"There's too much info!"---Don't use it. If all you need are the maps and some general ideas on what's what, boom. You're in.
"There's too many high-level characters!"--Easily remedied. You may still dislike the ones published in 'canon' but, again, it's easily ignored.
At which point are we no longer using Forgotten Realms?
If I ran a game where the players started in the Oasis town of Waterdeep where the last true dragon held off the Sorcerer-King’s armies from Thay… is that the Forgotten Realms?
I’ve got Waterdeep, Thay, evil mages, is that enough?
Probably not, being an oasis city means deserts, I’m not using the right map.
So, I’ll pull out the map. Game takes place in the Port City of Waterdeep which is ran by a Council of Gnomish inventors who have good trade relations with the Kender Lords of the Sword Mountains. The main villains will be the Lich Gondendes and his armies which reside in the Kryptgarden Forest.
Is it a realms game?
For the argument, a lot of people will say yes, of course it is, but no one who is asked if they want to play a Forgotten Realms game will think of this when they are asked. It isn’t really a Realms game, or even really based in the Realms.
The argument of “You can just ignore everything and it is still a Realms game” means one of two things to mean.
1) You care so little about the setting that it doesn’t matter what actually happens, in which case that is a poor reason to want to like a setting
2) You are just trying to win the argument.
You have to know something about the Realms to claim you are running a Realms game, and once you accept you have to know something, you really need to learn a lot to make it work. If instead you just ignore everything and do what you want, well, that’s fine... what about this setting makes it worth using then? IF it is so easy to just toss everything to the side... why use any of it at all then?
I have been ruminating about something as of late, particularly following the posts about the frustration of binary choice that Forgotten Realms represents. When people say how D&D 5E is not just Forgotten Realms because the books mention other settings, how would that appear to someone completely new to D&D? Someone who has never seen D&D before 5th Edition? Would this new player (either a GM or player to-be) be able to pick up a 5E book to gain an adequate basis of knowledge for Forgotten Realms? Likely. This endeavor is further aided by the published 5E adventures that are set in the world. What about when Greyhawk, Krynn, Eberron, Planescape, or Dark Sun are mentioned in the published materials? How does one get a grasp of these settings from the published materials? What does it look or sound like when these materials are mentioned without any supplemental publications that anchor the setting for them? What are these places? Who are these names they mention? Who are these faiths at the back of the PHB? What are these settings even like or about? This is far less of a problem for Forgotten Realms. It's the de facto default lens through which the game is viewed. SCAG. The majority of published adventures. Adventurer's League. Even Greyhawk's classic dungeons (and characters) have been sacked and pillaged for the glory of Forgotten Realms. This is the privilege that Forgotten Realms enjoys. Other settings may be mentioned, but there is virtually no published support for them for any new or returning player.
If only someone would invent GOOGLE....
Because that actually helps?
Seriously, if your first introduction to Dungeons and Dragons was picking up Storm King’s Thunder… how does the Google solve the problem of having no way to run a game in Dark Sun or Eberron.
Sure, if you saw the name and got curious enough you google and find a wiki page that gives you some basics. And you think that’s cool… so you, brand new player of 3 months, goes out, buys all the old 4e or 2e or both sets of Dark Sun and converts all of the material you need into 5e…
I seriously doubt it.
More than likely, you Google it, learn a little bit, realize it doesn’t exist in 5e and say “Oh, well I’ll wait until DnD releases some new content for it, then I’ll play a game there.” And at the rate things are going that is not going to happen.
We are fast approaching 3 years of gaming, and the only place you can buy 5e material for is the Forgotten Realms. I’m not counting Barovia or Ravenloft because our new player who does not spend time on these forums probably has no clue that Ravenloft is a separate setting. I don’t hate the Realms, I don’t care enough about them to hate them, but I can see where a lot of people are getting angry about the fact that the Realms are strangling everything else out of existence.
“Are your books on your shelves being destroyed?”
No, they don’t exist in the first place. I own zero setting books for any DnD setting (except for Forgotten Realms) because after buying the Core set for 4e the only other DnD books I have ever purchased are 5e products. My 5e material for Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Eberron, et. all does not exist. I’ve never bothered to give those settings more than a cursory glance because I am on these forums enough to see people talking about them. If that trend continues the people who care about those settings aren’t going to exist either, because there are no new players for those settings if nobody ever produces content for them.
That is where a majority of Realms hate comes from I think, the fact that it is preventing other settings from getting any attention besides a blurb telling DMs “Oh yeah, you can set this is Eberron if you want, we won’t stop you” to which most new DMs are like, “Great, no idea what Eberron is, glad other people can have fun with non-DnD products” because that is what it seems like to them.