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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 3938700" data-attributes="member: 1465">Interesting articles, solid answers.I don't fully understand why a new edition or a setting revision has the power to attract new gamers, but everyone seems very sure it does. When I wasn't playing RPG, I became curious by glancing existing products. Whether they were "new" or "old" I couldn't care less. I didn't even know. It's possible that some people are only attracted by the word NEW printed somewhere, but I also think that others can be more attracted by a large array of books already existing and ready to be explored rather than waiting and not knowing what will come later.As a matter of fact, who really needs a new edition/revision is the designers: they need it more than anyone else because the current one has reached the bottom of the barrel, and it's hard to find new ideas to publish. Resetting everything allows to rewrite the same thing in a modified shape. It's not a bad thing, because it results in having one more different version of the FR, and the more version there are, the more people may potentially like it and play it.---There is indeed one aspect that makes FR follow Eberron. Bakers says there isn't, but then he actually mentions it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> It's the idea of a setting "shaped from below", where there are no high-level NPCs from the start.Personally the idea of high-level NPC doesn't bother me as much as it does someone else. Evil high-level NPCs are actually great to have since long before the PCs can challenge them. This way, it may give the players a long-range target and motivation for the future ("one day I'll drag that tyrant off his throne!"). The alternative is to have high-level evil NPCs spring up only when the players reach high-level themselves, because you need of course to have proper challenges and you don't want to have only big monsters but full-plotting masterminds et al.So I actually think that the problem is with the good high-level NPCs. They bother players because they are better but you shouldn't kill them. Still, I think it's not bad at all for a setting to provide people who are in charge: kings, popes, archwizards, warlords... They even give the PCs a target or purpose in life, to become one of them!I'm not saying that the Eberron style of setting is wrong, but it doesn't need to be followed by every setting. Maybe Eberron is a bit like farwest / last frontier stories, where no one rules and everyone starts from zero, there is no top and everyone has a chance to define what the top is, while Faerun is a bit like the modern world, where there is a top and the way to it is in the cracks of the system. Why having the same game when you can have two?</blockquote>

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