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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 3463305" data-attributes="member: 14159">Your mileage may vary, but that's almost the exact opposite of the way I've seen the Realms unfold in play.Take my last Forgotten Realms campaign, 5 PC's, and in terms of setting knowledge we had:1. A person who had only played the Baldur's Gate video games and read one Realms novel (Spellfire)  and it was her first D&D game.2. A person who had read a few of the novels (Avatar trilogy and a handful of Elminster and Drizzt books) and played D&D but not in the Realms.3. A person who had played a lot of RPG's but only a very slight amount of D&D, and never in the Realms, and they hadn't played any video games set in the realms or read any novels set there.4. A person who had played a lot of D&D, but the only Realms game was in one where the DM heavily altered the setting.5. A person who had played a lot of D&D, including a lot of Realms games and had learned a certain amount of realmslore, but was fairly casual about the setting and as long as the major organizations/religions/cities/countries lined up with his broad expectations he didn't have a problem with the details being different from game to game.I'm a fan of the Realms myself, I know it better than pretty much any gamer I know locally and can use that to add flavor and dimension to an RPG scenario in almost any part of Faerun (and some parts beyond there), but compared to some hardcore Realms fans I've encountered online I know very little.  Yes, there are some people who are obsessive over the Realms enough to be upset if they go down a certain road and the DM doesn't say they run across a specific inn from a 15 year old Dragon Magazine article or if they find that the Guildmaster of the Coopers Guild in Waterdeep isn't the same guy they read about, or if some High Priest of Chauntea they find at a rural temple espouses some dogma that is somehow slightly incompatible with the as-written description of their faith.  However, that's more of a player problem than a DM problem.  It's sometimes come up of "why doesn't Elminster help us?" or "Where is Drizzt now?" or the like.  In every FR game I've ever been in, the "big name" NPC's have always either been busy with crisises of their own, or made at most brief cameos to help briefly and moved on.  It's a big world, and there is enough problems out there for lots of people to get involved.  Think of all the bad things that have happened in the Realms, like the destruction of Tilverton or Karsus's Folly, not even the Uber-NPC's get to save the day all the time, and sometimes tragedy could have been averted if the right hero (i.e. a PC) was at the right place at the right time.For many DM's, a well built and detailed setting means they have lots of help in creating the illusion of a fantasy world that the PC's are living in.  The presence of a large stable of established NPC's gives more of a feeling that the PC's aren't alone in the world, not that they have competition for what the PC's are doing.I think the Forgotten Realms is a prime example of worldbuilding gone right.  It is the depth of the setting that draws a lot of people to the Realms.</blockquote>

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