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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7068419" data-attributes="member: 1465">They are all good ideas.I most often run "vanilla" settings, mostly because I always have beginner players and I want to start them off with a classic game rather than with a variant in their first experience of D&D.But when I'm a player in someone else's game, or when buying books, I totally prefer settings with a few twists. I like different fantasy settings to be actually different.Some sparse comments here...1. This usually is a good starting point. If based on a specific culture of the past, a setting gains a distinct feel of its own.2. This is actually a great idea, because even if it's a small element compared to changing how magic works or how the gods work etc., it will have practical repercussions on adventures.4. While I love mixing up or creating new deities and pantheons, these provide hardly any twist unless you alter the structure of religion in the world. But if the default structure (i.e. lots of gods, each god has its own alignment/portfolio/temples/clerics, each character has its own patron god...) remains the same, then the change is practically cosmetic. However, here in this case there is at least a (small) twist in how the deities' alignments work, but I am not sure this alone would be enough to say the setting is significantly different from the norm.6. This is bold and challenging... it surely makes the setting different, but normally it requires to be backed up in terms of spellcasting rules, and there's the challenge: change too little and the effect achieved is only cosmetic; change too much and it's a huge work to keep everything balanced. You can elaborate this example by considering the correspondences Wizards = Elder, Sorcerers = Eldritch, Clerics = Divine and Warlocks = Primal. Then you could get away with only a small amount of house rules, perhaps as small as modifying/shortening the class spell lists a bit, and then just emphasize the differences through the narrative.8. I am more skeptic about this one. A different narrative and/or different mechanical description of races doesn't really change anything if then the game still allows characters of different races to be played essentially in the same way, and treats also the NPCs basically in the same way. The most common mistake IMHO is to end up having each humanoid race basically the same society as humans: cities, kings/queens, armies, same kind of ecology and economy, same technology, same everything... And then for the sake of player's freedom, allow each race to have PCs of any alignment, any class, any whatever... but doing so you pretty much always end up with elves being humans with pointy ears etc.</blockquote>

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