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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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One of the areas where Wizards rather mucked up in 4E was its support of the Forgotten Realms. To be fair, they'd probably mucked it up earlier, but their problems with supporting the Realms really became apparent in 4E.
Blowing up a setting isn't new or innovative - in fact, it's been used an awful lot - and doing it to the Realms is something of an object lesson in how not to do it.
Why support the Forgotten Realms? For the best possible reason: because it is a popular setting. Replacing it with a wrecked copy is something of a bold move; still, it had worked for other properties, why not the Realms? Oh well.
The reason I think Wizards/TSR may have mismanaged the property before 4E is because of the reason they needed to replace with: it had grown too complex. Complexity is a big, big problem when supporting a setting. If new writers can't write for a setting because they'll end up contradicting canon as there's no way they can grok it all, you've got a problem.
The company that I most admire in their handling of a setting is Catalyst Game Labs, and the setting is the BattleTech setting. Here you have a setting that they've divided up into various eras: Succession Wars, Clan Invasion, Civil War, Jihad, Dark Ages - and they support them all to some extent. More precisely, they support people playing in any of the eras depending on their desires.
They've blown up the setting a few times now, but the older forms are still there for people to play in. It makes it much, much easier that the basic BattleTech game hasn't changed much. The RPG, on the other hand, has changed massively, but it's always been secondary to the main attraction.
I wonder if this could work for a D&D world. What do you think?
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Robb Minneman
United States
Tacoma
Washington
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I have a friend who currently writes and edits RPG material for a gaming company. (I will spare him the humilation of being linked to me, and leave him anonymous.) I once asked him, "Why do you guys continue to focus on rules expansions, but don't write any adventures?" As a player, particularly an adult player with small children, I don't have that much free time on my hands. I would love to have a collection of pre-made adventures that I could tap into to run games with.
His answer was illuminating. "If I write an adventure, I sell one per game group: to the GM. If I write a crunch book, I sell it to every single player in the group. That's four times the sales for the same amount of work." And if you think about it, it's true. What flies off the shelves at your FLGS?
At first glance, this only seems tangential to Merric's point. But think about it a little more. Settings don't sell like crunch books do, and manufacturers respond to the market. With limited resources, they're going to chase the stuff that keeps them employed. And that means they're going to turn out just enough setting material to fill limited demand.
I wish this were not true. With every fiber of my being, I wish this were not true. I wish there were loads of awesome adventures being produced in deep campaign settings every minute for the game I want to play. Alas, this is not true. (I am fortunate, these days, to have a DM who has a taste for collaborative world-building, and who enjoys whipping up story for us, and engaging us in his world-building.)
And this really sucks, because a lot of the best material produced for games is those adventures. What do you remember from 80s AD&D? The awesome writing in the Player's Handbook? Don't be daft! Dude, Ravenloft! The Temple of Elemental Evil! Tomb of Horrors!
But I don't think we'll see their likes again.
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Eric Jome
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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There's more to content than adventures.
Just ask Dragonlance.
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Ramping up my reviewing.
