Mike Mearls is a Genius

[fanboy2000]

The Unconscious Gamer Mind

I've come to realize that everything I've said, and has ever ben said, about Eberron is wrong.

I just realized Wizard's devious plot. Eberron isn't a campaign setting people are supposed to play D&D in. What a silly notion! No Eberron is a projective test that trys to probe the unconscious mind.

Eberron is a Rorschach RPG test! Everything that's ever been said about Eberron is just us projecting our one hopes, thoughts, and fears on a campaign setting. Everything Wizard's has ever done in conjuntion with Eberron is designed to provoke thought. Or maybe just to provoke. Think about it...

1. The Setting Search
This was just a cover to make people think they had a shot at getting their setting published. It also made some former WotC employees mad and gave people a reason to love to hate WotC even more. Obviously this was designed by evil suits at Hasbro who probably flunked psycology in college and wanted to design an experament that was gurantieed to upset as many people as posible, while ingeniously giveing many people false hope. All I can say is wow!

2. Dinosour Riding halflings.
'nuff said.

3. The Warforged.
Ah! The Rorschach race! Obviously warforged were designed so people could argue over them. Really, who would ever want to play a sentient construct? And LA +0!? Please. Everyone knows that new PC races need to be at least LA +1 or what's the point? On top of that, the only reason to play a construct is to gain cool new l33t powers that demand a +1 anyways. Really, what were the designers thinking! Trade-offs are for people who can't power game.

4. Psionics
Everyone knows that no core D&D can include psionics and magic equaly. It's one or the other. I mean, if you include psionics, and a psionic race to boot, you're forceing no less than every single gamer out there to use psionics. And your braking tradition.

5. No Subraces...
Huh? Everyone knows you need at least 57 kinds of elves. And Dwarves. And Halflings. And Gnomes.

6. ...Except Drow
Clearly there to upset people who hate drow.

7. Lack of Core Story
This is the best one! The open call (oops, I mean setting contest, other companies do open calls, WotC has "Setting Searches") explicitly requested a core story, but the final product dosen't have one! A very clever bait and swich. I mean, it took an industry insider to point it out to all of us. So what if people want diffrent things from a campaign setting. Every industry insider and wannabe knows that you need to focus on one thing to the point of exclusion. And whats this movie analogy garbage! You don't comapire campaign settings to movies! That might imply a kind of game! The horror!

Also, the lack of a core story means that people can take multiple things away from the book. This is a subversive attempt to make people claim diffrent things about Eberron thus making causeing people on the internet to argue, thus reviling the unconscious gamer mind.

Or maybe its a game.

 

[fanboy2000]

Or maybe I should use a few more smilies.

 

[Ketjak]

That is a story that works once or twice. Once the players start expecting the McGuffin to be a worthless fake, they'll stop caring about it. It's one thing watching other people being fooled and even fun to be fooled in a role-playing adventure every now and then but I suspect that most players would not put up with being fooled as standard operating procedure for a setting. I'm not saying that Eberron does this but I am saying that a "fooled ya!" setting would probably not be a good idea.

An important safety tip for core stories. They need to be something that's entertaining again and again and doesn't get old (or at least doesn't get old quickly). Not all core stories succeed at this.

Totally. It's one of the reasons I'm not so sure that "Indy meets Maltese Falcon in D&D" is a good core story summary for Eberron. I flirted with running a film noir Eberron campaign, but the core story pretty much runs something like this:

Unpleasant people try to take advantage of each other while cooperating to perform a criminal, barely legal or immoral act in order to achieve greater degrees of power or wealth. In the process of performing the dirty deeds, their friends are hurt or killed, their businesses are ruined, and women cry (occasionally because of real emotions). Once the deed is done or (more likely) the characters failed, they wallow in self-pity for a while before hatching a new, riskier scheme to gain more power and wealth.​

Sounds like fun, no? I have a list of them I'd recommend you rent from Netflix.

Doesn't sound like Eberron or, for that matter, Indiana Jones or D&D.

I've decided to run a pulpy Eberron game instead. After all, the setting comes with flying machines, dinosaurs, and robots!

 

[Klaus]

Indiana Jones + Maltese Falcon would be something like this:

- The heroes are people cut above the normal folk, either by skill or luck, who go to exotic places to unearth relics from past civilizations (Indy part), in order to gain personal power, be it magical, physical or political (D&D part), all the while trying not to get killed, unsure of who their enemies truly are (Maltese Falcon part).

 

[Henry]

Indiana Jones + Maltese Falcon would be something like this:

- The heroes are people cut above the normal folk, either by skill or luck, who go to exotic places to unearth relics from past civilizations (Indy part), in order to gain personal power, be it magical, physical or political (D&D part), all the while trying not to get killed, unsure of who their enemies truly are (Maltese Falcon part).

Yep, that pretty much describes my last Eberron Campaign I ran.

