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Kiero
2012-08-16, 05:04 AM
This thread is where we talk about settings we once loved, but just don't seem to do it for you any more.

For me it's Star Wars. I've had an on-again, off-again fascination with it for a long time, it was the prequels that rekindled my interest at all (yes, I'm one of those strange people who'd prefer to forget the original trilogy ever happened), then the KotOR games that really stoked that into a burning desire to run/play things set in the Star Wars universe again. The new KotOR comics and Clone Wars cartoon heaped yet more fuel onto that fire and I was stoked.

But over time my interest began to wane again; turning KotOR 3 into a ****ty MMO set in some weird era I don't care about didn't help matters. Nor did the wild variability in the quality of the plotlines for the Clone Wars series. Mostly, though, I think it's just run its course for me.

I didn't grow up with Star Wars, I wasn't there when it all began as a small child (I wasn't born until the literal end of seventies), it doesn't hold some special, nostalgic place in my heart. I never identified with Luke Skywalker or his journey (not being white, the only person in the OT who looks even remotely like me is Lando), I didn't buy into the whole merchandising train. The big thing for me that Star Wars was really about was the Jedi. And the jedi as xia-analogues, peerless kung fu swordsmen with amazing superhuman acrobatic powers.

However, what the various media and RPGs consistently failed to deliver was anything like a consistent vision of what that was. There are so many different interpretations of the Force and it's impact on individuals and setting that it's almost impossible to reach common ground when discussing these things with a group. The morality of the setting, implied or otherwise, is so full of holes I don't know where to start.

It makes me realise how important that internal consistency is in a setting. And while it may make people laugh (given the debable of ME3's ending) I find Mass Effect scratches similar soft-sci-fi itches better with less headaches. Its much more considered how it departs from what we understand to be true, and what effect those things have on how everything functions. I don't get my hit of wuxia in there with the sci-fi, but to be honest I kind of prefer it for a fantasy flavour. Granted Star Wars isn't even intended to be sci-fi really, but that total mess of how the various elements of setting interact have become a turnoff for me.

So what about you? What settings have fallen out of your favour, where you once held them dear?

Yora
2012-08-16, 05:12 AM
I think there is niothing interesting left about Forgotten Realms. Everything gets explained and solved, and then you have all these timeline advances that remove major aspects that I liked. The 2nd Edition setting is still the same as it was 15 years ago, but there is no more exitement about it. And it is a bit too blue eyed for me now. Now I like things settings like Dragon Age, Planescape, Mass Effect, and Old Republic Era Star Wars (but go away with Clone Wars and Rebellion Era, and New Jedi Order Era doesn't exist!). But Forgotten Realms is too predictable. There is a standard script for how everything happens, and almost everyone knows it, and all people play the parts as the script dictates. There are no interesting adventures and no interesting characters anymore, since everyone automatically falls into the tried and true pattern.

Kiero
2012-08-16, 05:21 AM
I think there is niothing interesting left about Forgotten Realms. Everything gets explained and solved, and then you have all these timeline advances that remove major aspects that I liked. The 2nd Edition setting is still the same as it was 15 years ago, but there is no more exitement about it. And it is a bit too blue eyed for me now. Now I like things settings like Dragon Age, Planescape, Mass Effect, and Old Republic Era Star Wars (but go away with Clone Wars and Rebellion Era, and New Jedi Order Era doesn't exist!). But Forgotten Realms is too predictable. There is a standard script for how everything happens, and almost everyone knows it, and all people play the parts as the script dictates. There are no interesting adventures and no interesting characters anymore, since everyone automatically falls into the tried and true pattern.

I haven't played years and years of FR (or D&D for that matter, I had a ten year hiatus from it), so it doesn't have that quality for me. But it is stock-standard fantasy, which can get stale quickly.

A random idea I'd really love to try with the setting is to use it's prehistory, the Days of Thunder when the sarrukh empires ruled Faerun. It's basically sword and sorcery FR given there's humans and reptilians. Elves, dwarves, halflings, I think even goblinoids haven't arrived yet.

Yora
2012-08-16, 06:33 AM
A random idea I'd really love to try with the setting is to use it's prehistory, the Days of Thunder when the sarrukh empires ruled Faerun. It's basically sword and sorcery FR given there's humans and reptilians. Elves, dwarves, halflings, I think even goblinoids haven't arrived yet.
That's actually how my setting design started.

