Your comments are helpful. Especially this part quoted above. Still, that would be a lot of work to iron out all those details for a campaign.I've never said a group can't have great fun in Eberron - only that it's a lot of work to build the setting (because the official materials don't really do that), and when taken as given even by KB himself, I don't see how any of his "logical solutions" end up with a result more useful than the "logical errors" they are designed to replace.
For example, I think KB would've been better off having an in-setting limit to the types/schools of Arcane casters (maybe Necromancer and Summoner e.g.) and replace them, to a degree, with Magewrights and Artificers. But then he doesn't seem to be one to think things through and arrive at a solid result. Or if he does, it never gets published. Even on his blog.
Which cycles me back around and I won't repeat my usual refrain. On the other hand, KB does many things very well. He supports the setting like crazy online and at CONS. He is very kind and responsive to his fans and (largely) ignores critics like me... because, well, he has no way to efficiently differentiate critics like me from just trolls. I could be cynical and say he laughs at criticisms like mine while counting his gold but I don't have any reason to believe he's callous like that. He seems to be a genuinely nice guy who's had success beyond his young ambitions and is now working hard to keep what he's been given by the fickle finger of fate.
D&D/PF has quiet a few inconsistency problems before you even get deep into settings. As you know there are things that I think should have been emphasized more. Going back to my post I don't think he is even trying to take it to that level of detail to break down what I posted into something with a lot of moving parts. I think going beyond what I said and really getting behind the scenes would be nice in a secondary(splat) book however. It seems to me however that he is only trying to give details to a certain extent. That might have been how it was before he presented the setting to WoTC. He had a general overview, and came up with answers as the players came up with questions. That is an oversimplification, but I think it is an accurate model.
It seems that the intent for Eberron is to give you just a little more then enough to make the world work. The more intricate details are left to the GM on purpose.
I think many that love the setting as it is want an something to start with, but like the idea of filling in a lot of the details. Magi-tech aside others that are less enamoured want a "full setting", for lack of a better term.
It is kind of like how some people like to build their own remote control cars and airplanes, and others want them fully preassembled. <---Not a perfect analogy, but I think you get my point.
Personally I would not have liked a restriction on arcane casting. I do think the magewright* was a good idea since it can serve as the basic technician or lower level engineer for the purpose of creating many of the lesser magic-tech.
*I am not a complete fan of it, but it works well enough for flavor purposes because most players won't be asking too many questions such as "Well won't the magewright need spell X and spell Y to make _____?" If they did I would just power it up a little more. :)
I think you have some of the same concerns I do, but not to the same extent. Basically I think it boils down to "how much detail does one need to be satisfied".
As for the thing about critics: I really don't follow him so I don't know which questions he is not answering, but I think the way someone presents a question may decide if he answers it. If you ask it as if you(not you specifically) are a fan so it is seen as less of a challenge he might answer it. He may have just decided certain people just won't like how he does things so he chooses to not engage with them.
As for your direct questions; I guess by default I seem to be against published settings that charge top dollar for fluff that takes little to no effort to generate. Based on a response I got on another thread, I may need to add Planescape® to the list that, right now, only contains Eberron.
Forgotten realms is over-the-top with magic. It has a certain feel to it but one is hard pressed to criticize it on "logical" grounds. You either accept the setting or you move on. Now the same could be said for Eberron except - and I've already explained this - KB has gone to great pains to explain how the Eberron Setting solves all these problems that he sees in the standard D&D settings. But in my opinion his solutions do no such thing and his opinions, especially the premise that Eberron is "more logical" than the standard FRPG settings, is a manifestly void boast.
I think the setting has pretty good flavor for the areas it chooses to address so I would not say it takes no effort, but you know by now where I am going with lack of things addressed so I won't even go into that again.
I understand it is an open setting, but how does he claim it is more logical? From my understanding of it, the GM is the one to provide the logic/reason behind certain things.
Also quiet a few people have found logical problems with FR unless the spell plague got rid of those things. I was never into the setting, all that much so I can't really recall the complaints I used to see when I was more active on the WoTC forums. <--I am assuming those people knew what they were talking about. :)
...I understand it is an open setting, but how does he claim it is more logical? From my understanding of it, the GM is the one to provide the logic/reason behind certain things...The first one I came across was how; "If there has always been Detect Evil spell/ability in the world, then there would be no evil today". I can scarcely fathom the kind of blinders one would need to read the Core Books and yet come up with that conclusion. And worse, how did that concept continue once the setting was officially adopted to be developed at WotC?
