D&D 5E Why FR Is "Hated"

[Cyrinishad]

I'll drop into this thread to throw my 2CP in about why I like the Forgotten Realms... and funny enough, it seems like some of what people dislike about it, are redeeming qualities in my mind.

1. I like that it's a kitchen-sink/patchwork setting with tons of lore for people to read through when we're not at the game table... it takes pressure off me as the DM to facilitate my player's ideas & creativity about their characters within the setting. I like that this means I am always able to find a way to say "Yes" to my player's ideas, and character concepts, without worrying about them monkey-wrenching the aesthetic of the campaign.

2. I like that there's lots of high-powered, named NPCs... My players characters are always the stars of the show, but they enjoy the prospect of an occasional cameo appearance, or name-drop, (or potential conflict) with NPCs that have had their own notable adventures. This makes them feel like they're part of a larger, shared world.

3. I don't feel any pressure to include any Lore that I don't want to include, nor am I bothered by contradictory Lore about the setting... Why? The prevailing assumption of the setting is the perspective of an imperfect narrator. The "canon" info the Realms source-books are the recollections of various "gods" and NPCs like Elminster & Volo that are all biased in their perspectives, have ulterior motives, and are notorious liars... So, I use the voluminous amounts of Lore more as rumors, myths, assumptions, obfuscations, and exaggerations about what might have happened. And the "Canon Lore" remains that way until parts of it are either affirmed or contradicted by the adventures & investigations of the PCs.

Anyway, that's my 2CP...

 

[DEFCON 1]

Why is FR hated? Because percentages.

What was the breakdown Mike gave way back when about how the percentages played out with campaign settings from their info? Like 55% homebrew, 35% Forgotten Realms, 10% all others?

Well, whatever it was... FR popularity is a minority percentage. Thus *most* people don't like it at all. But then again, even more people don't like Greyhawk. And Eberron. And Planescape. And Dark Sun.

But we can go even further than that. How many people hate Joe Schmuck's homebrew setting? 99.99999%. And what about Andrea Snowflake's homebrew setting? 99.99999% hate her setting too. Mainly cause nobody knows a goshdarned thing about it. So even though the "homebrew" percentage might be over half... there's no one single choice out of any of them. As a matter of fact, there's not a single campaign setting you can say is LIKED by more than 50% of the gaming populace.

So no... it should not be a surprise at all that the Realms are hated like they are. The only difference being... it's hated by fewer people than hate everything else.

 

[Yunru]

The "time of troubles" adventures were the biggest piece of 2e "story-driven adventures" crap that I've seen, a big reason I gave up playing a lot of D&D not long after 2e came out because adventures went from simple concise site-based dungeons or similar, to over-blown novels trying to be an adventure. In the "time of troubles" adventures, the PC's get to watch gods battle, led around by Elminster, from near Thay, to Waterdeep, with an NPC who is better than any PC and must accompany them because she turns into Mystra at the end of the 3rd adventure. And another NPC also turns emo mid-way through and by the end he's the new god of murder. Honestly, I read all three adventures again recently, and struggled to see where the actual "adventure" was, unless the players got bored and just randomly attacked NPCs or Gods, and even then of course the silly PC's can't win and yet they must be lead by the nose to see the scripted ending. So you see, that's one example of why some people don't like the FR. From what I figured out even in 1e days, that seems to be the Ed Greenwood style of DMing... (or if it's not, his real style doesn't come out in what he's got his name on).

You see, this is why I want to run a campaign set during the time of troubles. Because why can't the party Wizard become the new Mystra, or some weird magic-based god of murder? From the sounds of it though, the APs themselves stuck too close to the stations of cannon.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Mercule]

I'm with those who despise the Realms. I'd be more than happy to have a genie make the whole mess disappear from existence (yes, that sorta contradicts my above post -- deal with it).

Really, it's not the Realms, themselves, that I hate. It's their popularity/prominence.

I owned the gray box. I didn't love it and found it kinda cheesy/lame. But.... It's D&D and even teenage me didn't expect Shakespeare out of a D&D setting. It really just wasn't something I wanted to use, as a DM, but I played in a FR campaign for about a year. Whatever.

So, what changed it from "indifferent" to "hate"?

1) It's freaking everywhere. I just can't get away from it. Just like the Crossfit guy, I'm happy he's getting in shape, but be willing to discuss something else. I mean, we can't even have a Ravenloft adventure without putting Realms content into it*.

1a) Even before the Realms were the only published setting, it was the most prominent setting. It was really, really heavily promoted from the beginning**. It was prominent enough in 2E that making Greyhawk the "default setting" in 3E was a big deal. Even then, that was just lip service where the Realms still had way more content published and the adventures barely made reference to Greyhawk, if at all.

2) Drizzt. Not Drizzt, specifically, but the high portion of Mary Sue and/or "goofy" NPCs. By "goofy", I just mean NPCs I don't like. I've never liked Drizzt, but his trajectory from "annoying" to "die-die-die" is pretty much about over-exposure. I don't like the Harpers or, actually, the global nature of any of the Five Factions. I don't like Elminster. I don't like the personalities of the active gods. I actually can't think of any NPCs that I don't dislike -- not that I know that many.

