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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Anax" data-source="post: 1580640" data-attributes="member: 19868">Ahh, but Harry the street bum who raises up to slay the tyrant *is* a heroic character.  The point isn't characters who are from-the-get-go uber (although having one level in a PC class does put you a little ahead of the game), the point is that whatever the background, the characters are quite capable of growing powerful and working to change the world.Is that a property that any DM worth his salt is going to have in any campaign (except perhaps one based on Norse or Zoroastrian legend)?  Pretty much, yes.  In this case, the contrast is between Eberron, in which the highest level well-known (potentially) friendly NPC cleric is level 16, vs. Forgotten Realms, where you've got people like Elminster running around.Is that a huge huge deal?  Not for some people.  But that's what's meant by "the PCs are extraordinary", not that they're somehow bigger than life even at level 1.For me, the biggest attraction right now is a coherent setting that blends all of these features together.  There's a danger of syncretism here--throwing all of the rules (psionics, what have you) into a pot without thinking about how things relate.  In a way, I feel like that can happen more with a setting like Greyhawk or FR in which you sometimes have to take a ruleset like Psionics and say "Well, it's been here all along, we just haven't been talking about it."  I think that Eberron feels better than that.  Eberron not only has hooks for things like Psionics, the descriptions of the world I've heard feel "big enough" for there to be secret organizations and cults hiding practically in plain sight with powers nobody knows about, as well as the tried and true "stuff that's far away so we don't know about it."  In Eberron, you can ignore psionics if you want--after all, the race that's all psionic is off in a distant land.  But if you do want to bring psionics in, you don't have to wave your hand about some race of psionic people that we've just never noticed right here in the middle of the map.A good example is a person who (perhaps misguidedly) is talking on the WotC Eberron forum about how to integrate the OA shugenja class into his Eberron campaign.  I was skeptical at first, but now he's talking about what is essentially a secret society type cult religion, which worships and gains divine casting abilities from the elements.  Given Eberron's range of religions (cleric spells are granted by entities as diverse as: a normal pantheon of deities, the physically-manifested-on-Eberron Silver Flame, and collectively by the living-dead ancestors of the Aerenal Elves) this is not at all unreasonable.So I guess that's a big appeal--a bunch of diverse stuff that feels, from the parts I've heard so far, like it all fits together.The other appeal for me is having both significant dense urban and very very metropolitan areas (like Sharn), and back woods in the sticks kind of areas.  It provides a lot more (to my mind) explanation for how an elf mage, a human paladin, a half-orc ranger, and a gnome rogue are going to hook up together.  That's not to say that Greyhawk isn't a pretty big and metropolitan place--it just feels different.  *shrug*</blockquote>

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