4th Ed Forgotten Realms

[Kimiko]

Is anyone else also seriously pissed about what they've done to the Realms in 4th edition? To me it seemed like an enormous cop-out that they just pushed everything forward a good century & off just about everything & everyone that's good and just in the realms.

[sb]

I agree it's a cop out, but I do like the world they have created.

[Imitarate]

That's true, but they didn't really need to ruin the world they HAD to do it. Points of light is bullshit, and you're not alone in being pissed that they pushed it on Forgotten Realms, a world which (contrary to its title) was useful for the fact that so much of it WAS fleshed out, that so much of it WAS well-documented. It was REALLY useful for novels and video games; that's why so many D&D games have been set in FR, really serving to make the whole setting better (Baldur's Gate series has become essentially canon to a lot of fans). I don't think we'll see that anymore.

It took me quite a while just to get over the DEITY changes they made (killing MYSTRA? WHAT? AGAIN? And wait, why isn't there a new Mystra? Didn't we establish that without a god holding the power of the Weave together that the WORLD WOULD END? THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRETY OF THE HISTORY AND FICTION? WHAT?), which, obviously, I'm not completely over, but anyways. Some of the setting changes are just frankly ludicrous, even setting aside the push-everything-100-years-ahead bullshit.

I think this has thoroughly sounded the death knell for FR fiction, which is a damned shame. There have been some really good books in the setting, and some incredible games (BG, Icewind Dale, NWN, even the old goldbox games were good for their time), but now they've fucked everything all up. Well, if they keep creating content set in the old FR I'll keep up with it, but I'm done with newFR. Worse than new World of Darkness; at least Whitewolf made an ENTIRE new setting instead of killing then raping their old one.
It's not a bad setting, but it's not FR. WotC has done what WotC is good at doing, alienating core fanbase for the sake of a quick buck.

[BRP]

FR suffers for the same reason it has flourished(I guess): its authors.

They are so stupid in the way they believe magic in a fantasy novel must work EXACTLY like it is way it works in the metagame.

They made a big deal about how many spells per day a character would have even though they didn't need to and didn't want to. And then with a change like this(which actually fits nicely with writing fiction) they feel like they cannot conflict the canon so they MUST come up with some really stupid plot. It's not like the first time they've done this either.

[sb]

Double post ftl.

[sb]

New F.R. feels like a strange old F.R./Dark Sun hybrid. The changes they made seems more like that of a Corporate decision than a designer decision. When you get to the point where you have too much history things stop being flexible, and when that happens, you run out of ground breaking material. In terms of new books, adventures, and video games, a whole new revision of the setting was in order. They can now also market the history leading up to the new setting.

As I said above I actually find the new setting fairly interesting. Some of the choices made make a pretty decent/logical amount of sense. But I agree, there are some that came across as a huge cop out.