 

[Belen]

Because I don't want Heinz 57 varieties of elves.
Because I want a campaign setting where I don't have to tack on Psionics.
Because I want the Dragon's alignment to be a mystery from the start. I don't want it to be a surprise that the Red Dragon is CN, I want the PCs to cautiously approach it.
Because I want a setting that actually details NPCs using NPC classes.
Because I want a setting that actually encourages magic weapon creation, not just purchase.
Because I want a setting with more detail than d20 Greayhawk and less than Forgotten Realms.
Because I want Orcs to be more than CE mooks.
Because I want a world map unencumbered by past products
Because I want a Campaign setting where there's a built-in reason for unexplored ancient ruins.
Because I want a cosmology that doesn't have hell in it.
Because I want a cosmology that doesn't have gods in it.
Because I want a setting that doesn't just allow cinematic roleplaying, but encourages it.

If I work at it, I can do all of that in Forgotten Realms. But then I don't get the advantage of using a published campaign setting. I can do all of that in Eberron without modification.

You want to know what Maltese-Falcon-meets-Indiana-Jones means? It means the heros are more likely to survive the encounter for no other reason than because they are the heros. It means the bad guys often plot and scheme for years just to have their plans dashed because the protagonist were hired at the last minute to stop them. It means that when the action gets bogged down and the heros don't know what to do next, someone kicks down the door and attacks them.

I fail to see why you need Eberron for any of the above. Pre-3e FR did not have 101 elves. I only ever remember High, Moon, Wood, and Drow. Eberron has that many elves.

I see no benefit these days in using a published setting. Stealing from them, but not using them whole. I ran Eberron a few weeks ago and I was less than impressed. People were more focused on Shifters, Changelings, and Warforged than they were on any story. To me, Eberron's core story is "look at me, I do not fit, and I am different!"

 

[Desdichado]

I see no benefit these days in using a published setting. Stealing from them, but not using them whole. I ran Eberron a few weeks ago and I was less than impressed. People were more focused on Shifters, Changelings, and Warforged than they were on any story. To me, Eberron's core story is "look at me, I do not fit, and I am different!"

In many ways I agree; at least to the extent that I can't really run an out of the box setting without making some significant changes to put my own stamp on it. When all is said and done, it's generally easier to simply homebrew and borrow interesting elements.

I disagree that Eberron doesn't have a core story, though --that is, if we assume for a moment that I buy into the whole idea in the first place. I think Claudio's pegged it pretty well; and that's exactly how my forays into the setting (as a player, not a GM) have gone to date, and exactly how I expect them to go in the future.

 

[fanboy2000]

I fail to see why you need Eberron for any of the above. Pre-3e FR did not have 101 elves. I only ever remember High, Moon, Wood, and Drow. Eberron has that many elves.

I didn't say I needed Eberron for those things, I said wanted Eberron for those things.

Eberron only has two kinds of Elves, Elves and Drow. Elves who live in different parts of the world may have different cultures, but they are not subraces in the D&D sense with different racial adjustments.

I see no benefit these days in using a published setting.

Well, I do. There are times I just want to run a game and don't want to spend the time it takes to do the (often) bureaucratic work of making a campaign setting from whole cloth. In the past, I'd use FR, but there are things about FR that bug me. Those things (the list above) are not in Eberron. It's like WotC performed all it market research on my clones.

 

[BryonD]

I see no benefit these days in using a published setting. Stealing from them, but not using them whole. I ran Eberron a few weeks ago and I was less than impressed. People were more focused on Shifters, Changelings, and Warforged than they were on any story. To me, Eberron's core story is "look at me, I do not fit, and I am different!"

I haven't given it enough thought to really have an opinion on the "core story" part. But I agree with the rest.

I agree with the earlier presented Greyhawk is Stone Soup and FR is Vegetable Soup (or whatever it was) analogy. But with one significant difference. FR is like vegetable soup where all the ingredients come in separate little bags. You can easily take and leave what you want and you can even pull a few bags out to mix into your own home made soup. Heck, you can even buy the little bags individually, so you can buy just what you want.

I wasn't inspired to buy anything else after the EbCS. But that book had two major elements in my assessment.
1) Stuff that was routine and brought nothing new in. Which certainly allows for the "you can bo anything in Eberron claims". But it doesn't bring anything new to the table, so I don't see why I should buy it.
2) Stuff that is tightly connected to the Eberron setting (vegetable soup with all the ingredients already mixed together). Shard related stuff, warforged related stuff, house stuff, the war stuff, etc... Stuff that is so tied to the political story, history and georaphy of the setting that it isn't nearly as homebrew friendly as FR.

I'm not predicting that Eberron will go down in flames. But when compared to the established success of FR, it is clearly missing the home brew support element. I don't recall ever actually playing a game set in the Realms. Maybe once or twice, but I don't recall any right now. But I buy a large portion of FR material. I don't buy Eberron material because it doens't offer me things I am looking for.

 

[BryonD]

Well, I do. There are times I just want to run a game and don't want to spend the time it takes to do the (often) bureaucratic work of making a campaign setting from whole cloth.

Interesting difference in perspective.

When I dive into a new campaign with a new setting, I find it to be far less work to make up the setting as I go for what I need, than to try to look at someone else's work and make certain I'm doing it correctly. Trying to remember who is where and what the relevant established factors are is exactly what I find bureaucratic.