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I picked up a copy of Warhammer Online this past week, and have been quite enjoying it. Enjoying it enough that I’ve joined a guild. So far they seem to be a pretty decent, if somewhat sarcastic and crass, group of people; I should fit right in. They require the use of Ventrilo for voice chat, which is a pretty reasonable requirement for a guild that’s going to do PvP combat.

There are some quirks with Ventrilo and Vista, however, and I wanted to make mention of them here in the hopes that they might be useful to other people. Note that these tips were only tested with Warhammer Online and they may or may not apply to other games, and while this was done on 64-bit Vista, both Ventrilo and Warhammer Online were the 32-bit versions so they should behave the same on 32-bit Vista. Your mileage may vary.

Push-to-Talk (PTT)

In order for your PTT hotkey — which defaults to the left Ctrl key — to be recognized when you’re in WAR, you’ll need to run Ventrilo as an Administrator. This may be because WAR needs to run as admin, or maybe it’s just something with Vent. Either way, that’s how it has to be.

Overlay

The overlay is important to me, as I still don’t know how to recognize people on Vent by their voices. I spent a couple of hours fiddling with third-party overlay add-ons, graphics settings, compatibility options, etc. Then a clever idea hit me: run WAR in windowed mode, with the resolution set to the same thing I’d use for full-screen. That worked perfectly! I was able to position the overlay such that it didn’t cover anything too terribly useful, and I also set up a hot key so I could toggle the overlay display in the event that I did need to see something behind it.

So now I’m exceptionally happy with how Vent and WAR are playing together, and I’m looking forward to a long and happy life of fart jokes via voice chat while beating in the heads of stupid Destruction players.

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This weekend I finally decided to throw my vote in to the next-generation console fight when I went and bought a PlayStation 3 (PS3). I picked up a pre-owned 40GB model from a local GameStop along with Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga and Burnout Paradise. I’d been thinking a while over which console interested me most, and which one offered the most compelling games, and here’s what it all boiled down to.

When the PS3 hit, it was generally lambasted as being too expensive, overpowered, and having no games worth a crap. At the time — almost a year and a half ago — these things were true. Since then there have been some price drops, developers are getting more comfortable with producing games for the hardware, and more exclusives are being planned and released. Also, since the resolution of the high-definition format war in undisputed favor of Blu-ray, such a player is no longer the extravagant, risky proposition that it once was. But there’s more to it than that.

More Hardware for the Same Price

• More powerful system
• Bigger hard drive
• Built-in WiFi
• Built-in Blu-ray

The PS3 is more powerful a system than the Xbox 360 or the Wii. The Wii doesn’t even attempt to compete in the same hardware space as the other two — they’re making their waves by offering a more compelling form of gameplay — but the Xbox 360 and PS3 base models are the same price and are generally considered hardware peers. On top of the better CPU and GPU, there’s also more hardware in the PS3′s box for the money. You get a bigger hard drive, WiFi support is included with all models, and you get Blu-ray across the board.

Having a hard drive available in all models means that game creators can count on it being there. This was one of the biggest innovations that the original Xbox brought to the table, and Microsoft threw it away, bringing us back the bad old days of tiny, expensive memory cards. The hard drive is also user-serviceable and -upgradeable with just about any 2.5″ SATA notebook hard drive. I’ll probably be buying a nice, big one from NewEgg sometime in the next year or two.

Further into the realm of optional components is the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360. Even though it was made obsolete overnight earlier this year, if it were part of the core console developers could still use it for games. But it’s not; it’s an add-on. This means game developers couldn’t target it for their releases, instead having to rely on the smaller capacity DVD medium. Sony’s developers can cram obscene amounts of content onto the Blu-ray discs; in-game content aside, they could even include a movie or similar extras and still have enough space for the game itself.

PlayStation Network (PSN)

While not as feature-laden as Xbox Live at present, it does provide a level online playing field for Sony’s developers. One of the biggest issues with the PlayStation 2 (PS2) was Sony’s “you’re on your own” stance with online games and content distribution. This left many of the smaller shops out in the rain, and produced inconsistent online experiences. Taking a lesson from the original Xbox Live, they provided something similar in the form of PSN for the PS3. It doesn’t currently have all the stuff that Live has — no matchmaking or in-game friend list support, or achievements — but all of those things have been publicly stated as being on the radar and part of the plan. In fact, the PlayStation Home stuff that should be coming out later this year goes beyond any of Xbox Live’s lobbies and achievement tracking and display. I’m looking forward to it.

