WotC's Chris Perkins Talks Realms & Sundering

Den of Geek has a lengthy interview with Chris Perkins about the Forgotten Realms and The Sundering. He also very briefly touches on other settings, indicating that WotC hopes that other worlds will be covered in the future if the right story comes along. On past controversial changes to settings, he says "Our guiding principle is to embrace the past and not pass judgment or rewrite history. We’d rather let the fans tell us what they like about the Realms and focus on those elements going forward." (thanks to MerricB for the scoop!)

 

[aramis erak]

There may be another reason why the Realms are now the dumping ground: Royalties.

AFAICT, Forgotten Realms was a TSR project from the get go.
I know that E.G. Gygax was the creator of, and entitled to royalties upon, all the Greyhawk materials, as they actually predate publication somewhat. I recall reading that E.G.G. was receiving small royalties from Wizards...

Further, the "authority" on Greyhawk was, at first, EGG himself. They still have access to Ed. They don't have access to Gary, and I don't think James Ward is on-board, either, especially since he's working for Eldritch Enterprises... (James was the man behind the AD&D 1E Greyhawk Adventures book. He also seems to have been the post-Gary authority on Greyhawk.)

They're not likely to do much with it unless the fanbase is loud, loyal, and willing to push them until it happens.
Further, it would mean a new hand behind it.

 

[wedgeski]

I dunno. Having the exact same thing happen again in Dragonlance would come across as a bit silly to me, not to mention devaluing the storyline where it already happened once.

Agreed. Plus, a setting is about much more than its villain.

 

[Curmudjinn]

That was a terrible interview. A lot of Drizzt-this and Drizzt-that(I love Drizzt, but he is not the Realms), and the rest was all political side-stepping. That was a waste of the interviewer's time and my own.

It was like a post-game interview with a professional head coach.

 

[am181d]

I'm no business man, but I fail to see the wisdom in polluting a well-known and consolidated brand with stuff that has nothing to do with it. What WotC is doing to the Realms is the equivalent of taking what is good about G.I. Joe and using it in the next Transformers movie.

That depends if you see the various D&D worlds as different brands. I suspect that Hasbro (and likely WotC) do not.

 

[Viking Bastard]

That depends if you see the various D&D worlds as different brands. I suspect that Hasbro (and likely WotC) do not.

I get the feeling that they used to think of them as separate brands, but that now they're moving away from that and trying to consolidate D&D as the brand.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I get the feeling that they used to think of them as separate brands, but that now they're moving away from that and trying to consolidate D&D as the brand.

My impression is that they've been wrestling with this idea for at least two editions, but possibly since the invention of 3e.

The settings of D&D add a lot to the game. They make it clear that the game contains a multitude of styles and worlds and experiences.

But, they're also a bit of a risk, since people might get confused about the difference between FR and D&D, or people might see Ravenloft D&D and assume D&D is all about 1920's horror movies. Or someone gets in and only buys products related to Greyhawk or doesn't buy anything other than non-setting material. If dwarves are different things in different settings, the brand team can't say "This is a D&D dwarf!", which means that, say, using the D&D logo on a movie that gives us Dark Sun dwarves or something might be seen as inauthentic.

One of the problems of working on D&D specifically is that it means many different things to many different people and because this is a strength of the game, any attempt to distil the "brand essence" down and apply it universally to D&D as a whole is destined to run into the rough (one might say that 4e fell prey to this perhaps more than any other flaw it may have had).

Honstly I'd like to know if it was an intentional change (and if so why), or if it was just a mistake

Almost positive it was intentional, given how much they highlighted that she was "free from confinement" it in the ad materials. They apparently pay people to be FR scholars, from the interview, so it's not like they couldn't get it right if they wanted to.

The reason why is a little more opaque, but I wonder if it was just as simple as saying "Why, in-universe, didn't she ever try this before? Um. Maybe she was imprisoned?"

 

[Cinderfist]

What a wishy-washy load of horse crap. Typical PR double speak. Basically were not going to admit that the spell plague annoyed a large chunk of our fans, but were going to change things up and make it so we can ignore the details and hopefully get our customers to forget that it happened.
They should have wrote one short story where Elminster wakes up having had a prophetic dream and dons the correct pair of magical underpants thereby avoiding the entire spell plague and everyone goes on their merry way. (and yes there was an article back in second addition dragon magazine that detailed the powers of his magical underpants, along with his pipe if I recall)

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

I get the feeling that they used to think of them as separate brands, but that now they're moving away from that and trying to consolidate D&D as the brand.

My impression is that they've been wrestling with this idea for at least two editions, but possibly since the invention of 3e.

If you're not going to make settings separate things with their own identities, might as well not care about different settings at all. They could drop the Forgotten Realms name, call it "The World of Dungeons & Dragons" and shoehorn in everything they think is cool enough to stay under the D&D umbrella. They would also be able to stop this nonsense about "settings will return when the moment is right" and talk honestly about it.

The fact, apparently, is: D&D fans love campaign settings. WotC doesn't like them because of brand dilution, they'd rather not publish them and have "The World of Dungeons & Dragons" instead. WotC would like a way to get out of this situation without generating even more bad PR, but we don't know if this is possible at all.

 

[Krafus]

This was a rather uninformative interview. The only part that surprised me was Perkins actually admitting that they hadn't done well by the setting during 4e. And the question I really wanted to see asked, wasn't:

"Going forward, will there be more Realms novels published per year, and more authors writing those novels?"

I've always been more of a fiction reader than a gamer, so to me, the novels have always been the most important part of the Realms. And, up until recently, while one could argue about the quality of Realms novels, no one could deny there was quantity, usually in the range of 10-12 novels a year. But for two years now we've been reduced to 5 a year, and going forward it seems to be the same, with 2 of those written by R.A. Salvatore.

I don't dislike Salvatore, but his PG-13 writing just doesn't appeal to me the way it used to twenty years ago. The novels of Paul Kemp and Erik Scott de Bie were welcome breaths of fresh air... but they're not contracted to write new 5e novels (other than Kemp's Sundering novel). So for me, Realms novels are now lacking both quantity and quality, and therefore I just can't get enthused about the setting.

 

[Arilon]

At this point, I would be entirely surprised if Dragonlance gets any formal treatment (beyond the meager information in the 3 rulebooks.) WotC totally screwed over Dragonlance fans in 4e. I don't know if it was Chris Perkins who said that there was only one good story to tell in Dragonlance, but that shows either a complete and total lack of imagination on his part, or is just a euphamistic way of telling DL fans to take a flying leap.

Sorry, but I've already been disappointed by things of the launch of 5e (though I do like the game itself) - from things that were going to be in the DMG (Kender, anyone?) to this bit of news. And, in the reddit conversation with Mike Mearls, he mentioned by name a few specific campaign settings that were on the radar, but didn't mention DL.

Either WotC is just stringing us along, or they have some great hidden plan for a surprise roll out of Dragonlance. I will presume the former is what's going on. They can specifically refer to other settings, but when it comes to DL, it's just "meh, when the time is right."

Sorry, but this interview (and others like it), have made me lose all hope in a 5e DL setting coming out. So, for all you FR fans (and I like FR, too, BTW), grats, you get your setting. And it sounds like Dark Sun (one of the worst I've ever experienced) and Eberron (I don't like technology in my fantasy settings) are on the radar, so grats to you, too.

DL fans like me get screwed again. Well, I've bought my 3 rule books for 5e. No more. Not another penny to WotC. I know it won't make a difference to them, but it's important to me to quit supporting a company that doesn't care about a segment of its customer base.