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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 5789036" data-attributes="member: 79141">Very strange coincidence, this: yesterday I was clearing out my spare room, and creating a shelf for all the old D&D stuff that I had in storage, when I came across the World of Greyhawk boxed set.Flushed with nostalgia I started rabbiting on to my fiance about how excited I was to get this box back in 1983, and then I opened up the maps and pointed out all the evocative place names.  And I wondered aloud why Wizards didn't stick with Greyhawk as their primary setting - which meant nothing to my fiance as she isn't a gamer.Then I woke up this morning and read Morrus' almost verbatim account of my own D&D experience (except that I came to the game through Greyhawk, and got into Dragonlance when it came out).  I feel exactly the same way as Morrus about this: Forgotten Realms means little or nothing to me (except I recognise some of the names from the Baldur's Gate series).Could this spring from the fact that I skipped 2nd edition completely?  (In those days I didn't have the money to spend replacing all my old books, so I carried on playing 1E before getting into other systems like Warhammer FRPG and - perhaps alone along my peers - Skyrealms of Jorune... anyone?)The precise problem with the setting, for me, is that it is too full. Forgotten Realms is the setting that appeals to completists; the setting that appeals to folks who want blueprints of the SS Enterprise and know what grade Boba Fett got for his metalwork GCSE.  You couldn't turn a corner in Waterdeep without tripping over a paragraph of canon.  That's not what a setting should feel like, as far as I'm concerned.  (Unless it's Ptolus, but we all have our little skeletons, don't we?)It also has, in Elminster, a principal character so dull, his official minitaure is smoking a pipe and pointing out places of interest.And Drizzt?  I have the same reaction to his popularity as I have to the inexorable rise of the Spice Girls, Harry Potter, Keira Knightly and other phenomenon I caught before they achieved global domination and erroniously predicted for an early grave: horror.  Thing is, I expect crappy pop acts to gain inexplicable fame and fortune.  But this hobby is supposed to be my sanctuary from populist tat.Let me get this out of my system:1) Drizzt is a stupid name.  A stupid stupid name. It sounds like the noise a fly makes when it falls into the toilet.2) Dual wielding large weapons isn't cool. At least not any more.  Not now that it is a 'build' type, as opposed to something a specific individual might do once in a while.  Sword and dagger?  Okay - that makes sense.  Two bastard swords?  Not unless you've got forearms like Popeye.  And two scimitars?  Now you just look silly.  Like a juggler in pantaloons and a fez.3) Drizzt is responsible for making drow a playable race.  That notion, along with the rehabilitation of minotaurs, is a pet peeve of mine.  They should stay in the monster manual and be playable by DM caveat only.  Honestly, there have been so many 'renegade drow' the Underdark must be empty.  I once heard about a new game in which every player turned up and revealed their own carbon-copy Drizzt antihero.  (A bit like the episode of South Park when Butters shows up in World of Warcraft with the same avatar as Cartman.)Now, having got that out of the way, here is the one thing I'd like to suggest to wizards when it comes to settings:Allow each setting to be unique.  Allow Dark Sun to be free of dwarves and elves, and feature precious few of them in Planescape.  Encourage your designers to create new places for players to explore that don't have any dragonborn, or tieflings.  I really don't see that it is necessary for every setting to be the same or have the same flavour as the 'core' (whatever they decide that to be).  This was the design decision that limited the usefulness of the 4E settings.But I'm glad they did in a way - because that led me to use compelling 3rd party environments (first Arcana Evolved, Ptolus and now Zeitgeist) which Wizards - with their 'all things to all people' ethos - fail to produce so spectacularly.The by-word for naff at our gaming table is 'Wizard's fluff', which sounds like a sexual euphemism, but we all know what it means:  The kind of copy that some poor 'designer' has to bash out to fill a page on some aspect of a campaign world, or some corner-case paragon path, or some new race he has no investment in.And the strangest corollary of this is that, instead of inventing, say, wilden, for one specific setting, all of a sudden, when they show up in a PHB, they are suddenly a feature of every setting Wizards has produced - along with revenants, warforged, vryloka, shades, hamadryad, etc, all of which belong in specific setting (or in no setting at all in the case of wilden).</blockquote>

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