Mike Mearls is a Genius

[BryonD]

Shifters and Changelings can just as easily be deleted from Eberron. And the planetouched are all right there in the core FR book. What's the difference?

I see the Shifter, Warforged and Changelling as being all about their special abilities.
For example, the shifter is all about the were nature and shape changing.

They may be half-human, half-other, like planetouched. But they strike me as being much further from the core human in base characteristics than the plane touched. (Also the planetouched are all +1 ECL, which has some small relevance).

Again, that isn't a problem. I'm just responding to your question. I do see a clear skew towards a supers archetype in these races that levitate and breathless define the character the way a metal body or the ability to shapeshift do.

To pull it back to my point, the Shifter in the very race description provides enhancements for taking shifter feats. There are a few feats that require gensai as a prereq (as there are for most every race, if not exclusively in core) but there isn't this built in package concept.
So if I want to take shifter's I need to take a fair fraction of the shifter feats and if I don't take shifter's then every product with shifter feats in it will have unuseable stuff right there.

 

[woodelf]

Absolutely.

When I first paged through the ECS, I thought that the Shadowrun core story would work well here. After further reading, I thought that the Star Wars core story would also work well. Ditto for LotR. And I'm almost 100% positive that there are others to be found.

Eberron supports multiple core stories, so that any DM can find the one he wants to use for a particular campaign. Not only that, but those core stories can be used in conjunction with each other, as Mike showed in his LJ (Star Wars with a dash of Shadowrun).

As always, it is up to the individual DM to determine what core story he wants to focus on.

And, it seems to me that it's quite possible that, whether they thought of it in these terms or not, that was what WotC had in mind: multiple, equally-valid, core stories. While Eberron doesn't appeal to me, it still appeals to me way more than FR. Part of that is that i don't much care for the D&D core story that Dancey described--most of my D&D games over the years have deliberately changed it, sometimes in radical ways. But much of it is simply that i'm not interested in the "rinse & repeat" part of the core story idea. As both a player and a GM, i do not want to do the same thing again next week (or next scenario, or next campaign). For me, the fairy-tale 3x thing is about right. At that point, i'm ready for something else. And i'd rather not do those 3 in a row, either. So, while re-playability of a core story may be necessary for the core story's viability, i'm not completely convinced that it's necessary for the setting's viability.

What you need, is to have a near-endless selection of scenarios for a setting. One way to do that is with an infinitely-repeatable core story. Another way to do it is with an infinite selection of core stories. Somewhere in the practical middle ground, we can have a dozen or two dozen "core stories" that fit with the setting, each of which can at least be repeated multiple times, if not infinitely.

As for success of undefined or multiple core stories: isn't this basically what the Known World Gazeteers did? That is, didn't each of them basically support a different play style, along with a different location?

 

[Hawkshadow]

Eberron: nice concept, bad details

I've been running an Eberron campaign for about 1/2 a year now. I really like the flavor of the setting, but find many of the details extremely frustrating.

Take, for example, the "core story". I started running the game with the standard fantasy d20 core story, but found that the wild areas where I expected the players to adventure were too far from the civilized areas. One of the "standard stories" mentioned in the main book is the adventurers start in Sharn, sail off to Xen' Drik, find adventure there, then come back to Sharn to sell their loot. The tip of Xen' Drik is about 1500 miles from Sharn. That's about the distance from London to Greenland. Sure, the Vikings were able to sail that distance, but none of the other Europeans were willing or able to until 1492. Even then, it's going to take a long time.

For instance, an Airship moves at twice the speed of a normal ship. A normal sailing ship can move 48 miles a day. A sailing airship thus can move 96 miles a day, so it takes about 16 days of travel by airship to get from Sharn to the tip of Xen' Drik.

So, instead of starting in Sharn, I started the characters in the Eldeen Reaches and had the characters adventure in the Gloaming. Even then, the characters were at least a week and a half of travel away from any city of decent size. When the players did, eventually, go to Sharn, I introduced a different core story almost identical to the one Mike Mearls outlined. (I actually took some plots from Spycraft and adapted them to Eberron.) This worked much better than the standard core story and is continuing to work very well.

My summary of this core story is:
The organization of a criminal mastermind is threatening a large merchant organization or a government. The players are enlisted by the large organization or government to uncover and foil the evil plots of the latest criminal mastermind. This usually involves blowing up the mastermind's lair or headquarters. The players are richly rewarded for their efforts, and enlisted to foil the plots of the next mastermind.
I think that WotC would be well served to steer DMs toward this sort of core story for Eberron.

 

[woodelf]

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).

I think that's a reasonable interpretation of the label. But i'd say that the first part (what you label the "Indy part") is stock D&D, too. Stated the way you do, i'd say the only part that is a deviation from standard D&D is the "unsure of who their enemies truly are" bit. And, IMHO, the primary pre-requisite for that is eliminating at least alignment detection, if not alignment. My long-running D&D game (AD&D1/2) pretty much matched your description, at times, because i had subjective personality stuff, instead of objective alignment.