There are also no monthly or annual fees for PSN, unlike Xbox Live. That’s a big win right there, in my opinion.

SIXAXIS Controllers

The SIXAXIS controller is pretty cool. It’s got motion-sensing like the Wii Remote, is as comfortable as the DualShock 2 controllers that the PS2 used, and are wireless and rechargeable. I like them a lot, and there’s nothing quite as badass as guiding your plane in Blazing Angels 2 by changing the pitch, roll, and yaw of your controller (I downloaded the game’s demo for just that reason, and may end up buying it).

Downsides

It’s not all gumdrops and sunshine, though. The Wii’s innovation factor is impressive, and I’ve seen some very cool games for it. They’re still nearly impossible to find in-stock, though, and I know several people who own them already who’d probably let me play at their place if I brought a case of decent beer with me. Xbox Live is currently a stronger online community offering than PSN, as well, even though that’s in the cards to be changing. Finally, I still don’t have an HDTV; they’re still outside the range of what I’m willing to pay for a television. This means the Wii would be better able to take care of my standard-definition (SDTV) set. However, I will be getting an HDTV sometime in the near future — maybe this year, after I’ve saved a bit and prices have continued falling — and at that point I’ll be able to take advantage of my big purchase with my PS3.

In summary, I’m happy with my purchase and I firmly believe I bought the right console for the right reasons. You’re more than welcome to disagree with me — as people are with any opinion — and I’ve got comments open below for you to do so. Don’t be a jerk, though, or I’ll drop my 11-pound console on your foot. Oh yeah, that’s another downside; the thing isn’t exactly portable. But the PlayStation Portable is and has all kinds of connectivity between itself and my PS3. Hmmm… how much is one of those?

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Earlier today — well, yesterday as of the time I’m writing this — I went to my Friendly Local Game Store and participated in the Gold Tier tournament they were running for Magic: The Gathering. I was running a rather inexpensive Sliver deck and didn’t expect to do so well but to have some fun anyway. I took first place, and had lots of fun. The big prize was a box of booster packs of the forthcoming Lorwyn set, but I also got three packs of Tenth Edition, a rather decent duffel bag, a nice plastic deck box, and a Magic: The Gathering toboggan hat.

I’ve been playing Magic on and off for over ten years, and I’ve only ever made it past the second round of a tournament once or twice in my life. I love the game, but I’ve never considered myself to be a top player, even amongst the local player base. Maybe I need to reconsider my position on that.

I just wanted to thank Sci-Fi Genre for hosting the tournament, Wizards for continuing to make the game so engaging and entertaining long after people thought the fad would die, and mostly to the other players in the tournament for throwing their best games and best decks at me. It was an exhilarating blast, folks, and I look forward to seeing what Lorwyn has in store for us.

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Updates:

• 2007-01-10: Added another difference that I thought of — the game’s lack of different shards.
• 2007-01-02: Corrected information about changing your secondary profession thanks to a comment from The Extremist.

Amanda bought me Guild Wars for Christmas, and it’s proving to be exceptionally fun. Some of my friends probably know that I’m an on-again-off-again EVE Online player and follow the evolution of virtual worlds with a keen interest. While I appreciate the number of things EVE is doing to advance the state of the art in online environments — large-scale, player-run corporations; freedom to follow your own course of action; minimization of restrictions on player activities — it’s a very hard game to get into. It’s alienating and distant, and that makes it hard to bring new players in. I pick it back up every so often, usually after major updates to see what’s new, but I have a hard time sticking with it despite how much I admire what they’re doing. Guild Wars, on the other hand, is much more approachable. It’s a fantasy-themed online role-playing game, and it takes a very different approach to the genre than anything else I’ve played.

What Guild Wars does differently:

No monthly fee

You buy the campaign(s) you want to play for roughly $50 each, and that’s that.

