D&D General Fundamental Problem Of Old Settings

[Zardnaar]

Or even franchises. We saw this with virtually every D&D setting and other franchises such as Star Trek/Wars.

That is crash TV erm crash RPG. Crash RPG is when someone invents something that people like for whatever reason. A future author takes over and what do they do? Some combination of.

1. Kill off existing characters

2. Blow something up. A big war, world shaking event or literally blowing the world up.

3. Something involving time jumps/travel.

4. New characters heavily handed replace the old.

TSR was notorious for this. Last seen during 4E and the Realms. Apart from being a bad idea to begin with it often leads to an arms race between authors as they try to top each other.

And of course if you object you get called toxic. I suppose blowing something up is an easy story to write.

My default position for setting if they ever get redone us to go back to the original release/key release tied to the setting.

This means War if the Lance for Dragonlance,the grey box for FR, 1991 boxed set for Darksun.

This is because it's simple and doesn't invalidate anything. If you want to blow the world up that's not a problem.

But but but what about the new generation? They already have their new stuff. I'm not a big fan of Ravenloft but I don't expect them to change Ravenloft to appeal to me.

There's not much in old settings that won't on the surface appeal to new players. Dragonlance for example is classic good vs evil. Not everything will appeal to everyone or maybe execution is slightly off but that's fine.

But but but what if it doesn't sell? Basically anything with the words D&D on it atm is going to sell well. Some of those settings have been buried since the 90s who knows how a well done update will do. In talking about the bigger settings,not say Birthright.

But but but it splits the D&D playerbase. In the 90s that was true as each setting got flow on support adventures, novels, splat material. These days it's more or less one and done there's no flow in Ravnica support.

Even a map folio release with old maps reprinted would have been useful as PDFs don't work well in that regard.

 

[jgsugden]

When I run FR, it is the Grey Box FR.
When I run Dragonlance, it is the time of the War of the Lance.
When I run Athas nobody lives long enough to realize when it is.

Eberron has done this right. The picked a time in the setting and set people up to run the game at that key point in the game world history where everything is ripe for adventure. I wish they'd do that witht the rest of the settings.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah Eberron is good like that.

 

[ninjayeti]

Yeah this is why I am perfectly happy not to get a 5E version of Greyhawk. They would be tempted to update the timeline, and the odds of that being done well is significantly lower than the odds if it involving something like Elminster and Drizzt showing up with a fleet of Spelljammer ships to save Greyhawk from an invasion of Kender.

 

[pukunui]

Eberron has done this right. The picked a time in the setting and set people up to run the game at that key point in the game world history where everything is ripe for adventure. I wish they'd do that witht the rest of the settings.

They’ve kind of started doing that with FR now. Some of the adventures have a date, others don’t really, but they’re all sort of late 1480s to early 1490s, and there’s not a lot of chronology (SKT is assumed to take place after ToD but it doesn’t have to, and PotA is concurrent with SKT).

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I call/name "Skywalker effect" when in a fantasy/sci-fi nothing happens for a lot of time until the main characters appear, and then the most of main Historical events are linked with theses, for example the tyrant's death or an invasion.

I don't reespect the canon lore and I like to change things and create mash-up

Other problem is adding new things, for example monsters, PC races and classes are harder with old settings. What if I wanted to add primal seekers, warden, vestige pact binders or incarnum totemist shaman (or wilder PC race) in Dark Sun?

 

[FireLance]

And of course if you object you get called toxic.

IMO, it's not whether you object, but how you object that determines whether you get called toxic.

For example, if someone had told me, "I don't like 4E. I think it puts too much emphasis on combat, I think the player characters recover too quickly from hit point damage, and the non-magical healing abilities of the warlord class make it difficult for me to narrate hit point damage as physical wounds, which I am used to doing," I wouldn't consider that to be toxic.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The thing is, it feels wrong to a writer to take stuff someone else has already created and republish it with a new edition stamped on the cover. It's called plagiarism.

But I think WotC also realise that they aren't going to sell many copies of a nostalgia-setting by blowing up the setting. GoS goes for maximum nostalgia by resetting the clock back to the original Gygax version of Greyhawk, and ignoring all of the "lets blow the setting up" that happened later.

Really, the sensible way to do a campaign setting is to have a fixed "Year Zero" for official products, anything that happens later is up to the DM and players.

Any novels and tie-in media should be set in the setting's past, so that they help explain how things got to "Year Zero".

 

[Li Shenron]

My default position for setting if they ever get redone us to go back to the original release/key release tied to the setting.

This means War if the Lance for Dragonlance,the grey box for FR, 1991 boxed set for Darksun.

Even though I essentially started my relationship with Forgotten Realms with the 3.0 FRCS (which is then my own "year zero" with the setting), I wholeheartedly agree with you.

I think basically all the famous settings became a success at their first iteration? So from a gaming point of view there is no need to advance or update the settings, if it worked great at that time then the best way to play it, is to play the original version of it. Of course from a business point of view, they want to release new books, but they could be "horizontal" expansions instead of historical advance (i.e. new places instead of new events), and of course they could be rules edition updates. I don't want to be forced to move along with the ludicrous FR metaplot just to get FR updated to 5e rules...

And by the way "updating to 5e" does not mean that every setting must allocate every single race or class or whatever is in the 5e PHB: a campaign setting gets its strength and personality from what exists in its fantasy world, including player character's stuff. If you force a new iteration of the setting to allow unprecedented stuff only because it's in the new edition PHB, you dilute and bastardize the uniqueness of that setting. It's the new edition which should support settings, and not settings being changed to support the new edition :/

Any novels and tie-in media should be set in the setting's past, so that they help explain how things got to "Year Zero".

That would be a great idea actually.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

If comic books are any indication, there are two ways to relaunch an ongoing story, so that it feels new, that it feels important and that it may attract new fans: one is "Everything changes!", the other one is "Back to basics." When you relaunch a setting, you don't want to give the impression that it's just the same book as the old one, and you don't want to betray what has made the setting successful in the past, so finding the right approach is not easy.