Updated Settings: Advance or Reimagine?
- Thread starter Oni
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fanboy2000
Adventurer
Interesting point. I don't know how often it happens, but it seems like in 3.x era new D&D settings often introduced new rules.
The most astonishing example, I think, is the 3e FRCS. That book introduced many, many, rules that made it into the 3.5 core rule books. Effective Character Level, Level Adjustment, Epic Levels, and the XP awarding method of looking-up each PC by the PC's level and dividing the XP value by the number of characters in the party (the 3e method used "Party Level") were all additions to the game made it to the 3.5 rules set.
There was another campaign setting, it was only one book, that contained rules for playing ghosts as PCs.
Some of the setting WotC licensed to 3rd parties made rules changes too. White Wolf's Ravenloft added a rule that there was no way to detect alignment by magical means.
So it seems like, at least in the 3.x era, campaign settings were often closely tied to their rulesets.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
The big problem in FR wasn't the advance vs. reimagining. It was the catastrophic change. You can't stop that when the changes are as big as the 3e -> 4e changes.
Obviously, the problem there is that these foreign elements obviously don't belong, and haven't been important. Instead of making something new, you're trashing all the stuff that came before, which is also a problem.
Really, if you want a great diversity of interesting settings that aren't shoehorned into changes, you have to do something that WotC won't do: let the setting trump the edition.
It doesn't have to be in a huge way, but when the two conflict, the setting should take precedence. No dragonborn in FR by default? That should be totally fine. Give the DM's some interesting ideas on how to integrate them if they choose to (including "they come suddenly from offscreen" and "they were there all along" options) and leave it the heck alone. It's not like people are hurting for racial choices, especially given FR's insane diversity of demihuman sub-races.
4e has fetishized the cross-compatability of its rules elements to an absurd degree, and rendered them sacrosanct by the "everything is core" dogma. Which is also weird for an edition that wants to publish a lot of settings. Settings SHOULD be different. My New Crobuzon game should certainly not have the same races, classes, and archetypes as my Middle Earth game. Dark Sun and Forgotten Realms are different and this shouldn't be a problem.
Fortunately, I think WotC has learned a bit of a lesson after FR. Eberron wasn't blown up, which was great, and other bog-standard fantasy settings probably don't need to be blown up, either (Dragonlance and Greyhawk are probably flexible enough to accomodate tieflings and dragonborn and assorted weirdness).
They're not abandoning their ethos, but as long as they stick to Generic Fantasy Land #324, or create new settings, there might be relatively few conflicts on the horizon. Heck, they've got two probably-dynamite settings they're just sitting on the IP for (the runners up in the setting search), both of which probably share some Eberronian elements (such as easy expandability). That's at least four more years of settings that won't cause as much wailing and gnashing of teeth as FR did, not to mention new or re-imagined cultural settings. "Oriental Advenutres" and the like, where you can include everything by default and dress it up in funny clothes and everyone's happy.
4e doesn't need to do settings that are "limited."
What kind of concerns me is if they want to -- the Dark Sun buzz, for instance, might tempt them to do a setting that doesn't have a whole lot of business having certain default D&D elements thrust into it.
Advance it? Re-imagine it? It doesn't matter. If we've got gnomes and woads and tielfings scampering around Dark Sun, it's going to be dissonant, and you're not going to get the effect you really want out of playing that setting, no matter the justification you use for putting it in there. It doesn't belong. That's only a problem if you're sycophantic about turning everything into a kitchen sink setting.
Obviously, the problem there is that these foreign elements obviously don't belong, and haven't been important. Instead of making something new, you're trashing all the stuff that came before, which is also a problem.
Really, if you want a great diversity of interesting settings that aren't shoehorned into changes, you have to do something that WotC won't do: let the setting trump the edition.
