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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brian Compton" data-source="post: 3814438" data-attributes="member: 24898">R.A. Salvatore's novels may have been best-sellers or come close, but have any other Realms novels done so?Also, I think they knew the problem with novel-driven settings, as well as small settings.  Ansalon of Krynn just is not very big, and the novels pretty much covered every corner.  Then you throw in time-travel, and now even the past isn't safe for playing because you could contradict some plot point no matter when or where you set your campaign.  "Ignore the books," you say.  But how can you?  They defined Krynn for just about everyone.  That would be like saying "Play a Middle-Earth game and ignore the Hobbit and the LotR trilogy."  How can you ignore that which defined the setting and made people interested in it in the first place?  Same for Wheel of Time and Song of Ice and Fire, or any other game with a big media tie-in.  I leave out Star Wars, because there you have enough unused planets to do whatever you want whenever you want without bumping into problems.    Hence why I could see where they might have wanted the Realms to go in a different direction in relation to novels and setting.  Play with the Moonshaes all you want, or the frozen wastes of the North, or some obscure mountain range in the southern lands, or the underground areas- we've still got a massive continent for the players and DM's to use.  Or do a small story in a corner of Sembia, Cormyr, or the Dales- it gives the place some more definition without totally making it the author's personal playground that no one else dare touch lest they ruin every readers' experience (or ruin every players' because they feel like its deja vu all over again).It's when they decided to try and be like Dragonlance and go after the whole continent/world that they made the Realms less fun to play.  Like one of the people in my group said, it's not so fun when you feel you're just being dragged along with the story, only to have said story get retconned come the next novel or event.I still have one nagging question- who buys the novels more?  Gamers or non-gamers?  If it's the former, we have only ourselves to blame.  If the latter... if the latter, then I'm not happy.</blockquote>

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