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

[Sarellion]

Huh?

I thought they were stolen.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Huh?

I thought they were stolen.

They were. I was posting some of my ideas from the 'Anti-Canon' I've been working on. I'll edit the post to make that clearer.

 

[Thanee]

I noticed poor old DL mentioned an awful lot on the "Least Favorite Setting" thread, so I'm curious as to whether or not those who have played it and disliked it have any recommendations on how to make it more appealing to today's gamers?

I don't really like Dragonlance as a setting, tho I do not have anything against DL in general, it just doesn't work well as a setting, because the background is too fixed through the novels.

It's kinda like Middle Earth, which also makes not the most sense to play in, because of the epic story told in the novels. If you play there, you want to be part of that story, not just do something, which has no relation to it, but if you become part of it, you have no freedom in your actions anymore, since the outcome of everything is already given.

Basically any setting based on an epic fantasy story doesn't really work well for a role playing game, IMHO.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Ottergame]

Despite whatever happens, Dragonlance will ALWAYS be about the Heroes of the Lance. Someone's game might be 1000 years before the original module, 1000 years after, the world can be remade dozens of times over, and it will ALWAYS be about the Heroes in most people's eyes. Middle Earth games are always going to over shadowed by the War of the Ring. These are events that define the worlds, and nothing can ever change that.

I'm going to chime in with the others who said they felt unimportant in Dragonlance. There's just to many high level NPCs, to many important events done by the heroes in novels. It's a hard taste to wash out of your mouth.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

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.

I don't have much use for Ansalon, but Taladas is one of my top three settings. I was happy to see Gnomes finally added to the world of Krynn.

 

[ssampier]

I'm strange. I haven't read of the novels. My brother tried to get me to read the novels, but I wasn't interested.

My relatives want to play in Dragon Lance, but no one wanted to be the DM. I was willing even though I was DL clueless. As a result, we created our own continent, away from the existing "meta-plot" of the DL saga. We had a blast adding the DL elements of gods, moons, tinker gnomes, kender and minotaurs. It's not DL by the book, but was loads of fun.

I even purchased the 3.5 DLCS because of that campaign.

 

[caudor]

The presence of reliable healing is a large portion of how challenge ratings are determined. If you take away divine magic and the ability to turn undead, every monster becomes tougher and undead become nearly unstoppable.

If there was some way to divorce the setting and its flavor from the novels and their mechanics, it could be possible to transform Dragonlance into something playable. As it stands, however, doing something like that would strip much of what Dragonlance is out of the setting, making it nothing more than a half-full bag of rules for plundering.

My thoughts exactly.

 

[CRGreathouse]

Different pantheons, organizations, or anything else? A *complete* overhaul and rewriting of the War of the Lance in gaming form in the tradition Marvel's "Ultimate" comic books?

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?

No limit? In that case, I could probably revive the setting (by my standards, of course).

Plunge the land into a dark age, reducing the communications abilities to a more medieval level. Remove the Wizards of High Sorcery entirely, leaving their ruins as magical locations with strange, Lovecraftian horrors. Reduce the black-and-white setting assumptions, more by taking Law from Good's bed (and Chaos from Evil's) than by removing the Good vs. Evil concept that is fundamental to the setting. Remove the assumption of monolithic evil, replacing it with a more powerful but less cohesive collection of evil organizations (helped by the technology reduction and reduced good vs. evil focus).

Keep at least one region (ideally a continent) free from the influence of the authors.

Remove the gully dwarves, tinker gnomes, kender, and draconians -- possibly replacing the last with another draconic race (with a nod to the setting name) that isn't so tied to the current metallic/chromatic dragon system. Replace said metallic/chromatic system with more interesting dragon types, probably one that does not restrict individual dragon alignments and outlooks so much*. Keep the excellent production values of the Sovereign Stone 3.5 books.

Rip out the pantheon completely, replacing it with a more creative one.

* If anyone's interested, I have more specific recommendations here.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Ugh. That is so fundamentally NOT TRUE that I don't know where to begin. DL has NOT been about the Heroes of the Lance since the classic series so long ago. They haven't even re-created 3E versions of the original series. Yet people STILL think that it's all about Tanis and Raistlin and Sturm, etc., etc., etc. It's not. And it hasn't been for quite some time. Any real DL fan would know that.

And I haven't been a real DL fan since it stopped being about the Heroes of the Lance.

I already said that the particular metaplot of the setting didn't interest me all that much.

 

[Eva of Sirrion]

For those who feel restricted or tied back by what's gone on in the novels, I'd suggest picking up the current setting book and running from the current time. Pretty much all the major plot elements have been resolved and now things are fairly open to your characters to make their names known and presence felt.