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Forgotten Realms

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Be My Head:
Ed Greenwood is by FAR the shittiest FR author.

Shandril gets attacked by about 50 dracoliches and a horde of cultists every few pages and then slaughters them all with her magical powers = the plot of an entire trilogy.

TheViscount:

--- Quote from: Be My Head on 23 Feb 2009, 20:15 ---Ed Greenwood is by FAR the shittiest FR author.

Shandril gets attacked by about 50 dracoliches and a horde of cultists every few pages and then slaughters them all with her magical powers = the plot of an entire trilogy.

--- End quote ---

It's called being an ex-PCDM with an inflated ego.

I've experienced one or two myself. It's kind of like god-moding, only it gets published by a major organization.

Trollstormur:
the entirety of forgotten realms is fucking terrible. It's stupid full of Mary Sue plot armor characters. Drizzt is the most irritating because of the shitheads who want to play their own CG Drow Ranger, and the story of Elminster is just plain retarded. How the butts do you make a character who literally cannot die and can do anything to anyone who isn't a greater diety interesting? (protip: having him live for a couple years as a woman isn't how you do it right.)



^^^ ed greenwood is the king of the mary sue self-insert.

TheViscount:

--- Quote from: Trollstormur on 23 Feb 2009, 21:55 ---the entirety of forgotten realms is fucking terrible. It's stupid full of Mary Sue plot armor characters. Drizzt is the most irritating because of the shitheads who want to play their own CG Drow Ranger, and the story of Elminster is just plain retarded. How the butts do you make a character who literally cannot die and can do anything to anyone who isn't a greater diety interesting? (protip: having him live for a couple years as a woman isn't how you do it right.)



^^^ ed greenwood is the king of the mary sue self-insert.

--- End quote ---

Sounds kind of angry? Do you play EQ2? I'm not being sarcastic.
Hm, I don't know about that. The main character of a story USUALLY does not die, and a story does not have to involve the death of the main character. I never read Elminster, so I can't give you any feedback on that.

KvP:
No, a lot of D&D players, usually the ones who were playing through 2nd ed and farther back but not always, don't really like FR at all. And their arguments have some merit. For one thing magic in FR is totally ridiculous. FR is like a comic book continuity now - it has a little bit of everything, with room for still more, and just about anything that could happen has happened. Gods are all over the place. Epic characters are numerous. Don't even try making sense of world timelines. And that's useful to a lot of DMs - it allows a lot of room for improvisation and connection to the gameworld at large without running much risk of totally fucking things up, since cataclysmic events seem to always be on the verge of occurrence - but it's still pretty fuckin' outrageous.

The only reason I like it is because I have become steeped in it via some excellent CRPGs. And so my warm feelings toward the setting have primarily to do with Wizards' canny marketing of the setting.

All that said, give me back Planescape, or better yet Ravenloft, any day.

As for Drizzt, he is very obviously a Mary Sue character (from wiki, emphasis mine - "a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot and is particularly characterized by overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, or having too many, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as "Mary Sues" is that they are too ostentatious for the audience's taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly.")

I have no doubt that sometime back in the late 70's-early 80's somebody actually rolled and played through a game as Drizzt Do'urden, but the reason he has become, rather undeniably, the single biggest hero in D&D fiction is that he, as a character, cheaply plays on all sorts of tired tropes and the sensibilities of the hardcore nerds who play D&D. He is a good character from an evil race, turning away from his evil destiny and the temptations of power and yadda yadda. He is an unparalleled fighter who fights with two swords and he has a pet panther. But he also has a sensitive and quiet soul and is good at heart. Most tellingly he's socially shunned for being different but only a righteous few are able to see his true worth. It's easy to see why so many people are drawn to the character, he's the sort of intellectualized badass that nerds wish they could be, he's exotic and mysterious and formidable and feared. The reasons why he's so beloved are the same reasons the internet won't shut the fuck up about ninjas. Same principle.

That's not getting into the still-cheaper ways that Drizzt is an exploitative character, like the hyper-sexualization of the Drow (which ties into the rather conservative sexual politics of D&D as a whole)

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