Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 6774950" data-attributes="member: 6777454">That is really the heart I am getting at.Putting out setting after setting after setting where the mood, technology, government, theme, aesthetics and such are all 100% identical and they are completely inhabited by exactly the same peoples who relate to one another in exactly the same way and everyone does everything in exactly the same way with every adventure starting with a bunch of likely random people meeting at a tavern and such cliches of how things have always been done... but the cities have different names...That's just not worth the effort for it to be supported as a real setting. The competition for default is over, and GreyHawk and Mystara had every chance, but ultimately Forgotten Realms won out as the default.So if you are going to tell a story in D&D, there needs to be a reason you aren't using the default. And it can't just be that you threw a dart at a board and happened to land on a different name. There needs to be something just fundamentally different about the setting that changes the whole tone, mood, pacing and conduct of the players in their roles to make it non-default.Eberron, Dark Sun, Planescape, Spelljammer and maybe Dragonlance to an extent can all to this, but only if they are put out there and introduced with their core differences being front and center as the pillars for the story. That is the only way you are going to generate any real interest for the setting among masses.Sure, probably for any of them you can take any of the sort of more generic Adventure League adventures and so long as A, B, and C are not core components and you make adjustments to D, E, F, G and H, then by all means the story could conceptually take place in one of those other settings. And that's fine that default adventures that are sort of generic on tone and theme can be placed into the setting as well.... But that just isn't the best way to introduce the world.....And giant guide books giving every small detail out have been tried and it hasn't always been as successful in the past as it could be. Many people will only give it a cursory look, figure they got the idea and then toss it aside. Why spend hours pouring over what is effectively an atlas unless it is either the first time you have ever experienced doing so or you are really into such dry, factual material. Being able to tell a story, being able to immerse your player in a narrative, that not only take place in the setting, but allows them to really experience something new that they just simply wouldn't with the standard fare, but makes it very clear very quickly that they are not in the Realms anymore and it is necessary to engage in this in a very different way than before.... That is what is going to hook the players.After that point they are free to either start making their own adventures in the setting or to adapt other adventures to take place within it. And that's great! But you really need that original narrative to be a unique and engaging experience to draw them in first.Because if your adventure comes across as something that would have worked just fine in default, the players are right to question why they need to learn new names for the things they already learned when they are effectively the same exact things with a slightly different coat of paint.And maybe it would be best to license these settings out to other companies who have a proven track record and allow them to run with them. Because it seems like WotC doesn't have a staff large enough to do more than the absolute bare minimum at this point.</blockquote>

Verification