Where the Forgotten Realms lost me...

[JoeGKushner]

My problem with the book is it feels grossly incomplete. If you compare this to the 3.0 FRCS book, it's like this one was the children's version of something. The text density is vastly lighter, the detail is lighter, the utility is lighter. It's go generic that an experienced GM might as well throw some names on a map and go, "After the Godwars, things were different. As you adventure, you'll find out how different they were." Maybe it's me but I almost feel like this setting was written for the lolbat.

http://www.pvponline.com/2008/06/30/interlude-the-adventures-of-lolbat/

 

[Adlon]

/agreeswithjoe

It's definately FRCS Lite. I ran thru my Grey Box, and IT totally destroys the FRCG on content and immediate playability....as does the 3e book.

It's important to note :
IME, the overall appeal of the FRCS to most DM's, was the fact that you can be a lazy DM. I fit into this category. I work, come home, put some prep time into my game.

I want to work on the game session for the upcoming evening, not stat out NPC's, flesh out towns, populations, products and services available. With all the NPC's fleshed out already, in FR books and 3pp NPC compendiums/materials, getting a 7th lvl BBEG was a no brainer. Change name, few this or that in stat block, done. The FR material handled the geography/demographics, and most of the NPC's pertaining to towns/cities and the like.

So, to me, and MOST others I've come across using FR, it was the convenience, and the availability of materials for the FR, that was the initial appeal for many of us. These are the same reasons so many DISLIKE FR, and thats fine and dandy. If you have time/gumption to DIY, then thats great.

You can literally take the Old Grey Box, and the core books, start out with the Beast Tamers, and go for years, with no other material. Same for the 2e Box, though not as meaty as the Grey Box, and the 3e book. Technically, for the lazy DM, you're set.

No so with the FRCG. Comments I see are 'it's better, it's alot more open for ME to do things as a DM.

Nothing wrong there. Thats a DM of the other school, who has the time/gumption to do it him/herself. DM's who have traditionally passed on FRCS might just warm up to it now, as you have that massive open availability compared to previous versions.

For me, the book is terrible. Aside from my extreme dislike of WHAT they've done to the Realms I adopted years ago, the book, on its own as a CS, for me the lazy DM, is severely lacking, and the map is about the most horrible, rushed map I've ever seen. The preview of the Great Dale only promises more FR Lite in future products.

 

[MerricB]

My problem with the book is it feels grossly incomplete. If you compare this to the 3.0 FRCS book, it's like this one was the children's version of something.

For myself, I'm not fond of the 3E FRCS book at all - I find it ugly, and the font is way too small for easy reading. For a potential new DM of the Forgotten Realms, I think it's awful.

The 4e book is, at least, more readable. However, like the 3e book, it suffers from lack of focus.

Cheers!

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

LOL, I'm not alone in my thoughts

I think the 1st Relams boxed set is superb, as a note, it's artisitic style is very important in it's feel...that sepia tone look and borders is truly beautiful.
Feel/soul is enormously imporant.

For example, check the early Thieves World books, mmmm, flavour of a fantastic stew!
Same with Leiber's Newhon, Tolkein's Third Age, John Norman's early "Gor" books (before they became S&M weirdness, lol) etc.

The "feel" is far, far more important than the "crunch". The latter has to flow from the former, not the other way around!

Original Dark Sun, omg, that's fantastic!! Some unecessary crunch though (templars are just clerics, tough! deal with it, their bureacratic powers are nothing to do with their combat power as an individual), but the "feel" is delicious.

Spelljammer and Planescape were fantastic for flipping your mind with new ideas/settings.

I'm sorry, the 4th ed setting stuff so far, has been ABYSMAL, as far as I'm cocnerned, totally bland, boring, off-the-shelf blahsville
Note though, I love 4th ed game itself.
it's very annoying as the adventures have been great.
Also, there's no need ot destroy a setting to fit new mechanics in.

For the Realms it's easy, just say dragonborn have began appearing from ...some logicak place and tieflings have been around for some time anyway, just make them *rare*.
And well, that's about it, really.

Fluff != Crunch.

I also agree that detailing a setting too much ruins it, for some. I love the Realms in the 1st boxed set..bam! huge area, lightly detailed, full of mystery, woot!
Some add ons were great: City System for Waterdeep (damn those maps and tables were an almost sexual delight for a DM, lol), and Undermountain..hey, one of the best settings of all time.

