Have you been disillusioned by Eberron?

[Maliki]

I was never sold on on Eberron, I like old school settings. So I voted other.

 

[Crazy 'Scaper]

I was really, really looking forward to Eberron when I first heard about it and the CS didn't disappoint. I loved it! But since then my opinion has steadily gone downhill. I found the published adventures to be weak. Sharn was quite good but there was just ... something ... that prevented me from rating it as highly as the all the glowing reviews seemed to indicate. Then came Race of Eberron which, with all its consistencies, may or may not be canon and then Five Nations. This was the biggest disappointment of the lot. From the moment I realised how thin it is to the power creep of some of the NPCs this went from being a highly anticipated "must buy" book to being one that stayed on the shelf of my FLGS. THere was always the danger that higher level NPCs would show up (and I'm not counting the cores in the CS because they filled very specific roles) and I've been dreading it. But after only a year? Sorry, but no thanks.

I think the real turning point came in a recent game when the obligatory "fight on top of the lightning rail" scene cropped up and I really had to resist the temptation to have the player find three other fights already taking place up there. That I even thought that didn't bode well. It meant that I wasn't taking the setting seriously anymore and that it was already falling into cliches. I knew then that try as I might I didn't enjoy this world. I used to like Eberron and for a long time I've tried to keep liking it, but I'm afraid that it just doesn't do it for me anymore. Now I'm looking for something to replace Eberron, and strangely enough I'm finding that it is the likes of Greyhawk, Blackmoor and Kalamar that are catching my eye.

 

[MonsterMash]

I was never really grabbed by the descriptions of Eberron after it won the setting search, and a year on feel much the same way. I do actually like certain parts of it - the post war aspects are interesting to me, but I find there is too much I'd want to discard in there and its too high magic for my taste.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Without me even 'selling it', one of my friends just went out and got the core book and the two setting sourcebooks and he's loving it, wondering why we aren't playing this campaign setting right now.

 

[Belen]

When it was a brand new concept, I was enthusiastic, but as soon as they decided to make it a huge deviation from the Tolkienesque medieval European into a pseudo 1920's pulp blending the 20th century with D&D I stopped liking it. Admittedly, they could have done a feudal Asian themed setting too and I would probably have liked that, or something truly fantastic (like Planescape or Spelljammer were), but the more I saw of it, the less I liked it.

I agree with you, but Wizards cares not one whit about what we like. They created a setting that will appeal to the 1o-15 year old crowd who has been steeped in Harry Potter, Pokemon, and Yu gi oh.

Yes, they added in some more adult elements to help win over existing fans, but they are firmly in the mindset that "Eberron ain't your grandpa's setting."

Spellpunk is what the kiddies want.

 

[Henry]

To the contrary, I can't play enough! Whether some new book contradicts my version of the setting, I don't care, because the core book and the Sharn supplement are flavorful enough for me to make my own world out of it.

And yes, I usually use Keith's flavor-suggestions out of the WotC forums in preference to the books - he's just damned good.

 

[diaglo]

i like Eberron for 3.11ed for Workgroups.

i won't use it for OD&D. but that doesn't detract from the fact i think it was good for the newest edition.

 

[Belen]

I have played in Eberron and run a session of Eberron. Playing in the setting was mildly interesting, but running it was godawful. I'll admit to not liking the setting before it arrived. I bought the book when it came out and I found a lot of impressive points. I really enjoyed the Great Houses and there seemed to be a lot of flavor feats, which did not crop up in normal D&D that often.

After actually playing in the world, I was very unsatisfied. It does have a kitchen-sink feeling to it. The parts do not always mesh together well either. Their seemed to be a lot of scifi/superhero aspects to the world such a robots (warforged) and mutants (shifters/changelings).

The biggest problem with the world is that it uses everything from D&D. This means that it incorporated ALL of the power creep in the splat books. While this may be great for some people, I am not sure the setting can fit everything produced for the game and remain viable.

I certainly enjoy some aspects of Eberron, but those aspects can easily be ported into a homebrew. For me, it is the restrictions and theme that sell a setting. Midnight, Dragonlance, Planescape, Dark Sun, and Ravenloft all had aspects that grabbed you and made you want to play in that setting. Eberron has some cool ideas, but nothing grabs me and says that I must play here. On the surface, the setting seems unique and different.

After playing and running the setting, it feels very cookie cutter with a lot of kewl powers thrown in. It has potential, but as long as it incorporates everything regardless of how appropriate, then it will fail for me.

 

[Graf]

Eberron continues to be the most DM & Player friendly setting I've run into in a while (since the Scarred Lands really).
Its new enough that the material is not overwhelming in quantity. It uses Core DnD with very few changes, so adventures from other settings can be plugged in with ease. I haven't run across anything that is contradictory to the basic story premise.
One of my players bought the Keith Baker book novel and liked it.

Setting fatigue -does- set in when you are running a game every week, but its not disillusionment.

While we're on the subject, what do you think of its treatment of psionics?

Eberron's handling of psionics is -perfect- given the current political (for lack of a better word) situation between the pro- and against- groups of DnD players. (The handling of it in the Scarred Lands was too)
Example: I like psionics; I enjoy having it in the world as an option. My players hate it and want it minimized. Eberron deftly threads the needle to allow psionics while making sure that players and their DMs can basically ignore it (unless the DM forces it on them) without having to do any re-writes. But it –is- there.

The decision to tie psionics to a specific race (who number very very few in the main area of the game world) and is very important in a far off place in the world the PCs will probably never go to unless they want to. So it exists, it is uncommon, there are strong reasons for why psions don't advertise their presence and most of them are (from fluff in the Races of Eberron) involved in a quixotic mission to change some far off plane's composition.

Brilliantly handled to my mind.

[Edits: Spelling/layout]

 

[mhacdebhandia]

The biggest problem with the world is that it uses everything from D&D. This means that it incorporated ALL of the power creep in the splat books. While this may be great for some people, I am not sure the setting can fit everything produced for the game and remain viable.

You've fallen victim to the single greatest misconception about Eberron.

The selling point was never "Everything ever produced for D&D can and must be used with this world!"

The selling point was "Everything in the core rules has a place in this world in a way which makes sense."

All those crazy aberrations in the Monster Manual? Creations of the event that formed the Mournland, spawned by Khyber the Dragon Below, or the tools of the daelkyr of Xoriat. Half-elves and half-orcs as widespread races in their own right? Millennia-old, true-breeding peoples with logical reasons for having a sense of racial identity.

Now, it's true that elements from the Complete series have found a place in Eberron just like everything in the core rules - Keith Baker has written articles suggesting that warlocks from Complete Arcane are very thematically appropriate for the Cults of the Dragon Below and for Xoriat, the Realm of Madness, for instance. But the marketing line has never been that every single little thing in every single D&D book has been shoehorned in to Eberron - just that, perhaps, since everything in the core rules fits in somewhere, most things in supplements will fit in too, but then again one would hope that was true for every official setting.

The real selling point of Eberron is, to my mind, that it was designed for the most current version of the game. This encompasses the marketing slogan of "Everything in the core rules is in here!" but says much more about what makes the world cool.