It doesn't have to be in a huge way, but when the two conflict, the setting should take precedence. No dragonborn in FR by default? That should be totally fine. Give the DM's some interesting ideas on how to integrate them if they choose to (including "they come suddenly from offscreen" and "they were there all along" options) and leave it the heck alone. It's not like people are hurting for racial choices, especially given FR's insane diversity of demihuman sub-races.
4e has fetishized the cross-compatability of its rules elements to an absurd degree, and rendered them sacrosanct by the "everything is core" dogma. Which is also weird for an edition that wants to publish a lot of settings. Settings SHOULD be different. My New Crobuzon game should certainly not have the same races, classes, and archetypes as my Middle Earth game. Dark Sun and Forgotten Realms are different and this shouldn't be a problem.
Fortunately, I think WotC has learned a bit of a lesson after FR. Eberron wasn't blown up, which was great, and other bog-standard fantasy settings probably don't need to be blown up, either (Dragonlance and Greyhawk are probably flexible enough to accomodate tieflings and dragonborn and assorted weirdness).
They're not abandoning their ethos, but as long as they stick to Generic Fantasy Land #324, or create new settings, there might be relatively few conflicts on the horizon. Heck, they've got two probably-dynamite settings they're just sitting on the IP for (the runners up in the setting search), both of which probably share some Eberronian elements (such as easy expandability). That's at least four more years of settings that won't cause as much wailing and gnashing of teeth as FR did, not to mention new or re-imagined cultural settings. "Oriental Advenutres" and the like, where you can include everything by default and dress it up in funny clothes and everyone's happy.
4e doesn't need to do settings that are "limited."
What kind of concerns me is if they want to -- the Dark Sun buzz, for instance, might tempt them to do a setting that doesn't have a whole lot of business having certain default D&D elements thrust into it.
Advance it? Re-imagine it? It doesn't matter. If we've got gnomes and woads and tielfings scampering around Dark Sun, it's going to be dissonant, and you're not going to get the effect you really want out of playing that setting, no matter the justification you use for putting it in there. It doesn't belong. That's only a problem if you're sycophantic about turning everything into a kitchen sink setting.
Dragonhelm
Knight of Solamnia
I will disagree with this point. I spoke with Rich Baker about the changes in the Realms, expressing my concern that the mass changes would have the same effect on Realms fans that the Fifth Age had with Dragonlance fans. It split the fan base. He said they were well aware of the impact of the SAGA rules and Fifth Age, but felt that they were handling this change differently. The difference, he said, was that instead of totally switching game systems, this was still the D&D brand name. (I'm paraphrasing as I don't have the original PM anymore.)
Point is, they knew from Dragonlance just how disastrous a time jump with new rules and massive terraforming could be - and yet they went ahead and proceeded anyway. I do not believe any lesson would be learned from the Realms when it wasn't learned from Dragonlance to begin with, though I will admit that sometimes you don't learn something until you experience it yourself.
Perhaps a new starting point was needed. Was this the best way, or would another way be better?
Tieflings already showed up in Price of Courage. Dragonborn could be second-generation draconians. Dragonlance does have some restrictions, but it isn't as restrictive as people might make it out to be.
Didn't the runner-ups get printed by other companies?
Shemeska
Adventurer
*blink* Interesting.
Glyfair
Explorer
Some of the semi-finalists did (places 4-10). WotC got the rights to the finalists (places 1-3). In fact, the word is that at least some elements of Rich Burlew's entry were added to the final version of Eberron (the deathless elves).
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Dragonhelm said:
Well, they went ahead, but they haven't gone back since. The SAGA thing is a little more nuanced, but DL aside, they just forgot all the anger and fury over the explosions (or assumed it wasn't over change, and was over something else) in FR itself. There's an acronym for stuff done when FR is reset: RSE, Realms Shaking Event. I've never seen a single one depicted in anything other than a negative light. 3e Realms dodged this bullet, but 4e Realms did not, perhaps because they thought things were different. They undoubtedly have more information than I do, but I'm under the impression that the RSE for 4e still didn't quite do what they expected.
