Okay so you hate Dragonlance, how can the current designers improve it?

[jonesy]

What does it need? Let's say there was no limit to what the current designers could do to improve the setting, what would you recommend?

Just that only Sovereing Press would get to continue with the setting. They've made wonderful work already and I hope they continue on the path. And I hope they would get to remake the DLCS their way. WotC should stay 500 miles away from anything Dragonlance. Their editors seem to not know anything at all about the setting.

I also thought the last trilogy was neat. The most memorable moment was when Tanis realizes that the gods never left and that the entire planet was orbiting a different star. I didn't see that coming and I probably should have.

You do realize those are two different instances from two different trilogies you've merged together.

When I read Dawning of a New Age, by Jean Rabe, she did me in. In the first chapter or two, she sets up Maelstryx, and then in one short paragraph, she fast forwards 30 years. 30 years? It just stuck a negative in my mind.

That was because she had been told to set the story 30 years into the then future. The summary of 'earlier events' was deemed necessary, but I do admit it could have been done better.

As far as this post goes, I realize I talked a lot about the novels that were written and little about the game, but my position is this: With Dragonlance, the novels are crucial to understanding and playing the campaign. The world (at least the supported world, Ansalon) is small enough that the major players of the books come into play early and often in a campaign. I didn't like the way the novels played out, so I couldn't see playing in a campaign and having to deal with Mina and the rest of the butchered characters from the setting.

I must heartily disagree. The novels play a crucial part only if the DM thinks they do. They are potential fluff for the setting, but you don't need them to play there. I'd go so far as to say that a DM who had only the new SP sourcebooks would do perfectly fine. And any player who uses novel information to try and 'outplay' the DM should realize that it's the DMs world he is playing in, not the novel authors. Oh were you relying on the Heroes of the Lance to save the day? Well oops, they were killed last week. Think killing Ariakas stops the war? Well would you look at that, he wasn't the one in charge after all. Trying to use the Disks of Mishakal to save the day? Didn't you know they were fakes?

As has already been mentioned, the 5th age novels by Jean Rabe were some of the worst novels written for the series (certainly by far the worst Dragonlance novels that I’ve ever read). The War of Souls helped this but by continuing to follow some of Rabe’s plot (instead of disregarding it entirely) I felt that Weiss and Hickman were limited in what they could do with the series.

That's an interesting view because it was Rabe who was limited in writing DoaNA because of the strict 'what you should have happen' guidelines she was given. I still thought that she managed to create an original and entertaining adventure. Yes, I like DoaNA.

One minor point is that I already have someone in my group who likes to play obnoxious gnomes. I'm pretty sure he would be overjoyed to play an even more obnoxious kender...

That's a player problem, not a setting problem. Kender and gnomes are obnoxious only if the player sets out to play them that way. Kender are not all crazy kleptos who don't understand the concequencies of their actions just like gnomes are not all goofy self-centered motormouths (there are already precedents of DL gnomes who've lived so long among other races that they have problems speaking in a 'gnomish' way).

 

[diaglo]

I don't think it's worthwhile to try. What the fans of it seem to love is by and large what I can't stand.

There are plenty of settings out there. No need to break what is obviously working for some folks in order to please folks who probably aren't going to respond to the effort.

ditto.

those who like it. like it for the reasons most of us avoid it.

 

[diaglo]

Am I the only one who read the novels and didn't like them?

yes,

 

[Steel_Wind]

Oh, and I did not like the Chronicals books, they read like a "paint by numbers" fantasy book, so dry and lifeless.

I would not disagree that they were not the best work of the authors. Dragons of Autumn Twlight, in particular, and its "spidery words of magic" was not exactly a work of literature. It is wooden gaming fiction.

The later two books in the Chronicles, when they were not trying to rewrite their gaming sessions, got better. But 20 millions copies - the number sold that RA Salvatore notes in the current introduction to Amber and Ashes - is still...20 million copies.

