Why no love for Dragonlance? [slightly rantish]

[Chun-tzu]

When you compared Dragonlance to the Forgotten Realms in 1E, there were some major differences. I'm hoping the 3E version will change some of it.

The canon storyline and characters in Dragonlance are a huge problem, in a way that the ones in the Realms are not. If you're playing in the time of the Wars, and Tanis or Caramon dies, you've got a serious problem. On the other hand, if you killed off Drizzt or Elminster, it's not as much of an issue. There may be repercussions, but it's not going to screw up the whole setting's history. Similarly, playing during that time kind of sucks, if you know what will happen. You know from the beginning that your party can't do anything to end the War, for example, because you already know when and how it's going to happen.

The other thing about Dragonlance is that the 1E hardcover presented some new options (new classes and races) and elminated just as many or more. You couldn't be a Monk in Dragonlance, because they didn't have any. No psionics, period. If you wanted to be a wizard, your options were pretty limited. No White Robes could cast Evocation spells, IIRC - WTF? You mean I can't be a good wizard that casts Fireballs without being a renegade?

This also ties in with the races, discussed above. Kender, Tunker Gnomes, and Gully Dwarves were already defined, and you didn't have a lot of options in _how_ to play them.

Dragonlance 1E -> too many limits.

 

[tleilaxu]

Back on topic...

Well, I think you hammered in this nail quite nicely... right on the head.

 

[Wayside]

Re: Re: Re: Why no love for Dragonlance? [slightly rantish]

Hey, thanks. This sentence right after the quote allowed me to better focus on what I dislike about Dragonlance.

Any heroic setting that has to be tweaked in order to allow the PCs to be the central heroes has issues.

A setting cannot be heroic if it doesn't have heroes, and if it already has/has already had heroes then tweaking will always be necessary to incorporate PC's into that heroic mix, unless the heroes havn't really done anything significant storywise. Dragonlance is in the peculiar position of having both a rich history, as some other settings do, but also a very massive center of gravity. Other stories are possible.. I mean there are how many other Dragonlance books about other events?.. and these do not require tweaking in order to be told. But these are secondary stories featuring secondary heroes.

I see no reason to be hostile to the setting simply because you can't outdo the people who have already played there. The world is just different from places like the Realms because things have actually happened there, events on the order of how world wars have affected us, and history has moved forward, and things have changed dramatically. If this, your life, were a game, and you expected to be the next Caesar, you'd be in for a world of disappointment.

I think Dragonlance *could* be played in successfully, but it would have to be back in tme, between the Cataclysm and the War of the Lance; and the players shouldn't expect to become world-renowned uber-heroes. In that way I think I'd rather play in Dragonlance than most other settings, because personally I just find the low (and hidden) magic, almost zero magical item, no cleric/magical healing concept appealing. But in my games your hitpoints never increase beyond your CON score and stupid people die fast so...

 

[Psion]

My reasons have been nicely summed up by Hellhound and Olgar, so I won't belabor them again.

However, I found this statement patronizing and just could not help but respond to it.

First off, anyone who can't tweak the setting to make their group's PC's the central heroes of the campaign is simply a novice. Period.

Sure, I could fight against player perceptions and write my adventures around the background assumptions. I also could use a hammer to remove a light switch cover. In both cases, there are easier, less messy, and more elegant solutions (another setting and a screwdriver, respectively, in case you were wondering.)

 

[Bendris Noulg]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Why no love for Dragonlance? [slightly rantish]

Sure, I could fight against player perceptions and write my adventures around the background assumptions. I also could use a hammer to remove a light switch cover. In both cases, there are easier, less messy, and more elegant solutions (another setting and a screwdriver, respectively, in case you were wondering.)

And what about us folks that went at the Core Rules with a set of power tools?

But in my games your hitpoints never increase beyond your CON score and stupid people die fast so...

Grim'n'Gritty?

 

[Ranger REG]

Didn't Tanis died? IIRC, so did Flint and Tasselhoff.

 

[Chun-tzu]

Didn't Tanis died? IIRC, so did Flint and Tasselhoff.

