Khorvaire:Two Problems

[reanjr]

Any simulation that has to take into account a few fully-equipped 16th+ level fighters (who could probably demolish an entire army, if you assume the standard "most people are 1st level")

Not entirely true. All they would have to do is grapple him. They'd take him out. In addition, one hits 5% of the time no matter what. The fighter would be wittled down given some time and casualties (perhaps 50? not totally beyond the ken of possiblity)

 

[reanjr]

So, if WotC comes along and says "Oh, we've cut the size of the maps in half", it's confusing. Adding missing material is one thing, but contradicting what is already in print is quite another. Not everyone is going to see the errata. DMs and players will get into arguments about which size is correct.

I am amused to point out that Ravenloft has changed in size (several times I believe). Not to say people didn't complain about it. But Wizards has been known to do this.

 

[reanjr]

This setting will be wonderful for a 10-15 year old to begin playing DnD, and it simulates a lot of the gaming styles I liked when I was younger, but it really does not serve my interests now.

This is exactly the kind of insults I'm talking about.

Actually, you are being pretty insulting to youth by implying that they are somehow inferior and being referred to as youthful would be insulting. There is such a thing as demographics marketing and it is possible that Eberron is popular among youth. In fact, it would be a good strategy on Wizards part, since their players are aging.

 

[Piratecat]

I am amused to point out that Ravenloft has changed in size (several times I believe). Not to say people didn't complain about it. But Wizards has been known to do this.

But the mists... The Dark Powers have been known to... Fluctuating island size... Err...

I got nothing.

 

[Piratecat]

Actually, you are being pretty insulting to youth by implying that they are somehow inferior and being referred to as youthful would be insulting. There is such a thing as demographics marketing and it is possible that Eberron is popular among youth. In fact, it would be a good strategy on Wizards part, since their players are aging.

Reanjr, please drop the subject. I'm a little surprised that wasn't clear. You can start another thread to talk about youth marketing if you want to, but future digressions along that line in this thread (or anything continuing the previous argument) are going to make me a very peeved Admin. My thanks to everyone for keeping the thread on topic as we continue.

 

[drothgery]

No, it's not.
So, if WotC comes along and says "Oh, we've cut the size of the maps in half", it's confusing. Adding missing material is one thing, but contradicting what is already in print is quite another. Not everyone is going to see the errata. DMs and players will get into arguments about which size is correct.

For what it's worth, FR became a lot bigger between 2e and 3e; ask SKR about it sometime.

As I see it, you've got several groups of gamers to deal with...

1. People who don't care much about demographics, or if the demographics make sense. This is probably the vast majority. They won't notice if the population or size of countries or continents are changed in errata, and won't care.
2. People who care about demographics to some extent, but don't care if the demographics make sense. This is probably a very small group. They'll use the numbers as printed, and won't care if there's erratta or not.
3. People who care about demographics, and care if the demographics make sense. If there's no errata to fix the population density problems, they'll house rule their own fixes on a campaign-by-campaign basis, or won't play in Eberron. While I suspect this is actually a larger group than group 2, it's still not many people.
4. People who wouldn't notice illogical demographics on their own, but if it's pointed out to them, it'll drive them nuts when they think about it. That's probably me.

So my guess is that issuing an errata would be helpful to the people who care about such things (admittedly a small group), as there'd be a consistent fix, and no one else would care. So why not do it?

 

[reanjr]

And you would not BELIEVE how many people would have yelled and howled at that idea. Many folks would feel cheated at that process, and have already said so when other settings have taken that exact approach. Some have been accused of just splitting the material to milk the customer base.


Could you elaborate on that? HOW is it different? What makes Eberron radically different than the Forgotten Realms, when they were new, or Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Hollow Earth, Mystara or Birthright? Personally, I think a lot of FR players are a tad miffed, now that the Greyhawk shoe is on the other foot, but that's just me being a wisenheimer.

I'd believe it. It's all the same people who have been indoctrinated by Wizards to think that Prestige Classes are real content.

The DM would not need to buy the Player's Book and the player's would not need to buy the Campaign Setting. If it was a quality product, people wouldn't complain too hard. (On the other hand, if they hadn't spent so much damn money on promotion and artwork, the book would be $10 cheaper)

As to the difference between the old settings and the new, there is certainly a new focus on rules rather than setting. I don't know about 3e GH, but if you take any 2e campaign setting and do a simple count of rules pages vs. content pages, you'll find that Eberron (and the new FR and possibly the new GH) are more rules-based.

In addition, the old settings didn't have the preconception that they had to fit the mold of FR or GH. They didn't have to support all the rules and creatures of the basic game. In essence, they were aloud to be alot more creative. Especially the ones that TSR never expected to sell (like Dark Sun, which did so well, they rereleased it after it was cancelled) and didn't have much managerial oversight on.

