settings, support and your buying dollar!

[Sledge]

I would happily buy a campaign setting, IF it was actually interesting to me. FR lost that a while back. Eberron never interested me. Thieves World might interest me. An actual 3.x version of Spelljammer or Dark Sun would interest me (Not that the mini versions qualify as they, ahem, suck)
I'd love to grab a very different world that is still balanced with the core rules as well.

 

[nemshammer]

I enjoy reading new published material and most of the time use it as inspiration for new ideas in my homebrew. I usually take published material and put enough of a spin on it that my players could read adventures and modules itself and not ruin it for them. changing the names to fit my campaign and keep continuity. Though it is nice to be lazy once in awhile and just keep things as is when i am rushed for time.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I like well-written published settings, but in the end most of them don't give me what I really want. I loved a lot of the Scarred Lands setting because it was well written, gave plenty of fodder for plots without boxing you in as a DM. My problem with it, and with most published settings was a lack of good maps. I want maps of all different scales. The world map showing the major regoins and cities, the nation/region map with lots of cities and towns, trade routes - and a good scale legend! And then I also want a variety of city and town maps.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Voted the first, even though it is not entirely true. I do not need them, but it's nice to have them.

Bye
Thanee

Ditto. I usually run homebrew, but I like adopting ideas or gaining inspiration from published settings and adventures. And those few worlds that do grab me--Eberron, Scarred Lands, Dawnforge, Ravenloft, a few others--I'll run largely out of the box.

 

[GuardianLurker]

Avast! Stand ye ready to be boarded!

Published settings I don't use so much as plunder.

It's sad when I see a good one go down (says a prayer over the corspe of Scarred Lands.)

Well, I'm not a pirate, but my barbarian hordes do find plenty of loot in them to bring back to my homebrew.

 

[Storminator]

I DM in Eberron, and I have a homebrew PBeM. I really like my homebrew, but I find a published setting invaluable. This became clear to me reading the "rules lite/rules heavy" threads.

I've probably spent an hour in prep work for the last 6 months of my campaign. I think I've stated up 7 NPCs, and 6 of those only partially. Other than that, I'm running published modules for a published setting without alteration.

Man, does this make DMing easy. It's not quite falling off a log, but it's close.

PS

 

[Yair]

I voted "need", but really it is "like". They're useful, at times - especially adventures for setting with unique elements/rules. But they are not actually NEEDED.

 

[Django]

I've had great success with Green Ronin's Mythic Vistas books. I don't play any of them precisely by the book; I mine them for details instead. Most recently, I picked up Hamunaptra and had a blast running a series of adventures using a lot of the material from it. We sprinkled a few bits from Testament in there as well. With those two books, a pile of history texts from the library, and a viewing of several choice movies, I had the whole game nailed for weeks.

I don't like how exhaustively some of the official settings are documented. I started running Eberron last year when the setting book came out and have found that as the later books came out, they were contradicting a lot of what I had done in the months before their release. Rather than try to resolve the differences, I just elected not to buy any of the later Eberron books. I stopped with the Sharn book. I imagine that when this campaign is finished, I'll have to decide whether to bite the bullet and invest in the rest of the source books. Early signs indicate not.

I look forward to the Wilderlands Boxed Set. If its anything like the original, it will fit my needs very well. I don't want to read history, I want nuts and bolts encounters and such. I can make up my own history and would rather not have to worry about diverging from the published setting.

It really got annoying when I returned to Greyhawk shortly after the Living Greyhawk Gazetter came out. I'd played Greyhawk for ages back in the day and suddenly here is this treatise on a Greyhawk that wasn't my own. I found that my newer players would expect the Greyhawk from the Gazetter and would be disappointed when -my- Greyhawk was different - even after I warned them of this very fact.

 

[tristan_tewksbury]

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?

My answer has changed over time.

In the days of yore, I used to always do home-brew campaigns. None of the published materials were much of an exact fit anyway and ended up being extensively re-worked, so in many ways it was just easier to make my own material since it would always match my vision of my campaign. Of course, in those days there was not all that much consistent material anyway.

As the industry matured, there were many more consistent settings available, but most did not match my style of play all that much, so I was still developing my own material.

Now I just don't have the time to devote to game design that I used to have available to me. As a result, an interesting pre-published campaign has become fairly important. However it must be a setting I find interesting. I can tweak the published materials as I see fit, but I am very happy to let someone else do most of the grunt work to get everything put together. I only have so many leasure hours and I would rather spend the majority of them playing rather than designing!

 

[trancejeremy]

It seems like every setting I like, doesn't get supported. Either the company goes under, or finds something more profitable..

Mystara - dead

Birthright - dead

Spelljammer - dead

my 3e favorites haven't fared much better

The Hunt: Rise of Evil - Mystic Eye is basically out of business, at least in spirit

Dragonstar - dead

Sovereign Stone - Sovereign Press dropped it in favor of Dragonlance. Though another company has picked it up, nothing has actually come out from them


OTOH, I want to get into both Blackmoor and the Wilderlands setting, but I'm not sure I can afford to.