Forked Thread: Why Ravenloft and 4E May Not Mesh

[Agamon]

I like that RL has been 1e-ified again: be a lousy place to visit, not a setting in itself. I think it works well with 4e in that regard, and, in fact, has in the game I'm currently running.

 

[Scribble]

From everything I've seen, the 4e Shadowfell is the AD&D/3e Plane of Shadow with a name change.

Maybe. Been a while since I've really looked at the original plane of shadow stuff, but to me it seems more ike mixing the plane of shadow with the negative energy plane, and getting a more shadowy death heavy morose place.

If you want Ravenloft to retain the atmosphere and depth it possessed over the course of two editions of development, I would say yes. Otherwise you're just making a quasi-horror weekend dungeon in the 4e Shadowfell and calling it Ravenloft. Some may feel differently of course.

See I do feel differently. I don't feel any of that atmosphere and depth really requires a seperate setting or place. All of that could be incorporated into the idea of things that happen on the shadowfell and in the domains while still letting it be sued by anyone utilizing any of the other settings.

To be honest I worry that the overall 4e design philosophy takes that as a major point of adherence when it looks at any and all previous campaign settings, be it RL, FR, Planescape, etc. Everything becomes rapidly homogenous to the point of adsurdity if you won't allow unique campaign settings to retain what made them unique in the first place.

Well we'll have to wait and see what happens with Ebberon. I personally feel it's a return to a more 1e way of doing things. The places themselves get to be unique, but the various system neutral stuff gets to be a part of it all.

Stuff like Sigil and the domains of dream, and even the idea of spelljammer port cities in the astral sea are great places that people no matter what campaign setting could find a use for, and shouldn't be shuffled off to their own campaign set. In my opinion doing that just seperates gamers.

IE: We want more info on the planes for Forgotten Realms! Why should Planecscape get all the planes stuff? Screw the FR we want Eberron Planes info!

Let all these great concepts help tie gamers together, and expand all the settings at once.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Wow, I must have really typed that wrong. That wasn't the message I was trying to send at all.

My bad then. It's the message others have sent on several occasions.

 

[DandD]

Wasn't Ravenloft simply a sucky demiplane where gribbly stuff was imprisoned anyway?

 

[Irda Ranger]

I don't feel any of that atmosphere and depth really requires a seperate setting or place. All of that could be incorporated into the idea of things that happen on the shadowfell and in the domains while still letting it be sued by anyone utilizing any of the other settings.

Please, not suing. Trial lawyers have never improved a campaign setting.

I agree with you though. With a few additional rules (like the Fear, Horror and Madness rules I'm discussing in the House Rules forum, *ahem*), there's no reason I can see that the Core and various Islands of Terror can't be geography within the larger Shadowfell that are cut off by the Mists. Ravenloft (after all) isn't that big.

Let all these great concepts help tie gamers together, and expand all the settings at once.

This can be taken too far though. It's really a case by case basis. Planescape/Sigil, Spelljammer and Ravenloft-as-Shadowfell "work" within the larger multiverse that might be imagined by any of the "standard fantasy worlds" (Krynn, Toril, Oerth). But mixing Krynn and Toril (or worse, Athas) just doesn't sit right with me. It never sat well with me when TSR tried this.

Agreed that more info on Eberron's cosmology would be nice though.

 

[Umbran]

Wasn't Ravenloft simply a sucky demiplane where gribbly stuff was imprisoned anyway?

Hey, if you disliked it that much, I see no reason why you'd bothered to read the thread, or contribute. It very much looks like the goal of this post was to annoy other people.

That is not acceptable behavior. Please don't engage in it again.

 

[Scribble]

Please, not suing. Trial lawyers have never improved a campaign setting.

I'd say they improved OoTS! (At least they made me laugh when they showed up!)

Man I make that stupid typo all the time.

This can be taken too far though. It's really a case by case basis. Planescape/Sigil, Spelljammer and Ravenloft-as-Shadowfell "work" within the larger multiverse that might be imagined by any of the "standard fantasy worlds" (Krynn, Toril, Oerth). But mixing Krynn and Toril (or worse, Athas) just doesn't sit right with me. It never sat well with me when TSR tried this.

I guess to each his own. I kind of liked it myself. It made the D&D universe feel like one big place with many different ideas and places to explore.

I'd argue that it wasn't actually that TSR had so many campaign worlds that harmed it, but instead that each one was designed to be such a niche of its own.

 

[M.L. Martin]

IIRC, much of these "redefinitions" had to do with abilities and spells which might disrupt a game of gothic horror and mystery. Ravenloft rules didn't make abilities "unreliable", some simply out-and-out didn't work. Things like "Detect Evil". Clerics and paladins got spanked the worst. Since many of these types of abilities and spells have been removed from 4E, this is one area where the rules and the setting are actually more compatible.