All of the most beloved settings with the most hardcore fans seem to be the ones that TSR accidentally forgot to have managers and marketing teams look into until it was too late and they had to work with what the designers had already done. They were done by the designers, making drastic creative decision with no oversight committee to tell them (as one example from the FR team) you can't remove the Paladin and Monk multiclass restrictions (they worked around this by allowing certain classes to freely multiclass). Eberron is a product of marketing, not creative inspiration. The only long term success Wizards/TSR has ever had with this approach was Dragonlance. Most of the settings that are still alive today (FR, GH, DS [if you include the recent Dragon/Dungeon rules update], RL) were made by enormously talented people who labored for love of the idea.

Now, I'm not saying Keith is not creative or that the campaign wasn't important to him. But it's simply a tool for Wizards to keep profits steady so Hasbro doesn't shut their RPG stuff down. Admirable, yes, but not the same as the old 2e settings. There's a lack of inspiration and discovery that I and alot of people miss from the TSR days.

 

[reanjr]

Reanjr, please drop the subject. I'm a little surprised that wasn't clear. You can start another thread to talk about youth marketing if you want to, but future digressions along that line in this thread (or anything continuing the previous argument) are going to make me a very peeved Admin. My thanks to everyone for keeping the thread on topic as we continue.

I apologize, I hadn't gotten to your post yet when I posted a response.

 

[Quasqueton]

I asked this in one of the previous threads on this subject, but it never got answered:

Does the population numbers in the ECS book include orcs, goblinoids, gnolls, kobolds, etc.? Or does it just include the PHB races?

Also:

Khorvaire has an area of some 9.3 million square miles.

It has an estimated population density of 1.6 per square mile.

Does the 9.3M square miles include places like the Mournlands and Demon Wastes? (I do not own the ECS book, so I may be getting the names wrong.) Does the pop/square mile sound better when the pop. is calculated only within the actual borders of civilized nations?

Quasqueton

 

[Hellcow]

First off, please don't take these questions or comments the wrong way -- I'm just trying to cast things in the light of the setting.

Of these, only about 1/7 are of fighting age (1,000 when rounded down).

Out of honest curiosity, where are you getting this figure? Remember that population numbers for a community "represent the adult population". So once you rule out children, in D&D, how old do you have to be before you're unable to fight? Remember that in Khorvaire in particular, we're just coming off of a century of war, so they'll be stretching the limits. By the time you reach middle age (and the -2 modifier) you'll be less useful -- but there is also the question of average lifespan, and whether most people do become venerable at some point (especially in a wartorn world).

Unless military servitude is a requirement by law...

I realize you're talking in general terms, not specifically about Eberron. In Khorvaire, this is pretty much a given until recently.

50 people cannot defend a town that size.

Agreed there. Of course, Sharn has 211,000 people, so we weren't saying it could. And Sharn is dependent on the agricultural communities in the surrounding areas to provide food for the population.

The rest of your points here are good, but they're about a Sharn-sized city with a small population, which we've never claimed exists. Hence the "there's lots of space with no people at all", allowing for a reasonable concentration of people within the cities and villages that do exist.

There's nothing wrong with vast tracts of wilderness if there is a reason for them, but civilization doesn't naturally spread like that... There, of course, are exceptions, especially in primitive cultures. City-states were common and were often surrounded by pretty much nothing. But they were huge in and of themselves with hoardes of people, making trade routes profitable.

And, as I've said, a nation like Breland is effective a collection of city-states.

My point is that I'm not going to defend it as logical. I'm going to defend it as something that supports adventuring. Looking to what *I* see as logical, large areas of unsettled space are the only way you should be able to get dangerous monsters; otherwise, if civilization has been established for an extended period of time, these creatures should have been hunted down and destroyed by the rulers of the community. Likewise for dungeons. Khorvaire accounts for the presence of dungeons, with the existance of Dhakaani ruins, remnants of the War of the Mark or the Age of Demons, and Khyber. But if you've had a village in the area for 300 years, why hasn't someone explored it already? You're not the first group of adventurers in the history of the world (though with that said, in Sharn the ruins were only partially explored before being sealed off). Open space allows for adventure. Continuous urban spread, as logical as it may be from a real-world perspective, is going to be less exciting. We've always said that it's a pulp setting, so look to Conan: the emphasis is on what works best for the story. When Conan is wandering in the wilderness and finds a lost temple -- well, I as a reader didn't think "So why aren't there a few villages nearby?"

Again, it is not my intention to dismiss your concerns if this *does* bother you. I'm just saying that this is the purpose the space serves in the setting, and if you don't like it you should change it. But Khorvaire is not supposed to be fully settled from head to toe, and that's not something that will change.

One of them is magic. If magic were truly technology, alot of this would be possible. Communication, distribution, food production, etc. could all be resolved with the judicious use of magic. But whenever anyone mentions magic being technology in Eberron, they are blasted and it is shot down. Apparently this isn't the case.