3) Someone phrased it as "Encyclopedia Britannica". There's just too much stuff for me to "master" the setting. I know I don't have to master it to use it, but I've been in games using settings with large back stories (Star Wars, Realms, etc.) and seen players who knew more about the setting than the DM. Even if the player isn't acting like an ass, it can still cause issues when the player makes assumptions, innocently, about the setting and the DM hasn't reviewed that portion of the source. In many (most?) cases, someone who is well versed on a topic doesn't separate out the sources for their knowledge, they just have a bucket of knowledge and no way to even know where the lines are for what is and isn't "campaign canon". I've read several of the older novels (I really tried to like it) and can safely say that there's no way I'm reading more. I'm also not slogging through all the various source books, either. So, me running a Realms game is just setting myself up for pain***, should I ever have a player who cared enough for the choice to matter (which I think I do, but he's been very accepting of the fires of hell to which I've exiled his hopes).

4) The Realms steals everything and makes it more a part of the Realms than wherever it came from. Drow and Lolth started in Greyhawk, but they've somehow become part of the Realms identity such that, if D&D and the Realms ever divorced, most folk would probably expect the Realms to take the drow with it. Kara Tur was just the name of the implied setting in the 1E Oriental Adventures book, but it's now the name of the OA-type area of the Realms. While the plasticity of the Realms is pretty amazing, it's something of a cancer where it would appear that the Realms is not just using, but consuming, all the D&D IP. I probably hate the Realms most because it is threatening to become synonymous with D&D in a way no other setting ever has: not Mystara in BECMI (a setting I don't like any better than the Realms, but have no ill will towards) nor Greyhawk in AD&D.

* Yes, I understand that was, at least in part, to support AL play. Well, CoS wasn't an AL-specific adventure and wasn't labeled as an AL product. There are actual AL products and free AL material. The right way to handle the AL needs of CoS would have been to put out a web supplement with the AL hooks in it. Don't want it in the AL bucket? Put out a UA supplement. It would be great if it had some ideas for other settings, but not critical, in this context.

** The timing is just right that, right or wrong, it also has the appearance of TSR using the Realms to try to replace/scrub Greyhawk and other Gygax flavor from D&D, following his ouster.

*** I briefly toyed with getting the SCAG and declaring that we were going to use the Realms, but that only the information in the SCAG was canon and all other sources were to be explicitly ignored. If there was ever a need to know what was at an otherwise unmarked spot on the map, I'd make it up without any research. Ditto for anything outside the bounds of the SCAG -- not sure whether Thay was on the SCAG map or not, but it wouldn't exist if that map didn't show it and one shouldn't make any assumptions about it that weren't called out (if shown, but no mention of Red Wizards were made, I might turn it into a society run by Paladins, just because). Ultimately, I decided not to because it wouldn't actually fulfill anyone's needs other than a bit of sadism on my part.

 

[billd91]

There are good things about FR and I don't hate it, but I'm well and truly over it too. And for many of the same reasons that the OP and Mercule above pointed out.

1) Over played. It becomes like listening to the heavy rotation, top 40 radio station. Catchy tunes but you'll be clawing your ears out if you have to listen to it all day.

2) Too many ubiquitous powerful NPCs/Mary Sue characters around. That's partly a product of all the novels, partly a product of trying to give the supplements a common voice. Either way, it really wears on you. It's like talking at a party with the guy who's always dropping names of celebrities he knows or has gamed with or follows on Twitter.

3) Too often screwed with. As the main product line for a good chunk of TSR's and WotC's campaign-world efforts, a lot of big, earth-shattering stuff has happened to it, not all of which were good ideas.

 

[cmad1977]

FR is fine as long as you pretend that every major heroic character does not exist, or has already died, or for whatever other reasons does not interact with the world except to be an antagonist to the PCs.

FR is written to be a playground for other people's heroes, where other peoples stories are playing out. To use it yourself, you have to make sure that those stories go away.

Like I said upthread about FR only being a map to me. None of the NPCs exist if I use the FR and none of the 'canon' ever happened.


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[ccs]

In D&D/FR though the PCs are supposed to save the world which is exactly what the NPCs are doing too.

NPC = Non-Player-Character. I.E., a character played by I, the DM.
Now I don't know how you DM, but in my games NPCs only do what I decide they do. How they acted, what they did in some novel? It might be interesting & serve the novel. But that's not some script I'm beholden to.

 

[Derren]

NPC = Non-Player-Character. I.E., a character played by I, the DM.
Now I don't know how you DM, but in my games NPCs only do what I decide they do. How they acted, what they did in some novel? It might be interesting & serve the novel. But that's not some script I'm beholden to.

Sure you can decide that this is what happens, but then you have to answer the question of why they are not doing anything. And this doesnt just mean the super NPCs but also the numerous lvl 10+ do gooders which are all over Faerun.
Or you can make a contract with your players to never ever speak about this topic.
Either way you wouldnt have to do this if you used your own world.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*