There's a quote in the new D&D 5 Monster Manual that says the monsters in the book are "yours to do with as you wish" and mentions making minotaur shipbuilders and pirates. Or anything in the book anything you want. There is also a "do what you want" support for classic settings and campaign worlds, allowing you to roll things back to the setting you loved.
There is a new-found openness in D&D 5 that I find refreshing. I would love for them to back this up with a community license that lets 3rd party companies play and publish, but we shall see. D&D 4 had this in it's "build your own" campaign world setting, but it feels the Nerrath-centric model has been rolled back in favor of classic settings in this edition. One sore point with D&D 4 was the sloppy retconning and treatment of the iconic game worlds where so much was changed it hurt longtime fans' perception of the brand. We need to see the D&D 5 DMG to see how far the new-found openness goes, and the game's assumptions of world-building and how far they want you to change things.
It feels like there are limits though. The numbers are tight, the magic item power is low, and the game has a particular low-fantasy feel. You are not going to do a typical MMO with gear-flation and massive item power with D&D 5, because you will break the game.
It is interesting to compare this openness with Pathfinder, where the default Golarion world feels like a sticky ball that prevents you from making a new world because there's room for everything in the default campaign world. Of course, nothing really prevents you, and the Paizo Gammastery Guide is a great resource for world building, but it is just too easy to stay in Golarion since "why go anywhere else?"
It's like the Walmart effect on small local businesses, Paizo's Golarion has a tendency to crush any other third-party game world around it with a single and focused specialty. Why create a "Ravenloft" style Pathfinder world when Golarion has a dedicated area just for that? Oh, and you can go get shoes, hardware, and frozen foods while you are there too. To compete with that, you need to be a big player, like Midgard or any of the other "big box" game worlds. The barrier to creating a third-party world players care about is high, since the default world covers everything and is so well-known to players.
It almost feels like the Forgotten Realms back in the day, that setting was so big in players' minds that it crushed anything around it. The difference was the Realms had this "author protection" effect where different areas would be "owned" by different book series, and the world had to go farther and father out to find spots that were unexplored and open for adventure. And then the fiction caught up, and farther out still you had to go. The Realms also was not as heavily "theme parked" as Golarion is nowadays, with spots for everything, a giant Sphinx, an Eiffel Tower, some pyramids, a Caesar's Palace, oh wait...that's the Las Vegas Strip.
I get that and Golarion confused sometimes.
You know I kid, but there is a little truth to that. I love Pathfinder and Golarion and The Strip, it just feels sometimes the weight of Paizo's single-world business model limits my creativity, or more importantly, the willingness for players I play with to want to play in anything else but the default setting. In contrast, D&D 5's dowhatchawant sort of relaxed focus on settings and creativity appeals to my creative side, Wizards is trying to repair a lot of customer animosity after the D&D 4 schism, so there is room here to mend fences. It remains to be seen what Wizards ultimately does with campaign settings and how heavy-handed they will be when it comes time to release campaign guides, but I am getting positive vibes now. I am hopeful.
At least the community seems tired of the system wars this time around, and everyone is free to play what they want. Thank goodness somebody's wish was heard. Go forth, playwhatchawant, build your worlds, and keep role-playing alive and well.
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