Thulcondar said:
From my perspective, FtA simply seemed... unnecessary.
It was a blatant attempt to wrench away the WoG from the material that Gyax wrote (remember, the Wars and FtA came about right after his departure from TSR). The original (1980/1983 books) presented a fantasy world in the "old school" tradition. A place for a DM to set adventures; a sketched-out starting-point that the DM could fill in as needed and desired. FtA tore that asunder; all of a sudden, a DM with a years-long Greyhawk campaign was faced with a decision; go with the "canon" history, or the one he had carefully created as the game play proceeded?
That was bad enough, but in addition the post-FtA Greyhawk started filling in all sorts of details that were similarly previously the demesne of the DM. Products like "Iuz the Evil". It was a reaction to the success of the Forgotten Realms products, where everthing was set up and presented in nauseating detail, for the benefit of lazy DMs who either couldn't work up those details on their own or couldn't think them up on the fly as needed. There was no room for individual DM creativity any more.
Greyhawk was at its best when it was a framework upon which the DM could imprint his or her own creative stamp. A place where you could plunk a "generic" dungeon. The Post-FtA Greyhawk was too much like Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance; everything laid out following an inexorable path, or detailed to the point where the talents of setting design were no longer needed.
This post kept nagging at me.
The argument, summarized, is that DMs who use the setting now have too much information and have to either ignore it or their campaigns because "lazy DMs" can't make stuff up.
But if the DM is not lazy then why is he using a published campaign setting instead of a homebrew, even thought "up on the fly as needed"?
The main problem is if the setting has few details there is NO choice. You have to make stuff up. So if you are a "lazy DM" (read: rushed, distracted, etc) even though you're paying for the world you still need to invest a large amount of creative energy and time into background. But if the world is detailed (or has sections of detail in-between the blank patches) you can choose to use as much or as little as you want.
And, as someone who has made his share of homebrews, in addition to reading published settings, I know there's also an brainstorming effect. Other writers will ALWAYS think of ideas that would never, ever have occurred to you. These ideas are not always good but can start you thinking in different directions.
Reading through this thread, as a relative newcomer to Greyhawk and the argument, much of the dislike seems to boil down to change=bad.
Most of the posters here who hate GW and FtA seem to be old school players (often retired from D&D:\ ). The two updates seem to be receiving the condensed, concentrated vitriol of the setting's change, the change of what people want in a published world, a change in the game and industry, etc. There's probably some residual feelings of the edition changes (OD&D to 1st AD&D to 2nd AD&D) mixed in there as well, further tainting memories and opinions.
Meanwhile, most of the people who have admitting to like one or both of the accessories, were newcomers to the setting.