D&D 5E Why FR Is "Hated"

[Mirtek]

There are zero rules on what gods can do. Therefore gods can do nothing. No rule says a god can heal, bless, raise the dead. A cleric can, we have rules for that, but as far as the rules are concerned the gods are just battery packs.

Actually all editions released rules on deities at some point (even if 2e's were just "can do basically anything they want"). 5e deities (based on Tiamat's stats) are the most powerless deities of any editions. Tiamat is indeed unable to do all you listed (despite her fluff in the MM mentioned her feared spellcasting power, her statblock is missing this completely)

Edit: Now that I think about it, 4e deities could do just as little as 5e deities

 

[hawkeyefan]

One thing about the Driz'zt novels. I've only really read the original trilogy, and in book 1 Driz'zt kills an adult dragon and loots it's hoard, that's where he gets his iconic twin scimitars.

So, yeah, he's only saving towns and regions and stuff, but we start off with soloing a dragon in its lair, which even back in the day was something only a higher level character would live through. He may not get around very much, but his territory is a place where you know an incredibly powerful adventurer lives and patrols.

Actually, he is not alone, but Wulfgar is with him, and it's Wulfgar, armed with a pretty potent magical weapon, that gets the killing blow (he shatters a large stalactite which falls and crushes the dragon's neck). Drizzt does get one magic scimitar from the dragon's treasure hoard, and it is a big factor in them winning because without it, he was not able to harm the dragon. They had gone into the cave to kill the creature so that Wulfgar could take a trophy to show his strength, which would allow him to challenge the leader of his tribe, but the dragon turned out to be a much stronger enemy than they expected. In the first book, it was still obvious that Wulfgar was the original hero of the story, and Drizzt was intended to be the sidekick....but that quickly changed.

But beside those details, I get your point. But I also think it's made clear that this is not the start of Drizzt's adventuring career, but that he's been around at least a bit. So I didn't mind that at all. It was also shown later in the book that he was definitely outclassed by Errtu, the balor demon that served the Crystal Shard, and only managed to win because the magic scimitar Drizzt had swiped protected him from the demon's flames, and also did more damage to the demon.

Don't get me wrong....I wouldn't say the books are without a bit of Gary Stuishness or whatever you want to call it....but I think that peoples' perceptions of Drizzt are often not based on what's in the books, but rather his presence in pop-culture, and the fact that he spawned a generation of players who made a dual wielding good drow.

 

[Ninja-radish]

I don't hate FR personally, but I find it a very bland and generic setting. I read the entire Sword Coast book and didn't have a single adventure idea afterwards. That's the first time in all my years of running games that I read a setting book and ended up with zero ideas.

Everyone has their favorite setting (Dark Sun and Eberron are mine), so WOTC's "there can only be one" decision to tie everything to the Realms was guaranteed to piss off everyone who enjoyed any other setting.

 

[Lanefan]

You cannot assume that if it doesn't say you can't, you can.

That sounds like a very 3e-based perspective, where the rules acted more like boundaries than they do in either 1e or 5e.

Once you open that door, the rules also don't say that a sword strike doesn't set off a nuclear blast automatically killing everyone in a 5 mile radius. There are billions and billions things that the rules don't say that you can't do.

Obviously, and a DM has to make rulings whenever one comes up; and these rulings will of course vary from table to table (though I think we'll all agree that a 5-mile nuclear blast from a sword strike would be ruled against).

But it really is a different perspective. In 1e (and, from what I can tell, in 5e) you may in theory try anything at a character level unless a rule specifically says you cannot. In 3e, however, it was more that you may not try something unless a rule specifies that you can (and if someone did try something outside the box the DM had to find a way to justify it within the rules).

The same applies to what a DM may do. If I as a 1e (or someone as a 5e) DM decide that gods can grant xp, then gods can grant xp. If I decide they can't, they can't. There's nothing official anywhere to back it up either way. Rulings, not rules.

