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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samnell" data-source="post: 3784809" data-attributes="member: 130">It is a matter of taste, sure. I powerfully loathe the frontier holds/kingdom/keep on the borderlands trope. It's boring. We must all have done it dozens, if not hundreds, of times in our years gaming. It's a dual-wielding good-aligned drow and a wizard with a big pointy hat. I realized sometime in 2001 that setting games far off the beaten path limited me infinitely more than setting them in the most obscenely detailed portion of the most heavily detailed campaign setting I've ever read. Setting details do not close off avenues for me. They're easy to ignore. The lack of setting detail leaves me with blank spaces I'm obligated to fill whether I'm so inclined or not, but it limits me in what can go there without breaking the verisimilitude. I can't just drop a metropolis in somewhere a day's ride over some hills, because they don't just appear overnight and someone would surely have noticed it even with bad roads. Likewise I can't have the fortress of evil fiend army #16 there, because their foragers would have raped, pillaged, and burned the hamlet the first level adventurers all came from already. Either I have to do all the work upfront, or I have to accept that filling gaps on the fly is going to create setting issues. I'd rather have no setting in the game at all, with the only setting implications arising directly from the operation of the rules themselves.I was thrilled to learn from Rich Baker's blog that they didn't intend to give the points treatment to established worlds. Then I discovered the FR changes and concluded he was being a lot less than candid. I can ignore those things, and intend to. But I don't appreciate the apparent duplicity involved and it's served to further sour me on the concept.I guess ultimately, setting was never in my way to begin with. Points of light, in addition to not being at all what I want aesthetically, is less tools to use too.</blockquote>

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