Re: Study: Dungeons and Dragons may improve mental health

On 4/19/2024 5:10 PM, Justisaur 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:
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On 4/18/2024 12:29 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
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(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? ;-)
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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

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I actually quite enjoyed the original "Forgotten Realms" setting, as
described in the originally grey-boxed AD&D release. A lot of my own
campaign material emulated the style of its 'Cyclopedia of the Realms'
sourcebook. It was only later that the setting started to annoy me, as
it became ever-more magic-heavy and every corner of it was detailed by
TSR/WOTC, leaving no room for exploration or development by players
and DMs. Forcing obvious fantasy-equivalents to real-world places
(Kara Tur = China! Maztica = Central America! Al Qadim = Mythic
Arabia!) didn't help; it just made the entire construct feel all the
more disjointed. And once certain characters started gaining undue
popularity, the whole thing started feeling weirdly tiny and
soap-operaish ("Oh look, Drizzt Duorden is in this adventure too!")
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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.
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 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.  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.
 

I came into Forgotten Realms in 2e, after already having read a few novels and played a few games I sprung for the campaign set. And I felt it was grating in ways that few other settings have been. There was the feeling about the whole setting material that this was basically just a theme park of a world, where even if you don't succeed, some high level NPC will swoop in and save everyone.
I did notice the barely logical worldbuilding in other settings as well. I have a fondness for Mystara. But at least that setting didn't throw a bunch of high level NPCs at you that were just there to show you how much you and your party sucked.
Even then I was ok with the setting until the switch to 3rd edition happened and the setting had a time jump of a few decades. That's basically the best sign for a setting to say: yeah, the designers don't care about this setting, why should you?
It is my understanding that by now multiple further jumps have happened.