Tanis and Tasselhoff both survived the original trilogy. Flint, Sturm, and Kitiara did not. The most recent book by Hickman and Weiss takes place many years after the original trilogy, and I don't particularly recall any of the originals having lived that long (even Palin, son of Caramon and Tika, is an old man).

 

[Ranger REG]

All I'm saying is that so what if the major figures of that setting dies?

Take the setting and make it your own campaign. I know that your FR game is non-canon to my FR game, the same applies if we play different DL games, or different Star Wars games.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

One other factor..

The original poster made 4 points for why people do not like to game in Krynn. There are two things wrong with his list. First, they are more reasons why people do not like the Dragonlance World in general then for gaming in it. The second is that there is a 5th reason specific to gaming.

5) There are no established standard enemies for the players that were not dealt with in Chronicles

I really like the dragonlance world. And to avoid problems of conflict with the book and over reliance on the fiction world, I set my campaign in the ass end of Krynn. The one place that is as far as I could tell, completly not dealt with in the standard fiction library.

I set my campaing in Nordmaar.

Nordmaar is in North eastern Ansalon, just North West of the blood sea. Its prime swampland. And until the 5th Age books, not mentioned in any book I had read (And I owned most of them). This allowed me to run my campaign without having to ever run into any celebrity NPC's.

Dragonlance before 5th age had no villian organizations or great enemies that were not already defated in the Chronicles. After 5th age, it had some nice Dragons for stock villians, but every other aspect of the campaign that made it appealing (the Gods, High Sorcery, and Elven Kingdoms) were dramatically altered.

The primary reason that Forgotten Realms is a successful campaign setting is that it has a very healthy mix of good guy and bad guy organizations to supply Intrested 3rd Parties and Villians for plot hooks. Dragonlance had the Intrested third parties, but not the villians.

You have the Zhentarim, the Red Wizards of Thay, the Cult of the Dragon, Menzobaranzan, Assasins from Calimshan, the Night Masks, the Harpers, the War Wizards of Cormyr, Evermeet, and many well developed clergy organizations with their own well explained agendas.

In Dragonlance, you had Silvanesti and Qualinesti, The Knights of Solamnia, the Ordersof High Sorcery, Astinus of Palanthus, and Throbardin. All make intrested 3rd parties. But only the Orders of High Sorcery is a ready source of villians in the form of Black Robe Mages. The only gods that were well developed were Paladine, Gilean, and Takhisis. With no source of non-defeated villians from the initial books, any adventure you ran that did not re-create the chronicles either had the feel of unconnected one shots, or was a campaign that could just as easily be ran in another campaign setting.

So if the best adventures you could run in Dragonlance had no real reason to happen in Dragonlance, why use Dragonlance in the first place?

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Wayside]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Why no love for Dragonlance? [slightly rantish]

Grim'n'Gritty?

I suppose, but not the set of rules published by that name. For starters the various +'s accorded to different stat values are gone. You add the actual value to the d20 (reduces the impact of the dice on the game quite a bit). So, a solid hit from a strong character is likely to fatally wound anybody (CON equaling hit points and all). No clerical magic (no gods or planes in the normal D&D sense); two other kinds of magic, both completely different from standard D&D. Many MANY other modifications that I guess you might say make the game Grim'n'gritty. To me they just make it realistic. It's a work in progress to say the least. I just use my friends as guinea pigs

I could imagine running a campaign on Krynn during the time period I mentioned before using largely the same rules I use now. I mean, technically it would be a Dragonlance game; the players would be adventuring on continents whose names are familiar to us, they would know some of the old legends and history of that world; but it wouldn't feel like Dragonlance.

Maybe that's the complaint some people are getting at but not quite being able to put a finger on: the feel of Dragonlance seems to be so set in stone, after the original books, that there's no more room to maneuver with it. Railroading the plot is one thing; railroading the feel is a much tougher hurdle to overcome. You really would need some tweaking to make gaming on Krynn feel, for lack of a better word.. cool.