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From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.dnd
Subject: Re: Study: Dungeons and Dragons may improve mental health
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2024 11:14:01 -0400
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On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 08:10:18 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>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

>> 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.  

Honestly, the quality was going down even before that. The 1st Edition
supplements ('FR1 Waterdeep and the North' through 'FR6 Dreams of the
Red Wizards' (1988), why yes, I do still own all my old books why do
you ask? ;-) retained a lot of the feel of the original campaign
setting. But the world-building started declining after that, and by
the time 'FR13 Anauroch' (1991) released, there was little reason to
stick with the Forgotten Realms after that. TSR was pumping out too
much material, too quickly and with too little review* and it resulted
in a very messy setting. 

The 2E/3E Spellplague transition was just the icing on a very shitty
cake, by that time. 


>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.

Fortunately, I very rarely had to deal with that, since most of my
campaigns were in a home-brew setting. But we occassionally played in
the Forgotten Realms (usually when one of the players wanted to try
their hand at DMing) and what you described was a definite problem.
Although it was less pressure to conform, and more an issue with every
player KNOWING too much about the world. "Oh, let's go visit
Elminster" or "Red Wizards are all evil bastards" or "that skull
symbol is actually the mark of the secretive cult of Myrkul". 

As much as we might have tried to avoid 'player knowledge = PC
knowledge', so much of the lore was so commonly known that it was hard
to avert. Between the novels, comics, video games and immense hoard of
official supplements, we all were saturated with Forgotten Realms lore
and it pretty much ruined all sense of mystery and wonder... which I'd
argue is an important part of any fantasy setting.

Which is probably another reason why the original material resonates
so fondly with me; it came out before all the magic was gone from the
setting.





* inevitable commentary about Lorraine Williams doubtlessly to follow