D&D General What Kind Of Setting Does Your Group Use?

[Zardnaar]

Players voted for pirates of caribbean so I used the caribbean. Kinda collaborative I suppose.

 

[Shiroiken]

Customized Greyhawk, as Gygax intended

 

[loverdrive]

I'm a strong advocate of creating world around PCs, so #3, of course.

 

[zarionofarabel]

I'm loving how close the poll is!

 

[werecorpse]

I voted 1. I tend to prefer to use a published adventure/campaign as the skeleton for my games.
I just finished Out of the Abyss set in forgotten realms with about 40% of the written material excised and plenty of Adventurers League and homebrew stuff scattered in so it finished at 17th level after a few years.

I am also running Shackled City set in Greyhawk with Greyhawk deities etc but with plenty of homebrew dungeons and some other published dungeons like Lost City of Barakhus, B5, B10, a few dungeon magazine adventures, a chunk of the ideas from Serpents Skull adventure path heavily retooled etc.

So I tend to play in a published setting, with lots of stuff from elsewhere and heavily homebrewed. But I figure the majority of people who use a published settings retool them, some more some less than me but that’s just a matter of degree.

 

[Remathilis]

Right now, I am running Eberron as published with a few choice elements lifted from other sources (a goodly chunk of Savage Tide and some of Ghosts of Saltmarsh).

While I do have a homebrewed setting, I have found that running a published setting (and modifying it slightly to my needs) works far better these days. Its less work, I get good art and maps, and for the most part no one I play with overly cares as long as the story is good.

 

[Accaris]

#2. It doesn't need to be collaborative because I'm very close to my players, and I already know what they're going to like and expect from the setting. So everything they encounter is like a little present they get to unwrap.

 

[GlassJaw]

Published but I don't adhere to canon and change things as needed.

The setting solely provides context for the players' choices; it's not a set of requirements that must be adhered to.

 

[Li Shenron]

I am running published adventures but since they are taken from random settings or without any, I think the result qualifies more as a homebrew.

 

[touc]

I've used a lot of, "Collaborative homebrew based on published work".

Sounds like my current Kingmaker campaign: set in a particular area of the Golarian world using 5E rules and a Celtic pantheon and calendar. The rest of the world might exist in reference (e.g. many escaped slaves from the demon-pact nation of Cheliax settle in the area you're now in), but I don't need the rest of the world right now or perhaps ever. The PCs have a lot of liberty to create NPCs during character creation.

Basically, this thread brings up the question: What does it mean to "use" a setting?

Good question. For my group, the setting is largely meaningless. No one is an avid reader of the Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, or even Dark Sun. Not one person has ever heard of the Golarian setting, and I'm not familiar with it beyond a few years playing Pathfinder games. So, we're not using the setting to visualize a familiar place or trigger nostalgia.

So, the "use" is for me, the DM, to save time. I use published materials because the day-to-day NPCs, maps, and histories are already worked up, letting me focus my time and energy on the story plot and adventure rather than the background color. Because no one has a clue about the setting, I'm free to make it however we want (e.g. the Celtic pantheon, new NPCs, rework the government of Brevoy, and so on).