NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8239418" data-attributes="member: 6777737">I would say the most vanilla setting is Points of Light. It encapsulates the core requirements of a D&D setting built for traditional adventuring: (1) vast unknown wildernesses, (2) post apocalyptic, and (3) weak modern civilization. Those three elements give the PCs (1) lots of places to adventure, (2) lots of stuff to find, and (3) the ability to influence and change the game world. The fact that there's basically nothing else in the setting by design to leave it open for DMs as a blank canvas is exactly what makes it the most vanilla. Some people will mix in chocolate chips, some people will mix in fruit and berries, and some people will mix in mint.Mystara and Greyhawk are both closest to this same idea, but they also both have a lot of existing narrative overhead. Like the City of Greyhawk is almost as detailed as Waterdeep. Mystara has a lot of published adventures, too. Savage Coast is pretty well filled in, IMO.Dragonlance has too much characterization from the novels. The sometimes visceral reactions people have to kender, gully dwarves, and tinker gnomes make it decidedly non-vanilla. So is the lack of divine magic if you're playing before the events of DoAT, which, IMO, is the only thing compelling about the setting. Dragonlance is a setting built for a single campaign: DL01-16. It kind of falls apart outside that. While post-Dragon War that might make it more vanilla, I think it just makes all the detailed theming come across as empty and a reminder of a better story.FR is over-developed. FR feels to me like a used coloring book. It's spent too long as a kitchen sink setting -- it's the default in 5e and has all-but comprehensive lore from 2e and 3e -- it feels like the ideas of countless people have been shoved into a sack. Sure, it looks like a cohesive world, but as soon as you peek into that sack you discover that each idea has grown legs like a cat and they all jump out and scatter into different takes that don't really want to associate with each other. Gods are born and die more often than mortal NPCs, and there have been no less than 3 major cataclysms like within the past 50-100 years in in-game time. I just can't find any common ground in the setting anymore.</blockquote>

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