Anon, why do you still play in the Forgotten Realms setting?

>>46691764
>Anon, why do you still play in the Forgotten Realms setting?
I don't. Why should I?

Outside of convention games, I don't. Why would you assume that I do?

>>46691764
Because some locations are not fully fleshed out mary sue fests and it's really really not hard to go "drizzt's dead" or change any other aspect of flavor I don't like.

There's so much written on it I can fish the good from the bad and reflavor it as I need. Also I like some of the organizations.

>>46691764
>Anon, why do you still play in the Forgotten Realms setting?
I just realized that I have never played a game in that particular setting. Time to kill myself I guess? Fuck you all!!!

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>>46691764
It's home. I grew up with it as the default setting since I was eleven. I also really like drow, but can't stand Drizzt. The character is largely responsible for making drow playable, but he is such an overpowered character I just can't stand the guy.

Yvonnel Baenre is, and always will be, best drow.

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>>46691764
I don't play in the Forgotten Realms setting and I don't see the general appeal of it over other generic fantasy settings.

>>46691764
Because it's fun.

>>46691804
>Because some locations are not fully fleshed out mary sue fests and it's really really not hard to go "drizzt's dead" or change any other aspect of flavor I don't like.

Not even sure why you'd bother killing off Drizzt; the Sword Coast region from Icewind Dale down to Amn and from the Sea of Swords in to the Sea of Fallen Stars is roughly the size of the United States. The chances of running into Drizzt are essentially zero anyway. Plus he's usually busy with his own things.

That's my biggest complaint about people's biggest complaint with the Forgotten Realms. The Realms is a big place with a lot going on in it at any one given time. It really doesn't matter that Drizzt is in it; he has his own shit to deal with. It doesn't matter that Elminster is in it; he has his own shit to deal with. At best they might be able to make cameos (a la the Baldur's Gate games), but for the most part (as in those games) they're just gonna be quick cameos before they go off to deal with their own problems.

Besides which, it's not like Ed Greenwood or R.A. Salvatore is gonna bust down your door Gestapo style and force you to include their characters on pain of rape and death.

>>46691878
>I don't play in the Forgotten Realms setting and I don't see the general appeal of it over other generic fantasy settings.

It's not really generic fantasy anymore. It started as it, but at this point the Realms are probably more fleshed out than Middle Earth. At this point all they're missing are complete languages for nerds to learn.

>>46691830
>but he is such an overpowered character I just can't stand the guy.

Not sure how he can be "overpowered" in a setting that has Halaster, Larloch, Elminster, Szas Tam, and the like...

>>46691913
That actually sounds very unappealing.

>>46691896
Yeah no I more or less agree; my point is rather that of all the things people fuckin' sperg out about w/r/t FR, most of them are as simple as a sentence worth of "nope" to fix.

>>46691764
I grew up on the Gold Box games. It has nostalgia value for me.

Plus the new published adventures for 5E are all in FR and ironically I never played any tabletop in the FR campaign setting, so it's actually a novelty after so many years of non-FR settings.

>>46691949
To each his own, I suppose. Basically the desire to run a game in the Realms is rooted in the same fundamental desire to run a game in the Star Wars universe, or Warhammer (either Fantasy or 40K), or what have you.

>>46691939
If you wear braces of swiftness on your feet, because putting them on your wrists will slow down your hands, you might be overpowered.

The guy reads like someone's first character, and has a pretty big mark of not facing the consequences of his actions. Lolth shows up a lot in dealing with Drow. Yet for all the times he has irritated her, she just doesn't turn the guy into a pile of spider legs. Why? Hand wavium plot armor.

What good is a character who faces no real threats anymore?

Just kept building off Red Hand Of Doom.

We are 4 campaigns down the line and still doing stuff related to what my players did in that module.

Hell, we have been talking of a complete reboot and me running a half-dragons campaign based off it with the players playing the bad guys.

>>46692028
So far I'm liking the way 5e handles FR.
It may be the only part that really stands out as stellar in my opinion. Not that 5e's not a good game, it just feels like it falls flat in ways I can't really articulate. I think at some level I'd have preferred an entirely new ruleset like 4e was (in spirit rather than in terms of like mechanical execution of said overhaul).

