D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

[EzekielRaiden]

No. And Thinking about "analogues" for what are fundamentally completely different deities is an element of Crawfordism-Perkinsism that I hope we leave behind.

Not sure why you'd feel that way. That's how several real-world polytheistic religions worked.

Ishtar (Mesopotamian) begat Astarte (Phoenician). Astarte begat Aphrodite (Greek). And then Aphrodite was syncretized with Venus (Roman). Likewise, Hermes is probably an offshoot from Pan (as in, formerly an epithet of Pan, Pan Hermes, "Pan of the piled stones"), and Pan was an offshot of an un-spellable Proto-Indo-European deity who also spawned a Vedic pastoral deity, Pushan. Hell, even within a single religion it's quite possible to have highly divergent takes. Poseidon was originally the head of the pantheon, back in the Mycenaean days, when chthonic gods were much more prominent--which made all the myths about Zeus's ridiculous antics a lot easier to explain. Further, certain gods could be worshipped differently in different places or at different times. Zeus was Zeus Panhellenos, "Zeus of All Greeks", but he was also Zeus Xenia, "Zeus of Strangers", as he was the god of hospitality.

A relatively clean solution to the problem of having literally hundreds of gods is to instead have a relatively constrained pantheon--say, forty-ish, counting deities of all alignments--and then different cultures perceive and worship some deity or set of deities differently.

 

[Remathilis]

This idea that you can magically fix buy-in by cleaving out most of the variety and creativity of fiction, locking folks into a single box, is one of the hottest--and wrongest--takes I've ever seen on D&D anything. I'm frankly shocked you would even suggest that all of D&D could somehow be imprisoned in the confines of a single setting.

I'm frankly shocked you aren't interested because that's exactly what 4e did with Nerath. A single setting scattered throughout the core books.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm frankly shocked you aren't interested because that's exactly what 4e did with Nerath. A single setting scattered throughout the core books.

Except it didn't...? Like what on earth are you talking about?

Because the Forgotten Realms got a campaign guide two months after PHB1. Eberron got published less than a year after that. That's already three settings (PoL, FR, Eberron), and thus has broken your requirement of just one setting, two if they absolutely have to.

 

[Hussar]

Because it worked so well for comics. That's why both Marvel and DC have had...uh...at least one "crisis" story every decade, and have begun to accelerate the pace?

Yes, it can be an ask to have multiple settings. No, that is not profligate waste. "Elseworlds" is popular for a good reason. Folks like variety and creativity.

This idea that you can magically fix buy-in by cleaving out most of the variety and creativity of fiction, locking folks into a single box, is one of the hottest--and wrongest--takes I've ever seen on D&D anything. I'm frankly shocked you would even suggest that all of D&D could somehow be imprisoned in the confines of a single setting.

Worse, who gets to decide what's in that setting? If WotC had listened to the loudest shouters during "D&D Next", that would have meant no dragonborn--who are now the second- or third-most-popular non-human race. But picking any existing setting will alienate the fans of every other setting, and crafting a totally brand-new one will alienate fans of every setting, on top of having to convince people that this brand new setting is even worth engaging with in the first place.

Pathfinder would like to have a word. As would nearly every other RPG on the market - Vampire, Traveller, Star Wars, Star Trek, on and on and on.

 

[Neonchameleon]

And I'm saying D&D's problem is having too many settings to be able to buy into. D&D needs one maybe two, fully developed settings, not 12 official and countless homebrew and 3pp.

I'm saying that this is missing the problem entirely. Just as you can write modules to be written or write them to be played unless you tightly integrate the setting with the rules all pre-written settings are optimised to be read rather than played. But games need them because no one is going to play without reading.

The opposite effect though is the generic PC so divorced from the setting that he could walk through a portal from Faerun to Oerth and nothing about him would change.

And yes this does seem to be a consequence of the way D&D does things with its settings. Not one single one of the PCs in any of my Daggerheart campaigns could walk into any of my other Daggerheart campaigns with nothing changing. Even the PC there for a one shot - and this is despite Daggerheart not having an official setting and not spending more than a few pages on each of the light framework settings it has. But then Daggerheart's settings were intended to be played.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

No. And Thinking about "analogues" for what are fundamentally completely different deities is an element of Crawfordism-Perkinsism that I hope we leave behind.

Dragonlance literally runs on that, with several Gods being tinily-veiled counterparts to more mainstream deities - Paladine to Bahamut, Takhisis to Tiamat, Chemosh to Orcus, Hiddukel to Mephistotheles, Morgion to Anthraxus, argurably also Zeboim to Umbrelee and Sargonnas to Bane or other way around.