Eldan
2012-08-16, 06:36 AM
Hm. There really aren't enough settings set in Antiquity instead of some weird pseudo-medieval age. Ever since reading Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser at the same time as I played Europa Barbarorum, I want a game set in the third century BC + fantasy.

Kiero
2012-08-16, 06:50 AM
That's actually how my setting design started.

I am now intrigued and wish to know more!


Hm. There really aren't enough settings set in Antiquity instead of some weird pseudo-medieval age. Ever since reading Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser at the same time as I played Europa Barbarorum, I want a game set in the third century BC + fantasy.

Agreed, I'd really love something with a genuinely classical/antiquity feel to it for a change. There's this great combination of things that would be familiar to someone wanting pseudo-medieval, yet having a cultural context that is also quite different. Not to mention different tech.

DigoDragon
2012-08-16, 07:42 AM
For me it's Battletech. After the clans get beaten I really didn't feel a need to keep going on after that.
Also agreeing with Forgotten Realms. It's pretty much been done.

Zombimode
2012-08-16, 07:53 AM
I think there is niothing interesting left about Forgotten Realms. Everything gets explained and solved, and then you have all these timeline advances that remove major aspects that I liked. The 2nd Edition setting is still the same as it was 15 years ago, but there is no more exitement about it. And it is a bit too blue eyed for me now. Now I like things settings like Dragon Age, Planescape, Mass Effect, and Old Republic Era Star Wars (but go away with Clone Wars and Rebellion Era, and New Jedi Order Era doesn't exist!). But Forgotten Realms is too predictable. There is a standard script for how everything happens, and almost everyone knows it, and all people play the parts as the script dictates. There are no interesting adventures and no interesting characters anymore, since everyone automatically falls into the tried and true pattern.

I used to think that I like Forgotten Realms. I DMed campaigns for 6 years in a setting I called "Forgotten Realms".
It was some time ago when I realized that the only thing my personal realms had in common with the published setting(s) were some names.
It was probably closest to 2nd ed Realms, but then again I pretty much did what I wanted and ignored almost any official lore (safe for some random bits and bytes I used for inspiration).

People often describe the Realms as a flashy, somewhat silly setting full of magical artists. With gods putting the most cliche high-school movies of the 90s to shame.
My own Realms were a high-magic but low-power setting, rather serious with a bit of crap-sack thrown in and sharp line between "religion" and "gods" (the gods being almost trancendent).

Yora
2012-08-16, 09:33 AM
For me it's Battletech. After the clans get beaten I really didn't feel a need to keep going on after that.
Also agreeing with Forgotten Realms. It's pretty much been done.

Ah yes, that reminds me that the Mass Effect universe is now ruined forever.
But I think that was inevitable from the very beginning. When the series is dominated by the fight against an all destoying evil, it can only end with either all the attackers or all the defenders destroyed. In either way, it's over.

Psyren
2012-08-16, 09:38 AM
Forgotten Realms for me. It was my intro to D&D (via Baldur's Gate/NWN - I didn't even learn about Greyhawk until several years later) but after experiencing Eberron, Athas, Golarion and Rokugan I doubt I'll be going back.

Talya
2012-08-16, 09:47 AM
Settings I've fallen out of love with are hard to come by. There's only a few I've ever liked.


The more detail and backstory and depth worked into a setting, the more i like it. For me, the pinnacle of Forgotten Realms is 3rd edition. The spellplague didn't happen. The events of the War of the Spider-Queen and later did not happen.

Star Wars is a fun setting, too. It's actually surprising, as much as I hate the prequel movies, they've wonderfully added to the depth of the setting, which lends more evidence to my thought that Lucas's creative ability never diminished. He just lost his ability to let editors and other people fix the problems in his scripts, which means his movies will forevermore suck.

I loved the "Everything including the Kitchen Sink" of Palladium's Rifts setting, but the game system is too bad to save the setting, and I don't have the energy to convert everything.

Exalted is a spectacular setting, though I'm not overly fond of White Wolf's game mechanics, either.

Velaryon
2012-08-16, 07:00 PM
For me, the first setting that came to mind is Ravenloft. It's still an interesting place, I just don't like to play there anymore.

