D&D 5E New D&D Survey, with some in-depth setting questions

[Parmandur]

Like I said, I think I'm just not going to get it. I've run games in Middle Earth, Dragonlance, and the Star Wars Galaxy, and never had any problems.

In Dragonlance I've played in a game that put the PCs into the War of The Lance, and we ended up as dragon riders. We saved the world, and the DM indicated indirectly but strongly that at least 2 other world threatening things were happening during the war as well, not even counting the so-called Heroes of The Lance. We fought 2 different Dragon Overlords, and stopped Takhisis from creating a line of half-dragons with her own blood in them as a "if this war fails the world will burn for it" contingency.

In Middle Earth, we helped Gandalf destroy the Necromancer in one game, and in another the players played Dwarves who stopped the nations of the West from being overrun on a whole other front (an event referenced in the Lord of The Rings), and another had much lower stakes and was set in the default time period of the The One Ring game.

In Star Wars we played in every possible era over the years, in core worlds and outer rim and unknown regions, as part of the Rebel Alliance, Jedi, Republics new and old, and in sectors and with organizations we made up.

That one Wheel of Time campaign was my only experience with RP in an established fiction universe (not counting the GR and Greyhawk, because that's fairly different). I can see that working for people, with the right group chemistry. But that will not always be present.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I have yet to meet a DM running DL tat doesn't want to just retell the stories from the books.

I’ve met many.

I think it really depends on the specific players. Some people are totally cool with mucking around in (and mucking up!) their favorite established world/s. But others can be so vested in the setting, for whatever reason, that they can't abide the idea of changing it in any substantive way.

Basically some gamers can't/won't reset their own expectations to match the needs of the game. And since it only really takes one unbending canon-devotee to transform a campaign into a headache, it can be better to just avoid the that setting, and stick to something that every player is more willing to adapt themselves to.

This is all fine, because people are people, right? It's just a thing that's blindsided me before, because I hadn't considered "strong devotion to canon" as something to seriously examine on the pre-game checklist. For me, it's just become another element of establishing expectations for a game.

Sure, it’s all fine, I just wish it made any sense at all, to me. Es

Because the world is already home to someone else's story. And that "someone else" is more well-known/popular in the real world than any of the characters in the campaign will ever be. When people think of Hogwarts, they think of Harry Potter killing Voldemort. When they think of Dragonlance, they think of the War of the Lance. When they think of Star Wars, they think of Luke blowing up the Death Star and redeeming Vader.

If the story has already been told, I don't see the need to tell it again but with new characters.

Agreed, though I know some folks enjoy resetting a world and going “those characters don’t exist, your characters will be at the center of the story instead”.

If there's a new story in the world, it's still going to be overshadowed by the story that got the world popular in the first place.

How?

That's my problem with doing stories in existing universe like this. There are exceptions, I would love to run an Exandria campaign some time, or use the Mistborn Adventure Game to run an adventure on Scadriel, but in general, neither I nor my players are interested in doing a Dragonlance/Star Wars/Harry Potter campaign because of them being overshadowed by the original heroes, even if that doesn't happen in-game.

How can the PCs or story be overshadowed if it doesn’t happen in game?

 

[Parmandur]

How can the PCs or story be overshadowed if it doesn’t happen in game?

Think of it as signal noise: playing in a world of a pre-existing story can potentially take some people out of the moment, because they keep getting distracted by another story entirely.

 

[Yaarel]

If 5e figures out a way to make the Mystara setting culturally sensitive, I wonder what that will look like?

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Agreed, though I know some folks enjoy resetting a world and going “those characters don’t exist, your characters will be at the center of the story instead”.

Sure, I've just never felt the urge to do that. I'm not saying it's wrong to like that, I'm glad that people can enjoy that style of campaign, but it's just not something that I or my players would like (trust me, we've tried).

How? How can the PCs or story be overshadowed if it doesn’t happen in game?

