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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 1693446" data-attributes="member: 6929">Why push Eberron? I'm beginning to see people coming up with a good reason:Because Eberron was built to work, and to use everything.Unlike the Realms, Eberron is supposed to be consistent. Unlike Greyhawk, its consistency demands the inclusion of up-to-the-minute minutae of the 3e ruleset and other crunch. It's a better investment because it's a better design (learning lessons from the past) and it can incorporate all the weird stuff out there. (In part, because it's new and nobody's quite sure what it is yet - if it sprouts an extra arm overnight, people will be all 'hey, how many arms did it have last night? Oh. Maybe we just missed one.')Now, imagine I'm Johnny Playstation, someone who has been convinced to try this new computer game called D&D Online. Apparently, it's based on this thing you do with dice and paper and Mountain Dew. Sounds kinda cheap - everyone knows real games cost, like, fifty bucks and need hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to buy or build the machine to play on. Whatever, I'm trying it, see? OK, I fire it up, play a little, and then think about what I've seen. Remember, I haven't had the benefit of a couple of decades glossing over any rough edges in a setting. I'm new. What I've just experienced (if I, the writer not Johnny Playstation, am guessing right, and I haven't read Eberron yet) is a world where magic is used to do stuff it should do, where ancient ruins have history, monsters have origins, and there's a good reason to ride off into the depths of Xendrik and beat up monsters and become someone really quite a bit more powerful than the rest of the world.Now compare that experience to Johnny Playstation playing the hypothetical FR Online. Sure, it'll work. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and NWN have proven that quite recently. But I don't think it'll feel as cohesive as Eberron, it won't have a Final Fantasy flair to it, and the NPC level is a bit oppressive, or so I hear. Hyperbolically, if you give someone a choice between a nice car, good fuel economy, and comfortable seats; and a top-of-the-line sports car with leather upholstery, an engine that glows in the dark, and a stereo that breaches the Geneva Convention, what will you choose?Johnny Playstation is a much more lucrative potential market than Simon Tabletop, I believe. Pandering to Johnny, with a setting that's not dumbed down and is, in fact, pretty good for Simon too, seems like a good move to me.Hm. Now I just have to read the setting whose defence I've leaped to. Maybe I got carried away a little...</blockquote>

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