Why *Dont* you like Forgotten Realms?

[Dausuul]

Kitchen-sink fantasy turned up to 11. Way too much lore. Ridiculous parade of world-altering catastrophes (not as bad as Dragonlance, but still). Too many powerful good-aligned NPCs. A touch of squick any time I think about Elminster's sex life and its likely relation to Ed Greenwood's personal fantasies.

And finally, no reason to like the place. It's a lot of bland, tired pastiches of various fantasy worlds, jammed together. If I'm going to run a game in a pastiche world, I might as well make my own and choose the source material that most appeals to me--I can rip off Tolkien or Robert E. Howard just as well as the next guy.

 

[Barastrondo]

When I was in college, Forgotten Realms really inspired me to build my own world. In high school I just ran out of modules, no continuity, just something to do on special occasions. But the FR hardback that came out inspired me to build a world and a campaign, and the way they zoomed in on specific areas taught me that the big advantage of "kitchen sink fantasy" is that you can do highly thematic and singular campaigns and set them all in the same world.

It would be hypocritical of me to say I don't like the Forgotten Realms. I don't follow it or use it, but that's because it basically inspired me to pretty much do my own thing, only attuned to my own personal preferences. Published settings are still good to steal inspiration from, but homebrew worlds are where I like to play when the name of the game is fantasy.

 

[Jor-El]

I can echo what a lot of people have already said.

1. I like the original gray boxed set, and many of the supplements that followed it.

2. Eventually however, it got waaaay too detailed. I didn't feel comforatable running a game there for fear of treading on continuity, or worrying about retcons down the road. Too much detail is not a good thing.

3. Didn't like the changes made for the Time of Troubles.

4. Don't like the over-powered NPC's and the HIGH FANTASY flavor of 2E on. Every small town shouldn't have a 20th level Archmage in residence, or Farmers with magical plows.

5. Definately don't like the post-Spellplague Realms. I hate when a setting gets re-concepted like that. I hated what they did with Krynn after Dragons of Summer Flame, I hate when they re-boot or re-start a Comic Book Universe, and I hate when an established line of novels or movies do it. I want my continuity dang it!

But I really dig the original Realms. I'd run a game from the Gray Box any day.

 

[Celebrim]

I hate to be this harsh given that Ed is probably a great DM, but since I can't lie either...

