The General D&D thread

Apparently Drizzt is back for a new expansion.

As for the character, he was alright, not as bad as some made it out to be. But I still he could have used some Chaotic Neutral due to his backstory.

RA Salvatore is apparently working on the upcoming module of the MMO Neverwinter. Following their Elemental Evil module, which has been rejected by the community as a whole.

Should be rejected coz it's set in the worst setting D&D has. Sadly it's too much to hope for the Forgotten Realms to do as their name exist and remain forgotten by all.

Best official D&D settings in order of bestness:

1. Planescape
2. Spelljammer
3. Everything else is tied for third

Depends on what I want to make. Spelljammer and Planescape are situational - you need to want to have games that will involve lots of traveling. Eberron is my go-to official setting if I need a fantasy-esque world. Mostly coz Eberron is awesome and can accept all sorts of play.

In all fairness to Elemental evil, making an adventure named after a famous first edition module and having it have fuck all to do with said module is sort of dumb.

edited 13th May '15 6:57:31 PM by CobraPrime

Shit, I totally forgot about Eberron. Alright, new list!

1. Tie for first: Planescape, Spelljammer, Eberron
2. Tie for fourth: everything else.

I think everyone should be able to agree on that with no problems.

edited 13th May '15 6:56:26 PM by NativeJovian

The cool thing about Spelljammer is that, by definition, it interacts with all the other settings.

Yeah, though I'll be honest, I like elements of Spelljammer (The Spelljammers themselves, Giant Space Hamsters), but there's parts of the setting that are kind of meh or outright bad (The emphasis of treating Space Is an Ocean complete with currents and the possibility of running ashore). Like a lot of the elements dealing with the cosmos and the stuff between worlds is kind of awful or lame or both. I sort of like 4E's approach of re-flavoring the Astral Plane as the Astral sea and adding Spelljammers to sail across it.

edited 13th May '15 7:03:53 PM by CobraPrime

Eh, as long as it has internal consistency I don't mind the science being mind-bogglingly wrong. After all, it is magic.

That's my problem. It sorta doesn't have consistency. For example, there's no gravity outside the spelljammers. Coz space. But the description of the the Phlogiston implies there's a down. Coz rivers and shores exist. And the pictures show this is a literal thing - not a figure of speech.

That and even once you have a spelljammer, travelling is a wizard-only business for the most part, so outside of combat the rest of the party gets to stick their thumbs far up their asses while the wizard has all the fun.

edited 13th May '15 7:13:51 PM by CobraPrime

Strapped into a chair channeling all their spell slots towards propulsion?

And casting spells to make cool shit happen like opening the crystal shells.

I just like the premise of Spelljammer more than anything else, really. Adventurers flying through space in magic ships, braving deadly space dangers for the chance at space glory and space riches? Sign me the fuck up. The mechanics I don't care much for one way or the other — as far as I know, they haven't actually been updated in any official capacity since 2e, so running a Spelljammer game in modern D&D would basically mean houseruling everything anyway, so I say just skip the middleman and make shit up however you want it.

I'm actually planning on running a Spelljammer game in 5e for my regular online group as soon as I can get my shit together for it. I want the focus to be on the man-to-man combat rather than ship-to-ship combat, so I'm planning to nix any sort of really effective anti-ship ranged weapon like cannons, catapults, or ballistas; instead, tactics will boil down to "ramming speed!" or "prepare to board!" (or both). That also lets me use old-school galleys with phlogiston oars instead of having a caster controlling a whole ship through a spelljamming helm (which I never really liked, due to the focus it put on casters). Of course, this is going to be a light-hearted campaign with references to everything under the sun, so there will be highly advanced single-man spelljammers propelled by bound elementals (like Eberron-style airships) that are essentially Space Fighters (that still attack by ramming, because how is that not awesome?) so I can make some Ace Combat expies. The campaign will revolve around someone figuring out how to use elemental technology to power full-sized warships, and all the fallout of that. (The first such ship will be the Celestial, and the second will be its sister ship / Evil Counterpart the Fiendish. This may may sound familiar to some people.)

It's gonna ba good times all around.

I kind of like the Forgotten Realms :P

That being said, I without exception always run my own custom campaign settings. Why bother using other people's work?

Maybe one might consider the work of certain other people to be better than their own, or otherwise just admire it.

Maybe they want to work with something they know will be familiar to many people.

Maybe they're just lazy.