The first campaign I ever DM'ed was set in Ravenloft, with a group of almost entirely new players. Several of them went on to become DM's, and all their campaigns were set in Ravenloft as well. We would talk now and then about trying the Forgotten Realms (where the first game I ever played in took place) but people generally wanted to stick with what we knew and enjoyed.

Unfortunately, once the mystique is gone and all the players know all the major secrets of the setting, who all the powerful players are and what their goals are, it's hard to find the same level of excitement you once had. You can only pretend to be shocked that Strahd von Zarovich is a vampire so many times, you know?

It doesn't help that the setting itself (especially its 3rd edition incarnation with which I am most familiar) has a sort of love/hate relationship with D&D. Ravenloft doesn't really want to be a fantasy game, it just includes some elements of fantasy while trying to play up the gothic horror side of it. It doesn't always work, especially if you don't have the right players for it.

I haven't reached this stage of "falling out of love" with the Realms or Star Wars yet, though I expect that I someday will. I'm currently running a Forgotten Realms game in which I mostly go from the 2e timeline, accepting 3e material as I see fit and ignoring 4e continuity completely. Much of it is new to me, and all of it is new to my players, so there's no problems yet with feeling like everything's been done there.

When it comes to Star Wars, I'd say I'm a little closer but still not in danger of losing interest in the setting just yet. A friend of mine likes to run in the KotOR era, though he keeps all his campaigns in the same continuity which no longer resembles the canon one at all because of all the things we've changed. The problem there is that the setting is becoming crowded with high-level NPC's (our former PC's), so it's just like the problem some people have with Faerun, except that it's our own former characters causing us problems.

Morithias
2012-08-16, 07:14 PM
I've fallen out of love with Forgetten Realms. It was kinda my "in" to D&D via neverwinter nights, it was my first real setting, outside of one shot campaigns, or quirk campaigns.

But then I found the background material....Faerun is a good setting....so long as you aren't willing to look at all the background material and ask any questions.

You know, the wall of the faithless, the racism and genocidal type stuff, the fact that all the gods are basically parasites who just want to keep power and torture you.

There is exactly ONE higher power I can respect in Faerun....Bel. A bloody archdevil.

So yeah, once I found out all the dark background stuff I threw it out, that's not what I like in my D&D settings, I don't like gods who claims to be good yet are not by any definition that a sane person would give.

hiryuu
2012-08-17, 12:35 AM
I had fun playing in FR. Until I really dug into the setting and it was like every culture that existed between 800 BC and 1800 AD in Europe, Africa, and Asia stuffed right next to each other. Ugh. Cultures are so different over a stretch of 20 miles it may as well be the gulf of the ocean. I have no idea why early medieval England is right next to late 1700s Spain.

oWoD. I went back and read Mage: the Ascension again after someone asked me to run it. I wanted to beat someone over the head with solipsistic jerkfaced weasel-mongering goatcluckery that the entire setting is bound in. You know the smug self-delusional weirdo in your group who insists that last night when he ate shrooms he opened an astral doorway and fought demons and who is absolutely certain they put hallucinogenics in tap water, and that any form of civilization, up to and including any agriculture that uses anything more sophisticated than "throw your seeds out the window, wait" is some kind of evil monster but is perfectly happy with air conditioning and toilet paper? Imagine a setting where there's a whole secret society of that guy, and they all get super powers based on how smugly inserted into their own personal philosophy they are. Werewolf wasn't much better, and while Vampire itself wasn't too bad, I've never run or played in a game that didn't self destruct due to player action.

Rifts. I thought the idea was excellent. Then, again, I started digging into the books. My real issue is that it's two settings: one of them is a gonzo-self aware humorous post-apocalypse, and the other is a Michael Bay movie that takes itself way too seriously. Luckily, Deadlands: Hell on Earth knows exactly what it is (Walt Disney's evil undead head in a jar attached to a giant octopus ride spider robot is an actual enemy in the freakin' game) and does its best to deliver that.

Winter_Wolf
2012-08-17, 07:13 AM
Wow, so little love for FR. Including me. I liked the gray box of Forgotten Realms, and several of the accessories, including Old Empires and Maztica. But killing Mystra every time a new edition comes out. What. Also no love for Maztica from TSR, despite being one of the more interesting parts of the Realms. After a while it started to feel like the Realms has more gods than mortals. Ranks in Knowledge (religion) should be mandatory to even attempt to keep up with 'Who's New in the Pantheon This Week'.