1) Very large portions of the setting appear to have the simple schtick of being the simplified analog of some real world location, mythology or culture. But even that doesn't really capture the problem, because this isn't HARN World or Birthright with complex takes on real world cultures. It's barely even the 'Known World' with its clear pastiches. As someone else put it so well, "It's high fantasy at it's worst, most boring, and most cliche. Forgotten Realms is not so much a high fantasy campaign setting based on medieval Europe as it is a high fantasy campaign setting based on high fantasy campaign settings."
2) The world doesn't appear to have been the product of any deep world building. It looks like a bottom up world. The geography and climate is haphazard. As such, it's really no more sophisticated or interesting than an average world building DM's world and in many cases much less so. The only difference is its published and therefore has had more time spent providing minor (and usually irrelevant) details.
3) It's got an incredibly dumb pantheon of dieties and it seems utterly unreasonable that anyone would be motivated to worship the pack of bland shallow and uninteresting beings out of genuine piety. I mean, boiled down to its core dieties you have a 'God of Paladins', a 'God of Rangers', a 'God of Magic-Users', a 'God of Barbarians', a 'God of Thieves', a 'God of Fighters', a generic catch all 'God of Adventurers', and even a 'God of Clerics' (who appropriately has uber-cleric followers in 3e). Then you have the snearing curled mustache evil versions of the above. It's a pantheon strongly tied to the D&D meta-game, and honestly I can't think of a single gaming pantheon that is less interesting. Even the Order of the Stick has a more interesting cosmology.
4) I've never seen any setting more grostesquely inflicted with 'DM PC's'. Eleminster is just the most famous example of the general trend of 'these NPC's will always be cooler than you are' which permeates the entire setting, but there are many other ones equally as bad. This impression is only strengthened by the innumerable second edition supplements and rule books designed to enforce that core truth.
5) What is true for its pantheon and the 'DM PC's' is true to one extent or the other about everything in the setting. While FR did force me to question the long held assumption that 99% of the world realistically had to be either 0th or 1st level, even after holding that idea up to a candle it still could not justify every innkeeper being a retired 10th level fighter and every village having at least one NPC of 9th to 14th level. FR suffers from tremendous level inflation, and in general FR NPC's of every sort are about twice the level of NPC's found in every prior setting. Taking the numbers and dividing by two helps alot, and is pretty much essential for any NPC inflicted with 'coolness'. FR didn't create the general trend of number inflation that D&D has suffered from for 40 years now, but it certainly helped push the idea that bigger numbers are inherently cooler and better than smaller ones - even ironicly in FR's case that a high level PC is relatively weaker to the rest of the setting than in any other published setting. I mean there are usually several 20th level characters in every town with more than 20,000 inhabitants. The splat books are filled with 15th-20th level fighters that are 7 feet tall, wield two swords, and have roughly 18/00 strength (or higher!). It's utterly ridiculous.
6) The quality of material published for the FR setting varies from the juvenile to the amateurish. Just how many truly interesting, gamable, or mature modules have been published for FR? The DL modules for all there flaws are less railroady, more sophisticated, and have a better setting than any thing published for FR. Any good campaign that occurs in the FR does so by accident and says more about the talents of the DM (and his willingness to throw out the cannon) than it does of the deep measure of thought (or lack of it) that went into the FR.
7) I'm going to disagree with those that say its 'too detailed'. FR lavishes most of its details on the major cities. The large amount of detail associated with the major cities is IMO largely welcome especially if you are going to do a campaign with alot of travel. But, in between the 'points of light' in the places where you might actually you know be adventuring, its a wasteland with hardly more detail than 'some monsters of this type are found here'. Most of the FR map is absolutely empty, and this was demonstrated to me when we actually tried to campaign in the FR. While the city maps are very nice on one level, they constitute a very small portion of what you'd like to have for a 'ready made setting'. Given the huge amount of information published on the FR, you'd think that it would be quite easy to run a campaign in the FR without much of the basic preperation of mapping and so forth. But in fact, you've got tons of information on the interior of inns, on the politics of far flung cities, but almost no information about what adventures actually do when they aren't kicking down a brew or hobnobbing with NPC's far more powerful than they will likely ever be and virtually nothing like a usuable module. Compare with virtually every other setting where the attention, time and energy of world building is primarily lavished on places for the players to adventure.

 

[Saeviomagy]

DMPCs are pretty much never good.

Ones that outright break the rules are worse.

 

[Festivus]

I was playing in the Living Forgotten Realms setting until they changed how that all worked and drove me away. I await January to see how the "reboot" looks for that. It was what was available at the time. Now there are more options open to me.

Regarding Spellplague... it's just yet another world shattering event... yawn. Oh look, another one is coming too, oh no, it's the Abyssal Plague... yawn.

The big dislikes for me are:

1. The players are small fish in a pond with some very big "hero" fish in it already was one of the things I didn't like about the setting.
2. There are novels about the setting, giving people preconceived opinions about things in the setting, leaving little wiggle room.

 

[Festivus]

(double post --- wierd)

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Some of the reasons I've heard are pretty ridiculous "I don't like Elminster", seems to be the funniest, just because it's so easy to just not use a specific NPC if you don't like them, and because they come up so rarely anyways, unless the DM builds his campaign specifically to make use of them.

Insulting other peoples' opinions isn't a good way to generate discussion.

Sure, you can just write out Elminster, but then you're making a big change to the Realms.

For people here.
1. Do you avoid Forgotten Realms products?

Some of the novels are good. I avoid any with Chosen of Mystra in them.

2. Do you like either Pre or Post spellplague only, and if so which one and why?

Both have their charms.

