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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 3911011" data-attributes="member: 22779">A further thought occurs.3e hardwired its implied setting far more tightly than any edition previously.  With the wealth/level guidelines, demographic guidelines and,  being able to purchase magic items, if you depart from those three basic concepts, you need to do lots and lots of tapdancing with the rules.  The implied setting is pretty solidly embedded in 3e mechanics.The thing is, the implied setting has very little flavour.  They give you all the mechanics of the setting and then assume that the DM will provide the flavour to fit those mechanics.  Thus we see post after post about how 3e can't do this or that kind of campaign, primarily campaigns with a lower magic base, but, also other campaigns as well.  That's because the implied campaign is hardwired.  3e can't do low magic settings (without lots of tap dancing) because it's not set up that way.  It doesn't do a whole lot of settings very well, other than the baseline one.  There's a reason that we see all sorts of mechanical changes with other settings.  You pretty much have to because of the basic assumptions of 3e.From what I see, 4e is going to keep the same level of hard wiring in the rules.  They aren't going to back off of that because so many people like the idea of baselines to work from.  It allows development to be much more cohesive than without a baseline.  However, what I think is happening is they are actually going to provide flavour with that baseline as well, which is a change from 3e.That flavour is going to be based on the core assumptions of the books.  3e could easily have the same thing, but, they shied away from it.  They didn't provide much, if any, flavour for the baseline assumptions.  That goes against the stated goals of 4e though, one of which is to provide faster play.  If the DM has to start out by detailing out all the whosits in his campaign setting, that's a huge barrier to entry to play.  However, if the core 3 manuals contain an entire campaign setting, complete with flavour (we know the DMG will include at least one settlement fully detailed), then the new DM can read the book and start play.This worked very, very well for Basic and Expert D&D remember.  What would later become known as Mystara was plunked right down in the rulebooks.  The entire game was wired for play in the Known World.  They made no secret of that fact.  The campaign outlines are right there in the books and in the modules that were included with the books.It's not like this idea is totally new.  It is actually, IMO, pretty tried and true.  Most RPG's have a hard coded setting right in the core books.  Thinking about it, other than GURPS, what RPG doesn't have a detailed setting in the core books?</blockquote>

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