>>46692070
I thought RHOD was originally set in Greyhawk?

>>46692142
It was built to be run in GH and FR, with eberron in mind to a lesser degree.

Eliser Vale matches up 100% geographically with southern Shaar, just with new place names to make it fit in all three settings .

>>46692028
>I grew up on the Gold Box games. It has nostalgia value for me.
Awesome, you have great taste and you are certainly not alone. Curse of the Azure bonds and Pools of Darkness are still some of my favorites. I belong to the "OSR" school of RPGs though.

>>46692262
I remember pools of darkness. I think I have the goldbox collection around here some place. Eye of the Beholder, and Eye of the Beholder 2 are also games I spend an inordinate amount of time playing

>>46692262
I grew up on that shit as well. Liked Dark Sun's Shattered Lands a bit more.

I wanna like OSR in principle but always preferred 2e and now I seem to really be liking Dungeon World, even though I thought I wouldn't.

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>>46692060
This is gonna take a bit. 1/2

>If you wear braces of swiftness on your feet, because putting them on your wrists will slow down your hands, you might be overpowered.

Yeah, that's not why he did that, and it was explained in the book where he did that. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you simply forgot the reasoning and not that you're just searching for a reason to hate the character.

The issue Drizzt faced wasn't that his swordplay slowed down with the bracers, it's that it was too fast. His feet couldn't keep up, and in an actual swordfight - particularly the high-fantasy swashbuckling sword fights that Drizzt gets into - footwork is just as important as handwork, for reasons of balance, weight distribution, positioning, and so on. While wearing the bracers on his wrists, in combat, his hands would move too fast and he would wind up swinging too soon or the like.

So he instead hit on the idea of wearing them on his ankles, allowing him to move faster across the battlefield and get into position faster, without impacting his ability to swing a sword and hit a target where and when he wanted.

>>46692299
>I remember pools of darkness. I think I have the goldbox collection around here some place.
Good stuff.
>>46692312
>I grew up on that shit as well. Liked Dark Sun's Shattered Lands a bit more.
:Storyfag: (hehe)

>>46692329
Not the guy you're respondnig to, but your explanation is still silly. They're magic bracers. They don't affect just the hands, they affect the whole body, including the feet, so if his hands are moving extra fast, so are his feet...and spine, and head, and torso, etc. It's an abstraction, not some pseudo-fantasy-physics.

>>46692060
>>46692329
2/2

>Why? Hand wavium plot armor.

No, it's because Lolth is *fucking insane*. Pic related.

>and has a pretty big mark of not facing the consequences of his actions.

Now I'll admit it's been awhile since I read most of the books, and I stopped at Sea of Swords, but from just Homeland when he faked killing an elf child (Ellifain) caused events that would reverberate through the next fifty or so years of his life:
- It got him exiled
- It got his dad Zaknafein killed
- Then Zak was a zombie thanks to Drizzt's mother, and killed a lot of deep gnomes and other innocents while hunting down Drizzt (though granted, also some genuine monsters)
- The pursuit of Zak got a pech friend of Drizzt's, Clangger, killed.
- This made Drizzt flee to the surface, where his first attempt to contact and protect a human family ended up with them all being slaughtered.
- Meanwhile all of Drizzt's family was killed due to Zak's failure to kill him, except Vierna, who went insane, and Dinin, who got lucky
- Until Vierna turned Dinin into a Drider, lead a raiding force against Mithril Hall, and killed a lot of dwarves, as well as Wulfgar, Drizzt's friend, while simultaneously Drizzt had to kill Vierna and Dinin both.
- Also it turns out that Matron Baenre was using Drizzt as an excuse to invade Mithril Hall, which got even more dwarves killed, as well as humans and deep gnomes.
- A few years later Drizzt would meet the elf child he saved. Ellifain was traumatized by the night Drizzt saved her and still deathly afraid of him and blamed him for her family's death
- About a decade after that Ellifain devoted absolutely everything she had to trying to kill him and ended up mortally wounding him in a duel where she, too, was mortally wounded. Drizzt survived only due to blind luck and his friends feeding him a healing potion (over his own objections, he wanted it to go to Ellifain).

That's just from one action in one book.

