D&D Settings: Discover the Great Taste of Vanilla

August 19, 2008 No comments

Before you jump directly to the comments to leave me a thousand word essay on why Your Favorite Setting doesn’t suck, take a minute and hear me out. I’ve been kicking around ideas to use in the shared fantasy world project, and looking at existing published settings, and I’ve realized that one’s world building creativity is limited when using D&D as the system of choice.

D&D has a default setting. It’s implied, but it’s there. The basic assumption is that whatever setting is used will have the core player character races, the core player character classes, the same monsters out there, and magic (including items) will work a certain way. Certain elements may be more or less prominent, there may be add-ons like additional player character races and classes, or world-specific magic items, but there is a central essence of D&D-ness that has to be there, or it stops being D&D.

And people want D&D. Try finding players with a pitch like “…and in my world, there are no elves”, or “…in my world there are no clerics”. Someone will want to play an elf cleric. You can’t get away with it. Unless, of course, you’re Wizards of the Coast, then you can tell people to take their gnome druids and half-orc bards and shove them where the sun don’t shine, but that’s a whole other rant. If you’re running D&D, you have to include the core races and classes listed in the core rulebook of the edition you’re using to keep the players happy and meet the unspoken expectations.

What you end up with is vanilla. No chocolate. No other flavors. Like ice cream, you can customize it with toppings, and like ice cream, toppings can make it unique and yummy. But underneath, it’s always gonna be vanilla.

More from unclebear

Uncategorized none

Comments

Leave a comment Trackback

Written by PatrickWR on August 19, 2008.

I abhor vanilla — perhaps that’s why the only D&D I’ve played lately is FFG’s uber-dark Midnight setting. My group’s best sessions have come playing games that encourage collaborative worldbuilding, like Burning Wheel or Wild Talents.

Because of that, I was elated to see that Adamant Entertainment has secured a license to publish game material in China Mieville’s Bas Lag setting. China’s fiction is most decidedly NOT vanilla.
Written by Golgotha on August 19, 2008.

So… uh, so, you are saying system DOES matter?
Written by Dr. Checkmate the Contrarian on August 19, 2008.

No. I don’t think that’s what he said at all. There are setting elements in the PHB, MM, and hell, even the DMG that imply a certain setting. Even without the rules.

Look at the Wizards and Warriors download for Savage Worlds at PEGinc. Totally different system, same implied setting. Even TSR/WotC’s most far out setting had the same base: Planescape? Spelljammer?

However, I think you can do A LOT with vanilla. For example, Midnight uses the same vanilla base as all the rest of the D&D settings. Middle Earth if Sauron won, is still Middle Earth.
Written by Ben Overmyer on August 19, 2008.

You know, back when ice cream was first getting popular in the 19th century, vanilla flavor was a rare and expensive treat enjoyed by the well-to-do.

There is something to be said for plain vanilla D&D games. Remember OD&D?
Written by Scott on August 19, 2008.

Another way of looking at it is: If you have a player who wants to play an elf cleric, why are you trying to run a game with no elves and no clerics?

It’s the player’s game too.

If avoiding built-in assumptions is that important, you can either play something with a modular and generic system (HERO being the one that springs to mind), and put up with the few assumptions built in to such a system, or you can dispense with the system entirely, and sit around the table telling stories together. Any system — ANY system — with any more structure than that is going to have assumptions, because you can’t build a system without them.

D&D is not unique in limiting world-building freedom. Like many systems, it can, in fact, be used with a wide range of settings… but it takes work to adapt, and the further you get from the base assumptions, the more work it’s going to take. It’s not unique in that, either.

Not wanting to run D&D isn’t a problem; there are lots of games out there. Wanting to take D&D, out of the box, and apply it to a vastly divergent setting without changing any of the core rules? That’s going to be a problem, sure. No more so than trying to run a hard sci-fi Star Wars or a dungeon crawling Top Secret or an Ironclaw with no furries or a non-superpowered college coming-of-age genre Marvel Superheroes game or a space-opera Vampire: The Masquerade with no vampires, though.

The systems aren’t vanilla. They just aren’t triple-scoop rum raisin/double chocolate/pistachio in a chocolate-dipped sugar cone with whipped cream, hot caramel, and a cherry on top. Not without putting some effort in. It’s harder to build one of those than to dip a scoop of vanilla.
Written by tbit on August 19, 2008.

Historically D&D was all about the House Rules. I honestly think more people DID play it vanilla style but that was by choice. It didn’t stop thousands of DMs creating their own flavour of the D&D rules & worlds, making Orcs the heroes, running underground campaigns with only the short demi-humans and stomping out all halflings to be found. TSR themselves answered that with such weird settings as Planescape and Spelljammer. I think if you troll the forums even now, you will find lots of people creating homebrews that tweak the hell out of the existing milieu of 4E. To stick with the vanilla analogy, it’s a base flavour — you can always add to it, spike it with some rum and top it with gummy bugbears.
Written by Questing GM on August 20, 2008.

I hated that the D&D core rulebooks were IMPLYING a setting. They should just come out and say it (or spell it out)! Like instead of the 3.5 DMG, it should have been written somewhere that it is the Greyhawk DMG or the 4e PHB as the POL PHB.

It became a nagging feeling that I was going to wrong way of playing the game when I started to do some homebrew. That it was ‘wrong’ to go against the implied setting since the mechanics and rules were worked from it.