In defence of Hickman and Weis, the Chronicles was their first project and they were both very much new writers, still learning their craft.

The writing quality in their later works grows and matures. The Weis writing in War of Souls is a lady who is no longer a beginning novelist, but is a master of her craft. I wish they had both had that experience & developed talent then that they do now.

No matter how you slice it though - nothing succeeds like success.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I agree. The problem I had and still have with DL is that the world seems to be about the major stories. I mean the WHOLE world seems to be about these stories.

You can't have an adventure during the time of the War of the Lance without it being entirely about the war. Players will suddenly start seeking out characters from the novels or they will start feeling substandard because while they are saving small town #242, the heroes of the lance are busy returning gods and dragons to the world and saving everyone on the planet.

It's lame to run through the characters as the heroes of the lance, it's been done too many times before.

Try to run in a different time period, and what do you have? Before the war of the lance: No clerical magic, thus no healing and preventing players from playing some of the major classes in the PHB. Either that or twisting history and the setting so that it isn't DL anymore. After? If you want to fit in with the novels and such, somehow everyone casts spells without gods or magic. So...basically, either you have a campaign having to do with the dragon lords and their oppression...or you run a generic fanatasy game with no real flavour that says "This is DL"

There is always something BIG going on that overshadows anything the heroes of the game might do. I submit that the heroes of DL are even MORE important than those of FR. In the FR at least you can say "Cultists of Bhaal strike in the North, stopped by Drizz't. The most powerful demon in the Abyss tried to take over the world, stopped by Elminister. And the great undiscovered dungeon of <insert name here> was plundered and a great unknown evil stopped by the party." It feels like there is so much evil, so many plots that the world still NEEDS more heroes as the ones that exist can't be everywhere at once.

In DL, the world is so focused around the events at the time that anything like a dungeon crawl or a simple, non-world spanning adventure feels out of place in the world and feels unimportant.

 

[HellHound]

For me, it would have to involve going back in time and getting rid of the original DL modules.

I don't play D&D much, I DM.

The one campaign I played in was the original DL modules. I was the only person in the group who hadn't read the books. The modules were railroading in the extreme, and the players around me just made it worse because they insisted that everything run exactly as in the books.

Damn near made me quit playing RPGs completely.

It -DID- chase me away from AD&D.

 

[Psychic Warrior]

I don't want the publishers to do anything with Dragonlance. I have lots of settings to choose from that I like. As Steel_Wind points out Sovereign Press is selling out their print runs and doing second printings. Obviously they are doing just fine. Dragonlance and I parted company a long time ago - I wish it (and its fans) well but I see no need to invest in yet another campaign setting (especially one that has such bad memories for me).

 

[Snotlord]

I have wanted to buy a proper DL gaming product for almost 20 years now, but have not yet been published as far as I am concerned. I want the War of the Lance era in a nice hardcover with maps and Elmore-only artwork.

I looked at the 3e setting. I did not like the artwork and it had too much white space (or rather huge borders). I could have accepted that (and I liked the Diablo books, so I am a forgiving guy!), but the killing blow as all the changes that followed the first books was included in the setting (Chaos Wars?).

Maybe I'm unfair. Maybe Chaos Wars is ultra cool, I never gave it a chance, but the first and only Dragonlance book I'm gonna buy is a War of the Lance book Setting I can treat as a static setting.
:\

 

[possum]

Personally, I love Dragonlance and most of it's creations. I am however, not all that interested in the War of Souls.

As an owner of several Dragonlance books and two game products, I have to feel that the campaign setting does a great job.

As for the issue of Dragonlance revolving around the novels' main characters, all campaign settings with a large amount of novels suffer from this.

 

[Dragonmarked DM]

Though I'm not a huge DL fan, I do enjoy some of the flavor of the setting. One of my all time favorite box sets was however the Taladas books. Their was something about taladas (and the whole book of fluff that came with the box set) that sparked my DM imagination. To this day I dream of returning to the lost conintent.