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

[TheSword]

To the topic… I love Eberron… but…

Something’s I really don’t like:

• The lack of good published adventures. The soft backs really are tripe. I don’t think there has been many if any published adventures which truly do the setting justice. Some of the Dungeon ones by Nick Logue are streets ahead the best.
• No good published campaigns… never got past the previous point let alone stringing into a campaign.
• I don’t like the lack of Gods. I know it’s a selling point for some folks but I think Gods in D&D are a big part of it for me. Making them remote i think hurts cleric and Paladin classes.

Everything else about it is bloody brilliant.

 

[pukunui]

To the topic… I love Eberron… but…

Something’s I really don’t like:

• The lack of good published adventures. The soft backs really are tripe. I don’t think there has been many if any published adventures which truly do the setting justice. Some of the Dungeon ones by Nick Logue are streets ahead the best.
• No good published campaigns… never got past the previous point let alone stringing into a campaign

I've played through the AL Oracle of War campaign. It had its low points, but I thought overall it did do a great job of making me feel like I was actually playing in the Eberron setting. My understanding is the DM did put a lot of work into beating the individual adventures into shape, but the Eberron-specific tropes, the locations, the NPCs, etc all felt genuinely like "this is what Eberron is all about".

(I contrast this with a previous campaign the same DM ran in Dark Sun using a whole bunch of non-Dark Sun adventures. At no point in that campaign did I genuinely feel like we were playing in the Dark Sun setting. It just felt like "generic fantasy land".)

I LOVE Eberron as a setting and have run a pair of campaigns there before... but I have always known of and have had to try and reconcile the one fatal flaw of the setting:

Eberron is meant to be a wide setting when it comes to magic-- magic is everywhere and everyone uses it in their everyday lives... but it is not deep. There are exceedingly few high-level magic users in the setting, which is why magic items and magewrights/artificers are so prolific-- they are creating objects that allow for the more powerful magics to be wielded by many more people, because there just aren't enough actual magic-users able to wield that powerful magic themselves...

...except for the three to six members of the D&D party playing the game that are the stars of the show.

This has always been my stumbling block with the setting. How is it that we are supposed to make groups like the Dragonmarked Houses (for example) meaningful to the players and their characters-- groups that the party should want to deal with and interact with-- when those PCs will out-level them all and end up more powerful than every single other NPC person, group, or organization that they might ever come into contact with? It's hard to make the party want to interact with members of House Jorasco for healing when the Cleric in the party has more spell slots for more healing and more varied and powerful recovery options then any dragonmarked member they would ever interact with in a casual manner from the House. The issue of standard D&D leveling and character advancement completely runs counter to how characters within the world of Eberron are meant to be. At least in my opinion.

I honestly think Eberron as a setting is one that really should be run as an E6 game-- a game where no character advances past Level 6-- so that more powerful magics always remain out of reach of the party and then would require them to have to interact with the few and far between NPCs that have those powerful magics they need, or the magic items they can acquire. If teleportation circles remain only in the hands of dragonmarked members of House Orien and not at the party's beck and call just because we as a table were playing Eberron with standard D&D advancement and the PCs are now all 9th level... it would do a lot better to maintain the aesthetics of the setting.

Yes, this is a problem. There are plenty of high-level baddies for the PCs to fight, but they will quickly outstrip their own allies and neutral parties. In some respects, this problem isn't unique to Eberron, but it is potentially exacerbated here.

I think the only issue with limiting Eberron PCs to level 6 is that they'd never get to fight the big bads like Dyrrn the Corruptor, Lady Vol, Rak Tulkhesh, Rashaak, etc.

 

[Remathilis]

To the topic… I love Eberron… but…

Something’s I really don’t like:

• The lack of good published adventures. The soft backs really are tripe. I don’t think there has been many if any published adventures which truly do the setting justice. Some of the Dungeon ones by Nick Logue are streets ahead the best.
• No good published campaigns… never got past the previous point let alone stringing into a campaign.

Agreed on this. The biggest flaw is that outside the insanely expensive AL APs, most Eberron stuff is tier one only. It would kill WotC to make a mid level adventure or AP for Eberron. Even Keith rarely ventures past 9th...