Very little character lock-in

In most games, when you make a choice like how to spend some attribute points after gaining a level, you’re stuck with that decision. There’s a great deal of planning and forethought that has to go into your character’s progression before you even realize what it is you want to or can do. This is daunting to new players and can make you regret choices you made back before you had any idea of how best to utilize your character. It also results in “sub-optimal” characters, a concept that I hate — why should I keep playing a game if what I want to do isn’t effective? With Guild Wars, you can freely rearrange your attribute points as you see fit whenever you’re in a town or outpost, and you can also rearrange your skills (more on skills below). If my Monk character is set up as a healer, and we need someone who can do some smiting damage, I just need to pop back to a town and set myself up that way and I’m good to go. The only thing you can never change is your primary profession; even your secondary profession, which gives additional attributes and skills for your character to use, can be changed multiple times after you do the quest to unlock the profession changer NPC.

Instanced areas and minimal grinding

In other games, when you’re running about a field trying to kill some stuff, you’ve got several hundred other people running around that same area trying to kill the same things. It’s been a problem since the first entries into MMORPGs and it results in such things as camping a particular spot with your group waiting for a boss to respawn so you can kill it and take its loot, assuming someone else doesn’t snag the kill before you do. Guild Wars gets around the problem in a way a few other games have by offering each group their own private instance of the area to play in. There are also some other subtle differences, such as the fact that what you kill stays dead until you exit and re-enter the area — no more worrying about whether or not you’re standing in the middle of a spawn zone. You also don’t gain as much experience points for killing beasties as you do in other games, where laying waste to monsters in the field is one of the primary methods of gaining levels. Instead, the bulk of your experience gains come from doing quests (more on these below, too) and while you do gain some experience from killing stuff, that’s not necessarily the fastest way to advance. As a result, you spend less time running around decimating the wildlife — so-called “grinding” — and more time feeling like you’re accomplishing concrete goals.

Skills

Everything in Guild Wars is accomplished via skills. You’ll gain some of these as quest rewards, some automatically as you advance, and the majority of them you purchase for in-game gold from skill vendors. They have a wide range of effects and types, and interact with one another in some very complex ways, and you can only ever have eight of them equipped at any time. This means for any given character build, you need to determine the optimal way to accomplish what you’re after, but there’s usually more than one way to do it. The skill balance and interplay is, as I understand it, largely developed by the guys who did Diablo, Diablo II, and Starcraft — all three games which are rightfully heralded for their balance and subtlety. I find I’m feeling less like there’s only one way to be an effective type of any given character in this game, which was a big problem in EverQuest, Asheron’s Call, Asheron’s Call 2, Anarchy Online, and pretty much every other MMORPG I played for any length of time. And, even if you do end up with a sub-optimal build, so what? Just go back to town and tweak your attributes or skills to see if you can do better. It reminds me a great deal of Magic: The Gathering. In Magic, a large part of the strategy comes before you even start shuffling your cards — deck design, deciding on the cards you want and how they’re going to interact, benefit you, and harm your opponent is a major part of the game, and solid designs will consistently and reliably win over weaker ones. So you start with a concept, you find a good base to begin working with, and you tweak and adjust as you see how it performs in play. Over time, as you face different challenges you’ll learn not only what changes need to be made, but how to more effectively use what you’ve got. It’s a subtle contest of wits between you, your friends, and the rest of the world.

Heroes and henchmen

In other online games I’ve played, you’re either a character capable of operating solo, a pet class who controls some other critter for doing the dirty work, or you’re part of a group. It can make it difficult for people who tend to prefer to operate alone or with one or two other people but want to do quests that require a full group. Guild Wars Factions (the second campaign) added henchmen to the mix. Henchmen are additional party members whose equipment, skills, and level are all fixed based on what town or outpost you were in when you added them. Guild Wars Nightfall (the third and most recent campaign, and the one I ended up starting with) added heroes. Like henchmen, heroes are additional party members to join your group and help you win battles. Unlike henchmen, you have additional control over what they do and don’t do, their equipment, and additional skills. Using both heroes and henchmen allows you to fill out a group a lot more easily, without having to bring on the double-edged sword of other people. For instance, Amanda and I have been running around — me with my Paragon and her with her Necromancer — and to our band of two we’ve been adding one of our warrior heroes and a healer henchman. It’s been quite fun and makes for a pretty solid group.

