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Faraer
Great Reader
3308 Posts |
 Posted - 23 Aug 2014 : 00:15:17
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The new Player's Handbook and Basic Rules refer to threats faced by adventurers, 'to local farmsteads or villages', 'threats to whole regions and continents'. It claims the five highlighted Realms factions 'all band together in times of trouble to thwart major threats'.
This idea of threats is very pervasive, often seemingly taken for granted. The idea seems to be a succession of Evil powers cropping up that seek to directly destroy or dominate the PCs, the rest of the line-up of heroes, and civilization on a small scale or as a whole. This threat is decisively defeated by the heroes, either destroyed outright or put down for a long time. Later, another one crops up, in a larger-scale version of the one-at-a-time attack rule. This is an overgeneralized caricature, but I don't think by much.
The Realms thoroughly doesn't work that way. Power groups aren't threats to PCs by definition or essence but may come in conflict with them according to each side's current aims and the play of events. They aren't alien forces from outside society but elements within society; they don't pose 'threats to all' because the Realms is local and Faerūn isn't a political or social unit, but to particular interests and power structures. They act by manipulating others, only rarely by direct action, because that tends to wipe out attackers in short order. This happens over long periods of time, not the span of an adventure or two -- there's a slowly shifting but continuous balance of power. Conclusive victories and defeats, clear beginnings and endings, are rare. Multiple plots are in play at once. Adventurers, governments, good-aligned priesthoods, and other groups are not lined up like pro wrestling babyfaces against the heels but have their own goals that are rarely unambiguously Good and often conflict with each other.
Often in the 'threats' picture the good guys are world police, like a common pool of white blood cells that travel around the body to fight infections. This is the conception that underlies the plaint that powerful good-aligned NPCs obviate PCs in the Realms. It's clearly a really appealing picture for a lot of people, even though in the lore it's impossible in a dozen different ways.
So, of course, I'm uneasy that a central part of the publishing of fifth-edition D&D is large-scale storylines, starting with Tyranny of Dragons, that seem to be closely modelled on this threats conception, which is foreign to the Realms.
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Edited by - Faraer on 23 Aug 2014 00:49:54
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The Masked Mage
Great Reader
USA
2420 Posts |
Posted - 23 Aug 2014 : 00:38:49
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| It may also just be a response to previous novels. Think about it - almost every series in the past few years has BIG threats and groups coming together to fight them. Been that way since the return of Shade & the Phaerimm war. |
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Irennan
Great Reader
Italy
3802 Posts |
Posted - 23 Aug 2014 : 00:44:46
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Yeah, I noticed this too reading the announcement of the ToD successor. Adventures seem to have a fixed template, with some uber -old, new, or awoken by some insane people- evil threatening to destroy the world and adventurers shutting it down.
Personally, I don't like this at all, especially since the general plots seem rather trivial. |
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. |
Edited by - Irennan on 23 Aug 2014 00:45:07 |
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Faraer
Great Reader
3308 Posts |
Posted - 26 Aug 2014 : 23:02:09
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Certainly the threats model overlaps with RSEs. The Godswar, the Spellplague and the Sundering aren't about a single evil threat, but they share with that model the idea of plot driven by forces outside Faerūnian society. But the 'threats' mentality unfortunately seems to be deeply ingrained at Wizards, across game and novel works, for instance the Star Wars Roleplaying Game book Threats of the Galaxy, and 'Chapter 7: Threats' of the fourth-edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. That chapter first conflates the PCs and other 'good folk', although in the Realms adventuring companies tend to have far from harmonious relationships with rulers, then presents what should be a dynamic matrix of interacting forces as a static array of opponents, an undifferentiated line-up of organizations and monsters.
This dynamism, the way people and groups interact with each other, the use of rumours and in-world plots to drive play rather than fixed events or static places, is one of the richest and most valuable things the Realms offers, and to bury it under the simpler threats model is a waste. |
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Irennan
Great Reader
Italy
3802 Posts |
Posted - 27 Aug 2014 : 00:31:32
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I think that they want to keep using the ''threats'' model because it provides them with a standard -and very linear- template to use with their new organized play thingy. They can easily dish out adventures following the same structure and that lend themselves to be handled with little effort even in large groups (like the ones that one might see at an ''encounters'' session).
The downside is a weak and repetitive storyline (for example, ToD is ''evil dudes are trying to recover artifacts and bring Tiamat on Toril''; the next one -Princes of Apocalypse, or something like that- is ''evil dudes are trying to recover artifacts and build temples to allow the Elemental Evil to destroy stuff''). |
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. |
Edited by - Irennan on 27 Aug 2014 00:32:50 |
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Threats
