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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8136555" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I disagree. There hasn't been enough time for anything like the KT Asteroid--we're still barely into the Cambrian period as far as tabletop games are concerned--and the things closest to it don't include the Forgotten Realms as a setting. Like I said before, if we're talking about the evolution of the game:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Greyhawk was the implied setting up until 4e, which created its own setting--it's only been with 5e, and thus the past 6 years, that FR has been the default setting of D&D. It's hard to argue that Greyhawk's influence is that far away when a mere fifteen years ago its gods were still the ones listed in the official PHB.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">FR hasn't been a particular driver of rules content or its evolution, it's been a driver of novel content and NPCs. Many of whom are roundly disliked by active players because they cause such difficulties for writing adventures set in that world. Sure, they make popular novel characters, but setting-wise? Not so much.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Though direct reprints of old adventures are not common, translations of old adventures into new formats (some of them re-skinning things to shove them into FR) continue to come from Gygax's work. Every edition has featured key Gygaxian plotlines, like the Temple of Elemental Evil, brought into current rules.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The OSR movement is still going strong and had a huge influence on the playtest period of 5th edition. You can't do OSR without recognizing the debt owed to Gygax and his personal style of running the game. The whole "rulings not rules" concept is straight out of Gygax's playbook.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Great Wheel cosmology has become the default, and it is absolutely "Gygaxian Naturalism" to a T. There were alternative cosmologies, but they were either completely supplanted (3e's unexplained World Tree) or sutured into the "new" Great Wheel (4e's World Axis with its Feywild and Shadowfell etc.)</li> </ul>To a very real and demonstrable extent, Gygax remains a significant influence on the rules, playstyle, and worldbuilding of D&D. Greenwood has had a significant aesthetic influence, and his "big NPCs, great heroics, and high fantasy" style has certainly become much more popular than Gygax's "Knaves & Kobolds" style of gritty murder-hole heistery evolving into feudal lords and wizard-tower-owners. But I'd argue that that's much more because most people want to emulate their favorite fantasy fiction (which tends to be high fantasy today, far more like Tolkien, le Guin, and Lewis, rather than the Moorcock, Burroughs, and Howard that were such big influences on Gygax). We have far more exposure to LotR and Narnia than to Conan the Barbarian--and that hugely affects the gaming narrative.You actually see a surprisingly similar trend in the video gaming space. Many of the early RPG-like and especially MMORPG games were much more brutal, hard-nosed experiences where bad stuff could just HAPPEN to you, with little guidance, lots of scrabbling for resources or doing incredibly obscure things to advance, and little in the way of story outside of the loot players acquired or the dungeons they'd conquered. Games like Ultima Online and EverQuest took TONS of lessons from early-edition D&D, and it shows in their user experience: dropping equipment on death, losing XP, zones with sharp changes in monster difficulty for the sake of "naturalism," etc.Then World of Warcraft came along. A little more flamboyant, far more story-heavy. And in its wake, that's what MMOs have become; people expect a main scenario quest, some amount of voice acting, at least a token effort at over-arching ideas beyond just "kill monsters get loot." Games like Final Fantasy XIV have been roundly praised for their excellent storytelling and acting. "Adventurer" in the video-game sphere has largely shifted away from gritty mercenaries overcoming self-chosen challenges, and directly to "big damn heroes saving the day and getting some sweet gear to boot." And the rise of games like Dark Souls was, at least in part, a desire to return to both the gritty self-chosen-challenge playstyle, as well as the brutal difficulty experience that many remember from yesteryear.To place all credit for the "hero-ization" and high-fantasy lean of modern D&D play at Greenwood's feet is...extremely generous. To further deny Gygax credit for the ways he continues to influence the game despite not even owning the brand for 20 years (and, well, his passing in 2008) is nothing short of special pleading.Does Greenwood matter for how we play D&D today? Yeah, I'd call that pretty much inarguable. Has Greenwood's work defined more of the way we play today than Gygax's work? No, I don't really think so. Maybe in another 10 years, when you have a generation of fully-adult gamers who have never known anything but Forgotten Realms? Even then I'd call BS simply because of the continuing influence of the OSR movement.</blockquote>

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