Because the players will almost definitely be looking towards the DM to craft a story just as epic as the one that popularized that setting. It causes the DM to have to try and live up to an expectation based on the world's original story, and if they don't, the players probably won't have fun. You feel the need to make your story as epic as the War of the Lance or Harry Potter, and even if you succeed in crafting an interesting story as the DM, you're still competing against the player's inherent expectations of how the story should be in that world.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Think of it as signal noise: playing in a world of a pre-existing story can potentially take some people out of the moment, because they keep getting distracted by another story entirely.

Sure, I've just never felt the urge to do that. I'm not saying it's wrong to like that, I'm glad that people can enjoy that style of campaign, but it's just not something that I or my players would like (trust me, we've tried).

Because the players will almost definitely be looking towards the DM to craft a story just as epic as the one that popularized that setting. It causes the DM to have to try and live up to an expectation based on the world's original story, and if they don't, the players probably won't have fun. You feel the need to make your story as epic as the War of the Lance or Harry Potter, and even if you succeed in crafting an interesting story as the DM, you're still competing against the player's inherent expectations of how the story should be in that world.

Huh. I…can’t relate, but I guess I’ll just have to accept that, in this case, I’m just not gonna really get it. It get it’s a thing, but I don’t get why. Our Star Wars games have rarely been anywhere near as epic as the Skywalker Saga, and only some of the DL games I’ve been in or run have been on the scale level of the Chronicles. Usually it’s more the Legends scale, or even the smaller more local stories that don’t rise to that level.

 

[Azzy]

Huh. I…can’t relate, but I guess I’ll just have to accept that, in this case, I’m just not gonna really get it. It get it’s a thing, but I don’t get why. Our Star Wars games have rarely been anywhere near as epic as the Skywalker Saga, and only some of the DL games I’ve been in or run have been on the scale level of the Chronicles. Usually it’s more the Legends scale, or even the smaller more local stories that don’t rise to that level.

I can see both points of views. With Dragonlance, the setting existed solely as a vehicle for the War of the Lance modules and novels. I was exited when I got the Dragonlance Adventures book, but it didn't flesh out the setting at all—no overview of the countries and landmarks or information on the various peoples. Between that, the WotL shaping everything and then quickly followed-up by the Twin's Legends saga, the setting felt claustrophobic at best. Then, on top of that, you had a cataclysmic event just about every week (Chaos War, War of Souls and whatever else). The setting just seemed tapped out with no room.

Star Wars, OTOH, has a lot of room in that Galaxy far, far away. Rogue One and the Mandolorian showcase this as they only minimally intersect with the Skywalker Saga. Also, with several eras detailed, there's even more room to play around—Old Republic (various video games), High Republic (new novels), Fall of the Republic (prequel trilogy, Clone Wars), Galactic Empire (original triolgy, Rogue One, Rebels, Bad Batch), New Republic (Madalorian and forthcoming shows), First Order (sequel trilogy), and all the fuzzy spaces in between. Even during era of the original trilogy, there's a lot more going on than what we see in the movies.

 

[Mind of tempest]

If 5e figures out a way to make the Mystara setting culturally sensitive, I wonder what that will look like?

some bits not that different others likely massively which depend on the area they focus on and how they do it.

 

[Maxperson]

I wish this would fly with my players...

I'm in the same boat as @doctorbadwolf. Even in worlds like the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk and Middle Earth, there is so much empty space(areas without complete or even no real lore) that you can create just about any adventure you want.

 

[Maxperson]

If I say, lets play Dragonlance, their expectations go right to that. So, I prefer to play in worlds that wont have that effect on them.

See, I would say, "I want to run a campaign that takes place in Dragonlance about 20 years after the fall of Istar. I have some really cool ideas for that time period." I wouldn't leave it at, "Let's play Dragonlance." Manage the expectations at the outset, before their minds can go to the War of the Lance and then sell it to them as fun and interesting.