What makes a setting dull?

[Oni]

That is one of the points of the setting. There are some things that did not get fleshed out enough(IMHO), but the campaign is one that is owned by the particular gaming group.

Perhaps, but failure to convey the excitement of the setting in the setting book does a disservice to the setting in general. I almost didn't give Eberron a try after reading the setting book.

[edit: could I use the word setting more??? setting setting setting]

 

[Desdichado]

On the Ebberron note: never played it (bar one rather brief foray into one module about an airship, erm, The Golden Dragon? Something like that.) I think the setting is OK but would work much better in another, more flexible, system. Say GURPS or HERO.

Considering the fact that Eberron is really one of the only setting that was specifically designed with the D&D rules in mind as informing setting design, that seems like that would be an odd thing to do. In a lot of ways, Eberron is the most quintessentially D&Dish setting out there.

 

[TarionzCousin]

The Flatlands Campaign Setting.

It just seemed, I don't know...

Spoiler

Oh, come on! Did you really expect to see the obvious phrase here?

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Firelance:
OK, I admit my experience of Sigil is limited to two sessions. That and a fairly long explanation form a friend of mine who is quite a fan of it. (In fact it's his favourite setting.) It's just that what I played in and heard about struck me with a great big dose of 'ho-hum.' Maybe my friend just explained it poorly.

But hey, as I said in my post: everyone gets something different out of these things. And just because something doesn't work for me doesn't mean it can't work for someone else. You never know, my mate might bring me around on Sigil yet.

 

[FireLance]

Firelance:
OK, I admit my experience of Sigil is limited to two sessions. That and a fairly long explanation form a friend of mine who is quite a fan of it. (In fact it's his favourite setting.) It's just that what I played in and heard about struck me with a great big dose of 'ho-hum.' Maybe my friend just explained it poorly.

Um, did you intend to respond to Shemeska?

Although how you can mistake a phoenix with a holy, flaming lance for the King of the Cross-trade is beyond me...

 

[WarlockLord]

Again, settings with a lot of novels that you have to keep track of - FR, I'm looking at you. Settings filled with Gary Stu NPCs. Settings where much of the good stuff has been done - I'd never want to play an original character in the Star Wars RPG during the movies, for example, as Capn T the Space Pirate can't blow up the Death Star - Luke already did that. Too much of a generic fantasy setting. We can easily homebrew that.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Settings become interesting because of strong themes and ideas, so any setting that lacks strong central themes and ideas will end up feeling dull.

I know there are fans of it out there, but I never liked the Forgotten Realms simply because it never seemed to have any real strong themes. It might just be the horrible 3E FRCS which was my only major exposure to the setting, but it seemed less like a setting with strong theme and more like a giant mass of aimless detail.

Honestly, because of this principle I tend to find that smaller settings designed for very specific kinds of games tend to work much better than large, world-sized settings designed to encompass as many kinds of games as possible.

I mean, I like Eberron in large part because it focuses so much attention on the central core of the Five Nations and the Last War, so that it particularly emphasizes certain kinds of stories and campaigns in a way a more generic and open setting can't. This is also why I have tended to dislike any Eberron product that puts a lot of effort into detailing more peripheral regions of the setting like Riedra or Argonessen.

Ultimately, I am the kind of guy who likes to custom-build homebrew settings for each individual campaign, which probably says a lot about my taste in settings.

 

[rounser]

In a lot of ways, Eberron is the most quintessentially D&Dish setting out there.

If by that you mean 4E D&Dish, then I'd agree. It's pretty ridiculous to claim it's more D&Dish in the classic sense than settings like Greyhawk, Blackmoor or Mystara, though. Kitchen sinking in everything in 3E doesn't offer a one-way ticket to D&D quintessence (in fact, arguably it leads to the opposite).

 

[Jorunkun]

I thought Kingdoms of Kalamar was kind of bland. Of course, I can't provide any useful examples of why I found it bland because it was so unmemorable to me.

Couldn't agree more. To me, Kalamar is the very definition of a dull setting. Hundreds of pages on a generic fantasy world; all the usual stuff is there, it's huge and pretty well detailed ... but none of it ever adds up to anything special.

 

[FireLance]

Kitchen sinking in everything in 3E doesn't offer a one-way ticket to D&D quintessence (in fact, arguably it leads to the opposite).

Of course, just because everything that exists in D&D can exist in Eberron, it doesn't mean that it does (not if you don't want it to, anyway). See quote from the Eberron Player's Guide in sig, or the first of the ten important facts about Eberron in this excerpt.