No it can't. At least not unless the DM rules that it can. Wish has this catchall statement,

"You might be able to achieve something beyond the scope of the above examples. State your wish to the DM as precisely as possible. The DM has great latitude in ruling what occurs in such an instance; the greater the wish, the greater the likelihood that something goes wrong."

OK. I'm used to 1e wishes that really could move mountains.

I don't think there's actually a single hill on I-80 between Lincoln and the Colorado border -- if you drop a gum drop, it counts as terrain.

And difficult terrain, at that!

Lan-"I've never been to Nebraska, though I've more than once been in every state that touches it"-efan

 

[Shasarak]

OK. I'm used to 1e wishes that really could move mountains.

Yeah, and that you never use because the DM would just screw you over.

Shasa - "You moved the Mountain where?" -rak

 

[prosfilaes]

The idea of "canon," as you are attempting to use it is a very new idea.

In what perspective, and why does that matter? You don't really get a need for this concept of canon until we're talking serials in multiple mediums, which really takes movies. Since the idea of canon came about with Sherlock Holmes, the idea is as old as the subject it's talking about.

You don't see people arguing that much about the CSI Canon. Or the Law & Order Canon. Continuity? Sure.

Continuity with what? With the canonical works. If you're worried about continuity with Season 3, Episode 4, "The Death of Bill's Grandma", then that episode is canon. If you're not worried about continuity with the novel "TV Show: The Death of Bill's Grandma", that's because you don't treat the novels as canon. The fannish attitude may be more obsessive, but it's along the same lines.

But it doesn't make much sense to keep arguing that other people are just playing FR wrong.

I don't think anyone is arguing that. But if we're discussing what the FR is like, we have to establish a set of sources that are reliable--that is, a canon. And if you can't take the statement that the way you're playing Elminister in FR is not consistent with the way that he's described in the canon, then perhaps you shouldn't be in this conversation.

Canon is important in playing FR for two reasons. First place, players want to be able to make up backstories consistent with what they know of the world. They often want to be able to play in a world they know. This can go to extremes, but even at the most basic level, it can be confusing to play in a game world you know but is subtly or grossly wrong with that knowledge at various points.

Secondly, it goes back to consistency. Being able to flip to the books and say what the next town east is is terribly convenient, and it's a lot easier to keep the same over several sessions. Trying to use works outside the writer's canon can get problematic; what was once a thriving elvish city now becomes a dwarven town in the next adventure.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Aaron L]

OK, I'll preface my post by saying I haven't read all 93 pages of this thread, only about 3 pages out of every 10 or so.

I have a very ambivalent relationship with the 'Realms. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I absolutely hate it. The Old Grey Box, I loved. That was a setting I could get into; very cool, lots of hits of fascinating stuff. Ad as more was filled i with the 1E books, I loved it more.
But then 2E came, the Avatar Crisis happened, and things went downhill rapidly for me. My friends and I call it the "Disneyfication" of the 'Realms; the bloat, the explicit rule that Bad Guys could never be shown to win (and they always had to be portrayed as bumbling, the Harpers became omnipresent and infallible... and I like the Harpers! The Code of the Harpers is a great book, ad I still read it The Code of the Harpersfrom time to time just for fun!) etc. I even noticed the change in the color scheme of the trade dress for the campaign setting; 1st Edition Forgotten Realms was grey; 2nd Edition 'Realms was purple. The effect was to turn me off of the 'Realms after a while.

The 3rd Edition happened, and I loved the 'Realms all over again. The FRCS was beautiful, and added a new, extremely welcome (to me) level of consistency and coherency to all the myriad mismatched elements (of wildly varying levels of quality) that all the many, many 2E books had added.


