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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 1475474" data-attributes="member: 1106">Yeah, there is a bit more to it.  One of the promises of Eberron is that it'll make swords & sorcery fantasy "make sense", by taking what it implies with having that much magic lying around to it's logical conclusions.  I'm a firm believer that this completely defeats the purpose of swords & sorcery fantasy, and ruins a lot of what's special about it - the role of wizards in society is completely unrealistic, but there are good reasons for that .  There's also lots of extending D&D gamist elements to their logical conclusions, which according to me is just plain loopy, because the simulation (D&D being a rough simulation of S&S fantasy with gamist compromises) then begins to define what it's simulating, which defeats the purpose of bothering to simulate a genre in the first place if you're just going to burn the house down by putting the gamist compromise elements (like the spell system, which is designed for PCs to go adventuring, not for commoners to grow crops) on a pedestal and emphasise their influence on the setting rather than attempt to ignore them (which is the lesser evil, IMO).  I've argued these points several times before, and after having raised it here, no doubt I'll have to again...Other things I don't like about it include mixing a thoroughly contemporary genre, pulp, with medieval S&S fantasy (although I've been assured in this thread that the detectives and dames are gone, now, so that may be a non-issue, but if the setting's designed in that spirit and had it weeded out there's bound to be leftovers) as opposed to something less prone to bring along anachronistic baggage like dark future (i.e. Dark Sun), the awkward kitchen sink inclusion of all core D&D into the setting as a decision made primarily for purposes of marketing rather than reasons of flavour...and finally, little things, the difficult to stomach stuff that's been highlighted like dinorider halflings and magic trains, and that picture of a half-orc on stilts with an asian peasant's hat just really annoys me for some reason I can't really articulate (I think it's the concept of half-orcs having a culture unto themselves which runs counter to my conception of them...they're rare halfbreeds, they have no culture to speak of, but they're being considered a full blown race...perhaps for gamist reasons?  I may be mistaken but I got that impression from the text).  And there was a rumour that it was going to be psionically heavy, but looks like they've backpedalled on that too (if it was ever true), and psionics gone mainstream instead of alien and rare, except in a world that's supposed to be alien in entirety like Athas, raises my hackles for other reasons which I'm not going to go into here...(In case you're wondering, I never submitted anything to the setting search, so there's no sour grapes at the core of my aversion to what I've seen so far.)A lot of that can be rebuked and defused, but the overall vibe I'm getting from this setting from what we've been shown is not my cup of tea at all...and it's being touted as a progressive new direction for D&D (which I consider pretty pretentious since I think it's a misguided new direction to start with, such as with the gamist oddities of the simulation defining what's simulated), with WotC's full might behind it...from what I've seen so far, I don't want to see D&D going in that direction!  Nevertheless, it hasn't been released yet, and may well become a synergistic masterpiece so I'll reappraise when it is...I've only played Ultima IV, and that was limited to hot air balloons, technology-wise, from memory.  I've heard about crashed Kilrathi fighter in one of the later ones though.</blockquote>

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