Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vanion" data-source="post: 2315646" data-attributes="member: 19612">Hit the nail on the head. I admittedly don't have any great liking for the setting, but haven't genuinely bashed it, just pointed out that it's not to my taste. FR isn't by any means a bad setting - it has a lot of strong points and was made with a strong design ethos which appeals to a lot of people. Being someone who this doesn't apply to, I don't play it, but by the same token that's hardly because it's the most endorsed/popular product and I'm "t3h inkr3d33buLl n0n-k0nf0rm4 d00d" or because I somehow feel superior to people who do enjoy it. I've got weird taste as far as Campaign Settings go, so I play stuff that's to my liking.On why I dislike it, the points Ted made were a good start, plot inconsistency being one of the most annoying things. The overabundance and incredible mundanity of magic would be one of the other biggies - it's simply personal taste that I like the acquisition of unusual items and powers to be a very special event, so that the players find it to be far more rewarding. The way in which spellcasters of all cut and cloth are a common feature in the setting is something I don't like having in a campaign, not to mention their widespread acceptance and the lack of stigma against any spellcasting group (only followers of a particular deity/organisation).Added to that is the general feeling of immaturity and lack of depth I find in the setting. Political ideals in particular are rarely self-contradicting in any measure (as you will always see in real societies), let alone complex. Religion is something that I find even more burdensome to use - followers of evil deities are simply seen as evil, they do evil, they generally understand that what they're doing is evil and have next to no moral justification for what they do. Sharites take the cake in that regard, having one of their main points of doctrine to be to hunt Paladins simply because they're good. It's very difficult to structure realistic characters and villains upon that premise. Certainly, you'll find examples of their counterparts in the real world (Satanists etc) but they're few and far between, and would never be comprised of the numbers FR makes them out to be.This is one of those things that annoys the hell out of me - most people, when committing acts that could be categorically labelled evil rarely see themselves that way. They have a sense of justification that (within their own mind) makes their acts the right and proper thing to do, not "h4h4 i li3k t3h k1lling". You can apply this to some degree to your own NPCs, but it's not something that you ever really find to be within the setting. Little things jar at me, like how there isn't a single natural desert on Faerun or how a couple of river bodies manage to run uphill at a couple of points after their source. Yes, this would probably be seen as incredibly anal retentive and overly critical on my part, but personally I like the setting to make sense from the ground up (quite literally), in terms of ecogology, history and anthropology. The general acceptance of the "Adventurer" is something else that makes me cringe. Moon elves apparently expect that a good percentage of their young population will travel the world, kill things, take their money and get resurrected if they happen to run into misfortune.  They're then accepted back, take up a trade or profession and life goes on.This is about as realistic as me just up and asking a friend, "Hey, you want to fly to North Korea or Cambodia to kill some people, upgrade our weapons and take their stuff? How about we go about busting heads and exposing a big drug cartel interstate then?"There are tons of settings that thrive on the "adventurer" paradigm, and I simply avoid them. If you like it, more power to you. Ironically, on most people hating the Drow, I don't find that to be unreasonable at all. Take the Germans post WW2 or Russia during the cold war - being in a state of constant opposition between nations meant that there was aggression and outright hatred on the part of most citizens towards the other country on a level that was all-consuming. Propaganda obviously fueled this sense of righteous anger to the point where there were a lot of people who were categorically willing to look at an entire nation/race as evil.Look at the German's own actions against the Jews and Romani (Gypsies) leading up to and during WW2 - almost an entire nation was convinced to hate people on the basis that they were somehow responsible for the current economic hardships. In a world at FR's point, where education would be far more limited to say the least (or should be anyway), how would the vast majority of people even know of Elistraee? All they've heard of is attacks on the Silver Marches, what little information the Tel'Quessir make available to outsiders and the overlying elvish prejudice that remains from the Crown Wars and years of raids.</blockquote>

Verification