But then...novels, some of which were dire, kind of got in way...Drizzt is a great character, but to me, Drow on the surface are rare as heck as most folk kill 'em on sight.
Drow are 90% thoroughly evil shmucks, 9.999% "CN" self-preservation artists.

and the Time of Torubles, barf! only the FR comic did that any good, if any of you have read it, bat that it was an excuse to have a very poor series of modules, have a complete non-believable no-user osme how usurp three gods, yeah, right!!!

Then with everything being detailed you feel little room for manouver.

Over all, as a DM, it just felt like I was being forced to accept all the things :/

the 4th ed changes to the Realms are even worse than the mess TSR made of Dark Sun (killing half the sorceror kings etc to fit a novel seriesplotline, grrr, and the official history sucked!).

Ah well.
I'll stick with the original FR, Spelljammer, Dark Sun and Undermountain sets, thank you very much

And note, I'd be VERY happy to buy more Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Planescape stuff, if they do it well.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

My problem with the book is it feels grossly incomplete. If you compare this to the 3.0 FRCS book, it's like this one was the children's version of something. The text density is vastly lighter, the detail is lighter, the utility is lighter. It's go generic that an experienced GM might as well throw some names on a map and go, "After the Godwars, things were different. As you adventure, you'll find out how different they were." Maybe it's me but I almost feel like this setting was written for the lolbat.

http://www.pvponline.com/2008/06/30/interlude-the-adventures-of-lolbat/

I highly doubt that experienced GM were the target group - most of those have the 3e book, me included. And it´s nice how "lighter" can mean "for dumb internet guys" or "children". This is one of the core problems of the RPG industry: "big friggin´ book with loads of fluff" means "good", not being willing to read that means "dumb." Problem is, there are fewer and fewer people who have the time to read much background fluff.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I highly doubt that experienced GM were the target group - most of those have the 3e book, me included. And it´s nice how "lighter" can mean "for dumb internet guys" or "children". This is one of the core problems of the RPG industry: "big friggin´ book with loads of fluff" means "good", not being willing to read that means "dumb." Problem is, there are fewer and fewer people who have the time to read much background fluff.

Your statement confuses me. If poeple have less time to read, then I'd imagine they'd have less time to create. The FR 4e version is so light that outisde of the initial adventure, everything is a fill in the wide open blanks. Hell, the FR 2nd ed book Forgotten Realms Adventurers, with all of it's cities and maps, blows this thing out of the water.

 

[Adlon]

Novels... always a big point of contention....

My take on the FR novels is this...

I don't look for or expect literary excellence. I expect and look for good stories.

The guy around the campfire spinning yarns may not do it well, in an entertaining way, but you can easily still be intrigued by the material itself....

Thats me and the FR novels. None is ever intended to be canon necessarily. Some never even comes CLOSE to affecting my campaign in any way.

But what I do look for and enjoy, is HOW these NPC's interact with everything around them. We can guess from the sourcebooks, and campaign setting writeups. But, I get insight as to HOW that NPC acts, thinks, REacts, ambitions, goals, etc.....

Some were pure bombs from a literary standpoint. Most of the Authors were/are game designers first......authors second.

But, take the Drizzt series. Ok, we all knew Entreri was a butt hole, but a dangerous butthole. In the series, we got a look into WHY, and how exactly he IS a butthole.

Spellfire by Ed....

in the Grey Box, meet the Knights of Myth Drannor. Well written up, the movers and shakers given good page space in the books......

But, in the novel, we got a GREAT look at the Knights, Elminster, saw a Dracolich (good insight for an RPG encounter) , had Cult of the Dragon NPC's and THEIR personalities....

All good insight.

Absolutely great for when the PC's go left, instead of right, and decide to perhaps finally go past that first sign on a narrow walkway to a squat tower in a pastoral burg in the Dales.

Or decide to hit Eveningstar, and perhaps interact with Tesseril Winter.

We learn their thoughts, as per the author's vision of course, their vulnerabilities (human element) , so IF you don't want to do all this personification yourself, you don't have to.

One thing I've found in 25 years... the Novel information is more easily retained than the actual game stats/specs/demographics are.

I don't remember if Bruenor Battlehammer is a 6th lvl, 23rd lvl, whatever.... and if his Axe of Mess You Up is +1, +3, Vorpal.....???
I would need to look that up.
But, on demand, I can personify him from the acceptable-to-me vision I gleaned from the novels.

