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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 6229274" data-attributes="member: 7006">The funny thing about people's reactions to the 4E Realms is that at the time they decided to do it... I think the folks at WotC really seemed to think that what they chose to do was doing all the players a favor.  Something that many of them actually were clamoring for.  At least, as far as I remember of the time.It seemed like there was genuine unrest in the community through the end of 3.5 about the amount of "canon" that the Realms was weighed down with, as well as the amount of "super-characters" running around, theoretically taking the spot of importance from the PCs that were playing.  There was just "too much stuff" in the way for players to feel as though they could jump in.  Plus, you add in the fact that 4E was going to introduce a whole bunch of new stuff that had not been seen before (thus requiring retconning up the wazoo like they did for Eberron)... just continuing the Realms from where 3.5 left off was not going to solve any problems players had, and indeed might have made the Realms worse.So the 100 year jump I think they genuinely thought was going to be a good one.  Not only did it clear the table so-to-speak for all players to not have decades of history to worry about and thus they could make their own histories... not only did it remove or lessen the influence of all the super NPCs and thus the player's PCs could have more of an impact... but it also gave a reason to explain away the stuff 4E was bringing into the game without invalidating or retconning any of the Realms that had occurred before.The upside for the idea was a good one.  It probably seemed to solve a lot of the problems players were complaining about, plus as an added bonus, it gave all the novel writers a much more open playground to write in... rather than having to try and jam their stuff into a Realms that by that point had been already filled to the brim with detail.But the downside of course being that players of the 3.5 timeline would feel like their portal to current Realms history was being cut off, plus feeling like WotC was asking them to discontinue their own campaigns to make the 100 year jump, especially if they were going to transition to playing 4E.But the reason why the 4E Realms didn't take off?  I imagine it was two-fold... one, what they actually DID with the idea of the 100-year-jump (both the explanation of what happened and the fallout from what did) was too far afield from the feeling of the Realms for many players... and two, they under-estimated the proportion of people who were happy playing 3.5 in their current Realms, unwilling to transition to 4E.  With the former... the efforts to bring in 4Eisms I imagine caused just too much of a change for Realms players to be happy with or to keep the Realms feeling like the Realms... and with the latter... perhaps the voices complaining about the situation of the Realms during 3.5 were loud, but in reality not as numerically large as they originally thought.  The need for a cleared slate was not as wanted by the populace as they thought it was.In both cases... WotC messed up.  Their changes were not good, and the voices they listened to were not as popular as they thought.  And that's on them.  Which I think is why they are coming right out and being honest about it.Which at the same time is why it's intriguing to see what becomes of the Realms following The Sundering... because just like R&D team went back into Dungeons & Dragons as a whole to try and get at the core of the game to inspire their designs of 5E... they seem to have done the same thing with the Realms.  They've gone back in, alongside many of the writers who have had a hand in its creation, to get at the heart of what makes the Realms the Realms, such that when it comes out the other side of The Sundering, it'll be a Realms that, while it isn't a duplicate of the Realms before the Spellplague...  it at least will hopefully invoke the feel of the Realms in whatever its iterations have been over the several decades it existed throughout 1, 2, & 3E.*EDIT* And just to not make you think they are abandoning the players who actually enjoyed the 4E Realms... the fact that they are not "rebooting" the Spellplague, the time jump, nor everything that resulted from it... tells us that they care about the 4E Realms players as well.  The shadow of the 4E Realms will still be layered across the 5E Realms landscape after The Sundering.  It won't be a duplicate of the 4E Realms either, but it will still invoke it in many ways.</blockquote>

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