I think, barring a major, ill-advised blow-up, Dragonlance might be fine. Greyhawk could be, too. FR could have been, but someone got enamored of the idea of killing off Mary Jane Mystara, and punching cunningly-calculated holes in some peoples' favorite regions, and making Dragonborn from Outer Space. Assuming they don't blow the settings up, they should be peachy.
The three that made it to the Final Final Round were all owned by WotC (Eberron and the two others), who paid out money to own them. Eberron got published, the others got shelved. 4e would be a perfect time to break those settings out
Probably.
Personally, I tend to prefer a reimagining or a reboot. But then, I've mostly quit reading novels based on D&D properties, and I put little stock in setting metaplot. (A strong metaplot is a deal-breaker for me as far as a setting goes. I'll make my own plots, thank you very much.)
Keldryn
Adventurer
My vote goes to re-imagining, every time. It doesn't have to be a dramatic reboot and re-imagination, but I firmly hold to the school of thought that the timelines of campaign settings should be driven by the players and DM of individual campaigns, not by novels and official products.
The 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book is a good example of a non-dramatic re-imagining. Halflings always wore shoes; there was no made-up event where a magical catastrophe caused the foot hairs of all halflings on Faerun to fall out and the soles of their feet to become very tender. Some "mages" and "magic-users" in 1e and 2e are Wizards while others are Sorcerers. Clerics of specific deities had different spells available, brand-new domain powers, and different weapons restrictions than in 1e or 2e, but it was always this way according to the 3e Realms. They did advance the timeline a bit, but that was likely to account for events of the novels than to justify why some elements of the game had changed. There were a couple of references to events like the Thunder Blessing (I think that's what it was called) that explained why dwarf wizards and sorcerers have become more common, which I thought was unnecessary, but nothing terribly obtrusive.
Compare that to clerics' abilities being more representative of their gods' areas of influence because three gods stole some divine tablets, got caught, got all of the gods demoted to mortal beings by the even more powerful god who was invented for this sole purpose, then through the actions of mortals who became gods themselves the gods were re-instated but as a reminder their power is more directly influenced by the devotion of their followers.
When a campaign setting is supported by a long-running line of novels, then I can see why a re-imagining might not make sense from a business perspective. On the other hand, comic book series seem to do re-boots somewhat regularly, and old movies and TV shows are successfully re-imagined a decade or so later. I am very glad that WotC decided from the start that Eberron's timeline (in the game setting) would not be affected by events in the novels.
I do think that the game settings need to be differentiated from each other in part by what they add to or subtract from the core rules. In the case of the Forgotten Realms, as essentially the flagship D&D setting I think that it does need to accommodate virtually all of the player choices that exist in the core rules. Given how the setting has grown over the past 20 years and what it already incorporates, something has to be a lot more "out there" than Dragonborn to not fit into the world.
The tone of Dragonlance was probably defined more by the D&D conventions that it excluded than by what it added. However, like the Forgotten Realms, Mystara, and Greyhawk, I do think that much of what defined the setting and really made it stand out has been lost or muddied by years of a large number of authors writing a large number of products.
I very much like the idea of starting each setting with a clean slate for each new edition of the game. Go back to the original concept (the baseline, so to speak, the Grey Box FR, the original Dark Sun set, the Dragonlance Chronicles, etc) and identify the major themes of the setting and what makes it unique. Look at how new game elements can be added without undermining these core elements. A good example would be how the eladrin were added to Eberron; it fits in well with the world's themes and adds some very cool flavour and plot hooks. If races such as the dragonborn and tieflings don't fit into a world, then don't try to force them in. However, most D&D settings have enough fantastic elements that dragon-men and devil-touched humanoids are hardly a stretch. Dark Sun is one of the few D&D worlds where I think they would be very much out of place.
After examining how new elements of the core rules fit into the setting, look at supplemental materials produced for the last edition, pick out the best parts that really worked, and discard the redundant ones or the ideas that in hindsight didn't work all that well or changed the tone too much. Incorporate these ideas as part of the setting's history or as hooks for potential future adventures (as appropriate).