I was being a bit tongue in cheek, but I've generally observed that running a campaign setting not of one's own design is actually more work, because there's so much backstory you have to learn and pick up.

That's why I like the Dungeon World model of "completely improvise the setting out of what the players give you."

Of course, I think that'd be really hard to do with a more complex system like D&D or (gods forbid) Pathfinder. You need too many stats for monsters and such.

My favourite settings were Planescape, Dark Sun, and Ravenloft. I also happened to enjoy Eberron a lot.

Forgotten Realms is decent (or at least originally), it was acclaimed back when it was small and having new ideas. Now with it becoming the official setting, they didn't do much to flesh it out as much as before. But yes, it needs a kick. (Too much Black-and-White Morality during main events, perhaps?)

edited 14th May '15 6:46:38 AM by YoKab

I hate the way Forgotten Realms handles the gods.

Too often they end up stealing the spotlight. And they are too... present. Part of the appeal of playing a religious character - or even characters of various faith or of various beliefs in said faiths is sort of lost when your god is as present as Christopher Walken. It's part of where Eberron gets props. Gods don't interferre, and you can even debate their existence and divinity, and various religions can worship the same god but have widely differing dogmas. FR doesn't have that coz, well, your god pops on the material plane every other sunday. FR's religions feel less like religions and more "Which super powerful being's clubhouse do you want to be a part of."

I also hate how disjointed the world is. Countries often feel barely interconnected, especially in a lot of their history that doesn't specifically deal with giant cataclysmic events. Countries that share border will however have cultures that basically share almost no similarity (See Thay and Rashemen)

FR for me never felt like a cohesive whole, just a pile of ideas, good or bad, stuck togheter with duct tape. Coz that's essentially how the setting was written, piecemeal. And FR thus falls short to more modern settings who were made entirely as a whole like Eberron.

edited 14th May '15 3:15:51 AM by Ghilz

I kinda wish they give Forgotten Realms a proper Reset Button and leave it for a while, and bring back more interesting settings while keeping the elemnts that made them great in the first place. It seems like the best for the community, it'll get people to buy more setting suplements, and it'll bring back the charm of multple setting and all that.

Also fixing Forgotten Realms from scratch isn't a bad idea at all. Have Gods more mysterious and bring some Grey-and-Grey Morality into it (Drizzt needs some neutrality according to his backstory, like the thrill for the hunt is all gone in him?)

What the hell is a Dungeons & Dragons anymore? The way they promote is like Forgotten Realms: Tabletop Edition, and it's not even that great.

edited 14th May '15 6:47:46 AM by YoKab

Well good news is all indication are that Eberron as a campaign setting supplement is in the works - or at least being considered. Besides a petition / charity drive organized by Keith Baker himself, WOTC released a free supplement in the first one of their new articles on their website giving 5e conversions for the most common Eberron races. Lastly their last monthly player feedback poll involved gathering player feedback on said conversions for use for some future release (They post an article after each poll saying what they learned from it. The last one indicated that the feedback on the Eberron conversion will go towards further release of Eberron material - time will tell what form this will take).

So at least that's one campaign setting we're seeing back again.

edited 14th May '15 4:28:41 AM by Ghilz

I like Eberron because Magitek pulp adventure is fun, Dark Sun by virtue of being so different, and Planescape because of the variety of elements you can throw into it and keep it consistent (as well as the overall philosophical focus).

My favorite was a game set in the Avatar the Last Airbender Verse. It was really cool.

The entire POINT of the Forgotten Realms is that the gods are present. That's the main distinguishing factor between it and the other "generic" D&D settings. Making the gods less present really removes a lot of FR's feel. Which is actually one of the things I dislike about 4E FR, the gods feel a lot less present. It's like, they tried to make FR into something completely different, and they failed on all accounts.

Reset button plz.

I always liked Netheril.

Gods weren't really the issue I had, it was more about how the main events started becoming convoluted, there wasn't really much morality in it. I don't know, it kinda became "generic" itself. Forgotten Realms has fun into it and a Game Master who uses it very well can create a fantastic session, but it's not improving that much.

It's one of those wierd cycles, something starts great, then it imporves, then it stops improving. Altought one can say it actually gotten a bit better with 5th edition.

To be honest a Reset Button isn't that bad when done well. But if they continue on improving like what they did at launch, then that works too!

edited 14th May '15 9:15:00 AM by YoKab