Quote from: Warthur;844887Baldur's Gate, which amongst video gamers is probably the most recognisable place name in the Realms.

Really?  I thought it was further inland.  And just checked the Princes of Apocalypse map, and you're right.  I stand corrected.  Cool.  So this book might cover between Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter.  AWESOME.  I loved those places.  I never actually got to play in Waterdeep, mind you, past the Undermountain boxed set.

Quote from: Alzrius;844898To paraphrase someone else (I think Wolfgang Baur, though I'm not sure), "logic based questions" does not mean "the setting functions the way it does in the real world." Rather, it's shorthand for "the setting has internal logic and self-consistency that it adheres to."

Which is what I meant.  Every good setting has a series of logical consistencies that are usually followed, in the Realms, unfortunately, Elminster breaks them over his knee and a spanks them for good measure.

Like I said, Akrasia, if your players can avoid those pitfalls, more power to you.  But the players I got in the past 30 years that have wanted to play in Realms, all of them wanted to interact with Elminster, and when they find out exactly how powerful he truly is, those annoying questions come up, and honestly, it's sincerely tiring trying to find an excuse to either depower him, or remove him, without metaphorically destroying Shadowvale, as frankly, he's a Sage of 'Great Power'.

The closest I ever got was turning him into another version of Tellah of the old Japanese RPG Final Fantasy 2 (4 in Japan) for the Nintendo Entertainment System.  Who was a crotchety old mage, on his last years with encroaching senility, but once had great power, and still remembers those days.

Which is completely unlike Elminster to those who love the realm or even read a little bit about him.

An interesting datapoint: Wizards just released the results summary of their June survey on settings (along with opening up their new survey on psionics). Here's the quote relevant to this conversation:

QuoteThe popularity of settings in the survey fell into three distinct clusters. Not surprisingly, our most popular settings from prior editions landed at the top of the rankings, with Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, and the Forgotten Realms all proving equally popular. Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Spelljammer all shared a similar level of second-tier popularity, followed by a fairly steep drop-off to the rest of the settings. My sense is that Spelljammer has often lagged behind the broad popularity of other settings, falling into love-it-or-hate-it status depending on personal tastes. Greyhawk and Dragonlance hew fairly close to the assumptions we used in creating the fifth edition rulebooks, making them much easier to run with material from past editions. Of the top five settings, four require significant new material to function and the fifth is by far our most popular world.

As I see it, this tells us a bunch of important things:

• Regardless of what refined, cultured fantasy-snobs like us who've been around the block a few times feel about it, the Forgotten Realms remains one of D&D's most popular settings.
• Of the top-tier settings, Forgotten Realms is the one which cleaves the closest to the core assumptuons of D&D - all the others are divergent enough to need additional systems support for their unique features.
• When you take the above two factors together, it rather exonerates the decision to focus the early 5E product line on the Realms - quite simply, it's the most popular of those settings which can be run with the core assumptions of D&D straight out of the box. Regardless of what hardened RPG forum readers have to say about it, that's the commercial reality Wizards have to deal with and it would be ludicrous and self-destructive of them to pretend otherwise.
• Equally, whilst there is obviously demand for Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun and Planescape, the 5E team evidently want to support those with robust mechanics, so we'll have to wait a little further down the line. (That said, the Unearthed Arcana articles on Eberron material and on psionics suggest that they are working to provide that system support.)
• Spelljammer being such a love-it-or-hate-it setting, if it gets support at all it probably won't be on the level we've seen for the Realms so far. Spelljammer isn't likely to become the focus of its own videogame and boardgame and novel tie-ins; it's more likely that it'll end up being a niche tabletop-only product licensed out to an outside development team on an even longer leash than those we've seen Kobold Press or Green Ronin working under with regards to their Realms stuff. Unless the main D&D team at Wizards grows in future years, it doesn't make sense to tie up too much of their time developing second-tier settings when there's five top-tier settings they can be making material for instead.
• Similarly, unless someone can arrange a suitable licensing arrangement it's unlikely we'll see much 5E stuff for Greyhawk or Dragonlance - the comments there seem to be a fairly unsubtle hint that if you want to play in those settings, you're best off just updating your old materials to 5E, due to them being so close to "Core D&D" in their assumptions. It really doesn't make commercial sense for Wizards to spend their time supporting multiple brands of vanilla D&D when one brand is clearly more popular than the others.
• Despite the affection felt by a few for settings like Mystara, it's deeply unlikely that Wizards will be giving it or any of the other sub-second tier settings much support in the foreseeable future, and depending on just how low the level of popularity is for the settings in question it might not even be worth Wizards' time licensing them out - licences take time to manage that they might not want to spend on those settings. Don't expect any action unless Hasbro authorise Wizards to sell off the unwanted IP entirely.

