different types of clerics, each dedicated to a specific god.  You would have to choose to be a cleric of Pelor, a cleric of Nerull, a cleric of Heironeous, or a cleric of Kord, right from the point you decided to play a cleric.  Your choice would determine which powers and abilities were available to you, and if you wanted to play a cleric of a different god, you would have to either rearrange the power lists (to questionable balance effects), file off the names and play a cleric of <s>Pelor</s>St. Cuthbert that performs identically to a cleric of Pelor, or come up with brand new lists of powers yourself...or wait until the eventual cleric supplement that contains a bunch of new cleric traditions.It would have been much more difficult to customize the cleric for individual campaign styles if it hadn't been a really generic class with a big "insert god here" stamp on it.St. Cuthbert isn't IP.  He's a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Cuthbert" target="_blank">Christian saint</a>.  Therefore the name is in the public domain.  Anything WotC has written about St. Cuthbert is IP, but his name isn't.To be fair, I would be very surprised if they tried to make Golden Wyvern into IP.  I figure that one of the reasons why the names are so throw-away is because they plan on throwing them away into the SRD and so didn't bother to come up with names they're interested in keeping.</blockquote>

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