A Vanila setting to me is one that, at least, has the hallmarks of a typical medieval fantasy setting which D&D has build.

It doesn’t force me to enjoy the Vanila if I wanted other flavors. But at least there’s something recognisable in our good old Vanila flavor.
Written by satyre on August 20, 2008.

The thing is, it’s the addition of sprinkles and the other stuff that make the settings what they are. So you’ve got players who always play against your setting? Great!

Opportunities for them to shine in both good and bad ways. They’ve written their own plot, how do they interact with the other players… the problem comes when the whole party wants to play a particular trope or the player wants to subvert the game as their creative agenda.

The implied setting of 4E to my mind isn’t a bad thing – Runequest had Glorantha and didn’t seem to suffer for it. Even the OD&D grognards will recall Greyhawk and Mystara (or the Known World) for those of you who recall such and I haven’t seen a sci-fi sourcebook for Dogs in the Vineyard yet.

What it does give you is a template to draw on and you can skew it to your heart’s content; if you want Midnight or Ravenloft, use the core creatures as shemps and then put some flash on them to make them different. If you really do want the whole hog, add in homebrew rules if say being terrified ought to be a big thing.

Don’t like that tieflings are an evil empire’s remnants? Have them as the cursed descendents of an order of paladins or a gypsy tribe that wanders the Lower Planes…

Creation of a few kickass settings may lack the demographic appeal of a complete system reboot but can springboard good play and encourage rules variants and presti- er, tier feats to be devised. Gotta keep up with my terminology!

To give it a geek flavour, settings are the stylesheet for the game – it may play the same but it can look and feel very different indeed.

And who knows, the next sourcebook may even have gnome bards in it. ：）
Written by Scott on August 20, 2008.

@Questing: It pretty much did spell it out.

The DMG has a couple of pages detailing the game’s assumptions, and then a couple more suggesting some ways those assumptions might be changed.

Gods, but I love the 4e DMG.
Written by Berin Kinsman on August 20, 2008.

>I was elated to see that Adamant Entertainment has secured a license to
>publish game material in China Mieville’s Bas Lag setting. China’s fiction is >most decidedly NOT vanilla.

True day, I love his stuff. Have you seen the game A|STATE ? Very China Mieville. But will Adamant’s stuff be D20? Not the system I would have picked.
Written by Berin Kinsman on August 20, 2008.

>So… uh, so, you are saying system DOES matter?

System does matter, but not for the reasons Ron Edwards espouses. We’ve been over this, Herbert. Don’t make me bust out the sipo.

D&D is perfect for running D&D. D&D settings are perfectly designed to allow you to run D&D. It is what it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You just have to design with those parameters in mind.
Written by My Dwarves are Roman at A Butterfly Dreaming on August 21, 2008.

[...] bring this up because of a recent post at Unclebear regarding the “vanilla”-ness of D&D settings. I disagreed with Berin’s implication that the restrictions on worldbuilding were intrinsic [...]
Written by Joseph on August 21, 2008.

You’re absolutely right about the settings implications built into some of the rules. I wrote about that myself a couple of weeks ago (http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com/2008/07/implied-society-in-ad.html).

I personally wouldn’t have any qualms against striking races or classes from a homebrew campaign. I’ve given strong thought to doing a humans-only world, as a matter of fact. That player who absolutely must have his elf cleric needs to either find a different game or put his character idea on hold while he plays mine.

And I do believe that you can fold Reces Peanut Butter Cups into your vanilla ice cream. One of the beautiful things about those campaign implications is that, once they’re brought into the shining light of day, they’re much easier for the DM to change without inadvertently throwing something off-kilter that won’t show up for six months.
Written by Lon Sarver on August 22, 2008.

One of the things I’ve always liked about D&D is that the system gives a good, solid starting point of agreed-upon assumptions about the world and how things work. I haven’t always liked the assumptions built in to the syetem, mind you, but I have liked the fact that the players and the GM are starting on the same page.

The emphasis that 4e places on this, and the degree to which these assumptions have been brought into the foreground, are part of what convinced me to buy into 4e.

Now, one can take the implications and assumptions and run in any direction with them. One doesn’t have to create yet another quasi-late-medieval Europe clone. All kinds of things can be layered on top of the foundation presented in the rules.

For that matter, the setting implied in the ruleset is open to multiple interpretations. This is made easier by the openness the game has about its assumptions.
Written by Berin Kinsman on August 22, 2008.

>One of the things I’ve always liked about D&D is that the system gives a
>good, solid starting point of agreed-upon assumptions about the world and how
>things work.

That is definitely a strength, and providing that context is one of the (many) reasons D&D remains the gateway drug to roleplaying.
Written by Berin Kinsman on August 22, 2008.

>I personally wouldn’t have any qualms against striking races or classes from
>a homebrew campaign.

A home game, definitely. But when doing a shared world or desiging convention games, in for a penny, in for a pound.

Leave a Comment

Previous Post Next Post

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Recent Forum Posts

Top Liked Posts

Roleplaying and Respect
480 37
Some Characters Are More Equal Than Others
11 10
DoubleZero Update
10 2
ROLPUNK and Reviews
9 7
ROLPUNK: a manifesto
8 1

Powered by WP Likes

Categories

Meta

Meta

© 2010 UncleBear Media Bingo - Credit Card Consolidation - Nevis Hotel - United Specialties