But then 4th Edition happened, and they utterly wrecked everything about the 'Realms that had ever made it unique or interesting; the "spellplague" destroyed Mystra and the Weave, the abominable retcon of Abeir and Toril having been separated into two distinct worlds in prehistory, the addition of dragonmen as a PC race and the retcon of Tieflings as an entire uniform race of accursed, thick-tailed, ram-horned devil-people (instead of being individual humans of fiendish ancestry with varied and unique appearance)... just, UGH. And like that, every fond feeling I ever had for the 'Realms was essentially obliterated because I could never think of the setting again without being reminded of the destruction they had wrought in one fell swoop in an ill-advised attempt to "change things up," or whatever their reasoning was. I am still appalled at what they did. Yes, I know I can just ignore the changes they made and pretend it never happened, but it's like how I used to totally love mayonnaise when I was younger... until the time I got sick from some bad mayo, and now even just the thought of it makes me nauseous. Sense memory and bad associations can absolutely taint things you would otherwise love (and the memory of 4E altogether is a very bad sense memory for me.)

But the thing that has always really irked me about the 'Realms is the way it has been presented from almost the very beginning; as "the most popular D&D setting evar." From almost immediately after the very first boxed set was published, the 'Realms have been portrayed as the most popular setting for D&D... even before it would have been at all possible to have gathered any such information about it's popularity. It was published, and suddenly *BOOM* it's the most popular thing EVER. Now, I'm a bigtime Greyhawk guy, and that has just always rubbed me exactly the wrong way and has always smacked of a predetermined plan to *make* the 'Realms "the most popular"... whether it actually was or not. After all, we all know about the, a-hem, "extensive" customer research TSR actually did at the time (zilch.) So just how did TSR so quickly know that the 'Realms was more popular than the Beatles? Easy; they decided ahead of time that it would be, and then just dedicated all of their resources to pump it out.) Especially since the "overwhelming popularity" of the Forgotten Realms was used as justification to stop publishing Greyhawk material. I remember how things were at the time, and far from some unified cry from the fans of "More 'Realms, no More Greyhawk" it was much more like "we're only going to publish Forgotten Realms because we've decided it will be the most popular." At least to me and all my friends, the "overwhelming popularity" of the Forgotten Realms appeared to be entirely manufactured by TSR. Sure, in any given year between '89 and '91 there may have been 3 Greyhawk, 3 Ravenloft, 4 Dark Sun, and 3 Spelljammer books on the shelves... but at the same time they were crowded out by 10 Forgotten Realms books and 3 boxed sets. It was pretty damn obvious where TSR was putting the vast majority of its resources, and so that was what everyone bought. 85% of TSR's 2nd Edition output was Forgotten Realms, and even books that were nominally "generic AD&D" based on the cover logo were actually set in the 'Realms once you opened them up and started reading. At least from where my friends and I were standing it wasn't so much that the 'Realms were what everyone was demanding, it was that the 'Realms was what TSR was dedicating itself to producing. "Supply-Side Campaign Setting." And then when Carl Sergeant (who had previously been a fairly famous parapsychologist at Cambridge!) just up and disappeared after that car accident, even as we were still eagerly awaiting Ivid the Undying, suddenly that was it... No More Greyhawk.


So, as much as I like the Forgotten Realms at times (and there have absolutely been times when I loved it) I will nevertheless still always bear something of a grudge against the setting... not so much for its own qualities (although the 2E 'Realms could get pretty horrid at times, and 4E 'Realms as just absolutely Abysmal) but for the feeling of being force-fed Toril with little-to-no alternative at the expense of my beloved Greyhawk.



PS- I apologize for any typos in this post; the "B" and "N" keys on my keyboard have stopped working, and I am reduced to individually cutting and pasting those letters from a Notepad file as needed (or relying on spellcheck), so if I missed any anywhere I am sorry for the confusion.

 

[Aaron L]

OK, I'll preface my post by saying I haven't read all 93 pages of this thread, only about 3 pages out of every 10 or so.

I have a very ambivalent relationship with the 'Realms. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I absolutely hate it. The Old Grey Box, I loved. That was a setting I could get into; very cool, lots of hits of fascinating stuff. And as more was filled in with the 1E books, I loved it more.

