D&D 5E No Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting in development?

[Lord Blackstone]

This is astounding if true. Not only are they passing up the opportunity to rehabilitate FR after the dogs breakfast that was 4E FR, they're also virtually pushing people into the arms of Paizo, which has a setting that it supports extremely well.

I would of thought of the Paizo model would be adopted by WotC quickly. Forgotten Realms is their biggest setting. Period. Holy wow....

Funny enough, I have read online and heard at my FLCS that people are going to use 5E with the Pathfinder Campaign Setting...

 

[KarinsDad]

Clearly you've never been on the Star Trek Online Forums if you think that was an over reaction.

I never said the devs were stupid, just the decision.

And a large chunk of the D&D fan base are FR fans, so while it might not be a majority, its will be a significate minority that is really upset. Big enough to hurt sales.

Significant? Hurt sales?

If I thought you were overreacting before, now I am sure of it. Both you and LB are overreacting. WotC might lose 10 or 15 players who are upset like the 2 of you, but significant?

First off, the Monster Manual and DMG are not even out and people are bellowing for a campaign book. Could you give them time to take a breath?

Second, the realms after the sundering are going to pretty much be similar to the ones before the sundering. For the most part, they are going to throw the 4E canon out the door. That means that DMs can pretty much play their FR campaign as if it were the 3E one and not much will upset it.

Yes, the Anauroch desert will start blooming again for the first time in thousands of years, and a few gods will be different, and some gods will be back, and Abeir will split from Toril probably taking a lot of shadovar with it, and Maztica might be gone, and a few NPCs should of died of old age, etc., etc., but most of that should be semi-irrelevant to most campaigns.

It's your campaign. Set it up how you want it to be in the meantime. I doubt the Ed is going to make the realms so non-recognizable that it won't work for most DMs.

And give WotC the time to take stock of players reactions to the game so that they can make good business decisions for future product.

The sky is not falling in and I seriously doubt that this will hurt sales. In fact, it will probably help sales because so far, Mike's team appears to be making good decisions.

 

[Roger]

Maybe they're waiting to see how well the Drizzt movie does.

 

[Lord Blackstone]

Significant? Hurt sales?

If I thought you were overreacting before, now I am sure of it. Both you and LB are overreacting.

Overreacting.... I hope so....

 

[SigmaOne]

Clearly you've never been on the Star Trek Online Forums if you think that was an over reaction.

I never said the devs were stupid, just the decision.

And a large chunk of the D&D fan base are FR fans, so while it might not be a majority, its will be a significate minority that is really upset. Big enough to hurt sales.

Just because other geeks are over reacting, perhaps in more exaggerated fashion, that doesn't mean you are not. And stupid is armchair-quarterbacking product strategy for a company when you have no internal information. I get that you're upset, dissappointed, and/or pissed off. And I think you have every right to be. Like I said, I'd like to see that book too. And I'd be much more likely to buy a 5E Realms sourcebook than most other books. But unless you've got actual connections and market data to back up your opinion that publishing a 5E FR book "soon" is the right thing for WotC to do, you're just another person complaining on the internet. Join the club; we have cookies, but don't hog them all.

 

[KarinsDad]

Overreacting.... I hope so....

Me too.

In the meantime, if you feel so strongly about this, write Mike an Email. Be nice, but tell him what you would like. He might surprise you.

 

[DMZ2112]

Ha! I knew it!

In fairness, that makes me about one for eight... the D&D team has been really hard to predict this time around. But I called this!

I think it's ideal. Let's have a Forgotten Realms season, then a Greyhawk season. Then let's have a Dragonance season. Then let's maybe have another Greyhawk season and a Planescape season and then a Forgotten Realms season again. Then maybe an original setting season! Let's publish new setting materialupon new setting material and support the edition that way so that we never again run out of reasons to publish books or make money so we never have to have another edition change.

We don't need an FRCS, we don't need another series of Dragonlance Age sourcebooks. It's all out there. We're smart enough to convert it and the new system makes it easy.

Yes please, more of this kind of thinking. Wish I'd been in that seminar, I would've /whooped/.

 

[Lord Blackstone]

Me too.

In the meantime, if you feel so strongly about this, write Mike an Email. Be nice, but tell him what you would like. He might surprise you.

I just need to have faith and believe that WotC has a plan. I have been extremely impressed with what they have done with the property. How they have gone way out their way to win fans back. They have done a top notch job in all aspects.

I haven't had this much fun with Dungeons and Dragons since 2E. Its a bit of a homecoming for me. I have been running a Warhammer Fantasy 1e/2E and World of Darkness (both old and new)for like 20 years. Forgotten Realms has been something that I have kept up on over the years both in novels and sourcebooks. Yeah, I have purchased 3e and 4th edition core materials but never fully embraced it as I have done with 5E.

As writing Mike Mearls a letter, I will give that some thought. I would never be rude to the man. He has tough job. He has to be the Pheonix for Dungeons and Dragons. He deserves respect. Period.

 

[sunshadow21]

Well, at least you're not overreacting.

I wouldn't be so quick to call that overreacting. A lot of 4E's difficulties came when people saw the full details of what was or was not being done in FR. As the most familiar setting to many people, the lack of substantial support was very discouraging then, and it will be discouraging again this time around, especially to fans of less popular worlds that are even less likely to see any kind of support at all for their favorites. If they want to support FR through articles, and similar smaller things, like they did with 4E, that requires some kind of medium like Dungeon or Dragon, and so far they have no plans for anything along those lines, so it's actually not all nearly as much of an overreaction as it might first seem. If they aren't going to support any of their IP worlds, what's the point of publishing adventures in them and getting people invested in them? They don't need to go the 3.x route of splat books galore, but they do need something, and so far there is no indication of what that something will be.

On a broader note, not supporting some kind of core world would be a big mistake on WotC's part, and one I would have thought they had learned from 4E. A big part of 3E's success was ongoing support for Greyhawk via organized play. Paizo would not be doing nearly as well as they are if they didn't have a core world that they actively support and sustain to serve as a common background for all of their material. I get they are trying to be all things to all people, but they are carrying it a bit too far to effectively satisfy anyone. They might have gotten away with that 10 years ago, but they won't today.

 

[mearls]

The original tweet doesn't capture the full story - we're not working on an FRCS right now because we are putting the bandwidth available for such a project into thinking about how to do an FRCS.

If you think of how we created fifth edition, we probably put more time and effort into determining what it needed to be (playtest, etc.) than into actually writing the final product.

The DMG is also still in the works - we won't even consider engaging in our next big RPG project until that is out the door, everyone has taken a vacation, and we're ready to tackle another huge project.