Stories for 4E/5E

[pendell]

I have a confession to make: I am not an active roleplayer. What attracts me to a system, however, is not the mechanics but the story told with the system.

Raistlin Majere. Drizzt Do'ourden. King Azoun. Artemis Entreri.

These are names that are evocative. They have interesting stories behind them.

I guess the fundamental reason I haven't been really interested in 4e and beyond is because those stories I've seen told about them have been primarily rebootings and re-imaginings of the existing worlds, not new worlds in and of themselves. They don't capture the imagination. It's simply the same thing with new play mechanics.

Am I mistaken? Are there some interesting stories out there for the new systems? Because that's what it would take to bring *me* in. What draws me to this environment is the desire to have my imagination captured and to suspend my disbelief. The mechanics/crunch of any edition are secondary to that.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Yora]

I did look at the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, and Dark Sun Campaign Guides for 4th Edition, but didn't really read through them. They seemed like the barest neccessities and giving hints of the most famous parts and aspects, without really covering anything in detail.
Would anyone really get exited about the settings from just these books? If you love the settings back from 2nd and 3rd Edition, where they got dozens of books, you'd probably bought the Campaign Guide and Player Guide for the updates. But the real meat would still have come from from the knowledge you had before.
Real Setting support is neccessary, and it can't just be done by online magazines.

It is similar with adventures, I guess. At the end, it is your own game, but people want some shining examples how great their own games can be. When looking at 4th Edition books, it always felt a lot like "yeah, you have these abilities and there are some dungeons where you fight monsters and stuff".
That's not great motivation.

[valadil]

I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but I actually thought the spell plague was an interesting magical event that left plenty open to interpretation on behalf of a GM.

But otherwise, yeah new FR doesn't do much. I ran a pretty decent campaign with it that revolved around stopping Netheril and (eventually) returning Mystra to power to end the spell plague. But afterwards the players said that I'd pretty much used up all the good stuff in 4e Realms. I can see some places that I would have liked to have explored, but there just wasn't enough information to work with.

[Jessica1990]

Those are awesome! Thanks for sharing.

[gkathellar]

Yeah, post-spellplague Forgotten Realms didn't do much for me. And Eberron just doesn't make sense in the absence of 3.5's ruleset, for what it's worth.

4E Dark Sun, though? 4E Dark Sun was fantastic. Arguably, a lot of what should have been in 4E from the start came in with Dark Sun, but the setting itself was done in a really bold and refreshing way. Not only was the 4E iteration of Dark Sun well-done, but the relationship between setting and game system was really strong — 4E and Dark Sun just worked well together, for almost the exact same reasons 4E did not work well with FR or Eberron.