Recent content by Remathilis

BIrthright 2027

It does create a very arbitrary line when one thing is generic enough to be in the PHB (Knowledge domain) but shunted off to the Forgotten Realms book, and now you get a bunch of bad interactions, such as DMs calling it Realms exclusive or lumping it in with spellfire sorcery or Scion of the...

Because you get dumb ideas like bladesinger and knowledge clerics locked in a Faerun book and half-elves khoravar and artificers locked in the Eberron book and DMs who ban the whole book or don't even bother looking at it because it's "for another setting". The whole bloody thing should work...

Those people ignore it like they ignore Golarion or Midguard. But the game itself builds upon that lore and everything is compatible with itself rather than contradicting itself. In less than a month, D&D released two player facing books (Heroes of Faerun and Forge of the Artificer) that...

Well, I figure if nothing happens between now and December 12th, don't count on anything until after the New Year, probably around middle of January.

It tells me a slight bit more than D&D. The elves work essentially the same across the world (there are no major differences such as Krynns dark elves vs drow), the gods are the same, every supplement is automatically compatible with the lore (no Dragonborn don't exist on Oerth arguments). Yeah...

I sit down to play Cyberpunk Red, I know I'm playing in Night City. I read the core book, I know exactly what options are allowed, where my character comes from, even what the slang my character is going to speak, choom. If I play Pathfinder, I'm almost overwhelmingly playing in Golarion and...

That's the rub; a good player can make a Dragonborn warlock fit like a glove and and a bad player can make a human fighter stick out like a sore thumb.

Exactly. It's a mismatch of expectations that leads to a breakdown of the games lingua franca. And in this case, it really highlights the dangers of going against D&D's established tropes. You confuse players who hear their are a party of gnomes up ahead and think PHB gnomes only to discover...

I don't consider Starfinder a Pathfinder setting because it's essentially a different game with it's own PHB and Bestiary and unique classes and species. But I'll look into Labyrinth.

I've already said it's too late. The smoke isn't going back in the bottle. But I'm just reiterating the issue with players creating characters that don't fit with the DMs setting is almost exclusively a D&D problem and there is a reason you don't see it often in other RPGs.

But if it's D&D's greatest strength, why do we have threads like this where DMs bemoan how their player's characters are disconnected from the settings? That's my point.

You know, Tales of the Valiant and Pathfinder are both open gaming. How many other settings but Midguard and Golarion are there for either of them? They are certainly no harder to design for then D&D, and probably are a great deal easier. Then again, how much effort does KP or Paizo put in...

You realize that dates back to 2e Planescape, right?

And yet, Nerath was the default pick-up-and-go. If you bought the core three 4e books and nothing else, you could run a perfectly serviceable campaign on Nerath. In 2014, you couldn't even run the Realms without a fourth book. I guess 2024 has Greyhawk in the DMG, but nothing in the player...