D&D 5E Is there any indication that WotC will launch a new setting?

[Coroc]

Tbh i only want some official conversion rules for the other worlds, and in that i mean rules which do not enforce dragonborn and drow as player characters on all official settings where they never existed. I do not need These conversion rules for Greyhawk, because Greyhawk is pretty generic.

For DS, DL and Eberron (maybe Birthright too, i have not analysed this thouroughly) they are needed.
There are some races which are not easily convertable to 5e like halfgiant or thrikreen.
There are some mechanisms which are not easily to do in 5e, that is precserving / defiling, inferior weapons and armor (DS), moon based magic (Krynn), and a solid psionic class up to Level 20 (DS and Eberron).

These are the things which should be clarified. I do not need an update of events, because there is tons of old material out there all available in reprint, i just want an official opinion on how to convert things to 5e.

 

[Parmandur]

Getting back to this, I had reason to look back into the various "... of Faerûn" books for the 3rd edition.

I had forgotten how many they were, and how stupendous the amount of words they contain. Races of, Magic of, Power of, Players Guide, the list goes on and on; and that's even we start with the regional sourcebooks Shining South, etc etc.

No wonder the line tanks when you publish such ultra-specific books!

I feel it's deeply dismissive to just cheer WotC on for dumping the entire idea, as if our only choice was between a watered-down anemic almost-brochure-thin treatment (like SCAG) on one hand, and a utterly overwhelming array of products (easily two dozen) on the other hand.

What people want is neither of those things.

They want a lovingly faithful update of the FRCS for 5th edition. Then they want the same for Eberron, Dark Sun or Birthright.

Just dismissing these desires by "you don't want WotC to lose money, do you?" is a crappy way to argue. Not least because we don't need self-appointed WotC spokespersons or guardians here.

How about we leave the economics to WotC, so we can focus on what fans do best - dream about future products?

Asking for a 5e Cerilia campaign setting book [replace with your favorite world] looks like an entirely reasonable request to ask here.

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

Well, in that regard, the "World's of D&D" rules agnostic setting book idea, similar to the twice a year Magic books James Wyatt is running, seem to be a great product idea. Focus on the world flavor, and the art, leave rules out of the book. I liked SCAG, so I got a used copy of the 3E FRCS book, which is great, but is filled with useless rule information, like 3E NPC blocks. Something like the FRCS, with no extraneous game crunch, would be ideal.

 

[neobolts]

The chances of a new setting is slim to none. The chances of old settings getting standalone support is also slim to none. The best shot is a survey of the various classic settings within one Manual of the Planes/Multiverse book.

Why do I say this? Multiple settings fracture the playerbase, as it did disastrously during 2e. Ryan Dancey was one of the key figures in the WotC resurrection of D&D as TSR faltered. The issues he was dealing with are largely the same as today.

Our customers were telling us that we produced too many products, and that the stuff we produced was of inferior quality? We can fix that. We can cut back on the number of products we release, and work hard to make sure that each and every book we publish is useful, interesting, and of high quality.

Our customers were telling us that we spent too much time on our own worlds, and not enough time on theirs? Ok - we can fix that. We can re-orient the business towards tools, towards examples, towards universal systems and rules that aren't dependent on owning a thousand dollars of unnecessary materials first.

Source: http://insaneangel.com/insaneangel/RPG/Dancey.html

In 5th edition, things haven't changed much...

I think it's like 55% homebrew. And then it's like 35% Forgotten Realms, and then everything else ... Very few people right now, turns out, running Dark Sun campaigns. A sliver of a sliver. Very few people running Hollow World campaigns. Very few people are running Mystara campaigns. It pretty much goes Homebrew, Forgotten Realms, I think Greyhawk's at 5% ands then everybody else is at 2% or 1%.

Source: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...lds-amp-More!&highlight=setting+Realms+Mearls

 

[Kobold Boots]

They've been pretty clear that most D&D games are actually homebrew settings - developing new official settings is not actually something the majority of the player base wants, so they're moving away from it.

To touch on a tangent of this.. getting the FR shoved down my throat at every turn is significantly impacting my enjoyment of the core books and largely the reason why I've dabbled with other games.. I want the FR material in a completely separate series of PDFs not in my rulebooks.

Please and Thank You lol

 

[Mercule]

Meant to reply to this earlier.....

Tyranny of Dragons is probably the worst offender among the published APs, but when push comes to shove it is just a series of short modules of generic D&D shennanigans held together by a paper thin excuse for a plot, itself easily stripped of any serial numbers.

Good to know. It's the one that pretty much turned me off to anything folks said was FRINO (Forgotten Realms in Name Only) -- which means I've only looked at the starter set, PotA, and Curse of Strahd -- other than HotDQ.