>>46692380
>They don't affect just the hands, they affect the whole body, including the feet

Not Drizzt's, not according to Drizzt himself, in the book itself, which for the record if I recall is "Starless Night".

>>46692438
Oh, I forgot my pic. Well, it's still in my first post, >>46692329

>>46692380
except you're wrong
that's exactly what they did

>>46692438
>while simultaneously Drizzt had to kill Vierna and Dinin both.
bruenor killed dinin

>>46692438
> Lolth is *fucking insane*

That is hand wavium plot armor.

Also stop fanboying.

>>46692551
lolth's whole big thing is keeping drow society in chaos
throughout all the books, salvatore is very heavy-handed in showing how the baenre clan controls menzoberranzan with an iron-fist and nothing changes (well, lots of small stuff always changes, but THAT never changes), so when drizzt causes all this commotion, she's actually in favor of it because drow society was stagnating

also, i think gods in FR can only affect their own devout followers; lolth can't just smite drizzt

I get that you don't like things because they're popular, but it's super transparent and you're only making yourself look bad

>>46692526
Well, the point is that Dinin wouldn't be dead, or a drider, if Drizzt had just killed the faerie elf girl like drow society said he was supposed to. He chose to be the good guy - which isn't wrong, but the direct consequences for it pursued him for decades.

>>46692551
It's not hand wavium plot armor, it's an integral point of Lolth's character. She's fucking insane. This comes up a LOT even in non-Drizzt stuff. The entire Out of the Abyss campaign that was released last year, for example, basically centers on Lolth losing her mind and deciding that she doesn't care about Menzoberranzan after all, instead dumping all the other Demon Lords there (who cares if everyone there dies or goes insane? Not Lolth, that's made absolutely clear) while trying to overrun the Abyss with spiders.

>>46691764
I'm playing with some newbs and one of them has played the Baldur's Gate games so it helps him out a bit and immerses him.

you just have to get past the mary sues

>>46692799
Its an integral point of the character because she was written by the guy keeping drizzt in one piece.

Apparently disliking someone for spawning years of edgy dual sword wielding mopes that are a super unique special good version of an evil race, and are always right, and who can make it past all moral issues within 5 pages is wrong, so I'm just going to say I hate the guy because he smells like soup.

>>46692473
>>46692505
>the books are right because that's what's inside the books
>circular logic

That's not how the bracers work in D&D, regardless of what the books say. Salvatore makes up a lot of stupid shit that doesn't make sense, like this bracers episode illustrates.

Please stop fanboying so hard, you'll hurt yourself.

>>46693020
Not him and I think Salvatore's a hack too, but simply pointing out the facts of the niggerelf's background and items isn't fanboying.

>>46692995
>Apparently disliking someone for spawning years of edgy dual sword wielding mopes that are a super unique special good version of an evil race, and are always right, and who can make it past all moral issues within 5 pages is wrong, so I'm just going to say I hate the guy because he smells like soup.
I have never encountered any in my 16 years of D&D

>>46693020
salvatore's stories are fantasycraft, he just doesn't know it

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Here's what you do:

You take this box set, you ignore everything that has ever come since (aside from maybe Waterdeep and the North and some adventure modules).

Don't worry about novels or video games or canon. Not every city and wilderness area needs maps. Even named characters don't need much personality--they're the mayor and a 6th-level fighter, that's that.

There was a fantastic review in Dragon when this came out which summed it up perfectly. Unlike Dragonlance, here was a fairly vanilla but heavily varied fantasy world that WASN'T bogged down by official books and storylines. The DM could add and change things without pissing off fans of the setting, because there WEREN'T fans of the setting.

I'll see if I can dig that review back up. It's pretty funny how much things have changed.

>>46692473
Yeah but they're magic items so they can work however they're intended to and the only reason needed is its magic I ain't gotta explain shit.
Making an element of the story needlessly complicated just to give Marty Stu Do'Urden a chance to show off how clever the reader is supposed to think he is just seems like a cheap trick.

>>46693020
>That's not how the bracers work in D&D

Then it's a God-damned custom magic item, okay? They can either be worn on the hands to grant an extra attack per round, or on the ankles to grant an extra move per round. Or something.

Besides, either they work like I'm describing, or they don't, they affect the entire body; but if they affect the entire body then they're not "slowing down his hands" as was originally claimed since it wouldn't matter where he wore them, yet we know that he does wear them.