People can be detected by that spell in Eberron so I really don't why it was made. Maybe he forget the spell did not change function in the new setting.
The second one was how; "The PCs ought to be the heroes of the realm". So the vast majority of the neutral/good NPCs are low level and the high level ones are about 8th level, +- 2 levels. While this does force mid-level PCs to be the most remarkable group in the realm, it also leaves the BBEGs (and I mean the BBEGs, the immortal or functionally immortal ones, who are also super-geniuses and command a hoard of minions and many far more powerful followers) without an effective opponent until such time as the PCs level up.
I do remember the PC's becoming legends around level 11, and I had your same thought. The way the campaign handled that was to keep them all trapped. The gatekeeper orcs had some planar blocking going on, and the Rashaka deities were trapped also. The Quori were on an isolated island, and stuck in dreamland for the most part. When/If they broke free the PC's are there to stop them.
I don't like the idea of "everyone is trapped" since it stretches being believable, but assuming they are all trapped which they are, it works. I did not see this addressed up thread if it is a logical problem, which to me is different from a problem of being likely.
I don't like the idea of "everyone is trapped" since it stretches being believable, but assuming they are all trapped which they are, it works. I did not see this addressed up thread if it is a logical problem, which to me is different from a problem of being likely.It railroads the BBEGs and, by association, the PCs as well.
It's also a way of not having to do any real work for the official setting products. The DM pays her $50 and then gets to do all the detail work specifying the outworking of all these trapped BBEGs.
This could be solved if WotC acutally had higher level adventures in Eberron, but yeah beyond that they won't likely see the light of day. At best some group will be trying to free them and the PC's will have to stop them. Actually even if they are free to walk, but otherwise occupied the GM still has to make the adventure so that is a problem with WoTC not having official adventures. Of course a GM can make their own, but in that case neither situation is an issue.
DMs always have the option of doing lots of detail work - that is a setting agnostic feature of 3.PF - but with Eberron it is mandatory.What's not mandatory is paying $50 for something that gives you manifestly worse results than posting a question or two to various forums.
I don't think the forums have ever given up 300+ pages of material all in one place, and once again the level of detail needed depends on the group, and the GM is still doing less work thank making an entire campaign from scratch. I am assuming you write your own settings, which probably have a lot of detail, more than most players need so that leads or your issues with Eberron.
As far as the "new-and-better" way of thinking about Detect Evil, he went into great detail on his blog. Note - his blog isn't official as it applies only to his campaign.
So I guess in his homebrew detect evil does not work as well as the official version. In that case his detect evil idea does not even apply to this conversation.
Side-note - interestingly, his blog-answers don't generally give any better help than the official WotC Eberron products but some of the comments/questions by the fans on that blog most definitely do. You can see them struggle with the very same problems over and over again.
I also blame WoTC for this. He gave them a base setting and many of the other WoTC people added and changed things. I wish I had the link, but they changed quiet a few things. I don't know if he still does work for WoTC, but I do remember him giving "corporate" answers at times. The fans need to go to WoTC, assuming they are still supporting the setting so they can get more material. I don't really know how much WoTC listens to their audience, and I don't want to get into that topic.
I just went to his blog which stopped two years ago, and he has some things that should have been in the books. Some of the stuff on the website should have also been in the book. A lot of the material being scattered is another problem.
What I am likely going to do is take certain things over to Golarion when I get the time, but not the magictech, unless I put it on another planet.
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Quark, nearly everything you've said comes down to personal opinion. However you seem to present it as factual. That tends to rub people the wrong way really. ProbBly why the thread is so long.
For me, a setting I purchase is done so to give me what's need to create consistent game world in and outside of the games I run. It also needs to give the stimulus I need to either write my own games or modify the modules I own to the setting provided.
So for my opinions, here goes.
- Golarion. The setting itself gave me little inspiration at all. Except for the Gnomes and bleaching. I found that concept great. The only reason I run games in Golarion is because Paizos APs are set there. Paizo writes my favourite APs so I run in their setting in order to reduce work for me.
