D&D 5E Greyhawk: Pitching the Reboot

[Aldarc]

I kind of agree but this brings a number of problems. When you get into strongholds there is bookkeeping and bookkeeping is boring. then there is the conflict with other rulers which bring in wrgaming. And while I like wargaming, there is the questions of how do you implement it. Do you go full Games Workshop, which will be expensive to the consumer.

Balancing armies and domain management, involves an economy, which is more bookkeeping. All of this would be better done as an RTS type game. Perhaps a mashup of Heroes of Might and Magic, Fort Triumph and Age of Empires. Finally this brings up an ethical question, from whom are you going to swipe the land that makes up your domain from in the first place?

Strongholds & Followers by Matt Colville provides a manageable degree of bookkeeping for a wide variety of... wait for it... strongholds and followers.

But this where I would also potentially take a page from games like Blades in the Dark, Stonetop, Numenera: Destiny the like. These are games that are about expanding your territory or building up your base/community. The bookkeeping is more abstract. In some of these games, the base/community gets its own "character sheet."

 

[dave2008]

All this said, I haven't see an evidence of a big vibe difference between Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. For the DMs? Sure. For the players? No.

Where have you looked?

 

[jayoungr]

Perhaps WotC would be better off releasing a generic "here's how to do low-magic D&D" book. Then they could market it as, "Play D&D in settings like Greyhawk, but also GoT, the Witcher, the First Law, the Broken Empire and Grimm's Fairytales."

I think that book is going to be a Dark Sun sourcebook, with sidebars on other possible settings. Just a hunch.

 

[hopeless]

Maybe start it off away from the most famous city perhaps that starting adventure at Saltmarsh which leads to the party becoming famous for foiling a smuggling ring.
Eventually invited to Greyhawk this place of extraordinary reputation, a place of heroes but when they visit they inevitably discover the truth behind the image.
Politics, skulduggery, vile plots and not just by the evil doers of tall tales but by those they assume to be heroic.
Forever stripped of that delusion such that when true heroism is made clear to them they are blind to that truth always left cynical and unable to understand that they are now the heroes people will look up to and that fact is why their "heroes" look to them as the future of Greyhawk because they no longer have the desire nor means to do the right thing any more.
Something like that do you think?

 

[fearsomepirate]

In summary, if they cannot completely control something, then F-it. That in a nutshell is what had happened with their reaction to Me and Gary pushing a Greyhawk reboot. And that has routes to breaking past compatibility of OD&D>Basic+1E>2E by creating 3E. The game was theirs, now, and that was that. Perhaps WotC will find out someday, just as Gary did, and much to his shock, that RPG's manifestation through D&D was a gigantic idea that had found its time and is, and will always be, much bigger than any one man or set of men can imagine within their limited scopes. Control, after all, is always about limiting scope...

Basically. From a publicly traded corporation's perspective, buying an IP you can't fully control is like buying a house where the original owners never fully move out. It's why you'd often rather have publishing & distribution rights rather than full ownership of a creative work.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Again, from Theros:

View attachment 135005

This is a good point. To extend the analogy with Greyhawk, Theros removed 7 races from the PHB (which are extremely common in fantasy properties) and replaced them with 5 races that aren’t commonly seen in tabletop games.

I would suggest that this, plus a couple of other elements from the book (emphasis on piety, gods as major figures in the setting and the Greek mythic inspiration), contribute to making Theros feel different from generic high fantasy.

But to get back to Greyhawk, if we were to limit races (not replace races with different uncommon races) AND also restrict classes, I’m not sure that Greyhawk would have the same success as Theros.

 

[jmartkdr2]

As others have noted, it's not about what you can't do - if you want people interested who don't have nostalgia, the setting needs to let them do something well that they can't do well with the existing tools. Ideally, it should be both thematically appropriate for the setting as established and something that can easily be ported over to other settings. For best results, it should also be a player option to maximize sales.

Stronghold/leadership rules could work, but most 'setting books' have included new races and/or subclasses.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I'm just saying that Restrictions is just Subtraction and Subtraction on its own is a terrible selling point. Saying you are adding Substraction and just Subtraction is purely selling less and offering a product that can be copied.

I agree. If I had to suggest, instead of weakening the party, strengthen the monsters.

Make Greyhawk the Witcher setting where monsters are particularly deadly and just hitting them until they die is a bad idea. Reimplement damage reduction and weaknesses for most monsters. Get rid of magic weapons ignore resistences. Make the weaknesses things that casters can’t easily ignore with a spell, and reward characters who take time to learn about the monsters they will be fighting.

Also, beef up the exploration pillar to give Greyhawk a more OSE feel.

 

[hopeless]

Wouldn't need to.
Just make use of what there is and instead of the variant human make it more regional in nature maybe use that bonus feat to have them be Magic Initiates of some sort.
And as for the routine npcs redesign them for 1st to 3rd instead of 9th as that's how it should have been.
I played in a game where the end villain was 3 orcs with one an Orc Warchief normally very difficult for 4 3rd level characters to deal with even when the dm rules a two critical failed rolls results in one PC going down from being shot in the back after the first narrowly misses the other PC....
THAT was more due to the DM not being able to adapt the game properly, I had a similar difficulty with 5e but I found a way to adapt and even then my NPCs wasn't 9th level for god's sake!
There is so much I don't know about 5e and I thought the Monster Manual rules for NPCs were wrong for 3e!

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

You lost me half way through the OP, and I just had to bring up the giant issue standing out to me about this angle:

WHY would you change an old setting that no one cares about now to make it fit a new audience, when you could just make a new setting for a new audience?

To my mind, the entire purpose of “updating” a setting is to fit it to the newer mechanics, and maybe tweak some elements to take into account advances in the art, so that old and new players can enjoy playing together in the same shared world.

If there are going to be two versions of the setting, you now have just created conflict rather than bringing people together. I mean, I can understand why corporations do that—so they can recycle the IP they already own—but its not a consumer-affirming process, its a financially exploitative one.

Shockingly, corporations like Hasbro like making money.

One way to make money is to continue using IP that you own.

Greyhawk (with the possible exception of certain specific expressions of the dungeons and/or Gord etc.) is owned by Hasbro.

Therefore, it makes sense for them to use the IP.

Moreover, when you have a large number of tried & true properties, it often works to introduce them to a new set of consumers. It ties the history of the property to the present. It is a virtuous circle- both for the fans (many of who get re-introduced to the history) and to the company. Which is why you see so many re-boots and nods to the past in various media.

TLDR; given the history of the setting and the upcoming 50th Anniversary of the product, it would be kind of stupid for Hasbro to not monetize it, wouldn't it?