D&D 5E Why FR Is "Hated"

[Lanefan]

Better/I] in what sense? I meant what I said - if a game provides options (in the case of D&D, say, a particular class choice) and you want to take that away, there's probably a cost. That's a prediction, not a judgement.

'Better' in that cost avoidance is inherently preferable to cost payment.

And I read it as not so much a judgement but a statement.

That said, I don't see removal of an option bearing any more cost than addition or change of an option. Nearly everyone tweaks the game to some extent (5e bakes this in, given that large swaths of the game are listed as optional). Yaarel just seems to want his-her own variety of tweaking to have already been done before acquiring the game...which, let's face it, none of us are likely to get unless we displace Mike Mearls and take the design helm ourselves.

Lanefan

 

[Yaarel]

Trying to explain - based on reading @Yaarel's posts - what I think s/he wants a monotheistic game to look like, namely (a) no clerics or distinctive miracle workers, and (b) an approach to resolution that permits the ingame events to be interpreted by the PCs, and by their players at the table who are making sense of the shared fiction, as expressions of divine will and providence made manifest through "ordinary" happenings.

As I've already posted, 2(a) is not something of personal concern to me as my fantasy games routinely have distinctive miracle workers. But 2(b) is interesting to me because I think it's a very important element in making play of a truly faithful PC viable (regardless of monotheism vs polytheism), and is something I often see ignored or denied on these boards.

By the way, Yaarel is a he.



The insistence on ‘objectively’ existing polytheism for the official campaign setting, creates many kinds of problems for other kinds of campaign settings. For examples.

The monsterization of the religions in the official setting. Compare, how player characters kill the ‘goddess’ of the Drow.

Interpretive faith as a feature of player authorship, is less possible. Rather, collective storytelling encourages the players to explain the significance of events in personal ways. Interpretive faith also works best for campaign settings that seek the verisimilitude of reallife cultures, where there are typically a diversity of religious traditions.

Support to easily run other kinds of campaign settings, is lacking.

I care about D&D. Yet the lack of alternatives to polytheism, turns me off.

 

[Selvarin]

By the way, Yaarel is a he.



The insistence on ‘objectively’ existing polytheism for the official campaign setting, creates many kinds of problems for other kinds of campaign settings. For examples.

The monsterization of the religions in the official setting. Compare, how player characters kill the ‘goddess’ of the Drow.

Interpretive faith as a feature of player authorship, is less possible. Rather, collective storytelling encourages the players to explain the significance of events in personal ways. Interpretive faith also works best for campaign settings that seek the verisimilitude of reallife cultures, where there are typically a diversity of religious traditions.

Support to easily run other kinds of campaign settings, is lacking.

The ability to appeal to a wider audience for D&D. Not everybody in our respective countries cares about or is interested in polytheism. It probably fails to appeal to the majority of the population.

Killing Lolth was decades ago, in 1E AD&D. While stats for avatars have been provided in some editions (such as 3rd Edition FR), avatar/god-statting has been set aside in later editions. If anything, deities have been moved further out of the limelight. So something like that today would be as it should be--an exception, and something quite unusual.

I'm not an expert but it seems in some Eastern religions the name of a god, goddess, or founder is more of a placeholder attached to a certain force or philosophy. What's stopping people from being creative and replacing D&D pantheons with philosophies from which 'clerics' draw their powers? What's stopping them from creating sects devoted to certain ideas? I don't feel like getting stuck in the endless "Why doesn't D&D support this from the get-go even though I can do it myself" circle of questioning but I'll put that out there anyway.

 

[Yaarel]

I'm not even sure if they want a game with monotheism since they want a version of D&D with no gods mentioned anywhere, that would mean no singular god as well.

Yaarel (he) wants the rules to have nothing to do with gods. At the same time, DMs can use whatever campaign setting they find interesting. Some will be monotheistic, some will be polytheistic, some will be other. Some will mix it up, like Eberron.

 

[cbwjm]

Yaarel (he) wants the rules to have nothing to do with gods. At the same time, DMs can use whatever campaign setting they find interesting. Some will be monotheistic, some will be polytheistic, some will be other. Some will mix it up, like Eberron.






*Unless this is like the No Homers club which is allowed to have one.

[/QUOTE]
Then just remove the gods from your setting. Just ignore references to them in the books. It really isn't difficult, they aren't hard coded into dnd.

 

[Yaarel]

What's stopping people from being creative and replacing D&D pantheons with philosophies from which 'clerics' draw their powers?

What discourages DM creativity?

The rules as written. Especially the rules that the players must consult, that contradict what the DM is trying to build.

The WotC legal enforcement, against the homebrew campaign settings that diverge from Forgotten Realms.

 

[billd91]

The WotC legal enforcement, against the homebrew campaign settings that diverge from Forgotten Realms.

If you're not going to publish, there's no legal enforcement against any kind of home-brew campaign you want.

 

[Yaarel]

Then just remove the gods from your setting. Just ignore references to them in the books. It really isn't difficult, they aren't hard coded into dnd.

It is very difficult for me to ignore the rules as written, when the flavor and mechanics and cosmology, endlessly refer to it.

 

[cbwjm]

It is very difficult for me to ignore the Cleric class, when it is the privileged healer of the gaming system.

You can still have the cleric class. They don't have to follow a god, just pick a domain and you're good to go. Instead they could be and avatar of the storm a sage or a philosophical healer, just as they could have been in past editions.

 

[Yaarel]

The Cleric class comes with too much setting-assumptions baggage.

The Class would be more useful its rules and descriptions were more open to the various kinds of settings, and various kinds of religious traditions that might happen in those settings.



Alternatively, maybe the Cleric is a campaign-specific class, like the way the Artificer class is specific to Eberron. If so, the Cleric is a specialty class for the Forgotten Realms/Planescape setting (5e seems to have merged them into the same setting). But if so, then the Cleric is no longer a core class. Make sure that Druid and Bard have optional builds that can heal equally well as the Cleric. Maybe even the Paladin can have an Oath that is a premiere healer, including all the healing spells True Resurrection at the high level, with bonuses to healing.