- Forgotten Realms. I loved the novels from this setting back when I was a teenager. I tried re reading them again recently and found the entire thing just boring. Nothing in the game setting inspires me at all to be honest. It's just so generic to almost every setting I'd read to date. You claim it makes no sense to to criticise it, but for it is a seriously boring setting.
- spell jammer . Bleh. It's a space game trying to use magic that never gelled with me at all. If I wanted space games, I played 40 k table top and wrote campaigns to link the battles. In later days I tried the 40k roleplay games by Fantasy flight but I've pretty much grown out of that setting too.
- Eberron. A breath of fresh air for me. It took the idea do magic replacing science and showed how it would work. Why put time into science and invention, when you can do it with magic instead. It had complex politics, better than any setting I'd run so far. It built in the concept of espionage beautifully. It had massive war and armies and everything I wanted in that at area. It had both good and evil deities. It had cults. It had dragons following their own plans. It had a continent of lost temples and civilisations to explore where people paid you to go there. No more adventuring just because. These were real reasons to be who you were. It gave me and my players to options to play everything we wanted when we wanted and we could ignore whichever parts we wanted. Like every setting before it, you can ignore whatever the hell you want in it and it doesn't destroy it.
I understand you don't like Eberron, but it's time to admit its just your opinion and yours is no more valid than anyone else's really. None of your arguments are actually any more valid than everyone elses. Makes this pointless, though it has given some insite for me in why people seek out prevents settings.
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Interestingly enough, to add to my point above. I now find 5 th edition so simple to run and understand, that I find my time for preparation is freer. I no longer need to read stat blocks to check every feat and how it works. I no longer struggle with spells, vs su, vs spell like etc and then learn every spell available. Everything is just available.
I don't even need to make up NPCs based off the player build rules. I just used some of the hundreds of pregenerated NPC types available for me.
As such, I recently went through Runelords. The first book at least. It took me an hour to convert it to 5 th edition. It took me less than 20 minutes to set it in Eberron. It will take a bit more to get the entire plot working in Eberron but I reckon it won't take to much to get this to be a Daelkyr rising or maybe convert the Ruleord into a Rakshaka trying to get free.
So this is me thanking you Quark. This debate got me thinking about my favourite setting enough to go through that effort and actually do the leg work. In one way, the Christmas wish you mentioned for me earlier in this thread has come true :) Yay!
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True enough. It is hard to get folks to listen in a forum.
I agree you made your points too. My tone was a bit harsh in the last post too. Something about typing, where the words don't come out with inflection or facial features to show intent. It's only after I go back through my posts sometimes that I realise it doesn't sound how I meant them.
Luckily, I rarely take offense from things on the forums any more.
I also agree with the novels. I first started reading novels from DnD settings when I was a young teenager. In those days it didn't take much to sate my appetite in terms of writing ability.
I'm older now, and my tastes have matured in what I expect from good writers. I can't stand David Eddings any more. I find that Raymond E Feist books leave me absolutely cold now. I still love his Magician Series up until a point, but his modern work seems trashy and shallow to me. As for Dragon Lance and Forgotten Realms. I reckon the War of the Spider Queen anthology were quite good. They were ahead of their time a little in fact, exploring the dark nature of the Drow rather than the traditional Drizzt as the hero. I also loved the second set of Dragon Lance books where Raistlyn and Caramon went back in time. Those books were a great insight into character development. I suspect if I read them now though, they'd tarnish my memory a little.
I now enjoy George R R Martin, I love David Gemmel novels (though he passed away a few years back now). I also love Terry Pratchett for his exceptionally intelligent writing. And for a complete change, reading the books of Robyn Hobb have been an eye opener for me as well. I usually don't enjoy fantasy novels written by women, but she has done an amazing job from my perspective.
None of those types of authors seem to be coming out of Golarion novels or Forgotten realms or Eberron to tell the truth. I've read about six of the Golarion novels looking for a glimmer of hope. There's one about a Pirate I liked, but not enough to even remember its name sadly.
Agreed on Official Eberron modules too. The setting itself was pure gold for me, but the adventures left me flat. I ended up running age of worms in it though. Best campaign ever, and the setting worked Beautifully for it (though admittedly, Age of Worms would be beautiful no matter where you ran it.)