Funny enough, I actually kinda liked some of the core ideas of HotDQ. I just didn't want to run it in the Realms. Or use half-dragons, but that's a different issue. I actually started converting it to Eberron. Instead of a caravan, I was going to put everything on the Lightning Rail, which actually would have given it a very cool Murder on the Orient Express feel -- very appropriate for Eberron. In the process, I realized that I was on the path to pretty much rewriting the whole thing and using the original as inspiration -- kinda like most Stephen King movies. We have a lot of parents in the group and missed enough games due to kids activities that, by the time we were done with LMoP, PotA was out and had an obvious segue. So, I abandoned HotDQ as something that didn't really save me time as a DM.

Speaking of Greyhawk and Dragonlance, there is just about as much fluff from those settings in the books as there is for FR: aside from cutesy remarks in the margins, Greyhawk is really more involved in Volo's Guide than FR, and lots of other settings get in on the action.

Do tell. As I said, the naming turns me off, so I haven't even seen the actual insides of VGtM. I recently grabbed the stats for the PC races on DDB, but that's it. When I asked about how Realms-oriented it was, someone on these boards said that it was largely generic, but had some Realms content and made some broad assumptions about using the Realms. So, I kinda wrote it off.

 

[Parmandur]

Meant to reply to this earlier.....

Good to know. It's the one that pretty much turned me off to anything folks said was FRINO (Forgotten Realms in Name Only) -- which means I've only looked at the starter set, PotA, and Curse of Strahd -- other than HotDQ.

Funny enough, I actually kinda liked some of the core ideas of HotDQ. I just didn't want to run it in the Realms. Or use half-dragons, but that's a different issue. I actually started converting it to Eberron. Instead of a caravan, I was going to put everything on the Lightning Rail, which actually would have given it a very cool Murder on the Orient Express feel -- very appropriate for Eberron. In the process, I realized that I was on the path to pretty much rewriting the whole thing and using the original as inspiration -- kinda like most Stephen King movies. We have a lot of parents in the group and missed enough games due to kids activities that, by the time we were done with LMoP, PotA was out and had an obvious segue. So, I abandoned HotDQ as something that didn't really save me time as a DM.


Do tell. As I said, the naming turns me off, so I haven't even seen the actual insides of VGtM. I recently grabbed the stats for the PC races on DDB, but that's it. When I asked about how Realms-oriented it was, someone on these boards said that it was largely generic, but had some Realms content and made some broad assumptions about using the Realms. So, I kinda wrote it off.

The intro is written by Ed Greenwood in character as Volo, and there are post it notes (like the MM) also written by Greenwood. Other than that, the only FR content, really, is the example Beholder pair bring the Xanathar Guild (itself pretty easy to file the serial numbers off of and rename the Beholder Godfather's thieves guild) which takes a few pages. There are quotes from some other NPCs in the text, like Lum the Mad or Tordek (the 3E Dwarf Fighter from Greyhawk), that are decidedly not from the Realms. The Yuan-Ti chapter ignores the Realms version of Yuan-Ti entirely, in favor of the Greyhawk "generic" version.

I like the sound of a HotDQ Orient Express! It works better for a PoL style making up the world as you go from PHB assumptions. Rename the cities, rename the Harper's the Guild of Wicked Guitar Soloists or whatever.

 

[Azzy]

Do tell. As I said, the naming turns me off, so I haven't even seen the actual insides of VGtM. I recently grabbed the stats for the PC races on DDB, but that's it. When I asked about how Realms-oriented it was, someone on these boards said that it was largely generic, but had some Realms content and made some broad assumptions about using the Realms. So, I kinda wrote it off.

I'm surprised you didn't gab the monsters, too.

If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that less than 1% of the content is Realms-oriented and even then it's pretty innocuous.

 

[Mephista]

To touch on a tangent of this.. getting the FR shoved down my throat at every turn is significantly impacting my enjoyment of the core books and largely the reason why I've dabbled with other games.. I want the FR material in a completely separate series of PDFs not in my rulebooks.

Please and Thank You lol

*Raises eyebrow* I think you're confusing rules books and adventure books there, hun. Rule books, so far, seem pretty setting independent. The adventures are set in FR, but that's hard to avoid - you can't have adventures outside of a setting, it just doesn't work. That's no different than all the Pathfinder adventure paths being set in Golarian.

 

[Mercule]

I'm surprised you didn't gab the monsters, too.

I'm actually not a huge collector of monsters. My campaigns tend to be a bit more city and intrigue based. That made VttM pretty easy to pass up.

Now, fiends and undead are a bit more interesting, because they don't really have an ecology and can be inserted into games as minions or masters easily enough. I've pondered grabbing the monsters from OotA, for that reason.

 

[Parmandur]

*Raises eyebrow* I think you're confusing rules books and adventure books there, hun. Rule books, so far, seem pretty setting independent. The adventures are set in FR, but that's hard to avoid - you can't have adventures outside of a setting, it just doesn't work. That's no different than all the Pathfinder adventure paths being set in Golarian.

Well, the setting is extremely light in the adventures: easy enough to repurpose for Generica, Land of D&D. The old 1E & BECMI modules had no setting, or just the lightest of assumed setting that could be repurposed...as with 5E adventures.