FR Update at WotC-Year of the Ageless One

[JohnSnow]

1- I didn't say customers. Not-yet-existent new and returning customers. You know, the ones that all this 'removal of lore' is supposedly for.

2- What polls?

3- Is WotC a decent company?

1. Well, since not all current D&D players play in FR, that'd be the first place to start. Other than that, there's blind tests.

2. Surveys. They pop up every so often when you join the website.

3. Well...maybe not in all ways...but yeah, WotC (and Hasbro) pretty much knows how to do market research. It's a pretty fundamental part of creating a strategy.

 

[Hussar]

Because there's no evidence that it isn't "actually seeing play". Of course, your mistake of equating "interest" and "time" speaks for itself.

I see nothing "pervasive". That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

That article was interesting - it certainly was a butchering of a game world that made the much-maligned Time of Troubles seem like a great idea. I'm sure this "new FR" will be great for a subset of newcomers. Whether more newcomers will make up for the droves of already-purchasing FR consumers leaving is something we'll have to wait to see. Coming from the world of business, my guess is "not bloody likely".

Take a look at the threads around here. Pervasive is the word I would use. I haven't seen nerd rage like this outside of Greyhawk.

Hrm, Enworld poll after poll puts bards at the bottom of the list of class played. Gnomes, again by Enworld polls were the least played race. I'm sure that WOTC's market research is a heck of a lot more accurate than that. The fact that NOT ONE SINGLE POSTER on this thread has set a campaign in the Mulhorand speaks for itself. If something isn't getting used, it's time to go with something else, rather than keep it in just because. That thinking gave us gnomes for thirty years.

First, it isn't about stuff that people don't actually use. People do, in fact, play bards, and gnomes and use Unther for something. The better way would be to do something interesting with the material that exists, not summarily delete it because the writing team, from all appearances, lacks a single creative bone.

Second, its a matter of self-interest. Even if some people don't care about what is getting obliterated today, they might care about whats on the chopping block tomorrow. Accepting the crappy changes without a peep means taking any influence the audience might have and flushing it down the toliet. If they had a solid, well-written design, I might worry about public influence making it crappy. But they don't, so they might as well accept public influence to make at least some of their existing audience *happy*.

Third, I don't think they actually have meaningful statistics. They might think no one uses Unther (or whatever), but I want to see them prove it in some meaningful fashion.

Why? Why keep material that people don't use? No one seems to answer this. Unther was underutilized. Gnomes and bards rarely saw play. Why make something that no one likes interesting instead of trying something new that maybe lots of people find interesting?

It's not about creativity, it's about realizing reality and learning from mistakes. Races without a clear vision suck. So, we eject the gnomes and maybe bring them back later when we can do it better. Bards in 3e blow. So, we'll chuck them to make room for the stuff that people actually want to play and maybe bring them back later when they can be done right. Unther wasn't being used by FR fans. Yoink, out it goes and we'll put in a mysterious Dragon born nation and culture in this under used space.

If something isn't working, you don't keep it, you fix it. Sometimes you can fix something without radically changing it and sometimes, you just have to buy something new. They've decided that going with something new is the way to go.

 

[Orius]

As an aside, why do people who have no interest, as they themselves state, in the Realms feel the need to post in a Realms specific topic about how they don't play they Realms?

Even if I don't play, I still have some interest in the setting. At the very least, the Realms has generated plenty of useable crunch in the past. Also, as the largest and most popular D&D setting, it's hard to ignore, and I'll have opinions on it regardless of how much of it I play.

 

[Orius]

I'm especially happy that Thay and Halarua being toned (beaten) down. I always wonder why these countries weren't more dominating in a setting that previously handed out so much power to arcane spell users.

I second the comment on Halruaa. The only thing that keeps it from being too illogical is that it's stuck down in the South by itself. Otherwise, I think it really sticks out, particularly in the case of 1e and 2e where such a high-magic region can wreak all sorts of nasty havoc with the rules.

 

[Fenes]

I run a campaign in Mulhorand/Unther, have done so since years.

 

[Imban]

Why? Why keep material that people don't use? No one seems to answer this. Unther was underutilized. Gnomes and bards rarely saw play. Why make something that no one likes interesting instead of trying something new that maybe lots of people find interesting?

Unther had a distinct chicken-and-egg problem: it was relatively interesting, if a total real-world ripoff, in its original conception. The Time of Troubles set up a major plot in it, shaking up pretty much everything about it...

...and then nothing interesting ever happened there, metaplot wise, for almost as long as I've been alive. Unther was underutilized because TSR started a change that "ruined" it and then abandoned it like that, never touching it again. Maybe it's better off gone, but the whole storyline could have been handled better, either by TSR or by Wizards of the Coast.

Gnomes and bards also have a heck of a lot of fans. Those two have just suffered from a lack of a clear conception for the former, and a lack of mechanical quality for the latter. To a lesser extent so do half-orcs, but a large segment of the players I know who like half-orcs are just as cool with being full orcs, or other "monstrous" races. I suppose I'm just waiting to see the details of the new version of the gnome to tell whether or not I approve of it, and pretty assured that bards will be back and retain the idea behind the class.

As a sidenote, when a grouping has issues with mechanical quality rather than flavour, I'd be annoyed if WotC decided to remove it entirely rather than work to make it non-useless in the next edition. For example, I dearly hope the Avariel have not been quietly disappeared from 4e's Forgotten Realms. The winged elves were always a race that appealed to me, but their stats in 3e were *so* poor that I don't think I've ever seen a player choose to be one. As such, it's true that Avariel never saw play, but not for a lack of player interest.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

If I may put my Comic Book Store guy shirt on for a moment, with regard to the dragonborn:

Worst. Explanation. Ever.

Seriously, they have months to think about this, and 100 years of history to give them plenty of story space to explain it, and they come up with "sucked in from another world"? Argh, that is so completely lazy. Even though I don't even play FR, it offends my inner world builder.

There are very few settings where dropping an entire country, full of odd people, in via a magical event is appropriate and not lousy worldbuilding; but Forgotten Realms is one of those. That's how, in the FR history, at least elves, orcs and the ancestors of the Mulhorandi people have gotten to Toril. There is an established precedent of exactly this kind of a thing happening, again and again.

 

[Steely Dan]

Seriously, they have months to think about this, and 100 years of history to give them plenty of story space to explain it, and they come up with "sucked in from another world"?

Well, we had the Saurials sucked in from an alternate material plane back in the day.

 

[Walking Dad]

Well, we had the Saurials sucked in from an alternate material plane back in the day.

Hm, they could explain the absence of gnomes as in "sucked of to an alternate material plane"

 

[Steely Dan]

Hm, they could explain the absence of gnomes as in "sucked of to an alternate material plane"

Have they confirmed an absence of gnomes in 4th Ed FR?