Quest variety

EverQuest was just about the worst in this regard, but the others had nothing much to write about. Take this here, run and see that guy over there, go kill ten of these stupid things. It was pretty droll and repetitive. I’ve found there are a lot of the same sorts of quests in Guild Wars, but there’s much more. Dungeons with puzzles and traps, missions where all you can do is give orders to your heroes and henchmen telling them what to do and where to go, quests to gain rank in various factions, and more. It’s a far cry from the FedEx and murder missions that most other games give you.

Casual approachability

Other games I’ve played tended to require a more solid devotion of time, and gave better rewards to more hardcore players who were able to spend more time playing the game. The WoW battlegrounds, as I understand, are very guilty of this and you can’t expect to compete without dedicating some serious time to it. Earlier tonight, I hopped into Guild Wars for about 15 minutes, ran around and killed some stuff in an instanced explorable area, and it was a productive run. Almost died a couple of times, but I pulled in some good experience with my warrior hero and my healer henchman. Then I jumped back to town and logged out when it was time to go. I like the fact that I can do this more easily than I’ve been able to in some other MMORPGs. Guild Wars also seems to reward player skill over time spent, with having a good knowledge of your skills and how to use them winning out over having dedicated serious time playing. Of course a player who’s higher level — which does take time to attain — is going to have better skills and equipment, but you can be a competitive player at your own level without having to pour loads of time into it.

No shards

Like EVE, there’s only one “server” (or “realm” or “shard” or whatever they’re called), so when you tell someone your character name you don’t also need to tell them what shard you’re on. This is mostly a convenience thing, but I think it’s the way all games should be designed in the future. It promotes a better sense of cohesiveness and prevents the community from being too thinly spread; this happened with Dark Age of Camelot as their subscriber base shrank, and required them to condense the server list in a somewhat awkward way.

With these pluses in mind, it’s not without its own share of issues:

Community

The community does have a greater number of obnoxious kids in it than others I’ve seen, though certainly not more than WoW which is a freakin’ cesspool of Middle Schoolers. I’ve seen ads shouted for guilds with minimum age requirements — 18+ in one case — and maybe that’ll help for long-term play, but there were a lot of immature fools running around in the public areas. That may be more a side effect of online populations than anything else, though.

Endgame

It does appear that the “point” of the game is to do player-versus-player (PvP) or guild-versus-guild (GvG) combat in the various and sundry arenas. This isn’t for everyone, and I think there is some high-level non-PvP content for people who don’t want to participate in the more aggressively competitive parts of the game, but I think PvP is the primary endgame. It reminds me a great deal of Dark Age of Camelot — a great game I’ve dedicated no small amount of time to over the years — in the frontier realm-versus-realm combat. Personally, I like this sort of endgame as I’m a competitive player by nature, but I list this under flaws as it’s not for everyone.

Instanced areas

I know this was under the list of strong points above, but I also put it here because it does tend to detract from the “shared world” feel that I enjoy about MMORPGs, where we’re all part of this fantasy world killing fantasy creatures. Of course, it doesn’t help when “Darkkillerdeathlol” runs by with no clothes on, but it is something I think I’ll miss about role-playing servers in games like Dark Age of Camelot.

That’s pretty much what I’ve got right now. I think I’ll enjoy Guild Wars for a time — quite possibly a long one. I’ll keep you posted.

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Earlier today, Voodoo Extreme got word from several sources with the Nintendo Wii launch information. Sony and Microsoft can fight their little overpriced battle with hardware whose core interfaces and concepts haven’t changed in 20 years. I’m going with Nintendo. Read all the juicy bits here. Now I need to save up $300-400 by November 19th. Dang it.

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One of the frequent complaints I hear about 3rd Edition (and 3.5) D&D is that you have to play it with miniatures. “It was designed to sell them,” a friend of mine bemoans, pointing to Attacks of Opportunity as the most damning evidence. I’ll admit that I did consider AoO to be so difficult without some sort of physical tactical gameplay aid that I’d generally not used them — they are an optional rule, after all, being labeled with such words as “can” and “may” in the Player’s Handbook. But I decided to see if there were other options.

Some quick Googling led me to one other person’s opinion, and that person happened to be Monte Cook. You may have come across his name before, in the front cover of your Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide since he was part of the core 3rd Edition team and is an all-around awesome RPG developer. Check out what he says — his advice is sound, and I think that’s how I’m going to try to play the upcoming D&D 3.5e game I’ll be running before considering and investing in other solutions.

