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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 4166360" data-attributes="member: 22779">Hrm, how about the entire cosmology?  Every proper noun?  Demogorgon?  Fraz-Urb-Lu (sp)?  Magic items.  Shoes of Fflagngngng (sp).  Racial relations in the PHB.  EVERY module produced by TSR for 1e, other than Dragonlance was specifically set in Greyhawk.  That's off the top of my head.So, you have pretty much every supplement for several years specifically placed in one campaign setting, the cosmology of the game and pretty much all the monsters associated with that cosmology linked directly to Greyhawk.  Even books like Oriental Adventures were linked to Greyhawk.But, there were no ties to GH in 1e?  Are you kidding?My issue with world building is that it becomes a process for its own sake.  If you look at all those world building columns and whatnot, the basic idea of world building is that you either from top down or bottom up, design a world independent of the campaign you are going to run in that world.  So, you work out the races, and the history, and the geography and the NPC's and this and that, and THEN you finally get to start making adventures.If you were to follow those DungeonCraft articles in Dragon (and Dungeon) from beginning to end, you're looking at tens, if not hundreds, of hours of work before you even begin to start developing a campaign.If I have a core setting, I can skip that part and get right to developing a campaign.Now, I do agree 100% that the core setting should not be rock solid tied to the mechanics to the point where it becomes more or less unthinkable to play that game in any other setting.  Star Wars, in its various iterations, is an example of a game where the mechanics are locked to the setting.  I wouldn't use the Star Wars system to do a Farscape style campaign, or a Battlestar Galactica, or a Dune or a Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.  There are much better systems for that.  Star Wars does Star Wars.  That's fine.D&D should be able to do a broader range of settings.  So, you cannot make the mechanics TOO strongly tied to the core setting.  OTOH, you need enough material so that the core setting actually hangs together.  3e failed in this.  The core setting material in the 3e books wasn't enough to make a campaign setting out of.  2e didn't even give you that much.  It flat out tried not to have a campaign setting at all.  It also failed because it carried too much baggage over from 1e, which was very closely tied to a specific campaign setting.1e, and better yet, B/E/C/M/I D&D did it right.  They gave you a pretty solid core setting with all sorts of tidbits and whatnot that you could play right out of the box.That's what I want in 4e.  I want to be able to read the books, smack together a campaign outline and a first adventure and start play.  I don't want to spend hours and hours detailing a fantasy setting.  I have zero interest in doing so.  If someone else wants to, more power to them.  But, why should I be forced to do the work so that they don't have to, when they are going to do the work anyway?</blockquote>

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