I hope Eberron is a flop. Am I evil?

[Henry]

In my years of dwelling on the Internet, there are two truths I've learned:

1) Enworld statistically would only represent a .4% sample of all gamers, and even that sample is highly non-representative, being a majority-DM sample which has been in the game long enough to fondly remember settings that the majority of gamers don't care about, much less know what they are! As much as I love ENWorld, and as useful as we are when determining the desire for certain niche products, trying to figure the gaming pulse off of our collective wrist is not the smart bet for WotC.

2) Most of the old-time settings that are fondly remembered as "labors of love" by the work of one man, are in truth just as much collaborations as Eberron. The Forgotten Realms of even ten years ago is not the same as Ed Greenwood's Realms, and Gary's Greyhawk is nothing like the Greyhawk of the Greyhawk Wars. The version we see has been massaged, mangled, fluffed up, poked and prodded into the commercially available versions as we were introduced to them. TSR's Larloch ain't 60th level, and TSR's Mordenkainen never adventured on the Metamorphosis Alpha, either.

 

[Sir Elton]

I'm sure Eberron is a great campaign and folks are having loads of fun with it but dead wishes nothing but evil for the setting.

dead wants the money-making machine called WotC-MegaCorp to really make a loss on this one.

dead wants them to realise that they've got enough great settings up their Armani shirt sleeves without having to churn out new material.

These are the secret thoughts of dead.

Am I evil?

Nope. Just a guy who wants his fantasy to be "pure." I'm jealous of Eberron because it's completely opposite of what they wanted originally. I felt dumbfounded: I could have pulled all the stops on Atlantis and got in the top 3.

Despite my jealousy, I *want* Eberron to succeed. It's just that simple. WotC put a lot of time and effort into it and I hope it pays off.

 

[buzz]

First point: Mearls is a genius. Listen to him.

Second, tangential point: Over in the Dancey thread we were talking about what can be done to help promote the hobby --why it is that fewer and fewer new players are being drawn into the hobby-- a subject that comes up a lot on gaming fora.

It's threads like these and people like dead that make me almost hope that this hobby *doesn't* grow and eventually is wiped from the face of the earth. Why should any pastime that seems to attract the kind of people who promote such negativity, who actively seem to want to work *against* anything that will keep the hobby larger than their own little game group, be allowed to continue? What's the point? Why should companies work to promote a hobby that seems comprised of ungrateful sods?

*sigh*

But, then I remember that this is the Internet and, as Henry has pointed out, what I read here (and mroe often at RPG.net, really) are just the ramblings of a tiny fraction of the gaming populace. I remember all of the great people who post here, or who I meet at ENWorld Gamedays, or who game in my groups. I remember the fat stacks of product I have sitting on my gaming shelf, and how, now more than ever, the ratio of freaking cool stuff to junk is practically 1:0.

So, yes, I do think you're evil (though not one of the greater evils), and I don't like your attitude. Thankfully, you're just one person a Web froum. I hope that someday you'll be able to express your opinions in a positive manner. Perhaps instead of hoping that a campaign setting you have no interest in fails, you should focus on supporting the settings that you do enjoy.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Well, one of us gamers plus a marketing board of Hasbro.

Its not "the brainchild" of Keith Baker the way FR was Ed Greenwood's homebrew game world for years before being published, or Greyhawk was Gary Gygax's personal playground.

So?

Does every "brainchild" setting need to meet those standards? And are you sure you are right about that anyway? Both of those settings were significantly changed from the "personal playground" of the originators to the published versions the public sees. Did Ed make the changes, or was it some "board of TSR"? Did Gary play his home games in a setting that was the exact replica of published Greyhawk or was published Greyhawk different in important ways? And do any of those ways make Eberron not Keith's "brainchild" because he ran home campaigns in settings years before the ideas now appear in parts of Eberron?

Only a single gamer, huh?

its only his "brainchild" in the sense of him coming up with a few concepts on a piece of paper, later 10 pieces of paper, that some marketers in WoTC/Hasbro felt would be the most marketable of all possible entries.

This is an obnoxious minimization of the work that went into it, whether or not you mean it as so. And surely hints at an ignorance of amount of the work Keith put in to it.

Then you toss out this "Hasbro" "marketeer" stuff. Again, ignorance at the level of separation between WotC's operations and Hasbro's management. You drop it out there as in such a way that folks would draw a dark inference that WotC is in thrall to some nefarious anonymous "marketing board at Hasbro".

Come on here. I know you don't want Eberron to fail, but ... *shrug* Whatever.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I felt dumbfounded: I could have pulled all the stops on Atlantis and got in the top 3.

