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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faraer" data-source="post: 3929339" data-attributes="member: 6318">Describing and explaining a secondary world without a central defining story is really difficult.Managing a shared world so that its original strengths are lived up to and not submerged (when the creator lives in another country), others' creativity is incorporated organically without their having to write pastiche, answering to the actual and perceived needs of adherence to multiple rulesets and diverse styles of play, past brand managers' different approaches, compromising this with an ongoing timeline and a more-profitable novel line, maintaining Hasbro-level profits with a form as non-mainstream as the setting sourcebook, trying to read audience preferences from sales data...I don't envy the Wizards guys either, for a moment.But when so much of the mismanagement is their own making, and several obvious and far less risky proposed policies are being rejected untried, even if what they're doing succeeds in its own aims, it still sacrifices much of what's good about the Realms -- including Ed Greenwood's entire project of progressively detailing the setting in print -- and it certainly is not the only single inevitable course they could take and won't be a 'Realms for everyone', as some of the PR claims.Traycor doesn't have to do that because he's severely misremembering, or misreading, the Volo's Guides. Those numbers just aren't in the books: something like that sort of level (not the 16th) might occur in a town of thousands of people (not 100-person hamlets), surrounded by ten times that in rural population. The Volo's Guides don't describe typical places but major towns and a few villages of particular note, sometimes separated by hundreds of miles (which in a medieval/renaissance world, if not in modern America, is a really long way). The characters are of all sorts of alignments and personalities: their aims are as likely to go against the PCs' as to overlap with them. And again, none of the character stats published for the Realms are meant to be taken as anything more than rough rules of thumb, often made up by editors. Ed didn't want to include them at all. They can't be taken literally because different books use different calibrations of the level scale. And, repeating myself once more, it's a setting in which groups of like-minded friends consistently outmatch foes of much greater raw power, as one of its central motifs.Numerically they're in the minority, because it's only a segment of the novel audience for whom the big macroscopic events are a draw. To Wizards' credit, there are plenty of smaller-scale books, including the 'class' series and the Knights of Myth Drannor novels. But it's the nature of the 'event' series to get hyped.Rich Baker has actually said he thinks they'll slow down the RSEs after the 2008 setting is done.</blockquote>

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