D&D General Eberron - why don't you run it? [-]

[Argyle King]

I can see changelings in particular leading to bad experiences in play.

I find warforged and shifters very evocative and have great potential and players have played reskinned versions of them in my homebrew campaign to great effect. Changelings and the psionic people are aspects of Eberron I find less fun.

The very short version of what I talked about in past threads is essentially this:

Every step of the way, any possible NPC -even the one that hired the party to track down the villain- could turn out to have secretly been the villain, and that's how the villain always remained one step ahead. Even when the party did manage to defeat the villain... well, surprise... he's still alive because that was actually a different Changeling that he hired to make you think it was them, but it wasn't actually them, so he's still alive.

That experience caused me to question the entire premise of the setting. How does a setting with the potential for political intrigue and grayer morality function when a common element of the setting is never being able to be sure that the person you are talking to is actually the person that you're talking to?

Since then, I've also had the misfortune of being in (non-Eberron) games with players who are Changeling PCs who have some weird fetish of tricking NPCs into sleeping with their character.

In general, the implementation of the race/species isn't something I like. As that race/species is a core part of Eberron and I still have the unfun experience in my mind, I don't enjoy the setting -which sucks because there are a lot of parts of the setting that I think are cool ideas.

 

[Remathilis]

It is interesting how when we talk about pulp in relation to D&D, we almost always mean sword and sorcery and its various offshoots. Conan, Lankhmar, Princess of Mars, Elric, Dying Earth and so forth. But when we talk about Eberron we mean Indiana Jones and the Mummy. You almost never see any pulp examples given by people talking about Eberron beyond those. Even Keith is guilty of this, despite the fact that he consistently lists Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance and Burroughs as three of his favorite authors and is of the age to have grown up with those stories as definitiive examples pulp literature.

Raiders of the Lost Ark was definitely part of the dying gasp of pulp in the early 1980s (having had its peak in the 60s and 70s), but is no way definitiive of the entire genre. And the Mummy of course is a later homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but is itself a step removed from the tradition.

It does Eberron a disservice to not have listed more and better references as to what pulp means if they are going to use it as the catchphrase for the entire setting. Especially when people already have good reason to associate D&D and Pulp with the authors I listed (they come up repeatedly in the history of D&D).

The authors I mentioned aren't the only examples of pulp, but are some of the pillars of it. Nor is Indiana Jones the epitome of pulp (and is further removed from it than said authors). There is a whole lot in between, but pulp in Eberron doesn't actually mean pulp, it means two specific movies that are only loosely connected to the wealth of pulp that came before them.

Indiana Jones himself is a hero in the Allan Quatermain school of pulp that has fallen deeply out of fashion. Eberron tried to capture the elements of Deepest Darkest Africa adventures that were the rage in the early 20th century no clearer example of that than Xen'drik. Of course, those old stories are rife with racist colonial bs, making them hard to recommend as inspirational reading material (though it's not like Howard or Lovecraft are better and they are still used as inspiration).

 

[earthsea_wizard]

Since then, I've also had the misfortune of being in (non-Eberron) games with players who are Changeling PCs who have some weird fetish of tricking NPCs into sleeping with their character.

Are you playing with adults? Extremely unfortunate if so. It's a shame that finding or forming an in person group and playing long term with trusted friends has fallen out of favor. Much less of this kind of stuff to deal with. Any time I make the mistake of going on the DnD Reddit half of the posts are complaints about online games with strangers and how foolish everyone acts and it seems most people don't know how to even navigate the social landscape.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Any time I make the mistake of going on the DnD Reddit half of the posts are complaints about online games with strangers and how foolish everyone acts and it seems most people don't know how to even navigate the social landscape.

LOL... at this point, after almost 20 years of annonymous online gaming (Everquest, WoW, et. al.)... I think it's safe to say that the people who try and play online in a mature and helpful manner that one would actually behave like at an actual table... are indeed they the ones who actually don't know how to navigate the social landscape. The social landscape is a hellhole and everyone knows it. Which is why even other online places like Twitter and Facebook are full of people who post with the most insulting and pathetic excuses for behavior because there's no way to get punished for it. So maturity and respect is the direct antithesis of online social landscape. It's not what we'd want... but it's what we got.

In the old days, if you behaved as people do online that way in person, there's a good chance you could get punched in the face if you acted like an asshat that way. But nowadays online? There's little to no punishment for it, so few people actually do.

