Wizards wanted to fire us, so can we fire them for setting laziness

[Jester David]

Also Useful:

List of Third-Party 5th Edition Campaign Settings

 

[Mistwell]

Are you being compelled by a curse inflicted upon you by an evil fairy godmother that prevents you form using material from another publisher?

You're going to feel awful if that turns out to be the case, yah know!

 

[cmad1977]

I’m ambivalent about the specific lore of the settings. It never makes it into my games anyways. For me the setting are basically maps and ideas for different styles.

 

[TarionzCousin]

You have never really left until you've moved your bookmarks.

 

[seebs]

So you feel that Eberron was too different from standard DnD to remain the default setting

When was Eberron ever "the default setting"? Not 3E, which predates it. I don't think the core 4e books started out with Warforged either, so it can't have been the default there.

When was it the "default setting"? If it wasn't, how could it "remain" the default setting?

 

[neogod22]

Did someone burn all your copies of Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Oriental Adventures, Dragonlance, Eberron, Planescape and Spelljammer? If they did, you can still get them cheaply at the DMs Guild site and use them easily in 5E.

Yes. Well not burned, but ripped up and thrown away.

 

[neogod22]

The same can be said for FR which has more pre 5E material than all of those settings combined. So why do we need more?

This is why it's their default world. It's the most fleshed out world with the most characters, the most stories, and any of the campaigns from most of the other settings can easily be converted. Unfortunately for settings like Dragonlance and Dark Sun, after the main campaign, the setting pretty much just dies.

 

[CrimsonCarcharodon]

While I've never set a game in the Forgotten Realms, I totally get why it's a good base setting. It's flavorful enough to be able to say, "oh yeah, Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, those are in the Realms," but generic enough to not jar new players' expectations. All of the Forgotten Realms' basic concepts are in the core rulebooks, and pretty much always have been.

Eberron, while my favorite setting, has a bit of a departure from classic D&D. Dragonmarks, warforged, kalashtar/psionics, those are all things that haven't been in the core rules. And they wouldn't fit in all settings. Magic robots and people that are closer to Jedi than wizards aren't exactly what I'd call iconic for D&D.

Dark Sun is way too weird for a "default" setting. Cannibal halflings, elves that are ridiculously tall and raid/enslave folks, precisely zero divine magic, and Preserving/Defiling are huge deviations from the D&D norms.

The closest setting that could compete with Forgotten Realms is the Nentir Vale, since it was built from the ground up to include dragonborn and tieflings. Personally, I'd have stuck with it, but that's just me. Choosing the Realms made sense. It's hugely popular (relatively speaking) because of the novels. Drizzt alone is a hugely popular character.

Really, my biggest issue with the Realms is that they basically hit the reset button. The spellplague and all the other huge shakeups in the 4E era actually made the setting interesting. The Neverwinter setting book was fascinating. If ever I happen to run a Realms game, that's likely the era I'd put it.

 

[Zardnaar]

They did that because the spell plague was hated. Hell I went to Golarion and just bought Midgard for 5E.

There is no other viable kitchen sink setting. Nerath is the closest, Dragonborn and Tieflings are not classic D&D and Mystara and Greyhawk died off years ago.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

As for Forgotten Realms, I think parts of it do have a distinct 'Canadian Wilderness' frontier feel

I think that is down to the influence of the Baldur's Gate CRPG, made by Bioware, in Canada.