But then came 2nd Edition, and the wonderful 'Realms was assaulted by the Avatar Crisis and its fallout, and things went downhill rapidly from there for me. My friends and I call it the "Disneyfication" of the 'Realms; the bloat, the explicit rule that Bad Guys could never be shown to win (and they always had to be portrayed as bumbling Keystone Cops) and the Harpers became omnipresent and infallible... and I like the Harpers! The Code of the Harpers is a great book, and I still read it from time to time just for fun) etc. I even noticed it in the change of color scheme of the trade dress for the campaign setting; 1st Edition Forgotten Realms was dark and grey; 2nd Edition 'Realms was light and purple. The effect was to turn me off the 'Realms for essentially an entire decade.

Then 3rd Edition happened, and I loved the 'Realms all over again. The FRCS was beautiful, and added a new, extremely welcome level of consistency and coherency to the myriad mismatched elements of wildly varying levels of quality that all the many, many 2E books had added. The FRCS put together everything that had been spit out for the 2E 'Realms, and made it make sense.


But then 4th Edition happened, and they utterly wrecked everything about the 'Realms that had ever made it unique or interesting; the "spellplague" destroyed Mystra and the Weave (which is, in my opinion, without question the most unique, interesting element of the Forgotten Realms; the living stuff of magic that permeated the universe of the 'Realms, and the effective Goddess that was a woman's intelligence layered onto it to maintain, regulate, patch, and guide it), the abominable retcon of Abeir and Toril having been separated into two distinct worlds in prehistory, the addition of dragonmen as a PC race and the retcon of Tieflings as an entire uniform race of accursed, thick-tailed, ram-horned devil-people (instead of being individual humans of fiendish ancestry with varied and unique appearance)... just, UGH. And like that, every fond feeling I ever had for the 'Realms was essentially obliterated because I could never think of the setting again without being reminded of the destruction they had wrought in one fell swoop in an ill-advised attempt to "change things up," or whatever their reasoning was. I am still appalled at what they did. Yes, I know I can just ignore the changes they made and pretend it never happened, but it's like how I used to totally love mayonnaise when I was younger... until the time I got sick from some bad mayo, and now even just the thought of it makes me nauseous. Sense memory and bad associations can absolutely taint things you would otherwise love (and the memory of 4E altogether is a very bad sense memory for me.)

But the thing that has always really irked me about the 'Realms is the way it has been presented from almost the very beginning; as "the most popular D&D setting evar." From almost immediately after the very first boxed set was published, the 'Realms have been portrayed as the most popular setting for D&D... even before it would have been at all possible to have gathered any such information about it's popularity. It was published, and suddenly *BOOM* it's the most popular thing EVER. Now, I'm a bigtime Greyhawk guy, and that has just always rubbed me exactly the wrong way and has always smacked of a predetermined plan to *make* the 'Realms "the most popular"... whether it actually was or not. After all, we all know about the, a-hem, "extensive" customer research TSR actually did at the time (zilch.) So just how did TSR so quickly know that the 'Realms was more popular than the Beatles? Easy; they decided ahead of time that it would be, and then just dedicated all of their resources to pump it out.) Especially since the "overwhelming popularity" of the Forgotten Realms was used as justification to stop publishing Greyhawk material. I remember how things were at the time, and far from some unified cry from the fans of "More 'Realms, no More Greyhawk" it was much more like "we're only going to publish Forgotten Realms because we've decided it will be the most popular." At least to me and all my friends, the "overwhelming popularity" of the Forgotten Realms appeared to be entirely manufactured by TSR. Sure, in any given year between '89 and '91 there may have been 3 Greyhawk, 3 Ravenloft, 4 Dark Sun, and 3 Spelljammer books on the shelves... but at the same time they were crowded out by 10 Forgotten Realms books and 3 boxed sets. It was pretty damn obvious where TSR was putting the vast majority of its resources, and so that was what everyone bought. 85% of TSR's 2nd Edition output was Forgotten Realms, and even books that were nominally "generic AD&D" based on the cover logo were actually set in the 'Realms once you opened them up and started reading. At least from where my friends and I were standing it wasn't so much that the 'Realms were what everyone was demanding, it was that the 'Realms was what TSR was dedicating itself to producing. "Supply-Side Campaign Setting." And then when Carl Sergeant (who had previously been a fairly famous parapsychologist at Cambridge!) just up and disappeared after that car accident, even as we were still eagerly awaiting Ivid the Undying, suddenly that was it... No More Greyhawk.