 

[earthsea_wizard]

LOL... at this point, after almost 20 years of annonymous online gaming (Everquest, WoW, et. al.)... I think it's safe to say that the people who try and play online in a mature and helpful manner that one would actually behave like at an actual table... are indeed they the ones who actually don't know how to navigate the social landscape. The social landscape is a hellhole and everyone knows it. Which is why even other online places like Twitter and Facebook are full of people who post with the most insulting and pathetic excuses for behavior because there's no way to get punished for it. So maturity and respect is the direct antithesis of online social landscape. It's not what we'd want... but it's what we got.

In the old days, if you behaved as people do online that way in person, there's a good chance you could get punched in the face if you acted like an asshat that way. But nowadays online? There's little to no punishment for it, so few people actually do.

Indeed. I do not have any social media accounts anymore and only end up on Reddit on occasion one doing some sort of research. I still value forums and frequent this one the least (I am a fan of Candlekeep, Dragonsfoot, GiantITP and a few others). I am lucky that I was able to game in person for a few decades with the same people until a few years ago, we now play online due to a few moves out of state and internationally, but it is the same people.

RPGs are kind of an intimate experience to me and imo is something best done around a table with people you know and like, though I understand we aren't all so lucky. However, I have observed that many people now simply say they don't know anyone who games and go straight to the internet, rather than turning non-gaming friends and family on to games or going out to physical spaces looking for other gamers (though I understand those spaces are dwindling).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

A lot of pulp is technologically much more modern than Conan too.

Sure, pulp is generally used to refer to the cheep fiction from the first half of the 20th century. A lot of which was set “in the present”. So Eberron’s magitech reproduces the technology of that period - only it runs on magic. Whilst Conan is technically pulp fiction from that period, it’s not the type of pulp that informs the setting, I guess that’s the main reason for the “noir” qualification.

Wanting to do a Conan flavoured game is certainly an excellent reason for not using Eberron. Golden Age Batman is more the thing.

 

[nevin]

The books or the movies? There has been a trend lately to do Agatha Christie adaptations that are much more grimdark than the original novels. I blame Nordic Noir.

Of course, people getting Poroit's name wrong is a running joke in the novels.

i think modern Noir tends to go so far over the edge that everything is predictably going to screw you and nobody is really going to win. I never return to any game like that. Just no fun. If you are talking 50's Noir where a good ending is at least possible and not everyone will screw you then I'm ok with that .

 

[Argyle King]

Are you playing with adults? Extremely unfortunate if so. It's a shame that finding or forming an in person group and playing long term with trusted friends has fallen out of favor. Much less of this kind of stuff to deal with. Any time I make the mistake of going on the DnD Reddit half of the posts are complaints about online games with strangers and how foolish everyone acts and it seems most people don't know how to even navigate the social landscape.

A lot of that took place in Adventure League games or in (memory fails me at the moment) what that same concept was called before AL. They were people who were chronologically considered adults (but other people at the same table may not have been).

In theory, I'm not even necessarily opposed to concepts such as romance, lust, and sexuality being part of a story. I simply didn't want to be part of someone else's weekly sexual assault fantasy.

I try to be open minded. I'm not one to yuck someone else's yum. Maybe in some very specific context, that behavior could illicit a chuckle via dark humor. But it was an ongoing weekly thing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure, pulp is generally used to refer to the cheep fiction from the first half of the 20th century. A lot of which was set “in the present”. So Eberron’s magitech reproduces the technology of that period - only it runs on magic. Whilst Conan is technically pulp fiction from that period, it’s not the type of pulp that informs the setting, I guess that’s the main reason for the “noir” qualification.

Wanting to do a Conan flavoured game is certainly an excellent reason for not using Eberron. Golden Age Batman is more the thing.

The fact that the tech is magic would actively harm the vibe that Eberron is trying to foster, for me. It wouldn't look right to me.

 

[haakon1]

To the original question, I mostly didn’t play Eberron because I didn’t pay attention to it when it came out, and when I did read some adventures for it in Dungeon, I didn’t like it. I like Tolkien or Gygaxian or historical vibes, and the lightning trains and all felt incompatible with that.

Like to me the TV show “Tracker” has more D&D vibe as I like it - wide open beautiful empty spaces, a wandering righter of wrongs with a team - than Eberron does.

But I also think “13th Warriors” is a better D&D movie than “D&D: Honor Among Thieves”, so go figure.