Reply To: D&D officially turning Forgotten Realms sights away from Euro inspired campaigns

[onlyonepinman 18062xp 2]

@greyhunter88 you make quite a good point about Forgotten Realms feeling generic (although the word I would use is bland) because of its diversity. There is almost a monoculture across the entire setting and with so many varied species nothing is ever unique or interesting. The thing that usually makes a setting interesting is culture clashes, and Forgotten Realms lacks that in any meaningful; without those cultural differences the settings feel a little less believable. D&D tends to replace cultural diversity with racial, or rather specieal, diversity. However all of those species, for the most part, live together quite harmoniously and while it is true that states or city states occasionally go to war the motives usually feel contrived, like they were written into the game for the sake of having them rather than any real reason. Expansionist states are always seen as the bad guys, usually being resisted by an alliance of smaller, cities or states, the good guys usually described as “free”. The political aspects of Forgotten Realms are quite bland. But as boring as that can be, it’s really easy to get into that setting and it allows a for pretty much any character type you can thing of. I would definitely expect this to be a continuing trend in any additional parts of the setting regardless of its real world cultural inspiration.

As you can probably tell, it’s not really my preference. I am happier in games where there are restrictions and the choices you make when building your character can have consequences in the game world beyond the abilities available to you – D&D doesn’t really have that built into any of the settings as far as I am aware (although I don’t claim to be an expert on all of them).