Were you in the top eleven? I'd like to see what you did, if so.


Regards,
Eric Anondson

 

[Desdichado]

I'm jealous of Eberron because it's completely opposite of what they wanted originally. I felt dumbfounded: I could have pulled all the stops on Atlantis and got in the top 3.

Give me a freakin' break.

Eberron is hardly the complete opposite of what they "originally" wanted; if you are going to run with that "I didn't win because someone changed the game on me without telling me" routine, you're only going to look ignorant and bitter. That's completely false. And if you're going to run with the "my highly original and ingenious setting Atlantis could have been in the top 3 easy" routine, you're going to lose what little credibility you still retained.

 

[myrdden]

Trainz doesn't know if you're evil (you might).

The fact that you didn't post in your thread for a while makes Trainz think that you're trolling.

Eberron is the brain-child of one of us gamers, and Trainz wishes all the best for that guy. Trainz doesn't personally want to buy and play Eberron, but you or Trainz have absolutely no reason to wish ill towards it.

And Trainz thinks that referring to oneself in the third person makes one look like Smeagol, who was a filthy and unpleasant little critter.

Word.

Myrdden agrees with Trainz.

Myrdden also is not sure what the original point of this thread is.

 

[Funksaw]

I'm sure Eberron is a great campaign and folks are having loads of fun with it but dead wishes nothing but evil for the setting.

dead wants the money-making machine called WotC-MegaCorp to really make a loss on this one.

dead wants them to realise that they've got enough great settings up their Armani shirt sleeves without having to churn out new material.

These are the secret thoughts of dead.

Am I evil?

------------------------------
If I were WotC, I'd re-release:

Mystara -- heeeeeeeaps of material here. And a decent fanbase, I think. You could also re-release all the old modules. Don't bother updating them in a new timeline, just present them as is with 3E rules. (WotC has an obsession with updating timelines.)

Spelljammer -- just as a one-off book; a "campaign-option" if you like.

Planescape -- also a one-off "campaign-option" book.

Greyhawk -- if GH is gonna be the *default* setting, then I think it should get support just like FR -- otherwise make FR the default setting! A recent poll on EN World showed us the GH is just as popular as FR. I don't know, maybe there's just a lot of old-school folk on EN World.

The problem with those settings is that they're not likely to encourage those who haven't liked D&D in the past to give it a whirl - Eberron has, to a limited extent, although I think they could have done better with it.

 

[Nisarg]

Marketable = good, in this case. Did anyone seriously expect the setting search to produce Harn? How excited would the community have gotten about another generic classic fantasy setting, anyway?

I totally agree that marketable=good. In this case, however, it turned out that marketable= a setting I will not enjoy.

But that wasn't my point in the original post. My point was that what Eberron lacks, for good or ill, is the "lived in" feel of a setting that was someone's homebrew game world for a few years before being published. It has almost an "out of the box" sort of feel, everything too pre-arranged. Everything a little too consistent and logical to be real.

One of the things that ended up making Forgotten Realms a huge hit was that it brought to the table with it 10 years of having already existed. It was a living world with history that you read and made you feel "yup, someone's been gaming in it". This made it seem more alive, because not all of it was a product of intelligent design, some of it was already the product of the unpredictability of actual play. Eberron lacks that.

Nisarg

 

[Hellcow]

Its not "the brainchild" of Keith Baker the way FR was Ed Greenwood's homebrew game world for years before being published, or Greyhawk was Gary Gygax's personal playground.

its only his "brainchild" in the sense of him coming up with a few concepts on a piece of paper, later 10 pieces of paper, that some marketers in WoTC/Hasbro felt would be the most marketable of all possible entries.

Well...

First off, as has been alluded to by others, while Eberron in its coherent final form was not a world I had been running games in, it drew on ideas from multiple homebrew settings I'd run. Not the same thing as FR, no question, but not made up on the spot either. Furthermore, yes, one page is easy. I sent in seven of those. Ten pages isn't that hard. But that final 125,000 word story bible? If you think that's a trivial amount of work or creativity, I have a few projects I could use your help on.

As for the original question of the thread, no, I don't think Dead is evil. I love Planescape myself, and would be happy to see more official Planescape material. Loving something and wanting to see more of it isn't a crime. But as others have said, I think it's a pipe dream to believe that if Eberron fails the powers that be would say "Why don't we give Planescape another chance? That was our big mistake." And I have to agree with Buzz that negativity rarely solves any problems. If you want a setting back, is there an active, positive way to pursue your goals -- like the Planewalker.com people are doing -- as opposed to just saying "I hope that everything that isn't my favorite thing fails"?