So, as much as I like the Forgotten Realms at times (and there have absolutely been times when I loved it) I will nevertheless still always bear something of a grudge against the setting... not so much for its own qualities (although the 2E 'Realms could get pretty horrid at times, and 4E 'Realms as just absolutely Abysmal) but for the feeling of being force-fed Toril with little-to-no alternative at the expense of my beloved Greyhawk.



PS- I apologize for any typos in this post; the "B" and "N" keys on my keyboard have stopped working, and I am reduced to individually cutting and pasting those letters from a Notepad file as needed (or relying on spellcheck), so if I missed any anywhere I am sorry for the confusion.

 

[Maxperson]

See but now you are taking your logic too far to the other extreme.

There are zero rules on what gods can do. Therefore gods can do nothing. No rule says a god can heal, bless, raise the dead. A cleric can, we have rules for that, but as far as the rules are concerned the gods are just battery packs.

There needs to be a happy medium obviously.

Nah. It's not that gods can do nothing. It's that each DM needs to house rule what gods can do for his individual game. House rules don't often help forum discussions about what the rules are.

The rest of the party gets fed up with me sometimes though. They still poke fun at the fact I kept pushing us to return to the city to run our business and take care of the orphans we adopted instead of chasing some rumor about goblins in a forest over a month’s travel away from our base.

And, different game same group, now we are having issues because they decided to take the slow overland route to go rescue a friend instead of the faster route by magic or ship. One of them even commented on how they didn’t like the person anyways, so if they die before we get there its no big deal.

They very much seem to be a group of “if the DM suggests it, we should do it because that is the plot the DM has planned” even when that makes zero sense for the story.

Each group has its own collective personality and style. I tend to be more proactive, so when I enter a new group I tend to take over unless others in the group are the same way. That's not to say that I hog the spotlight or don't let others say and do things, but that the groups tend to behave towards me the same way yours does towards your DM. If I suggest it, they tend to go along.

Fortunately, in my current group there are three of us who are proactive, one of us DMing at any given time leaving two of us to balance each other out as players. The other two players are the kinds that tend to follow.

But, for this to be a mistake, you have to assume our DM new those details. I will guarantee if I asked them about the Flaming Fist they will have no idea what I am talking about. They use the FR map and a few random details they remember, but they generally have no idea about the setting at all. I’m generally the one providing details like “Who is Sune?” or “What is a Shar?” This is why I tell people these games are not Forgotten Realms games, my DM grabbed the for FR because that is where DnD happens and other than that generally knows next to nothing about the setting.

Well, if your DM doesn't really know the Realms, then he's not really running the Realms. Nor are the NPCs really going to be overshadowing since most of them probably are lost like the other details.

And how do you figure most high level people aren’t going to do anything? If, under your logic, they needed to go adventuring or doing something similar to become high level then wouldn’t they have been heroes quite often? How are the Clerics and Paladins not helping the people and yet still following the will of Helm or Torm or whoever? Sure, they may not travel to the next town over to save that town, but the town they live in and serve they will surely act to protect. Even a selfish and self-absorbed wizard knows that letting the town he buys supplies in burn underneath his nose is just going to make his life harder in the future.

They'll be looting tombs and whatnot, not running around being heroes. They will be adventuring, but not in the same way as most PC parties. As a result, they aren't likely to be volunteering to risk death to save a city or the world.