I would guess that when a new edition is released, more groups start a new campaign than try to convert an existing campaign literally. I have absolutely no data to back that up, it's just the sense that I get, and it reflects my personal experience. When I'm starting a new campaign, I really don't need to know why something that worked a certain way in game rules published 10 years ago works differently now; there is no reason not to assume that it was always this way.
The 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book is a good example of a non-dramatic re-imagining. Halflings always wore shoes; there was no made-up event where a magical catastrophe caused the foot hairs of all halflings on Faerun to fall out and the soles of their feet to become very tender. Some "mages" and "magic-users" in 1e and 2e are Wizards while others are Sorcerers. Clerics of specific deities had different spells available, brand-new domain powers, and different weapons restrictions than in 1e or 2e, but it was always this way according to the 3e Realms. They did advance the timeline a bit, but that was likely to account for events of the novels than to justify why some elements of the game had changed. There were a couple of references to events like the Thunder Blessing (I think that's what it was called) that explained why dwarf wizards and sorcerers have become more common, which I thought was unnecessary, but nothing terribly obtrusive.
Compare that to clerics' abilities being more representative of their gods' areas of influence because three gods stole some divine tablets, got caught, got all of the gods demoted to mortal beings by the even more powerful god who was invented for this sole purpose, then through the actions of mortals who became gods themselves the gods were re-instated but as a reminder their power is more directly influenced by the devotion of their followers.
When a campaign setting is supported by a long-running line of novels, then I can see why a re-imagining might not make sense from a business perspective. On the other hand, comic book series seem to do re-boots somewhat regularly, and old movies and TV shows are successfully re-imagined a decade or so later. I am very glad that WotC decided from the start that Eberron's timeline (in the game setting) would not be affected by events in the novels.
I do think that the game settings need to be differentiated from each other in part by what they add to or subtract from the core rules. In the case of the Forgotten Realms, as essentially the flagship D&D setting I think that it does need to accommodate virtually all of the player choices that exist in the core rules. Given how the setting has grown over the past 20 years and what it already incorporates, something has to be a lot more "out there" than Dragonborn to not fit into the world.
The tone of Dragonlance was probably defined more by the D&D conventions that it excluded than by what it added. However, like the Forgotten Realms, Mystara, and Greyhawk, I do think that much of what defined the setting and really made it stand out has been lost or muddied by years of a large number of authors writing a large number of products.
I very much like the idea of starting each setting with a clean slate for each new edition of the game. Go back to the original concept (the baseline, so to speak, the Grey Box FR, the original Dark Sun set, the Dragonlance Chronicles, etc) and identify the major themes of the setting and what makes it unique. Look at how new game elements can be added without undermining these core elements. A good example would be how the eladrin were added to Eberron; it fits in well with the world's themes and adds some very cool flavour and plot hooks. If races such as the dragonborn and tieflings don't fit into a world, then don't try to force them in. However, most D&D settings have enough fantastic elements that dragon-men and devil-touched humanoids are hardly a stretch. Dark Sun is one of the few D&D worlds where I think they would be very much out of place.
After examining how new elements of the core rules fit into the setting, look at supplemental materials produced for the last edition, pick out the best parts that really worked, and discard the redundant ones or the ideas that in hindsight didn't work all that well or changed the tone too much. Incorporate these ideas as part of the setting's history or as hooks for potential future adventures (as appropriate).
I would guess that when a new edition is released, more groups start a new campaign than try to convert an existing campaign literally. I have absolutely no data to back that up, it's just the sense that I get, and it reflects my personal experience. When I'm starting a new campaign, I really don't need to know why something that worked a certain way in game rules published 10 years ago works differently now; there is no reason not to assume that it was always this way.
Because in FR's long history, they never waved their hands and ported in races from other dimensions to explain their sudden inclusion.
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