If that turns out to not work well, and the group decides not to revert to my previous behavior of simply ignoring AoO, I might give some of Fiery Dragon‘s counter sets a go. Cheaper than miniatures by a long shot, they still accomplish the goal of allowing everyone to see the tactical layout of the encounter.

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I find myself suffering again from one of my many character flaws that’s plagued me my entire life: Indecision. I’m still thinking about the D&D campaign I’ve discussed before on this site. It was primarily brought about by my waning interest in reading and learning about the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting — the book had been sitting on my floor for a while, and every time I’ve tried to get back into it I’ve failed. This doesn’t give me much hope for the setting as a whole, as if there’s one person in a D&D group who needs to be invested heavily in liking the setting it’s the DM.

Maybe Forgotten Realms would be a bit more interesting. I’ve played it and enjoyed it in the past, and it certainly has no shortage of support. Or [Eberron], with its high-action, energetic environment and refreshing take on D&D-style fantasy. I was running these thoughts around in my brain, and I remembered a game I’d picked up a while back and had never gotten around to trying: Exalted. It’s a very epic, non-traditional fantasy game made by White Wolf, makers of the popular and gothy Vampire: the Masquerade. The concept behind it is that each of the players is one of the chosen of the mightiest of gods, the Unconquered Sun. This means that they’re significantly more powerful than the average mortal, and provides a high-scale level of conflict. In most games, characters start out having trouble defeating a small band of organized goblins; in Exalted, they start out having the ability to dominate entire regions of the world. It uses [White Wolf]‘s Storyteller System which I’ve found in the past to be easier to learn and use than the D20 System that D&D 3.5e uses. At least, I thought it was — having done some reading in the Second Edition Exalted main book, it’s far more complex than I remember it being when I played Vampire. Maybe that has something to do with the additional capabilities of characters, or maybe it’s just a more complex system for a more complex game, or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but I’m worried that it might be trickier to play.

So, this leaves me worse off than I was before. Eberron still looks intriguing, Forgotten Realms is as it always has been, Kingdoms of Kalamar is solid and boring, and now I’ve got Exalted to think about as well. Sigh. I hate being indecisive and flighty.

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In continuation of my discussing some of the different settings for the forthcoming D&D campaign, I’ve settled on Kingdoms of Kalamar. Read on to find out why.

Realism

Insofar as one can have realism in a setting where magic, dragons, orcs, and unicorns are real, Kalamar has it in spades. The world feels natural and normal, like it actually evolved, geologically and ecologically, throughout time. While it was created by an all-powerful, omniscient being — just like Kansas and Pennsylvania — it has natural history and science behind its design and current state. The folks at Kenzer & Co. who developed it had a good idea of how biology and ecology work.

Versatility

One of the more common traps that befalls some other campaign settings is the so-called loremaster effect. One of your players, or another person you know, takes it upon themselves to find out everything they possibly can about the game world in which you’re playing. With some of the more content-heavy settings, especially those produced by Wizards of the Coast, this includes lots of sourcebooks, novels, online publications, short stories and supplements in magazines… the volume of information can be overwhelming. For someone who’s interested in maintaining a game setting that’s as close to canon as possible, it can be quite a task to keep all this going and keep it in-line with your local changes; basically, the more content there is to worry about deviating from, the more content the DM has to track. With Kalamar, it’s a significantly smaller company producing much less content, leaving me feeling more free to institute the other third-party or home-grown content as I see fit, without having to worry about something else from on-high causing a conflict. Kalamar is huge and has big swaths of largely undocumented stuff, perfect for dropping in a little village that’s suffering from a local threat. But it doesn’t suffer from the downside of having a small amount of content — the content that is there is very high-quality, and there’s plenty written about various different, more densely populated or interesting, areas of the world. So if I want to have a highly detailed urban setting, I’ve got Geanavue, Loona, or Zoa, not to mention the fan-produced stuff about Bet Kalamar.

