Well, seeing the action occurring in the 4e discussion thread and deciding to steal an idea from our SWSE sister community, here's another one.

Forgotten Realms in 4th Edition, post Spellplague, seen in the FRPG and FRCG. What do you think? Total crap or absolute crap? ;) Let us know.

I'll go with Option C, "All of the above".  :p


The only redeeming feature about it, to me, is that it's almost like a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting, which is just funky enough to work...  but at the expense of ruining the Forgotten Realms?  No.  Just...  no.  And I thought the changes looked bad when we were looking at spoilers from Grand History of the Realms. . .

I love how the only character to survive was Drizz't Do'Urden. They're willing to kill every other unique character, except for the golden goose. That's what really screamed "cheap" to me.

I thought Elminster survived, too? Since he's the Author Avatar...

They killed off everyone but Drizz't?

Ridiculous. Thanks for concreting my lack of enthusiasm for anything 4th ed ;)

Based on what I've seen, I'd really rather 'forget' anything of the Forgotten Realms with regards to 4e.  If I ever play another 4e game, it most certainly will not be in my beloved Realms.

I thought he was Gandalf :D

How are these two statements in any way mutually exclusive? :p

Fair enough.

The benefit of the spellplague is that they can remove a lot of the Ed Greenwood copyright and royalties just as White Wolf come out with the new world of darkness to get rid of all the royalties that the old world of Darkness had to authors no longer working for them.

a more game related analysis is that Drizzt is only hero with centuries of life whose power is based in his skills and young (he is very young for a drow). All the chosen, elminster and company were long lived because magic sustained them (because they were chosen of mystra as well as daughters of mystra for the seven sisters).

Create a magic disaster and the chosen are all dead. Most of the liches probably perished, the knights of Myth drannor died in the fighting (for the couple of elves). The major enemies are also preserved by magic and their clones probably destroyed in process too (Manshoon for example).

Most of the other heros are human and would be dead of old age if not battle.

Actually, Elminster survived, except he's crazy and useless. The Simbul too, but she's no longer queen of Aglarond. Most of the old heroes are dead, or screwed over.

Jarlaxle survived though. There's a theme here.

I keep intending to write a review or commentary of the 4e FR, but I just can't be bothered. What can I say? It's got no redeeming features whatsoever. The end. And it's such a monumentally boring prospect - every time I look over 4e material of any kind, my eyes just keep sliding off the page, I just can't stay interested in it.

4e FR is just such an about-face in terms of the old design. A once very-detailed and rich setting, now ultra-minimalist (a polite way of saying lazy). An optimistic, bright and on-the-up-and-up world, now post-apocalyptic and ruled by evil tyrants. Independent city-states swapped for empires, large kingdoms and federations. Grand heroes killed off, with over-used villains in their places. And it was all brought about in such a stupid stupid way.

Maybe the new setting style works for someone, but it just doesn't work for FR. Or me.

Alright, the only good parts about 4e FR is the Returned Abeir continent. It's interesting, it has character, it has potential. Coincidentally, it's the only bit that Ed Greenwood worked on.

Okay, what are people's thoughts about 4e FR and RoA? Anyone think we should adapt to the new setting? We'll be in 1375 DR for a loooong time yet (well, Sword Coast South is approaching 1376), and I prefer to think we'd develop our own version of FR after that, a better version. I certainly don't want to see all this trashed. So put me down for a "hell no!"

I vote on creating our own future tale of FR.

And I'm certainly not placing an ultimatum (gods, like anyone would care either way) but I would definitely move on to other games if we did go ahead with 4e.

I was curious to see if it was as bad as everyone's saying? So I thumbed through it briefly this morning while I was out...and yes, it is.

I echo BCM's sentiments fervently (except without the cursing :p)!!!!!!!

I want nothing to do with the 'new' FR.

Continue in the 14 hundreds. 4e might be viable to eventually switch to if it ever gets some material behind it and stops reading like an MMO manual.

Heck, I half expect them to list which keyboard commands activate which powers at the back of the book :D

As for 4e forgotten realms, let's just officially declare it non-canon and keep working with the good Greenwood stuff.

I wanted to give it a chance, hoping it would have some redeeming features. Alas, no. It's such a shame that they trashed Ed Greenwood's world, that so many others had had a hand in over the years, the likes of Steven Schend, Eric Boyd, Elaine Cunningham, George Krashos, etc.

I was getting the feeling I was too old to keep playing D&D ... Real life kicking my butt once in a while reminding me I had a million other things to do , but I was never able to stop , for FR was something too rich to stop exploring ... there was always that unique realm or village full of peculiar tales , characters , inns and dungeons that were worth a "last" adventure.

