Critical Role Tell me the selling points of Tal'Dorei / Wildemount, without mentioning Critical Role, Matt Mercer, etc.

[Umbran]

None of those are even true lol.

Mod note:
Some things are true.
Some things are false.
And yet other things are matters of interpretation and impression.

Everyone should make sure they are leaving sufficient room in their rhetoric for that last one, or problems will arise.

 

[Seramus]

No, the other settings caught on because of their quality and/or because they offered something new, not because they were attached to another property.

New-ish at the time. What usually happens is a trope is used for a while, then it suddenly explodes into popularity, then gets oversaturated. A good trope will then go through decades of falling and rising popularity as it is copied, both poorly and well, fade for a while, and come back again.

This is normal.

But in this case, New isn't even necessary. People love familiar stories told well, just in slightly different ways. Some of the most successful and famous things are just old tropes eternally retold.

 

[Clint_L]

No, the other settings caught on because of their quality and/or because they offered something new, not because they were attached to another property.

BTW they were attached to D&D. As in, directly pushed by TSR. Greyhawk was drawn from Gygax's home campaign and then brought in as the first default setting, and then Forgotten Realms was heavily pushed by TSR as the new default setting to displace Greyhawk. Neither of them "caught on" organically because of their "quality" or because they "offered something new," but because TSR, who basically controlled the market, made a marketing decision to push them.

And both are very much fantasy pastiche settings, much like Exandria. So it seems strange to have so much beef with the CR setting for being unoriginal but then champion similar settings like Faerun, which didn't exactly invent the wheel. Let's face it, WotC's D&D settings, like most of its other tropes, are heavily derivative. And that's not a criticism; they are generic by design, to make room for plenty of different styles of DMing. I think it is a strength of Exandria that it is often reminiscent of familiar settings. It's a familiar feeling D&D setting with contemporary sensibilities.

Your argument seems to be that these earlier versions of fantasy pastiche settings were better. I disagree. /shrug. Different people like different things.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

No, the other settings caught on because of their quality and/or because they offered something new, not because they were attached to another property.

They caught on because they were first, not because they were good. Greyhawk was a terrible pile of steaming garbage compared to modern settings - but that’s because a huge amount has been learned about building worlds for D&D since it was published.