Will 4E Eberron be as bad as FR?

[Imaro]

FWIW I am a big fan of FR 4e. It has been a highlight for me of the 4e adventures so far. I wouldn't have touched FR with a barge pole in 3e.

Most of the vitriol I have seen against FR4e comes from FR3e fans. From that POV I am expecting the same complaints with Eberron4e from Eberron 3e fans as I am expecting them WotC to do much the same thing with the setting.

What does whether the complaints come from 3e or 4e fans have to do with anything ( and I will note on the WotC boards there are quite a few fans of 4e who weren't keen on the FR changes.).

Yep. If the new Eberron is as good as the new FR was, I'll be happy.

Well, I for one am glad that the people at WotC aren't thinking like the above, as I found 4e FR to be mediocre at best compared to many other published settings and... The FRCG also seems to have done pretty badly on amazon which is odd for a D&D book (It's like seventy-something in Roleplaying Games, this is worst than most of the modules).

I think the Forgotten Realms CG and PG suffered a little bit from being produced on the heels of the Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master's Guide. I worked on the FRPG as a writer and the EPG as an editor, and having gone through part of the process on both books, I can say that we definitely improved the process the second time around. We sat down after finishing the Forgotten Realms PG and CG and took a hard look at what we could do better. Hopefully it will show.

I'm glad to hear this and hopefully I will be buying Eberron 4e, but I will be holding off until others review it.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I play 4e.

I don't play 4e Forgotten Realms. Much pricery content, horrid changes, mashing of garbage into the core, etc.. etc.. etc... For those who love it, it's great that they got a new campaign setting. For those that loved the old one and find the new one a complete waste of time... well, the FRCS 3rd ed book is still one of the best buys on the market in terms of detail and graphic design.

Eberron doesn't have as much to sacrifice. It's also not advancing as far (if at all.)

I believe that Eberron will not be as bad as the Forgotten Realms was for fans of the Eberron setting in comparission to fans of the old Forgotten Realms setting.

 

[Shemeska]

I rather suspect that the full extent of the 4e changes to FR was influenced in part by the fact that outside of Richard Baker, the 4e design team has next to no experience with the setting. Any additional development of the setting would either require heavy use of freelancers (Brian James, Boyd, Schend, Greenwood, etc) or a massive crash course for the 4e design team members on the cumulative body of FR lore.

Of course, if WotC sticks by their 'two books per campaign setting and all future support via DDI subscription' model, that doesn't hold as much water, since the core design team wouldn't have as much to worry about since they wouldn't have to worry about producing future support books, regional supplements, etc that every other edition of D&D has used to develop and support the setting.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Most of the vitriol I have seen against FR4e comes from FR3e fans.

I've NEVER been an FR fan. The one time I played it, I was the DM, and I blew it up a million times worse than WotC did (Cthulu instead of the Spellplague) and it was AWESOME....for my group.

Of course, I wouldn't keep playing in the campaign after that...it had run its course, and the new Realms STILL doesn't appeal to me, though now more because it has nothing different to offer me than because it has omnipotent cheesecake NPC's.

Having done what the 4e team did myself, I understand all the benefits and great things they were going for, but I think that those goals could have been accomplished without re-living the trauma that the Time of Troubles caused in the fanbase, and perhaps with adding something to the Realms to make it appealing even for those who haven't ever tried it. Realms fans have been the abused stepchildren of edition changes since AD&D, and I know a lot of them are fans of Drizzit and Elminster and Mystara and the Harpers and all sorts of things that I have kind of a visceral hate for, but they don't deserve this. You don't HAVE to alienate your base (your pipeline to new players) in order to present the setting as more welcoming than 3e presented it.

Specifically, a "tight focus" on a few regions and the problems those regions had, with perhaps the mention of things like the Spellplauge to keep it an option, without forcing it down the fans' throats, would have been better.

The Realms deserve better than what 4e gave it, IMO. Eberron will probably fare a lot better, being more amenable to many 4e philosophies right off the bat, without needing a big shake-up to align it with what 4e does.

 

[The Little Raven]

Actually, the more I think about it, the more the "2 books and out" model does have one kind of glaring issue: any new fans that FR picks up won't have anywhere else to turn for new FR D&D information (or repackaged old FR information). They might have novel lines to follow, bu there'd be no game material support for the setting. I wonder how this objection was over come in the board rooms there...

This completely ignores the fact that when they announced the "3 books and out" setting philosophy, they explicitly said that future support for the product would be through D&D Insider.

And lo and behold, we've gotten several Forgotten Realms articles in Dragon Magazine since.

 

[Shemeska]

And lo and behold, we've gotten several Forgotten Realms articles in Dragon Magazine since.

The combined page count of which probably wouldn't fill half of a regular sourcebook for the Realms. The support has been glaringly mediocre at best through the DDI up to this point.

 

[DaveMage]

I imagine that it's a tough design call on how to do campaign settings edition to edition. 3E reimagined certain things in the realms (Red Wizards as magic item proprietors, for example), but kept the setting mostly compatible with 1E/2E fluff.

With 4E FR, the 1E-3E fluff is pretty useless, so it's understandble that if the 1E-3E fluff made one a *fan* of the setting that they wouldn't be a fan of the new Realms since it's essentially a completely different product. It's appealing for the designers because they can create new fluff unburdened by the past, but alienates many fans. In my opinion, it would have been better to create an all-new setting rather than do what they did with the Realms, which is essentially use the marketability of the Brand Name to sell a new setting. It may make good business sense in theory, but it's a lousy thing to do to fans of the (now previous) setting, IMO.

I don't think Eberron will have any of these issues, though, since a) the setting itself is less than 6 years old (FR-in the D&D RPG sense-is 22 years old), and b) the style of Eberron seems to fit very will with the 4E style of play.