Actually, in this thread alone I've said that magic *is* used for communication, and that it could be used for the long-distance preservation of food (though what I've also said is that you don't have a magic refrigerator in every house). Magic is used for irrigation and healing -- though again within limits, so it's not as though ever person in the world can afford cure disease vacinations. Magic is used for transportation -- but it's not as widespread as it might be. Lightning rails do link the main cities, and while personal transport may be expensive, House Orien certainly deals in different prices for freight -- so if the farmers around Sharn have a huge surplus, enterprising merchants could buy it up and sell it in Starilaskur. It is neither as widespread or generally as effective as *21st century technology* The average house does not have a magic phone, a magic TV, and 1.5 magic cars. But it is used for many of the purposes technology has been used for in the past.

I also think that with the number of evil, intelligent humanoids, if monsters were REALLY taking up this much room, the humans, etc. would be hiding in their cities and would never travel.

Actually, intelligent humanoids (who are not necessarily going to be evil) will generally have created civilizations of their own, as found in Darguun and Droaam. Eating random passerby may not be top of their list. With that say, you may be refering to the "lost city of grimlocks" I suggested earlier, for which I had my previous Conan example in mind. Even there, my thought was "dungeon with small population of degenerate grimlocks", not "highly organized militant nation of grimlocks". There may be populations of goblinoids or orcs hidden away from the days of Dhakaan -- most of the population of Darguun was lurking in the mountains and marshes before being called out by the war -- but again, a goblin enclave in the middle of Breland is unlikely to go looking for a fight. When I mentioned monsters in the wastelands, I was thinking more of the wandering gray render, the pack of manticores that has just recently settled around the road, things like that. Not the intelligent monsters that should form their own civilizations -- but the animals and magical beasts that could pose a threat to adventurers. Hmm, just like in The Hobbit when the trolls "come down from the mountains" - the issue is not "why on earth do people ever travel when trolls and stone giants are out there".... but rather, there exists the chance that if you travel, you might encounter a troll or a giant, because they haven't all been hunted down and destroyed.

Why does wizards give errata for rules? They could just let the DM fix it...

Because, as I said, in the case of the missing BAB no-one can use the class until it is fixed... and if you make the wrong fix the class is unbalanced and provides a quantifiable advantage or disadvantage compared to other classes, as compared to population numbers which most people will say "there's as many people as I want for purposes of this scene". If a spell is too powerful and will cause written adventures to be too easy, it needs to be addressed. But if the issue in question has no quantifiable impact on most people's adventures, it does not *need* to be addressed. I am not arguing that certain people feel "well if I use these numbers as stand, they *would* have a quantifiable impact!" -- but that's only because you've gone to the trouble of figuring out precisely what those numbers should mean, deciding that the world needs to have a consisted spread to be logical, and enforcing those on the scene... and even then, if you pick up a published adventure, it's not going to say "use population denisty to determine the number of monsters in this scene." It is something that may make people uncomfortable in the world, but it will not prevent them from using game materials. And the less errata the better, because again, not everyone will have access to the errata in the first place. If you don't have to contradict what's been published, it's always better not to. In this case, people CAN adjust the population numbers to whatever they are comfortable with, and there's no danger that you'll make the population TOO dense and oh, that's going to ruin that printed adventure as well.

You can do research and come up with a "correct" number for population that no one in their right mind would complain about.

I respect your opinion on this, and as I said, I'm not the one who came up with these final numbers. But they don't bother me. I am content with the explanations that are provided. On the other hand, I don't read The Hobbit and say "Now, why are the dwarves sneaking into the troll's campsite? Shouldn't there be a village along the road, or at least an inn?" And, of course, you could try to come up with an explanation for how a system of city-states could come about. As I've said before, we never wanted a fully populated colonial sprawl. We're not going to change Khorvaire to be that. So it falls to you to either find a way to reconcile that to your worldview, or to decide that you just can't play Eberron if that's how things are.

And for those who think that this is beyond the scope or possibility of a campaign setting, you're wrong. I've seen a campaign setting with maps of grain, rye, cattlet, etc. production, migration pathsof various cultures, high and low pressure systems, ore deposits, etc.

Sure, KoK. But did it have all of that in the very first book that came out? More importantly, that's not what Eberron is about. We've said all along: we're pulp adventure. Find a Conan book where he gets into a discussion of the grain harvest. If you want that level of realism, either add it in, or play KoK. We *will* be adding more detail as time goes by. But while I respect the views of the simulationist, Eberron is first and foremost designed as a world for adventure, and that is always going to come first.

I don't think any of this is necessary to enjoy Eberron, but alot of people do.

I respect that. And as I've said, Eberron's *not going to be the game for everyone*. It may be that it's simply not the right world for the hard-core simulationist. I'm sorry if that is the case, as it's not my intention to dismiss anyone's views. But Eberron was designed as for pulp adventure -- not deep realism.

I am amused to point out that Ravenloft has changed in size (several times I believe). Not to say people didn't complain about it. But Wizards has been known to do this..

Well, as I said, I'm not remotely in charge of what WotC will do: I'm just guessing.