Religion

Kalamar has a rich pantheon of gods, with each having significant power in their domain(s). This really isn’t all that different from every other campaign setting out there, but gods, religion, and faith are more integrated into everyone’s lives. In a lot of settings, religion only matters if you’re a paladin or a cleric — even monks tend to be generic Kung-Pow ass-kickers in most worlds. Religion on Tellene is a part of everyone’s life, and while everyone generally tends to follow only one god, most people acknowledge the existence of the others, and will even pay homage to them for certain things (e.g. briefly say a prayer to The Traveler before beginning a journey). I also like that all the different cultures — see below for more on this — have their own names for each of the gods, in their own languages. It gives a very realistic feel to the pantheon.

Culture and Race

On Tellene, there are many different sub-races of each race. You could call them cultures or ethnicities, but they add a level of depth to what was a very two-dimensional system of heredity. Someone whose family hails from the southern island of Svimozhia looks different and has different traits from someone whose origins are further north, where winters are harsher and longer, and there’s less sun. They’re both humans, but they’re still different. You could have an all-human party and it would still be full of variation. Humans are the most populous race on Tellene by a long shot, in part because they reproduce more rapidly than the other races due to their shorter average lifespan, but also because they’re exceptionally resourceful, quick to adapt, and foolhardy. Elves, gnomes, halflings, and all the others still exist and can be found in abundance in their own areas, but humans run the show. I won’t let this impact the players and their choices in race — after all, parties of player characters are the very rare exception rather than the norm, so why should standard racial boundaries apply to them? — but it might come into play in their adventures. If most of the people in a small village have never seen an elf before, they’re certainly going to remember the elf rogue who showed up with his half-hobgoblin, halfling, and mismatched human cohorts; might make sneaking around kind of difficult, necessitating more careful planning.

Magic

Kalamar is what’s considered a low-magic setting. This means that if you were to find a small village in the middle of nowhere, odds are high you wouldn’t find any magic users or magic items. Perhaps the village’s most learned individual might know about some aspects of magic, but he or she probably wouldn’t be a magic-user, themselves. People certainly know it exists, and most are aware that it can be used for both good or evil, but magic and magic-users are still hard enough to come by in most regions of the world that they’re generally considered exceptional. Some places might look askance at magic-users, while others might not even bat an eye (especially in larger cities), so a wide range of reactions is certainly something that extensive magic-users should expect when traveling. Magic doesn’t permeate everyday life like it does in some settings, but it is common in parties of adventurers — again, they’re the exception rather than the rule — so it won’t impact the players much in terms of character choices.

Something else I intend to try with this campaign, since I’ve only ever done it with Vampire: The Masquerade, is role-played character creation. We go through the characters’ lives, starting at an early age, and I role-play with the players to determine the events that shaped who they are. For instance, by working out how they reacted when they were little to, say, an armed assault on one of the townsfolk where they live — hiding behind something, defiant yelling, studied scrutiny — I’ll get a good idea of who they want to be. I’ll draft that up in the form of a character summary, or even a fully filled-out character sheet, and go over what I think they’ve got. They still have final say over what is and isn’t an aspect of their character — it is their character, after all — and if they want to scrap the whole thing and start over by simply rolling someone up and applying the background later then they certainly can. I’ve found that this offers a good introduction for new players to how role-playing games work, and prevents them from having to know too many of the rules and options ahead of time. I’ll give `em the available races, the available deities, and the available classes to give them an idea of where they might like to aim themselves, but actually getting there will be their responsibility (and mine).

I’d like to obtain a copy of the Kingdoms of Kalamar Player’s Primer to share with my players, since it’s a lighter-weight background introduction to the world of Tellene, and I may put some content up here summarizing the world and its races, deities, calendar, and regions for them to read. That is, after I finish reading the remaining books that I’ve got to read.

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So I’m starting up a new D&D 3.5e campaign and have been trying to determine which campaign setting I’d rather run. The choices have basically boiled down to:

• Forgotten Realms, with a focus on the city of Waterdeep
• Kingdoms of Kalamar, with a focus on the city of Genavue
• Eberron, with a focus on Sharn, the City of Towers

Funny coincidence: Waterdeep and Geanavue were both created by the same man, Ed Greenwood, who is in my mind a towering genius of fantasy world design.