So either way that Anon (you?) was wrong.

>>46692995
>Apparently disliking someone for spawning years of edgy dual sword wielding mopes that are a super unique special good version of an evil race

Y'know, I have never once in my life encountered someone who actually played that or knew someone who actually played that, and even online all I ever hear about are stories that they "did" exist rather than any Anon who claims to have actually met one. I'm starting to seriously doubt they ever existed, or else were even a thing beyond the early to mid 90s.

>>46693139
I unfortunately have in tabletop games, and a few characters named Drizzt or XDrizztX in any online games that include elves and dual wielding. I'm sure some of them are trolling, but others really want to be the character.

I've even seen Drizzt the Sylvari in gw2 and those are plant people.

>>46693147
>I'll see if I can dig that review back up. It's pretty funny how much things have changed.
Please do or maybe even just a reference to the issue number.

>>46693296

Dragon Magazine #129. It was too big to post but you can easily find it through Google.

Page 82, "Role-playing Reviews" by Ken Rolston.

Nostalgia, it's the first setting I played in.

>>46693147
>The DM could add and change things without pissing off fans of the setting, because there WEREN'T fans of the setting.

I mean...but, we had to know that wasn't going to last.

>>46693336
Ok, now I have an even dumber question.

You have any clue if there are archives of Polyhedron that are either online or well seeded?

>>46693400

Salvatore's books could have flopped instead of being New York Times bestsellers.

Baldur's Gate might have been a broken mess instead of one of the best CRPGs of all time.

Bad adaptations happen all the time and fans ignore them. Just wait for the upcoming D&D movie (set in the Forgotten Realms).

If they'd stuck to their guns and kept it a kitchen sink fantasy setting for use with role-playing games products, ignoring the novels and resisting the urge to officially advance the plot, things would have been different.

And it's odd because now they're really going back on that. A lot of the 5E FR material hearkens back to the earlier stuff, and they reinforce the point that your version of the Realms is yours. Which has always been the case of course, but you're still going to piss off novel fans when you say your game is set in 1357 DR and Drizzt never existed.

I echo some of the anons in here already

>it's an easy default
>every GM just wordlessly deletes all the OP novel bullshit characters
>great amounts of stuff to cut apart and reassemble for a new campaign (organizations, places, etc)
>i grew up with 2E and 3.5E and even though i don't play either these days i consider FR sort of "home" as sad as that is

>>46692380
The bracers basically counted as either extra attacks *or* as boots of springing and striding.

You could either attack more (albeit with penalties) or you could move more. They were always intended to be used for movement rather than attacking. They are basically half the haste spell depending on where you have them equipped.

So not only are you wrong, you're wrong according to the books they're in and to the universe they're in too.

>>46691764
I don't, because I made muh own setting.
People from the Forgotten Realms have entered, but it's a world into itself for the most part.
There was even an NPC who was secretly a fanboy of Drizzt through reading stories about him, though he got over it.

>>46693289
>because no one ever references popular shit, and no one particularly unimaginative has referenced the shit they thought coolest at the time.

You're dealing with the american fucking chuunibyo. These people would be naming themselves after fucking anything; You can find alucards, eren jaegers, starks, naruto's etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc anywhere and everywhere. "Drizzts" weren't a fucking unique occurence or a problem, fuck off.

>>46694613
Always salt always salt, insult those who question your world belief, you are always right always right a boxer with no foe but your shadow.

>>46692438
Drizzt also has to deal with the fact that a random asshole from Calimshan, who learned his trade shanking hobos in back alleys, got as good at fighting in 30 odd years as Drizzt got in 300. Artemis may have lost, but unlike Drizzt he wasn't laden with +5 magical gear he got for free from the Harpells.

Malchor Harpell is a faggot, btw.

>>46691764
Forgotten Realms is a handy tool-box. You know where every tool is, and you immediately recognize what it's for. You get to work and everyone else also knows what to grab to get the job done.

When you want to play generic D&D, you mean that you want to play Forgotten Realms. It replaced Oerth in the 80s, as what we meant when we talked about AD&D generically.

It's not the best setting at anything. It is the best setting for everything.