NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7151568" data-attributes="member: 5142">You are correct that his account was probably too strongly worded as to imply his experience as a universal one. Nevertheless, I suppose this is why some settings are a problem for some but not for others: differing sets of experiences as a player or GM. If someone says, for example, that the high-profile NPCs have been an annoyance for them in Forgotten Realms, then while this problem may not be universal, it is problematic enough to become a point of contention for those people. (And this seems to be a common enough one in terms of frequency of greivance.) I doubt it would be particularly helpful to either blame the GM or to callously dismiss the sour experiences of these players as if their words were but wind. Perhaps, rather than trying to provide a counter-experience or dismiss these players' sour experiences, it would be more helpful and beneifical to recognize that this can be a problem with running the Realms. Not a universal problem, but a potential pitfall nonetheless. As I said before, I do suspect that this issue, particularly in regards to the Realms, Dragonlance, and other non-D&D franchises (e.g. Star Wars) is psychological. For some people, there is certainly the question of why these NPCs aren't doing this task themselves. But I do think that another issue is the getting over the psychological hump of what can feel like a text-focused setting. By "text-focused setting," I refer to settings that are strongly rooted outside of the tabletop fiction in other media: e.g,. Star Wars (films, games, novels), Harry Potter (books), or Middle Earth (books, games). While Star Wars could be a world setting that I could potentially consider roleplaying, Star Wars (for me at least) is about these characters in the films, television series, and games (the latter to a much lesser extent). It's not that I have any envy of the heroic status of Luke, Han, and Leia, or some vain desire to outshine them in saving the universe, as some have condescendingly implied about this line of objection. I just have a more difficult time immersing myelf in a world where the setting is so closely associated with the fiction of other fictional characters. I can play in a non-powered superhero campaign where there is a grandiose Superman-like "Captain Awesome" much easier than I could in a DC game where Superman exists. Captain Awesome could even be more powerful than Superman and my character. I would not mind. The problem lies far less in the power level of the characters and more with roleplaying within the bounds of the associated outside fiction. That is generally why I greatly prefer to run as a GM (or participate in as a player) settings "inspired-by" these other settings. This, in some respects, true for D&D, particularly of settings that have a strong connection with extra-tabletop fiction. There have probably been far many more people to read the Dragonlance books than play in the Dragonlance setting. I, for one, have not played in Dragonlance. I associate Dragonlance with the novels over against the tabletop experience. So the setting sometimes feels less like a place where I would play a roleplaying character and more like a place where these novels transpire. That, I suspect, is part of the problem for Forgotten Realms. It's so closely tied to these novels (and even video games), for good and for ill, that some people have a difficult time seeing it as something other than a world associated with the characters of these novels. (Now while I could hypothetically run a campaign "inspired by Forgotten Realms" that removes these oft-spoken-about NPCs, Forgotten Realms does little to inspire me in the first place, so it is already a dud on my end, though I understand that's not true for everyone.)</blockquote>

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