On 4/18/2024 9:30 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 01:15:57 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/18/2024 12:29 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
(I just wish I had more to say about frp.dnd... but I'm barely
involved in the game anymore and completely out of touch with the
latest trends. I mean, I guess we could rehash old issues, like: who
would in a fight, Drizzt Duorden or Elminster? ;-)
cue to me ranting how the Forgotten Realms are the worst of the DnD
settings and really never should have become as popular as they somehow are
I actually quite enjoyed the original "Forgotten Realms" setting, as described in the originally grey-boxed AD&D release. A lot of my own
campaign material emulated the style of its 'Cyclopedia of the Realms' sourcebook. It was only later that the setting started to annoy me, as
it became ever-more magic-heavy and every corner of it was detailed by TSR/WOTC, leaving no room for exploration or development by players
and DMs. Forcing obvious fantasy-equivalents to real-world places
(Kara Tur = China! Maztica = Central America! Al Qadim = Mythic
Arabia!) didn't help; it just made the entire construct feel all the
more disjointed. And once certain characters started gaining undue popularity, the whole thing started feeling weirdly tiny and
soap-operaish ("Oh look, Drizzt Duorden is in this adventure too!")
The "Forgotten Realms" was never /great/, but in its original form, it
was a good 'starting point' - a baseline 'adventure world' - for
beginner players, I think. It certainly appealed to me more than the "Mystara" setting of BECMI D&D, or Greyhawk.
I loved the original 1e gray box, the Waterdeep supplement added some
really nice tables for things like picking pockets. 2e after
spellplague was so-so. While the novels were o.k. for high-fantasy
pulp, I found they made my job harder as a DM as many of my players knew
them far better than I did and I always felt changes to the world would
be criticized. They weren't but I felt the imagined pressure and
pressure to constrain my adventures to the written setting.
--
-Justisaur
ø-ø
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