D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

[Hussar]

Personally, I'd be pretty hard against it. As a GM, worldbuilding is one of the tasks that I enjoy most. Suggesting that the players have just as much responsibility for it is like suggesting that someone else has just as much responsibility to eat my dessert as I do. No, stay away from my raspberry cheesecake!

Whiich is fantastic. I mean, if the DM wants to do all the work and actually does it, I'm pretty sure no player is going to complain too much. Great. Wonderful for you.

However, I don't think writing the game for someone who has the time and energy to actually do all that work is a good idea. I think it is better to teach groups to share in the work so that we build more DM's. To me, that should always be the primary goal of the DMG.

 

[Minigiant]

I get that. I'm arguing that, as bait is a "tool" to catch fish, Greyhawk is a pretty good "tool" for catching D&D shoppers. Probably one of the best.

Sure

However overuse of fishing tools and ignoring teaching tools is how the 2014 DMG became well known as a poorly made book even by the designers

 

[Parmandur]

I get that. I'm arguing that, as bait is a "tool" to catch fish, Greyhawk is a pretty good "tool" for catching D&D shoppers. Probably one of the best.

Borrowed nostalgia is a thing, particularly for people.getting into something for the first time.

 

[MNblockhead]

There are some different philosophies when it comes to world building. I don't build worlds for the sake of building worlds, I build them for the expressed purpose of adventures. Which means there are big, big gaps in my world because I don't bothering asking or answering questions unless it has something to do with the adventure. In the case of a published setting, they can include some of that stuff because it can inspire some adventure ideas.

I ran a Hell on Earth campaign years ago centered on a survival community in Little Rock, Arkansas. At one session, a player asked me all sorts of demographic questions.

Player: How many people are here?
Me: About 5,000.

Role an Int check. You succeeded? Great/ How many people are there?

Player: How many fighting adults?

How would your character know this? Who do you go talk to figure this out and how to you bring up the discussion to avoid arousing suspicion? Or how do you go about inconspicuously casing the area to come up with a rough estimate?

Etc.

Actually, I'm even lazier these days. I have random settlement generators in Foundry and Discord. I also have an old copy of Citiographer which will also randomly generate a map, but I'd have to put to much work into the text-files used by the population and name generation to have the results make sense for any but the most generic kitchen sink setting. So now, if they really feel this is important information for them to know, I would have them make appropriate skills checks based on how they describe their character going about figuring this information out. On a success I would just copy-paste the randomly generated status.

One thing about coming to age during OD&D and AD&D is that there are always random tables for these situations.

 

[Desdichado]

However, I don't think writing the game for someone who has the time and energy to actually do all that work is a good idea. I think it is better to teach groups to share in the work so that we build more DM's. To me, that should always be the primary goal of the DMG.

Sure, but I also don't think it's a good idea to take time honored and pretty ubiquitous social contracts about how the game is typically played by most people and start flipping over tables and telling them to do it differently, especially when--as the biggest most mainstream player in the industry--you've got a lot more to lose by doing so than some indie game or even a smaller but still big player in the industry, who can afford to be a bit edgier with their implied social contract.

D&D, by virtue of its position in the marketplace has to try to be almost all things to almost all customers still, which means not rocking the boat too much. I think that that approach to worldbuilding will be seen by too many players and GMs as rocking the boat more than they like.

 

[MNblockhead]

That would explain it then. IF every campaign is a new world, it is much easier to just pick what you need for a campaign, and then leave the rest. But when you run multiple campaigns in the same world, you have a much harder time doing that. Not only if you have players who will remember what you did before, but I find it irksome as the DM if I go to put a big threat somewhere where I already placed a different threat. And if you have canonically had something before, then it becomes a fact of the world, and unless every troll is a unique being, one troll means that the species "trolls" exist on your world.

True. I do want to run my same group of players through my homebrew setting again, but I would advance the timeline significantly where I can put in easter eggs and so some of the long-term effects of what occured in the earlier campaign, but with enough of a time lapse for it to make sense that things have changed and that history can be a bit unreliable. But I don't worry about it that much. Since years have passed since I ran a game in my own setting, and since I'm MUCH more invested in the details of my setting and have spent much more time thinking about it, I'm not really that worried about players noticing contradictions or incongruities. It is a vast world and they ranged wide and far. Their experience of the world was more breadth than depth. I could make significant changes that they wouldn't notice, especially if I start the campaign in an area they handn't visited or spent much time in.

Not exactly something I want to get into again, but my main issue is never the concept of limitations. Sure, I have world-building level issues with it sometimes because of internal logic for myself, but that isn't the main thing that tends to drag me into the hissing and screeching debates.

It is when the idea of "what if your players don't like that" gets floated and the response feels like "Well screw them, this is what I want. If they don't like it, they can play with someone else." And that just rubs my entire philosophy of the point of being the GM the wrong way. Especially since, from where I am sitting, it always seems so trivially easy to keep the flavors close, while offering the different options.

 

[MNblockhead]

Not antiquated, tiresome, and nonsensical dungeon crawling?

Get rid of "tiresome" and you have the perfect elevator pitch for me to want to join your game! Antiquated and nonsensical dungeon crawling? Yes please!

 

[MNblockhead]

A lot of people are talking about "nostalgia bait" like it's a bad thing. I'd greatly prefer it to "Magic: the Gathering bait," or "Marvel bait," or "MMORPG bait," or about a hundred other kinds of "bait" they could be using.

Nostalgia is a good thing.

Those scurrilous WotC capitalists are FUN-baiting me again! How dare they! ;-)

 

[Staffan]

I get that. I'm arguing that, as bait is a "tool" to catch fish, Greyhawk is a pretty good "tool" for catching D&D shoppers. Probably one of the best.

Eh, I don't know. There is a small group of diehard fans, but the emphasis is on small. Wizards has been trying to make Greyhawk happen ever since they bought the place in 1997 and haven't succeeded.

 

[TiQuinn]

It wouldn't be the first time a corporation like WotC exhibited behavior that's at odds with their statements about their sales. Either they care more about appealing to legacy gamers than they claim to, or the devs are too caught up in their own nostalgia to look past it, or their marketing strategy is incoherent. I wouldn't be surprised to find that any or even all three of those are true.

There seems to be a disconnect. Either D&D’s target audience age is not what they say it is, or what products people think that age group gravitates towards is very wrong. I don’t think Strixhaven and Ravnica were specifically written for kids - I’m not sure why anyone would think those settings would appeal to them more than say, Forgotten Realms or Planescape. Also, if one of the big reasons that 5e was initially successful was because it went back to its roots after 4e tried to make a hard right turn away from its sacred cows, wouldn’t that suggest that the younger demographic also cared about that?