You may notice that all of the options I’m looking at are based in or around cities. I’ve found I tend to like urban campaigns a great deal, primarily for the wealth of options they offer the player. When any good you want or any service you require is readily available it means you can spend more time figuring out how to do what you want to do, rather than whether or not it’s feasible or possible. But, all three cities are positioned in areas designed to offer easy access to a wealth of other areas — subterranean, jungle, forest, water, etc. There’s also absolutely no reason other than convenience and roots to keep the players in any given place. If they find they dislike the city and want to go somewhere, then far be it from me to stop them. My job as the DM isn’t to restrict their choices so much as encourage them to make the right ones.

Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of each setting.

Forgotten Realms

Pros

• Exceptionally well-supported by Wizards.
• Large world, lots of locales and people for players to experience.
• Has been around for decades, so there’s an overwhelming amount of content.
• Standard-fare fantasy, which more people are going to be familiar with — a so-called “high-magic” world, where magic-use is rather widespread.

Cons

• Very expansive world means it can be tough to decide where to set down.
• Wanting to stick to canon can leave one feeling restricted.
• Can seem kind of bland and played-out since it feels a lot like LotR.
• The abundance of content can result in players (and DMs) who become Realmslore Lawyers

Kingdoms of Kalamar

Pros

• High levels of verisimilitude lend a very realistic feel to the world and its inhabitants.
• I like the “renaissance faire” kind of texture that the world has.
• Very cohesive, “realistic” setting.
• Very detailed and thought-through.
• Could adapt a large volume of third-party adventures and modules to the setting without feeling like I was messing with something whose contents were written in stone by Wizards like I would with The Realms and Eberron.

Cons

• Not a first-party Wizards product, so it’s not as well-supported.
• Somewhat bland in that it’s not quite as high-fantasy as Forgotten Realms or Eberron — it’s what we call “low-magic” like Greyhawk in that powerful magic isn’t all over the place.
• Not as familiar to me as the Realms — my D&D education was on Toril, so I feel like I know it well.
• Content updates have been few and far between for a while now, and I’m worried that the vibrancy and life that new content (including setting, rules, and adventure releases) tends to bring will be minimal, leaving things feeling stale.

Eberron

Pros

• First-party, so it’s going to be well-supported.
• New and different.
• I think the Action Point system is cool — it puts the hero back in heroics — but I suppose we could strip that out and adapt it to another setting.
• The environment and world is really quite interesting.

Cons

• Completely new and unfamiliar to me, as I’ve at least read through most of the Kalamar stuff and have been in the Realms for years.
• I personally think Warforged are dumb and only serve to complicate the party dynamics, especially when Clerics are involved.
• Not quite like what people think of when they think “fantasy role-playing.”
• Despite protestations otherwise, it does feel like they’ve replicated large chunks of technology with magic.

The bulk of it really boils down to what kind of feeling and environment we’re looking for, I suppose. Forgotten Realms feels like traditional high fantasy, with abundant magic, wonder, and power. Kalamar has a very realistic, historical feel to it, plus Elves, Halflings, etc. as well as magic. Eberron is like fantasy film noir — there’s an ample supply of sinister, the good guys aren’t always good, the bad guys aren’t always bad, and there’s always something new to worry about. I’m leaving it to my players to each decide which they find the most intriguing, and I’ll base my choice on their opinions.

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Found this interesting link in Gamasutra about how World of Warcraft is teaching and encouraging the wrong goals. I concur, so read on: World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things

While I don’t necessarily agree with or subscribe to his points in their entirety, nor do I place Street Fighter on the high pedestal that the author does — quite likely because I suck at it — I do think he’s somewhat on the ball about the general “dumbing-down” of MMORPGs. In general I’ve found the “theme park” play style that WoW uses to be somewhat bland and unexciting for me long-term, which is one reason why I’m giving serious consideration to going back to EVE Online. They recently made a major hardware upgrade, and CCP continues to be one of the most responsive and active developers I’ve yet seen in the MMOG space.

I’ve also got a couple of ideas to bring to EVE, one of which is here: The EVE Documentation Project. I hope to be able to take the community’s drive for compiling information about EVE and put it in a wiki where they can do a better job of maintaining and producing it. The forums (EVE account required) are trying to fill that purpose now, but they’re really not an ideal vehicle or tool for such documentation. I’ll hopefully be making a post to said forums at some point in the near future and we’ll see how things go.