Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Primal" data-source="post: 4920332" data-attributes="member: 30678">No, I don't think I ever said that reading all the canon sources is a requirement for running the Realms; I did say that I expect the DM to know the basic facts about the region (from the campaign setting book), and coming up with plausible reasons for any major changes (such as replacing King Azoun and Vangerdahast with his own NPCs). And that's just my own personal expectation; whatever goes for your group is just fine by me. I generally keep my campaigns 80-90% faithful to canon, but in my current campaign I rewrote a well-known noble family's history and replaced the local ruler simply because I thought the canon NPC was boring and uninteresting (and I'm about to hit the PCs with the 'Age of Worms', which has made me rewrite large parts of local history as well). I don't think you're a "lazy bastard" by my standards; IMO a lazy DM is someone who doesn't read any books, doesn't pay any attention to character and NPC backgrounds or motivations, and doesn't bother to convert material at all but drops it "as is" into the setting (and often doesn't even bother to tell you why City of Greyhawk appears in the middle of the Dalelands or why clerics of Hextor co-exist peacefully with Banites). On top of it all, in my experience this type of DMs don't even  bother about campaign consistency or storyline, and think that randomly rolling for encounters in a series of caves/rooms constitutes to a real adventure (and I've played under such a DM, believe it or not).   In general I agree with your post above, although I would argue that 4E FR failed miserably in its goals; I don't know exact sales numbers or how well LFR is doing in comparison to Pathfinder Society and its predecessor, LGR. The fact that WoTC has (apparently) deemed the sales were not good enough for follow-up books RB talked about as a possibility and the number of active posters on Candlekeep and WoTC FR forums (the number of posters have dropped dramatically on both boards). Maybe FR *has* gained boatloads of new fans who just don't participate in online discussions -- I don't know. But all this says to me that the existing fan base has moved on to other settings or using the 2E/3E Realms. 4E Eberron is another story; regardless of the fact that there are 15+ (flavour-heavy) canon accessories published during the 3E era, they still didn't prune it back. And I'm fairly sure the Eberron books will outsell FR by a mile.  Golarion and Paizo APs absolutely rock, because not only is the art, writing and maps all top notch in my eyes; the world is also pretty well-designed, "sandbox-y" and represents the "shades of grey" morality rather than "black-and-white". The difference to FR canon is that Paizo products generally detail only a couple of locations within each area, concentrating on "what is the stuff most useful to most DMs" instead of minutiae (and since I've already got FR for this, I don't need it here -- and if I occasionally *do* need precise details, I can apply my FR lore to Golarion). What I also love is their online support for their stuff -- I can actually tell my players to download the Player's Guide and say that it's what their PCs know without having to "infodump" them myself (whether they read it or not is up to them). All in all it's a beautifully executed concept that appeals to hard core FR fans like myself (there's enough lore to fulfill my needs most of the time) and those do not care about minutiae (the canon lore does not seek to encompass everything). <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=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification