D&D 5E (2024) WotC Should Make 5.5E Specific Setting

[doctorbadwolf]

Dude, you quote-replied me first to tell me how different 5e is from 3e and 4e, completely ignoring the fact that 5e is no longer the current edition of the game. I’ve got nothing for you here.

5e is the current edition.

Your comment didnt make any sense so i sought clarification. Becaus the immediate preceeding edition, and the last version if the game to have a new set of setting elements made just for it, was the massively different 4e. If we dont count 4e because Nentir Vale was never made official as a setting, the last setting made based on the then current game was Eberron! So how different or not the 2024 update for 5e (which is still 5e. Inarguably.) is immaterial to the question. No 'version' of 5e has a setting made for it.

Then at some ppint you switched to arguing about whether there was a problem to be solved when that wasn't the topic of the thread or of my request for clarity.

And no, adventures set in Faerun do not fill the design space being discussed. FR is a classic setting as old as the game, not a setting designed with the themes and assumptions of 5e. Th closest we have is Radiant Citadel, which is...not a full setting. It could be. It could have been had they been willing to ditch spelljammer or change it to focus on flying around the ethereal and put the Citadel in the Spelljammer book with more details and depth, but even then that is a setting made in part to contrast classic settings, not to speak to what most 5e games look like. It is made to be novel. So it doesn't fill the 'request' of the thread topic, either.

 

[Minigiant]

I couldn't agree less.
National archetypes are a tired way to build and present a setting. There are many, mny more ways, starting with some which don't rely on any kind of pseudo-encyclopedic knowledge. The radiant citadel and its, well, radiant way to present multiple micro-settings, to start with, is very much "in line" with what could be perceived as the "new" audience.

And like I said in the very very beginning that the community is split between "Everything is Present and Normal" and "There is a deep story reason why you don't see X but see a lot of Y".

But WOTC really only wants to take outside settings and sprinkle dragonborn and warlocks and magic initiate on the edge of the map.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't agree

For example, I teach friends who want to be DMs a simple way to make their first setting: National archetypes

• The Empire
• The Kingdom
• The Rebellion
• The Republic
• The Theocracy
• The Other One

Stick them on a continent. Then devise the populations, religions, relations with each other, with monsters, etc

My point is if WOTC were to do this an perhaps made the Empire majority Dragonborn and the Republic Human and Goliath, and the Theocracy being fiendpact warlock devil worshippers, the plurality of the 2024 5e buying customer base would say that is cool.

You have 6 major groups there and 10 PHB races. Which ones suffer to make place for Dragonborn and Goliaths?

 

[Maxperson]

And I would tell them to start with small county-sized region, or maybe an island, and not worry about other counties or even a national government at the start - such things rarely affect the lives of ordinary people or 1st level characters.

What do you do when WotC give advice, and you don’t like it?

Seems to me that “pretend it doesn’t exist” is the usual answer, judging by how many comments on these forums ignore the advice in the current DMG.

Yeah. If you're new you should start small, dealing with much smaller groups and power structures. The first time I picked up the DMG to try my hand at DMing I would have been overwhelmed by all of those major areas and power structures.

 

[Maxperson]

This a pretty long thread so this may have been brought up already but I don't think D&D 3.5's default setting, at least at publication, was Eberron. A quick glance at the list of deities in the Player's Handbook seems to indicate it was Greyhawk. Greyhawk didn't see much in the way of supporting material but the Forgotten Realms & Eberron saw a good amount of support but neither seem to be the default.

Greyhawk was 3e/3.5e's default setting in the same way The Forgotten Realms is 5e's. There's very little in the way of support for those settings in the core books. So little that there really is no setting to default to.

 

[Maxperson]

I never had the 3.5 rules but the default setting for 3.0 was Greyhawk. I assume they commissioned Eberron because Greyhawk was not popular.

I think they just wanted to do something new. 3e had the very popular Forgotten Realms, so they didn't need a new setting due to the unpopularity(if that's even the case) of Greyhawk.

 

[Yaarel]

Greyhawk was 3e/3.5e's default setting in the same way The Forgotten Realms is 5e's. There's very little in the way of support for those settings in the core books. So little that there really is no setting to default to.

Forgotten Realms was the default in 5.0 baking much of it into core rules. But this is no longer the case in 5.5.

The 5.5 rules are decidedly setting agnostic. Meanwhile the new Forgotten Realms books show the setting enjoying the liberation from the needs of being a default. It celebrates the idiosyncratic weirdness that can happen in Forgotten Realms.

I still perceive a design goal of Forgotten Realms to be a kitchen sink. Its designers want to ensure that all the rules in the Players Handbook are true in the setting. But also there is lots of stuff that has nothing to do with the core rules.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I never had the 3.5 rules but the default setting for 3.0 was Greyhawk. I assume they commissioned Eberron because Greyhawk was not popular.

No, they just wanted to create a new setting that used all the 3rd Edition conceits and ideas, and that didn't stop it from adding stuff that definitely went beyond the core 3rd Edition rules, like Warforged, Changlings, Shifters, Kalashtar, Artificers and son on. It was really supposed to be a new setting, so the story parts of the 3rd Edition - like the available gods - did not need to be adhered, too, either.

I think Greyhawk remained the default setting for 3.5 (it definitely didn't switch to Eberron), but maybe my memory is just hazy. (But I think not, at least the gods stayed the same.)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

You have 6 major groups there and 10 PHB races. Which ones suffer to make place for Dragonborn and Goliaths?

I don't think every race needs a single nation just for themselves. It depends on your preference if they even start all out as "racist" nations - quite possibly they didn't, nations only forming after the different ancestries were already found all over the world, but maybe that's where they started. But in the present time, there have been so many wars, rebellions, military coups, revolutions, inheritance battles, unification attempts, strategic marriages and alliances that the national borders do not strickly align to any ancestries, even if there might still sometimes be an internal divide between ancestries (but also between houses, provinces, guilds or religion) in some cases due to geographical distances or internal conflicts.