Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="HeapThaumaturgist" data-source="post: 2442588" data-attributes="member: 12332">So I've been thinking about Eberron alot lately.  Not sure why, exactly, as I've never been a fan.  But, I think, some of the ideas behind the setting are interesting ... taking the existance of magic and running with it.  But the "lower power, more prevalent" slant that's taken by the setting doesn't really hash with D&D's exponential power curve.  It feels 'artificial'.  The same with some of the mechanics introduced by the system ... pantheonic clerics, warforged, dragonmarks, the artificer class.  To play Eberron it seems like you'd have to play with blinders on ... if everything in D&D has a place, then why haven't more intelligent people taken over all of the power structures, as opposed to the CR 10-13 leaders?  If the Artificer works as written, why are there still Sorcerors?  Why on earth are Warforged LA +0?  How do Dragonmarked individuals make an entire living off of a 2/Day ability?  A system where concepts can play out a little more freely seems like it might better serve ... where a warrior (say Strong X) could become a king and devote himself to those pursuits (multi to Charismatic Y) without needing to be totally hobbled mechanically in the process to explain it ... where somebody could gain a small magical ability usable at-will but with a different mechanical penalty (fatigue, strength damage, etc) ... where PREVALENT magic could be mechanically instituted without Meteor Swarm and Disentegrate sitting in the wings  (say Ben's upcoming Grim Tales magic expansion?) ... Has anybody thought of doing this?  I pitched it to a few people around here who would love to give it a run, but I'm moving off in two weeks.  Just a mental exercise, I suppose.  It just feels to me like Eberron was a cool homebrew that has suffered the same problems as many other homebrews in its time ... D&D's core assumptions don't allow for a whole lot of variance.  The Artificer, for instance, is a very interesting CONCEPT ... but the execution breaks the whole darn magic system up and down the block.  For me it already feels like it's halfway there.  The approach they took with NPCs feels like they'd have been better built with a d20Modern/GT style system ... the approach to magic makes Vancian magic seem like a kludge (the Artificer, for instance, gets to cast any of his spells whenever he wants, to the extent of his slots, and is balanced by another mechanic ... time ... which is to say they wanted to escape the Vancian system more than any of the other core classes).Of course there's a whole lot about Eberron that I just don't LIKE ... Voodoo Elves and dragon-riding halflings, for instance.  But that's just me.  --fje</blockquote>

Verification