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I think Eberron is a really cool and very original setting with very impressive world building. And I would probably never run a campaign there.

As I explained over in the Forgotten Realms companion thread, I run games in Forgotten Realms because it is familiar, and has a vast lore that most people I play with have a take or leave approach to. Nobody (I play with) gets upset when I make it my own, but most people have an entry point of having played a previous game (tabletop or video game) set there. I should also add, in contrast to a setting like Eberron, it's generic fantasy at its core, with everyone's expectations for generic fantasy covered. This empowers players to know what they can try and do by drawing on familiar tropes. You come to a village and you know to expect there's probably a tavern and a blacksmith. You can also picture it in your mind even if the DM doesn't paint a very clear image of it.

Eberron does not fit this sweet spot. It's a setting pretty unfamiliar to anyone who hasn't played in it or read the sourcebooks, the latter camp of which are likely to have some lore stickler tendencies getting in the way of my feeling free to make the lore my own or improvise on the spot. And it is unfamiliar enough that I worry players will feel a bit at a loss to know what they can try in this world.

If I'm going to go to all the trouble of mastering a setting's lore, making sure my players understand it, and generally educating them about how the setting works it's going to be for a setting of my own design. If I'm going to use an established setting it's going to be one familiar from lots of media and relying on well-worn tropes so that everyone knows how things work and what they look like without needing tutorials.

The best, most original, or most impressive setting from a worldbuilding standpoint is not necessarily the most fun or comfortable setting to game in, and a dumb, cliché setting that everyone thinks they're sick of may nevertheless be the one they actually enjoy playing in the most. But, of course, if the setting gets you excited enough to put in the work to make it work for your table then that overrides all other considerations, I just don't have that relationship with any setting I didn't create myself.

 

[pukunui]

Agreed on this. The biggest flaw is that outside the insanely expensive AL APs, most Eberron stuff is tier one only. It would kill WotC to make a mid level adventure or AP for Eberron. Even Keith rarely ventures past 9th...

I love how one person says Eberron should be low-level only because it can't support high-level play, and another person complains that Eberron has no mid-to-high level adventure support!

 

[overgeeked]

Eberron is one of my all-time favorite D&D settings. I run it regularly but have to really fight against the urge to just homebrew my own to run an existing setting.

I don't run Eberron for two reasons.

First, the lore is absurdly dense and hard to collate across however many books. Plus there's picking which version of the lore to follow. OG book, that plus some 3X supplements but not others, that plus all the other 3X supplements, the 4E lore, the 5E lore, that plus tracking down what Keith's added to the lore since I last checked in with his website.

It's just wildly too much. That's probably why I stick with the OG book, 4E, or Last War. Forget everything else.

Second, dragonmarks. The idea of dragonmarked houses is fantastic. Built-in factions with their own powers and interests is wonderful. Love it. But the idea of 99% of PCs that have ever existed in an Eberron game having these supposedly super-rare dragonmarks is just maddening. Also, for some reason "there will be no dragonmarked PCs in this game" causes interest to completely evaporate. Imagine that.

 

[Remathilis]

I love how one person says Eberron should be low-level only because it can't support high-level play, and another person complains that Eberron has no mid-to-high level adventure support!

Eberron supports high level play the same way any D&D setting does. There is so many interesting places to put high level foes (Khyber, Demon Wastes, Sarlona, the Mournlands, Xen'drik, the planes) but it would mean designers would have to leave Sharn and the Five Nations and design stuff for them!

 

[cbwjm]

The setting just never really appealed to me. It's got some cool stuff for sure, but the overall setting never grabbed me so I never ran it and still don't really have any real desire to.

 

[bloodtide]

My biggest turn off is how much Eberron was made out to be the Anti- Forgotten Realms game. The big selling point of Eberron was that it was not like the Forgotten Realms.

No gods, no alignments, no high level NPCs, no heavy lore and no meta plot.

 

[Umbran]

I've got a + thread going about the Realms, thought I would even it out with a - thread!

Mod Note:
Hey.
In the future, please don't do that.
A (+) thread is called such because the moderation rules in it are a little different than normal.

The moderators do not, and will not, support a (-) thread.

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