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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kaptain_Kantrip" data-source="post: 181141" data-attributes="member: 546">High Fantasy = Low Intelligence?The prejudices don't come so much from the crappy novels but from the ridiculous power level of the NPCs and organizations in the setting itself. When every NPC in a position of power is a 20th level archmage or high priest with super-duper magic items, "chosen of the gods" templates, and a gazillion magic items at their disposal, it's obvious that in order for your players to make any difference in the setting, they must compete with these uber-munchkin NPCs. The NPC rulers are all designed to be invincible to "maintain the setting and characters as Ed Greenwood envisioned them," IMO. So players have no chance to change anything as written. The gods themselves will lay down the smack if their uber-chosen NPCs are messed with. So you can't win. If you do, you aren't "running the Realms as intended." In FR, magic and monsters are everywhere and so there is nothing special about finding a +1 sword or meeting a troll. It's poorly thought out and extremely juvenile. It feels more like some 40 year old fan boy's wet dream than a real, living, breathing world... Which is why it appeals to so many gamers, I guess. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> More intelligent, researched and detailed settings like Harn, Greyhawk, Glorantha, etc., aren't as popular because they appeal to older, sophisticated gamers, not young teenage kids who just want to smack things with their +10 vorpal blades and don't give a damn about RPing, historical accuracy or anything else because they just don't know any better... yet. Hopefully, some day they will. And when they do, they will abandon settings like FR for one of the ones I mentioned before or a homebrew, or another game altogether. +10 vorpal blades wielded by 150th level fighter/cleric/wizard/assassins are only fun for so long, after all.All this said, I don't think FR is "complete" crap... it's unusable as written without major tweaks for anyone with a maturity level above 18 years, but certain elements are interesting, such as the Church of Bane, Red Wizards, Damara's political crisis from 1e... It's all the uber-lameness of the munchkinisms that kills FR, drowned in a sea of ridiculousness: Skullport, Undermountain, Waterdeep, Shades, Elminster, Beholders everywhere, godlike NPCs, Shadowdale, Time of Troubles, Cormyr, Harpers, too much treasure and magic items distributed like candy, Halruua, too many gods... I could go on and on. The fact that they keep changing things every few years instead of providing a stable environment drives me nuts too. In Harn, the year in official products is always 720... It never changes, so that what they publish won't ruin your campaign. From 720 on, the world is entirely your own to do anything you want with. No published material will ever contradict what you have done as DM. That is a welcome relief after being messed up by pinheads in FR with the Time of Troubles and other nonsense! There are no stupid novels that become "canon" even if you've never read them like with FR. I don't object to novels per se, but they should never be incorporated into the setting. I don't read them (Spellfire and Curse of the Azure Bonds were enough to turn me off forever to any TSR novel).I do think the FR team dropped the ball with keeping FR a munchkin's paradise and the 3e team made a mistake by not including better world-building and historically accurate setting details in the DMG... From reading the DMG, one would have only the vaguest of notions of how a medieval world works. D&D 3e is too wrapped up in a video game "back to the dungeon" mentality to care, and everything they have released certainly points to this fact. *sigh*Anyway, that's my anti-FR rant for the night.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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