Ravenloft? really...

Over Kara-Tur and Al-Qadim?

Quote from: tenbones;844988Ravenloft? really...

Over Kara-Tur and Al-Qadim?

They counted AQ as part of the Realms for this survey. But there were times in D&D history that Ravenloft was reportedly the #2 setting in terms of popularity. It probably benefits from association with the classic adventure, too.

But for much of my quarter-century in gaming, Ravenloft has been the main thing keeping me in D&D's orbit.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;844992They counted AQ as part of the Realms for this survey. But there were times in D&D history that Ravenloft was reportedly the #2 setting in terms of popularity. It probably benefits from association with the classic adventure, too.

My personal experience down here in Rio suggests that, back in our AD&D 2e days, Ravenloft was second only to Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance in popularity.

And I didn't even know about the 1e adventure until the OSR rolled along and showed me What Came Before.

Quote from: The Butcher;844994My personal experience down here in Rio suggests that, back in our AD&D 2e days, Ravenloft was second only to Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance in popularity.

Ravenloft was definitely Big in Brazil.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;844992They counted AQ as part of the Realms for this survey.

They meant to include Kara-Tur in the Realms too but goofed. Gives me hope for AQ/KT themed regional sourcebooks to follow the Sword Coast one.

Zero chance of my beloved Birthright then.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;844009Looks like the smaller companies are filling the same niche that reliable freelancers did in the 80s and 90s. Makes sense--with more distribution channels and broader licensing agreements, you can start up your own company and prove your design skills that way, rather than through Dragon, Dungeon or APAs.

In spite of the ENworld post, this smells of the "not our core business so outsource it" craze that started in the 90's. WOTC appears to be somewhere on that spectrum.

A few things can suffer in that model, in either the best case "partner" mode or the  "slap a WOTC sticker on it" mode. Consistency & Improvement would be what I'd primarily worry about, if I were doing their Supplier Management. Enforcing enough of a "voice" so each product doesn't seem completely different while still retaining the advantages that different voices bring.

The ability to learn from product to product would be the second area. Farming it out fresh each time could mean always making the same mistakes.

Both of these could be solved by strong guidelines and a very good editor. Neither of which WOTC appears to have ... Tiamat & POC I'm looking at you.

Quote from: Warthur;845031They meant to include Kara-Tur in the Realms too but goofed. Gives me hope for AQ/KT themed regional sourcebooks to follow the Sword Coast one.

Yeah that would be awesome.

Ravenloft... I played/DM'ed the shit out of the original two modules... then the boxset. I've been left feeling that despite the many murderous and good experiences of with the products, that D&D never did "vampires" in a way that I liked.

And my group(s) of players got to the point if I said "Running a Ravenloft Campaign" - they would give me the "dubious look".

Quote from: One Horse Town;845041Zero chance of my beloved Birthright then.

Indeed. But I'd be surprised if the very proactive Birthright fan community wasn't working on a 5e conversion, with a draft version already.

To be honest, I think it's actually fairly straightforward; I'd use the regency system, holdings, bloodline potency, mass combat, realm magic and battle magic as-is, while substituting the bloodline powers for the appropriate 5e spells.

Quote from: Akrasia;844806Strange.  
I've never had any problem completely ignoring Elminster, Drizzt, and the rest of the canon NPCs in my FR games.
I've never had any problems in ensuring that the PCs can become the 'stars', the main 'movers-and-shakers', of the region(s) within which they adventure.
The WotC secret police have yet to arrest me for such transgressions.

Some people really dislike playing a setting with a strong metaplot or strong characters baked in.
I don't, but is a deal killer for some people, but they solve it as GMs by using the material in their own setting, for players they have to ask the GM to run an 'open' setting.
But given that almost any setting, even the Young Kingdoms which has it's Ragnarok in the books, can be gamed in whilst ignoring the main story arcs.

It's an individualist thing, the idea we have in the modern world that anyone can be President and change the world.

Quote from: Akrasia;844875There are some races and creatures that need stats (I'm pretty sure they're not in the MM).  

And some mechanical role for Factions would be cool.

My friend Paul Mitchener ran it with 13th Age fine.
I knew nothing about the setting but looking at the stuff out there it seems likely that a relaxed ref like you seem could handle it with 5e easily.
Maybe a few backgrounds for 5e from the setting for players?

It felt like Sliders crossed with a taxonomic version of the Multiverse.

http://daedaluswing.wikidot.com/faction-backgrounds
http://community.wizards.com/forum/planescape/threads/4152356

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;844652That's not "spin-doctoring", that's just a description of how publishing works in today's publishing industry (or probably even the publishing industry, ever).

The "spin-doctoring" is them using semantics to try to claim its an in-house project.