4th edition just made it ease ! It totally sucks ! It killed every single tiny sparkle of hope that WoTC would ever keep up with the good work of TSR and the original guys, its just a comercial crap such as Warcraft and the likes ...

I hope RoA survives.

That's not really fair.

Warcraft is actually a very well developed and thought-out setting that's grown and developed since the original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Sure, it doesn't have the same pedigree as OFR, but there's a lot more there than it appears at first glance.

Admittedly, most people don't know most of that history - I mean, who among the nine million or so WoW players actually realises that the Prophet is actually Medivh, the man who opened the Dark Portal that let the Orcs come to Azeroth in the first place, come back to life? Not many, I wager.

*nods and pretends to understand what Miko's saying*

:p  *giggles*  You and Ami come over here, and I'll let you teach me WoW, li'l sis.  :)  *giggles more*

Anyway, we have got some fantastic PCs and DMs here in RoA and some great leadership, especially DM BadCatMan.  RoA is going to make it just fine.  I just hope we do it with 3.5 rules in the current Realms and ignore the trash WotC is putting out now.

Oh, I don't play WoW. :p I just played the RTS games and a few WoW D20 games, and read a couple of the books and the manga.

Yeah, and here I've barely even heard of it.  :p

You know what's really funny?

TSR in the end was a s*** company. The CEO felt she was "better" then gamers and forbade playtesting because she refused to let her employees actually play the game she was making.

TSR was a horrible company, but it still produced some great products. That's why AD&D got so convuluted, each product line was marketed like it's own independent game and so there's horribly overlap and contradiction between the settings.

And yet the writers who actually stayed on produced some brilliant pieces of work.

Now WotC is the exact opposite. The executive board all grew up playing D&D, they're all self-admitted gamers. And yet, they're producing s*** for a game. It's lazy, it's a huge step backwards...

I just don't get it, truth is stranger then fiction.

Opinion, not truth.  And there's a whole lof of people out there who are more than happy with the design behind 4th Edition D&D - and not just people who play World of Warcraft, either (despite that being a rather common 'myth' among most of the 4E-haters).  The system doesn't do anything to prevent roleplaying, and the mechanics are tight and solid - and balanced.  While there are many things about 3.5 I love, playing at high levels, spellcasters overpower the non-casters to such a ridiculous degree - and that doesn't make for a good cooperative game.


Sure, the 4E Forgotten Realms stuff is bad, but that's mostly because they wrecked the original Realms to make it - if I hadn't come to know and love it so much already, I wouldn't have thought the new books were that bad at all.  But, I did, and I do.  :p



On another note, WotC is currently producing my very favorite brand of roleplaying sourcebooks, with their Star Wars Saga Edition, and each new book keeps amazing me with the top-notch quality (even if some people do love to nitpick about silly statblock errors that won't make any difference at all in actual play).  So, while I won't be buying into 4E FR, and probably not anything 4E outside the core rulebooks for a good long while, WotC is definitely doing something right.  :-)

Wizards of the coast is part of Hasbro, big multi-national interested in making money. THey made a game that was by design able to be used for MMO so that they could make the MMO and link the two. The success of Neverwinter Nights, World of War craft and similiar games basically clinched it.

That said, I have seen a lot of groups at my local games store playing 4th ed. People that didn't play it before but I see just as many of the older edition gamers and I see very little overlap. Only a few have converted.

From what I can tell, Hasbro has left WotC alone, but then I don't know much as I don't do much research. I just make broad stereotypes and act like they're 100% right because it's easier then actually doing research :D

In reply to PC praguepride (msg #21):

I can't imagine that Hasbro is really 'leaving WotC alone', it's not their nature, and I don't know how many of the original people are still there anyway.

*sigh*  TSR always seemed to be swinging from emphasis on creative people (lots of wonderful ideas, but too much of it didn't make money, partially because resources were spread too thin) to the beancounters (oh, no, the bottom line is bad, let's get rid of all these expensive writers that we don't understand anyway, and cut all the 'extra' lines) and never seemed to hit the middle ground.  And in one of their purges of creative types, a number of them went and started Pacesetter, which put out some great products, but had made the same mistake of too much emphasis on one aspect over the other.  (That year when we went to GenCon we ran into one of the people involved and asked about who was minding the books, got a sort of blank look, knew they wouldn't last, darn it.  Ironically it's possible their initial success is what did them in, it's surprising how too much expansion too fast can be as dangerous to a company as a lack of sales.)