You just decide if the authors representation fits your minds eye's version.

Than, if EVER you need Bruenor to appear in game, the slide into his personna should be VERY easy.

Elminster can sound to some like a cackling fool of awesome might in some sourcebook writeups... in Spellfire, we discover he is most certainly NOT a cackling fool.

And, we get alot of insight as to how he is to deal with, how he reacts, how he casts and what?

They work for me....

 

[Vocenoctum]

Your statement confuses me. If poeple have less time to read, then I'd imagine they'd have less time to create. The FR 4e version is so light that outisde of the initial adventure, everything is a fill in the wide open blanks. Hell, the FR 2nd ed book Forgotten Realms Adventurers, with all of it's cities and maps, blows this thing out of the water.

I find the new "lighter" style to be bland. I also think it misses the point of RPG's since IMO it requires a certain level of ability to read & process information. There aren't many "dumb" RPGers simply because the game isn't the style they'd want to play ANYWAY. It's silly to me to "dumb down" material to make it easy for Average Joe to slip right into, since Average Joe won't play the damn thing anyway!

But, whatever.

 

[Vocenoctum]

I do have to wonder one thing: How much of that 1E Grey Box arose from play, but instead arose from Ed's copious boxes and boxes and BOXES of notes that he wrote for his enjoyment, and Jeff Grub et.al. later interpreted for DM consumption.

I think people underestimate others work on the 1e FR also. D&D products have always benefited from a diverse team that could work togethor. They need a common "goal", but one voice only tells one story.

I mean, as a more recent example, Eberron was based on Baker's stuff, but the finished product is a group thing and better for it. (Though Keith Baker has many great ideas for stuff, no doubt.)

But, they need to keep a tighter reign on freelancers and such. Some of the books they put out for Eberron really conflicted with the Eberron setting, imo.

FR suffered for that, I don't know how far novel writers drifted from the intent of things, but their influence was a pain in the rear.

(Dragonlance was the worst abused of the bunch. I dropped it last year when it became clear that the batch of books coming out for it was a random assortment that had no idea of what DL had been.)

In other words, what FR tends to lose a little bit of, with every new edition, is the touch of Ed Greenwood. Even when they make sure that with every new edition he keeps a hand in it, I have to wonder how much of him is really in it. Maybe someone who haunts Candlekeep might know if he's spoken on his level of input in 4e's Realms material very much.

I don't think it's so much that, as the loss of FR's modularity.
1e had a core setting with hints of stuff elsewhere, then those areas were expanded on later. Mulhorand was a great place, but it wasn't needed in the core.

3e brought everything into the core book, to it's detriment I think. It became so "huge" and "overdetailed" because it included stuff that wasn't needed for most games. It's why I didn't like the complaint about the "realms fan", it seemed to assume you needed to know a lot to run a cormyr game or a dalelands game, and I just never found that to be true.

4e just smashed things together in a mishmash of "kewlnew!" and what they figured was the old core. The main diversity of style if between old stuff and new, rather than new & new. For the most part, fans of the new material are people that didn't like FR before, and folks that like FR before hate it...

So, 4e FR, the perfect FR for those that don't like FR!

 

[JohnRTroy]

Yeah, I agree with Henry.

Ed's not perfect, he wrote a horrible module once (Don't remember the name, it dealt with the Moonshaes--it didn't really have a lot of guidance for the DM, it needed to be fleshed out). But he is a great campaign designer and I've loved his modules and novels--and especially the early Dragon articles--Dragon was a great font of knowledge from Gygax, Greenwood, and Moore.

I feel the best campaign settings have the touch of the individual authors. I've always liked Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms better than all the other realms, which more or less have the smell of "designed by committee". Good campaign settings take years to develop and flesh out, and require a lot of logic to prevent plot holes. Also, if the original creator dies or is removed, a lot of time others "shake things up" just because they can.

It's why I can't get into Greyhawk ever again. Gary was forced out of TSR. The only real Greyhawk for me was the original folios and what occured in the Gord books. There was a long period of "stupid stuff" (WG7, Mika Oba, Greyhawk Wars), then some people who wanted to treat Greyhawk with respect but still (at least to me) capture the magic.

I fear in the game industry too many consumers are more concerned about the trademark than give respect to individual authors.

If Ed Greenwood ever leaves or is kicked out, that's the end of FR for me.