D&D 5E Question about 5e Forgotten Realms
teitan
Legend
I can see that sort of. Back in the 2e heyday for the Realms that was a term bandied about describing them. Late medieval, early Renaissance.
MonsterEnvy
Legend
Yeah the setting is actually fairly different cause most of the dead gods are back along with the gods that replaced them still being around.
Sword of Spirit
Legend
What they appear to have done was decide, “Pre-4e Forgotten Realms is more popular than 4e FR. But we don’t want to ruin our line of novels by rebooting it back and declaring 4e an alternate multiverse. Plus, we ruined any chance of making all of our hard core fans happy as soon as we created a 4e FR and split the fan base. So we mainly have to just focus on novels and more casual fans.
Lets do this. We‘ll say in-multiverse stuff happens that reboots the general feel of the world to its most popular and iconic timeframe, without actually changing the timeline, so we can maintain continuity with the novels. We shall bring back all organizations that were iconic, make sure the nations and city states all feel familiar, etc. We can even bring back from the dead a bunch of popular human heroes who probably should have died of old age and therefore be ineligible for resurrection magic a century or so ago. We’ll come up with some ’It’s magic!’ explanation in the future if people really start wondering, but the casual fans aren’t likely to care much, so we can worry about that if and when it happens.
But we also want to keep the gonzo stuff from 4e, like dragonborn and tieflings walking around all normal like. People seem into that. We’ll need to make a point of saying that stuff is still around, and prominently feature them.
It‘ll work, trust me.”
And, judging by how infrequently topics like this even come up, it seems like it has worked; and I really do attribute that to the brand essentially de-emphasizing addressing hardcore fans, and focusing almost exclusively on the casual gamer at this point. It didn’t start that way. They started off the play test trying to focus on all sorts of gamers, but I feel like a couple of years after the game was out, once it was a juggernaut drawing in new casual players in swarms, they haven’t really cared to address the interests of the more hardcore fans.
Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not being critical of casual players or saying they should be required to be familiar with a bunch of lore to get into the game. What I do claim is that a product (especially in the lore area) that will appeal to the hardcore fans will also appeal to the casual players—but the reverse isn’t necessarily true. So ideally for the game as art you’d focus on making a product that the hardcore fans approve of, and it will be just as popular with the casual fans. Unfortunately, because the game is so big now, they probably literally are not being paid to put that much effort into making it a work of art. The financial pay-off at this particular point is likely seen as not justifying more focused effort on continuity and similar issues. Right now the product is on fire, and if anyone is saying anything, it’s probably along the lines of “Don’t put time or money into cleaning up the details or try to capture any sort of artistic vision. Just maintain a consistent level of product approval and sales.”
I realize that the world runs on money, but I do not have to like it.
Lets do this. We‘ll say in-multiverse stuff happens that reboots the general feel of the world to its most popular and iconic timeframe, without actually changing the timeline, so we can maintain continuity with the novels. We shall bring back all organizations that were iconic, make sure the nations and city states all feel familiar, etc. We can even bring back from the dead a bunch of popular human heroes who probably should have died of old age and therefore be ineligible for resurrection magic a century or so ago. We’ll come up with some ’It’s magic!’ explanation in the future if people really start wondering, but the casual fans aren’t likely to care much, so we can worry about that if and when it happens.
But we also want to keep the gonzo stuff from 4e, like dragonborn and tieflings walking around all normal like. People seem into that. We’ll need to make a point of saying that stuff is still around, and prominently feature them.
It‘ll work, trust me.”
And, judging by how infrequently topics like this even come up, it seems like it has worked; and I really do attribute that to the brand essentially de-emphasizing addressing hardcore fans, and focusing almost exclusively on the casual gamer at this point. It didn’t start that way. They started off the play test trying to focus on all sorts of gamers, but I feel like a couple of years after the game was out, once it was a juggernaut drawing in new casual players in swarms, they haven’t really cared to address the interests of the more hardcore fans.
Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not being critical of casual players or saying they should be required to be familiar with a bunch of lore to get into the game. What I do claim is that a product (especially in the lore area) that will appeal to the hardcore fans will also appeal to the casual players—but the reverse isn’t necessarily true. So ideally for the game as art you’d focus on making a product that the hardcore fans approve of, and it will be just as popular with the casual fans. Unfortunately, because the game is so big now, they probably literally are not being paid to put that much effort into making it a work of art. The financial pay-off at this particular point is likely seen as not justifying more focused effort on continuity and similar issues. Right now the product is on fire, and if anyone is saying anything, it’s probably along the lines of “Don’t put time or money into cleaning up the details or try to capture any sort of artistic vision. Just maintain a consistent level of product approval and sales.”
I realize that the world runs on money, but I do not have to like it.
teitan
Legend
Novels? You mean the novels that other than 1 Driz'zt novel a year, from a different publisher, hasn't had a new book since 2016 which indicates the plan to cut the fiction line was in the works since right around the release of 5e or shortly after?
pukunui
Legend
Yeah, I would say it’s even more noticeable now though.
Larnievc
Hero
Yeah, whenever my group goes to Waterdeep it’s knocking on early Victorian times.
Warren Ellis
Explorer
A better question to ask might be, what was the point of the Spellplague in the first place? What was the need for the various officiL weird shakeups that heralded each new edition of Forgotten Realms?
Why couldn't it have simply just released the same Realms but in a new edition?
Why couldn't it have simply just released the same Realms but in a new edition?
It's almost like WotC came to the conclusion that continuous concern about Forgotten Realms "canon" is a waste of time and energy and they just want to tell people to go ahead and use the 30 years of documentation they already have to create whatever type of FR game they want and to stop worrying about trying to run a cutting-edge "current" game.
They got tired of trying to invent three paragraphs of new Turmish history for every edition and just want to you use whatever Turmish stuff you have lying around for your upcoming Turmish campaign.
They got tired of trying to invent three paragraphs of new Turmish history for every edition and just want to you use whatever Turmish stuff you have lying around for your upcoming Turmish campaign.
Similar Threads