 

[S'mon]

For instance, an Airship moves at twice the speed of a normal ship. A normal sailing ship can move 48 miles a day. A sailing airship thus can move 96 miles a day, so it takes about 16 days of travel by airship to get from Sharn to the tip of Xen' Drik.

If you double those speeds you get something more plausible - ship doing 4 miles/hr instead of 2 miles, airship doing 8 miles/hr instead of 4. IMC I use speeds more like those in OD&D "Minrothad Guilds", so a clipper ship can do up to 150 miles/day, typical fast merchant 100 miles, and I use the standard 50 mile/day speed for eg fleet movement including foraging on the coast.

 

[Vurt]

For instance, an Airship moves at twice the speed of a normal ship. A normal sailing ship can move 48 miles a day. A sailing airship thus can move 96 miles a day, so it takes about 16 days of travel by airship to get from Sharn to the tip of Xen' Drik.

Not to nitpick, but this came up recently so it's fresh in my memory. ECS p.125 lists an airship's speed at 20 miles/hr. If you've got enough pilots and crew, there's no reason you can't sail 24/7, so that puts travel close to a much more reasonable 500 miles/day.

The organization of a criminal mastermind is threatening a large merchant organization or a government. The players are enlisted by the large organization or government to uncover and foil the evil plots of the latest criminal mastermind. This usually involves blowing up the mastermind's lair or headquarters. The players are richly rewarded for their efforts, and enlisted to foil the plots of the next mastermind.
I think that WotC would be well served to steer DMs toward this sort of core story for Eberron.

Oddly enough, my current campaign mirrors this fairly closely!

Cheers,
Vurt

 

[Desdichado]

Even then, it's going to take a long time.

Have you never heard, then, of glossing over the slow parts of the game? In our Eberron game, we were playing through the modules series, and at one point, we had to sail (by regular ship) from Sharn to Darguun. We mostly handled it like Indianna Jones; the figurative red line that showed we were moving without any detail of what we were doing on the voyage, except maybe a faded montage of minor things here and there.

I can't imagine how that's a problem, unless you insist on roleplaying out the entire journey. It never really occured to us to do so.

 

[Klaus]

Hawkshadow -> Sharn: City of Towers (pg 19, under "gateway to Xen'drik") lists the following travel times from Sharn to Stormreach in Xen'drik (1,500 miles):

Sailing Ship: "a little over one month", costs 300gp.
Elemental Galleon: 3 or 4 days, costs 3000gp
House Lyrandar sailing ship (non-elemental powered): 11 days, costs 1500gp

Airships do not usually make the trip.

If the PCs can get an employer to sponsor the expedition into Xen'drik, the sponsor usually pays for the transportation and the letters of marque required to legalize the expedition. Which is why it's a good deal to get a sponsor.

This is one way of giving the "dungeon crawl" the Eberron spin. Sure, you go underground, kill things and take their loot. But you were hired by someone and you must take steps to keep things within the law, otherwise it's contraband and plundering, and subject to persecution by the authorities.

 

[Ketjak]

Hawkshadow -> Sharn: City of Towers (pg 19, under "gateway to Xen'drik") lists the following travel times from Sharn to Stormreach in Xen'drik (1,500 miles):

Sailing Ship: "a little over one month", costs 300gp.
Elemental Galleon: 3 or 4 days, costs 3000gp
House Lyrandar sailing ship (non-elemental powered): 11 days, costs 1500gp

Airships do not usually make the trip.

If the PCs can get an employer to sponsor the expedition into Xen'drik, the sponsor usually pays for the transportation and the letters of marque required to legalize the expedition. Which is why it's a good deal to get a sponsor.

This is one way of giving the "dungeon crawl" the Eberron spin. Sure, you go underground, kill things and take their loot. But you were hired by someone and you must take steps to keep things within the law, otherwise it's contraband and plundering, and subject to persecution by the authorities.

In the latest Dungeon, the Eberron adventure described an airship as making it to the Xen'drik interior in 4 days.

 

[woodelf]

There's a huge gameplay difference here. Tokens depend on classes, reinforce their archetype, and you get pools of token to use on abilities. Using glass marbles or whatever comes to hand, this gives a particular flavor to IH's gameplay, but that is clearly not for everyone, that is, namely, people playing RPGs as pure improvised theater.

But gameplay at the mechanical level is mostly-distinct from gameplay at the "core story" level. That is, while the mechanics can favor certain activities, which in turn favor certain core stories, it's merely a favoring, not a necessary thing. In particular, a setting can at least attempt to override those mechanical preferences when defining its core story.

Which is not to say there's anything wrong with your preference (whether it's for or against tokens and other gamist elements intruding into your game world), just that it really doesn't have much of anything to do with core stories.