D&D 5E Mike Mearls on Settings

[robus]

I heard Curse of Strahd was good. (I haven't played it yet.) That proved people wanted Ravenloft. So, Greyhawk? Planescape? Dark Sun? Eberron? We'll see how 'off the beaten path' they go.

Err that path is quite beaten!

 

[schnee]

Another good comparison is the two premier Arch Mages of the setting. Elminister is a HUGE figure in the setting. He hobnobs with gods. Virtually every single major event in FR has his fingerprints on it. Compare to Modenkainen. What has Mord actually done? He doesn't talk to gods. He doesn't play around with massive, setting changing events. He's just kinda there. Inscrutable. Very powerful, to be sure, but, hardly playing in the same league as Elminister.

Elminster isn't just hobnobbing with gods, the goddess of magic literally hobbed his knob.

 

[Robyo]

WotC sure seems to be casting nets at the grognards. This edition's scope seems all about foregoing innovation for nostalgia. They should let the OSR pick it up and let D&D progress into the new. Of course if they opened up Greyhawk for 3rd party content that would be pretty cool.

Have to agree that Greyhawk and Realms are pretty similar. You can add the S&S or HF vibe to either setting.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Well, maybe they'll insist more on some specific type of fantasy and make one setting or the other the exemplar of that style. If Greyhawk was left untouched for 40 years, maybe they could use the setting as an exemple fantasy type different from FR.
If Darksun is known for being the go-to S&S dying world setting, maybe Greyhawk could be used to show something more than just high/low fantasy, gritty/heroic fantasy; there's more types out there than this.

Greyhawk as a romantic fantasy setting, anyone?

 

[Maxperson]

Birthright, Eberron, Nentir Valley, Rokugan, Jakandor, Ghostwalk?

And Al Qadim and Ravenloft are two more that I really like.

 

[Oofta]

The reason I like the idea of a Greyhawk campaign (other than nostalgia because you never forget your first campaign) is that it's a fairly generic mid-to-low fantasy campaign without all the baggage of the Forgotten Realms. The Realms are fun in their own weird way, but there's always that guy that tells you you're running NPC Bob the Wandmaker wrong because in Book 22 of The Spin Cycle series it was clearly stated that he was left handed. No matter how many times you remind him that it's you're copy of the Realms and is just based on the official material. He's just "trying to be helpful".

I do think that they should also go more old school, no meta-plot, no great war and so on. Have some background bad guys who love the color purple for some odd reason sitting in the background that I can grab and use if I choose to do so or just leave them dormant for the next century or two because I really don't approve of their pallette choices.

In addition, as much as I like settings like Eberron or Dark Sun, for better or worse they stretch what people think of when they think of a fantasy setting campaign. It makes sense that they would do a relatively straightforward sandbox fantasy campaign first.

Of course no setting choice will satisfy everyone, and as with the D&D movie it could be amazing or it could be crap. We won't know until it's released. If it's not worth my money, I'll just rifle through my bookshelf and pull out the old books one more time.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I have to say something very controversial, but I do say it as an old-timer with much love for both Faerun and Oerth:

Greyhawk really isn't that different from FR.

Difference in level of detail? That's really not a big difference. Liches with armies? Both have 'em. Mad reclusive wizards? Check. Secret racial supremacist organizations? Check. Big waterfront town that dominates the setting and the region's trade? Check.

Much as I love Oerth's history, and its Leiber- and Howard-esque origins, I don't think you could draw a hard line between the two and show a huge self-evident difference.

Dragonlance would be in a different boat, though a slightly similar boat. At least we had the Cataclysm and the divine isolation, and the magic moons, and the LotR-esque elements, but still somewhat classic fantasy.

Dark Sun is an example of self-evidently different. The minute you're fighting with a bone sword back-to-back with your six-armed insect-man ally, against a tribe of cannibal halflings, while your party wizard is sucking the life out of the ground and giving you body aches in the process just to cast magic missile, you KNOW you ain't in Faerun anymore.

Eberron is another - golem-men detectives interacting on lightning trains with good-aligned blood-priests while solving a whodunnit before going home to his two-mile-tall Mega-City while his friend with the inherited magic tattoo cuts a trade deal with a medusa diplomat from the next-door monster nation, that also screams a different brand of fantasy.

Much as I'd like to see Greyhawk goodness, and find out if Iuz still has his nation, or see a mega-adventure dealing with the mystery of the Invoked Devastation and Rain of Colorless Fire, it doesn't scream "drastically different fantasy" from Forgotten Realms to me.

I don't think you are far off with your assessment...or that many would find your stance controversial. The difference between high fantasy and sword and sorcery fantasy aren't that big to most folks. Yes, there are distinctions....but most are in flavor.

And I think that's what makes the idea of making Greyhawk in 5E so challenging; the differences between it and the Realms are mostly aesthetic. You can take the existing 5E rules and create a game set in the worlg of Greyhawk right now, as is. Use the old Grey Box or the Greyhawk Adventures hardcover or what have you, and you have all the setting info you need. I mean, even Tales from the Yawning Portal kind of proves that.

So the question that Mearls seems to be asking is how to make the GAME different for the setting. Otherwise, what's the point? And that's trickier.....the differences from a mechanical standpoint are even more subtle, I would say.

What would you guys say a Greyhawk rules module should have? I'll given an example.....I would say that healing should be more difficult, and there should be a limit on HP, similar to first edition. So I'd say that after 9th or 10th level, characters only gain new HP equal to their CON modifier, or 1 + CON modifier at most. And I would make what is currently considered a long rest to be the Greyhawk equivalent of a short rest, and for a Greyhawk long rest to be two days of rest. Something along those lines.

Can you guys think of any other mechanical rules changes that would fit with the idea of Greyhawk?

 

[Greg K]

My setting wishes are for the following settings provided they go back to the original boxed sets for each:
Dark Sun
Al Qadim
Ravenloft
Greyhawk

For a 5th setting, my choice would be either Birthright or the Known World Gazetteers.

 

[Pauln6]

I toyed with the notion of more limited hit points when 5e came out but it does seem to punish martial characters, especially where wizards and warlocks now get higher dice.

1e didn't apply con modifiers to hp after name Level to avoid the gap between the haves and have nots getting too wide. My Greyhawk campaign has been running for about 27 years so I'm intrigued to see what they propose. Prestige classes, deity specific spells, tweaks for standard domains, regional backgrounds or feats, and even stats for some classic items and villains would be fun.

 

[jasper]

I agree oofa. Forgotten Realms has too much lore once you include everything publish. Think of it this way-Realms - All tv shows, and movies set in New York city (include knock offs) vs Greyhawk - all the tv shows and movies set in Alabama.
And like oofa I sick of people telling me I can't put a Krispy Kreme in Time's Square just because novel x,y,z (which I never read) had already mapped out Time's Square.