3. What Don't you like about Forgotten Realms?

Too many high-powered magical good-aligned NPCs with non-specified but ridiculous powers. Not just magical ones either. They're all incredibly intelligent and charismatic (not surprising, the authors have months to write a novel), have vast resources that would make S.H.I.E.L.D. jealous and run their own spy networks. They all know ancient lore that no one else would know. The good guys are so "overpowered" (not (just) in combat terms*) the bad guys never stand a chance. Sure they can make mistakes, but never the same kind the PCs make.

And not only is the god of magic a main character in the old setting, but she's good-aligned! (Dragonlance, at least, did this right by having three of them, one of each alignment.)

Sometimes the CoM novels seems like bad James Bond parody novels, but only worse; Bond can't teleport, and he still has limitations. And if something bad happens to him, Elminster's Evasion or a goddess will not literally save his life.

So in short, novels featuring important good-aligned characters damaged the setting. You can throw them out, but then it's not really the Realms.

*In fact, in 3e the Chosen of Mystra were wimps, ruleswise, compared to their 2e counterparts, but that's in part because people tried to convert them as "closely" as possible. (They all have insanely high stats that they "rolled" in 2e, not counting the Constitution boost, but no stat-boosting items, and their item selections usually suck, too.) But their rules combat power isn't the real issue.

I should point out I'm only complaining about a few subseries or authors, it's just too bad the Elminster and Friends subseries is one of the most important. (Also, I will complain endlessly about Elaine Cunningham. Drow shouldn't get to slap Lolth in the face and get away with it.) The six-part drow "Dissolution" series was not only pretty well-written, but the drow were actually evil! (Well, most of them. None were good.) And I really liked the Erevis Cale trilogy that I read, and several others too.

 

[Dragonbait]

I know this thread was for people who do not like the Realms, but I think that since I have a love/hate relationship with it I could post.

1. Do you avoid Forgotten Realms products?
No. The setting has become such generic D&D that I have no problems removing the Forgotten Realmsian references and using it elsewhere without it losing any flavor or purpose as I do with the inferred setting of the core 3E or 4E creatures (Oerth and PoL respectively).

2. Do you like either Pre or Post spellplague only, and if so which one and why?
I flip-flop. I like the idea of having a setting that I can pick up and just tell people "make characters" and I'll see cultures referenced without me having to push a player to do so. Pre Spellplauge is this to my groups. Post Spellplague has some nice differences and changes in the setting that I like. It amps up the weirdness levels that exist in most modern fantasy settings. And it's just different enough that I feel I can add my own touches and the setting police wont come and take me away.

3. What Don't you like about Forgotten Realms?
Been there Done that. A lot of the older material had the players following in the footsteps of previous characters. I've always been a fan of the PCs exploring someplace completely new and untouched. That is not the norm for the Realms unless I go to the underdark of to the jungles of Chult. It also created the illusion that people were much more worldly than they really were supposed to be. Would a mercenary leaving Cormyr for the first time know much about Amn, let alone the politics of Halruaa? The map shows a HUGE area, but does that mean PCs should know what lies beyond every mountain?

People complain that cultures in the Realms resemble real-world cultures. I don't mind that, but I would like to see some more differences. I want to know how a soldier from Tethyr, Cormyr, Amn, and the like differ. How do the people dress in the different areas? I've never seen a book that covers that. Even the art shows much of the same, aside from the rare fantasy-Middle Eastern or fantasy-Mongolian image. It seems everyone wears the same chainmail, carry the same longswords and the same shields.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Why I dislike FR:

Elminster
and
Drizz't

But, once you get those two Mary Sues out of the way, it's not that bad of a setting. Although as others have pointed out, it feels rather bland and generic these days.

I'm not saying that every setting needs to be some crazy over-the-top wahoo weirdland, but FR just doesn't feel as fresh as it could. (Although 4e / the Spellplague did help mix things up a little bit.)

I do play Living Forgotten Realms, and I own both of the 4e FR books, so I clearly don't dislike the setting enough to avoid it altogether. I just don't think it's the be-all end-all.