Very true, and a more correct assessment of the situation than my original. However, there's another side to this that was starting to rear its head in 3E and would be even more problematic in 4E: the balance concerns of changing any abilities that would have to be changed. In 2E, with a couple exceptions, most of the things changed were spells, so you'd get the surprise once or twice, but typically, a character could swap that spell out for another spell without much long-term impact on play. (Psionics might have proven more of a problem, and I hope that most DMs addressed it by letting PCs know what powers wouldn't work beforehand.) In 4E, though, powers are both integral enough to a PC and few enough that if any power were to prove ill-suited to the setting, you'd really have no choice but to ban it ahead of time, and too much of that might cripple certain classes. It's not insurmontable, any more than a paladin in RL in 2E or 3E, but it's something that a 4E Ravenloft would have to be aware of.

Not much more difficult than hiding the fact that you're 1/3 the size of a human with giant feet. In this regard, any race other than human and, marginally, elves/half-elves would have drawn unwelcome attention, thus limiting the choice of core races suitable for play in all editions. So, nothing changed here.

I don't know; I think dragonborn and tieflings are much more likely to get an extreme response, and harder to pass off as humans that dwarves ("short") or halflings ("children"). (Gnomes, admittedly, have all sorts of troubles.)

I see no incompatibilities with 4E here. Few items doesn't mean no items, and 4E already has an expectation of fewer items per character than earlier editions.

I was getting more at the attitude that "treasure should not be placed for the sake of treasure," which seems to run up against 4E's assumption that campaigns can expect treasure. Still, good adventure design can overcome this.

Here's the irony of all this "documentation" you provided, Matthew: they illustrate how RL is different than the core assumptions and common playstyles of AD&D... the system Ravenloft was designed for! So if you try to hold up these quotes as evidence of why 4E wouldn't fit RL, then they also prove that AD&D wouldn't fit it either, and in some cases, even more so!

Now, obviously this isn't true. Could you run RL with 4E out-of-the-box? No. It would take some tweaking. But that's true of all editions. All of them have been sword-and-sorcery fantasy games, so adaptations need to be made to run a gothic horror game with them. But, as I pointed out above, I think there's at least a couple of areas where 4E is a couple steps ahead of other editions in compatibility.

Yes, Ravenloft and AD&D were always an odd fit--but AD&D was also more amenable to tinkering and reimagining than 4E seems to be at this juncture. Elements of 4E fit Ravenloft very nicely, but I'm not sure if the whole gestalt of the rules set can fit Ravenloft without one or the other shifting, and I'm not convinced that WotC is willing to make the shifts on the rules side.

 

[Irda Ranger]

I was getting more at the attitude that "treasure should not be placed for the sake of treasure," which seems to run up against 4E's assumption that campaigns can expect treasure.

This is so amenable to solution that I hardly consider it worth mentioning. We already know the numbers you need to add to the attack progression to make The Big Three unnecessary; everything else is already optional.

AD&D was also more amenable to tinkering and reimagining than 4E seems to be at this juncture.

I'm going to disagree with this too. 4E is so well (and so transparently) engineered I have found it far more amendable to reimagining well than AD&D was. (I emphasized the word well because you could always reimagine AD&D willy-nilly but without a coherent game engine it was really, really hard to know if you were "doing it right").

 

[M.L. Martin]

This is so amenable to solution that I hardly consider it worth mentioning. We already know the numbers you need to add to the attack progression to make The Big Three unnecessary; everything else is already optional.

True. I seem to be having trouble making my point. Mechanically, 4E would be fairly easy to modify to fit Ravenloft in several ways, and is in some cases superior to previous versions. (I remain agnostic about how well the tactical combat emphasis would work with the setting.) As a game or culture, though, I think the 'core D&D experience' that drives so much of 4E design is distant enough from Ravenloft that either the 4E designers will have to let some of it go if they do Ravenloft 4E, or Ravenloft will have to undergo some changes of its own.

I'm going to disagree with this too. 4E is so well (and so transparently) engineered I have found it far more amendable to reimagining well than AD&D was. (I emphasized the word well because you could always reimagine AD&D willy-nilly but without a coherent game engine it was really, really hard to know if you were "doing it right").

You may be right. I admit that worry about that tactical emphasis and a general ambivalence about 4E means I haven't delved deep into the system and looked at trying to make it work for Ravenloft. Still, the general zeitgeist of the systems seems friendly to tinkering with basic mechanics in AD&D than 4E, although I admit that 4E is tremendously extensible off its baseline. But my concern in the thread that spawned this discussion was less "Can 4E and Ravenloft be made to fit together?" (enough people seem to be doing it, and I'm sure that it will do for most gamers who already know and love the setting and want to use the system) than "Will WotC be willing to make the sacrifices needed to make 4E work with the Ravenloft I know and love, or will the setting have to be sacrificed to the system?"