Darksun lost favor with me after a while, partly because there's only so much "the world is a living HELL!!" that I can take. Also, 2E psionics was mandatory, and not exactly streamlined. Still love Darksun thri-kreen though.

Yora
2012-08-17, 07:58 AM
I had fun playing in FR.
It's not that it's bad. It's just getting stale after some time

Mordokai
2012-08-17, 08:24 AM
I've fallen out of love with Forgetten Realms. It was kinda my "in" to D&D via neverwinter nights, it was my first real setting, outside of one shot campaigns, or quirk campaigns.

But then I found the background material....Faerun is a good setting....so long as you aren't willing to look at all the background material and ask any questions.

You know, the wall of the faithless, the racism and genocidal type stuff, the fact that all the gods are basically parasites who just want to keep power and torture you.

There is exactly ONE higher power I can respect in Faerun....Bel. A bloody archdevil.

So yeah, once I found out all the dark background stuff I threw it out, that's not what I like in my D&D settings, I don't like gods who claims to be good yet are not by any definition that a sane person would give.

The Realms were the first setting that was introduced to me, via Baldur's Gate 2. I still love that game dearly and by extension, a sliver of that love transers to section itself. That being said, it's really not that much, since I found out about Eberron, Ravenloft and other settings.

With that in mind, I still find myself interested. Could you provide some links about the things you mentioned above? I would love to fill any gaps in my knowledge.

navar100
2012-08-17, 12:21 PM
Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms for the same reason: I'm sick and tired of their continuous apocalypses to explain edition changes, and the game world comes off worse than it was before. Good gods die. Evil and Chaos get stronger. The world is a clusterfrack. I don't need unicorns and rainbows everywhere, but really the misery and destruction just goes on and on and on.

Morithias
2012-08-17, 12:28 PM
The Realms were the first setting that was introduced to me, via Baldur's Gate 2. I still love that game dearly and by extension, a sliver of that love transers to section itself. That being said, it's really not that much, since I found out about Eberron, Ravenloft and other settings.

With that in mind, I still find myself interested. Could you provide some links about the things you mentioned above? I would love to fill any gaps in my knowledge.

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Wall_of_the_Faithless

Well here is the wall of the faithless. Basically it was created because in Faerun if a god doesn't have enough worshippers they vanish/die. So basically it was created to more or less hold every mortal soul hostage so that the gods can continue to harvest prayer (Cause gods need prayer badly).

Also keep in mind if you're simply never told about the gods, like if you're born in a tribe that's separated from the rest of the world and simply never learn of the gods....wall of the faithless.

Vknight
2012-08-18, 09:14 AM
D&D any edition, every edition, any setting anywhere.
I'm just tired of D&D at the moment to such a point I'm just going to finish my current game and then stick with other games for at least a year.

Its a much as I'm tired of the setting as I'm tired of my players in D&D.
Online Group? Meh get upset at fights that are supposed to be hard and complains about questions they have to find the answers to not being answered

Live group? Fights to hard start to whine. Over confident and try to fight everyone or burn there house down. Introduce a powerful NPC group gets upset

Both complain when I give plot and give no timeline just get it done saying thats railroading...

And its only in D&D this happens. Some combination of these problems show up and it drains on me over and over again

Jack of Spades
2012-08-18, 09:32 AM
Given that Deathwatch is my group's summer game, WH40K. I can take a bit of grimdark and a bit of blind zealotry (hell, my character's our group's zealot), but it's just not a setting that makes games fun or interesting. Nothing you do will ever help, and the fact that you're playing military men in a 6-fronted combat zone means that it's rare for anything you do to even be connected to your prior actions. That, and my character wants badly to a) die in the name of his beloved Emperor and b) purge all heresy/xenos/whathaveyou from the galaxy. However, he can't do that because the Ordo Xenos want prisoners and the Adeptus Astartes generally frown upon instances of the Black Templar deeming his squad heretical and taking it upon himself to 'cleanse' them. So, I'm where I end every Deathwatch-infused summer: Playing a character whose only remaining in-character mode of interaction with the world is "I kill the enemy" who is too high-level to just die already.

Oh, and also Forgotten Realms, I guess, even though I've never played it /bandwagon :smallbiggrin: