settings, support and your buying dollar!

[Spell]

I'm curious about your approach to published settings and their support...
how important it is, for you as customer, that D&D/ d20 has a big number of recognisable published settings? how important it is to have support material (adventures, regional sourcebooks, whatever) for those settings?

in other words: if D&D was only a generic fantasy system (the way it used to be in the beginning), would you still play it? what if its settings were one-shots (that is little or no support)?

 

[Turanil]

I have bought a couple of settings books, but truly prefer to run adventures in my homebrew campaign worlds. So, published settings are a source of inspiration for my homebrew...

 

[Goblyns Hoard]

I don't buy published worlds anymore... I bought Forgotten Realms way back in early 2nd ed and used that but it never really grabbed me. I've had a flick through Eberron and read some of the stuff on the web site to keep up with ideas, but I use home brews because I can bring in the ideas I like from other worlds, add in my own stuff and mix it all up to my liking. However the main reason I use homebrews is because I really enjoy creating the worlds myself.

 

[Westgate Polks]

I have been a big fan of the Forgotten Realms setting since the original grey box, so I enjoy most of the support WotC gives it. Eberron looks somewhat cool, but I reserve judgement until I have had the chance to play a few characters. Greyhawk lost my interest around the time of the "Gord the Rogue" books.

Now, I don't always use the material as cannon; often times campaign events have induced me to rewrite portions of the material. But the depth is immensly usefull for tweaking rather than creating.

 

[Jdvn1]

I could go either way on it. I could run published settings, but I also want to run a homebrew. A bit of both worlds, I guess. And I can used ideas from published settings in my own homebrew, so.

 

[Starglim]

I buy published settings largely for the cool ideas in them, and tend to adapt heavily any adventure that I run. So published settings are important to me, but the location of adventures is not. A map is just a matrix to arrange the setting elements (unless there is actually something interesting about the map, such as the Scarred Lands' sea of blood). I have no use at all for dry gazetteer entries that I could roll up myself on the same table that I half-suspect the designers used.

 

[Bront]

I never used to like pre-gen worlds, till I sat down and read through Eberron. Now it's hard to get enough of it. However, I never buy pregened modules, as I prefer to run things a bit more off the cuff. I've heard some generaly good things about the modules, but not realy interested.

 

[Morte]

What I want is published adventures that I can use with a minimum of effort. Conversion takes effort. So more adventures in less settings would be my ideal.

Putting them all within 50 miles of the same city, or 10 parsecs of the same star system, or whatever would be even better. Then linking them gets easier, too.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I admit it: I have my own homebrew. I do like published Settings: Birthright, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Everquest, Lone Wolf, Kalamar and Scarred Lands. What I like about them is the material they have available to them. I like to use my homebrew as a meshing ground for putting ideas in it from other campaigns. If there are two ideas that I want to use but ar conflicted, I tack on a new continent or chain of islands to use it in. I let my campaign expand in depth and detail as the ideas to to intertwine and comingle in my head. My world is riddled with plenty that is 'borrowed' from other places. My own Chanak you might say.

 

[Li Shenron]

I used both published settings and homebrew ones. I think campaign settings corebooks are great usually, sometimes even just for inspiration, and in fact nowadays I'm more likely to buy a new setting main sourcebook rather than a generic D&D supplement. I like material that is developed as a whole rather than as tiny pieces.

I haven't bought regional books however, mostly because they are quite costly. I would like for example to focus on a couple of settings (e.g. Forgotten Realms and Rokugan) and explore their supplements fully (the regional FR books and the clan Rokugan's books), but when I will do so I would want to collect them all, not just pick a couple, and that costs.

So in general I'd say that the majority of adventures I've run did not take place in published settings BUT I like buying setting books BUT I haven't so far explored a setting beyond its first 2-3 books.