Forgotten Realms...build up/bash

[Psion]

Anyways, as I've been browsing the threads, I've noticed some pronounced anti-forgotten realms sentiment, and I'm really curious why. I've not really played a setting other than forgotten realms in D&D, and so am of limited perspective, but forgotten realms seems to cover the whole "high magic prebuilt setting that allows for customization on the smaller scale" setting.

Part of it is FR's fault, and part of it isn't.

I'm a hard sell when it comes to close-to-typical D&D settings. It's just not worth buying into a product line that is going to make me feel constricted when I can have so much more creative freedom doing my own thing. So, really, if you are putting out any close-to-typical D&D fantasy setting, the cards are stacked against you from the get-go in my book.

That said, FR gets extra marks against it in my book because it is often annoyingly static and hidebound. Yes, I am one of those folks who feels that Elminster is blatantly a mary sue version of EG. Yes, I am one of those folks who feel that NPCs hog too much of the limelight in FR, and 3e FR has not done near enough to rectify that... and nor could it, really, given the importance of novel sales to the line.

If you dig FR, that's cool. But that's why I don't feel the need to heavily invest in it.

The people who don't like the Forgotten Realms don't like it for the same problems the OP sees in it. They just don't find that the strengths of the world outweigh its minuses.

AFAIAC, the strength of the setting is its content. I can use the content without buying into the setting's background. And happily do so when a book comes up that looks like it has highly portable material that would be a good match to my game (the last one being serpent kingdoms.)

Edit: Actually, I'd go so far that some Realms components are better out of the Realms. As it stands, as some have pointed out, the Realms is a giant "kitchen sink" of setting components. By pulling choice components out, you have a better chance to highlight the individual components instead of miring them down in the morass.

 

[Estlor]

Hi, I'm Estlor, and I'm a recovering FR basher.

Here's my problem with the setting:

1. It's an old setting and it's been overdone. If you look back into the vast history of D&D products, you can find about two products for every square foot of geography in FR. Maybe that's a touch of hyperbole, but the point is there's been too much development. It stifles the creativity when everything that could have been done has been done three or four times over in a region. Here's an example. I was talking with a friend once who is a big Realms fan about how overdone the place was and he launched into this tirade about Sembia. It's always a good sign when they take an area deliberately left untouched for the DM to work with and make it into a major center of activity.

2. It's disjointed. This is a side effect of my first gripe, but the problem is when you run out of areas to work with you go make more. Faerun is overdone... wait! How about Kura-Tur... let's do that. No, let's do Al-Quadim. No, how about Maztica? Or let's go into the past and detail all of that! Every time they get a kewl idea on how to do an Earth culture right in fantasy, even if it's been done before in the setting, they "discover" a new part of Toril and run with it. Forgotten Realms is like a multinational corporation publicly traded with several wholely owned subsidiary settings under it's umbrella of companies.

3. The novels/metaplot. I like metaplot as much as the next guy, but I like it in small doses. Don't try to micro-manage what's happening everywhere in the world and hard-code it into the timeline. Don't get these great ideas that work in fiction and back-dump it into the RPG setting ad nauseum. And I know other settings are guilty of this. Heck, Mystara (my favorite setting) did entire almanacs of metaplot at a time. The good thing about that, though, was it was disjointed metaplot. I could pick up this thread and run with it while tossing away everything else away and not seriously harm the setting's development. Everything in FR is too big, too epic, too world-changing. It's like a new mini Time of Troubles each year.

A note must be made about the NPC characters that drive the setting. Whilst it is easy to ignore them or change how they are handled, the problem with insanely high-level, well known heroes and villians running amok in a setting is they're always going to outshine what the PCs can do because we're busy framing small, developing plots that work with an RPG while these NPCs are running around blowing up planes and altering reality because it works for a novel.

(Honorable mention) - Back in the 2e days, I hated FR because they kept churning out new books month after month while all the other settings slowly withered and died. I was bitter at TSR's "milk it for all it's worth and to heck with the rest" policy they took on campaign settings near the end. I'm over that, but that was the spark that ignited my hat of fargottin ralms

 

[The_Gneech]

My experience of FR is mostly from Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights, and what always strikes me about it (at least in those contexts) is its rather "Disneyland" feel -- every tavern has a random scattering of elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings, you've got all kinds of weird NPC race/class/personality combinations, and so forth. People call it a Tolkien riff, but I see it as anything but! Tolkien's races and cultures were distinct and operated in discrete enclaves, instead of all being a giant hodgepodgey mix.

I will say, however, that I quite like the Silver Marches handbook...

-TG