On Khorvaire, Good Gaming is said exactly the same way, but it carries the weight of political intrigue and subtle threat behind it. As it should hehe.
Agreed on Official Eberron modules too. The setting itself was pure gold for me, but the adventures left me flat. I ended up running age of worms in it though. Best campaign ever, and the setting worked Beautifully for it (though admittedly, Age of Worms would be beautiful no matter where you ran it.)
This is how I tend to view Eberron. The setting itself is extremely rich, exploring a lot of things most worlds don't ever look at, and it's quite possible to maintain the political and espionage aspects while removing most of the more annoying elements from the adventures, many of which were actually interesting premises, but weak in execution. The magic as tech aspect isn't as notable to me as much as the fact that it's the only one that makes the type of magic that one would actually expect to see commonly common while limiting the stuff that one would expect to see more closely guarded and less understood. I never could get into FR's paradigm (and for that matter, the whole original theory of magic access in D&D generally) of commoners having virtually no access to or knowledge of low level magic, but yet higher level, world shaping magic and artifacts are apparently common to encounter with plenty of people coming out of the woodwork that seem to understand how to use it without destroying themselves. It's a concept that works fine for novels or movies, but not so much for a tabletop coop game played out over the course of several years.
The lack of novels don't actually bother me all that much. I've never been really impressed with the idea of crossovers between the tabletop RPG and the novel/movie/TV show/computer game; the type of plots, characters, and worlds that work well in one don't usually do all that well in any of the others; each medium tends to be best when telling the type of story designed to its own strengths. For all that both FR and Dragonlance have a fair number of decent novels, they aren't all that interesting as campaign worlds to me. If I were looking for a setting for a series of novels or a small regional based mini-campaign or one off adventure, they would absolutely be at the top of established worlds I would consider, but for a full fledged table top cooperative campaign, the worlds as a whole just aren't all that interesting to me. Eberron is actually one of the few established worlds that I would seriously look at for that unless I was running an AP that already had a lot of the world interactions for Golarion worked in; for all that both Greyhawk and Golarion aren't bad, Eberron is the only one truly designed fully with the idea of giving a DM a solid outline to work from while leaving all of the details to the DM and campaign.
I don't think the forums have ever given up 300+ pages of material all in one place, and once again the level of detail needed depends on the group, and the GM is still doing less work thank making an entire campaign from scratch. I am assuming you write your own settings, which probably have a lot of detail, more than most players need so that leads or your issues with Eberron.Strictly speaking, that is true. Looking at them in detail though and I often see less than 30 pages of content I can use or don't already know from another official product.
The book on Stormreach was the best IMO. The book on Argonnessen among the very worst - the "very worst" category has lots of company. ;)
KB seems to be lobbying hard for him (or someone) to develop new content for Eberron in 5E. I'm not sure why WotC are dragging their feet - either because Eberron has historically provided little ROI as a setting or maybe because, now that KB is Important People, he costs too much to contract or maybe Kobold Press or others have first right of producing 5E content.
I would like to see KB writing again also. I thought the Xendrik book was the worst one, and the book on the psionic nation was the best, but I get your point. :)
Interestingly enough, to add to my point above. I now find 5 th edition so simple to run and understand, that I find my time for preparation is freer. I no longer need to read stat blocks to check every feat and how it works. I no longer struggle with spells, vs su, vs spell like etc and then learn every spell available. Everything is just available.
I don't even need to make up NPCs based off the player build rules. I just used some of the hundreds of pregenerated NPC types available for me.
As such, I recently went through Runelords. The first book at least. It took me an hour to convert it to 5 th edition. It took me less than 20 minutes to set it in Eberron. It will take a bit more to get the entire plot working in Eberron but I reckon it won't take to much to get this to be a Daelkyr rising or maybe convert the Ruleord into a Rakshaka trying to get free.
So this is me thanking you Quark. This debate got me thinking about my favourite setting enough to go through that effort and actually do the leg work. In one way, the Christmas wish you mentioned for me earlier in this thread has come true :) Yay!
What I intend to do is give 5th one year to see how WoTC handles errata and splat books. If they can still give me the other things I like then I will try it out. PF can take a lot of time, and if I had more time I could write my own adventures again, which is what I prefer, but making NPC's can be time consuming even with Herolabs, which I often have to doublecheck anyway.