Campaign Worlds

Looking back over my almost 30 years in gaming I've been trying to find the perfect gaming campaign world in which to run adventures. I've tried all the major D&D realms in print, or at least the fantasy ones. They all seem to be different when you read the material, but in execution all players seem to lump them into one. Sure they may have different deities and locations, cultures and customs, but in the end an elf in the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, or Greyhawk feels much the same. The fact that the base races exist in every fantasy realm ever created for D&D seems a bit odd to me.

Lately I've been trying to streamline the D&D experience and taking a hint from other games and sources as well. What if there were only four player races to choose from? Human, Elf, Dwarf, and some small race (be it halfling or gnome) seem to be all that's really needed. The added complication of half-breed "races" seems a bit unnecessary. There are enough sub-races listed for elves and dwarves, and since the point of adventure gaming is to play "heroes", allowing the evil races into the game as playable choices seems contradictory. In fact, the inclusion of the Assassin class in the game seems to encourage bad play. However, once offered it's hard to undo.

Some campaign worlds did limit the types of races and classes that were available, and yet some expanded upon them to a ridiculous degree. Harn, for example, made humans the most common and one could only play a demi-human if you were lucky enough to roll one on a random race table in the beginning of the campaign. Of course, many people simply ignored the roll (and the table) and made whatever they desired. The Forgotten Realms encouraged the use of all races and classes in the core rules and added a plethora of others into the mix, seemingly at random. Dragonlance had weird versions of the base races (techno-gnomes and kender), but the others were more or less the same with different names. Greyhawk was custom made for all the base class and race choices so that campaign was easiest to use. The Known World campaign was based off the Basic and Expert rules so there were limited choices for race and class there (later expanded to include some of the Companion rules classes and races). Darksun and Ravenloft were much later but also used the same basic races with some additions and cosmetic changes. Planescape tried to expand on the races and classes a bit too much and showed what can happen when everyone has every option open without limit.

Later editions of D&D removed all the race and class limits. They introduced so many options that a DM had to more or less construct a world of mish-mashed pieces at the whim of his players. I've played generic campaign worlds before - they can work if everyone accepts the generic feel of the campaign. Those who try to become more specific in their choices kill it for everyone else though. For example, my "family D&D" campaign I run for a group of related friends - we chose to run the adventures from DUNGEON magazine in level order. I cobbled together a 3rd edition campaign from a group of beginning adventures and adlibbed a lot of the material in between. The characters were mostly generic - a halfling rogue, a gnome bard, an elven druid, and an elven wizard - so no campaign specific material needed to be used. All the options in the Player's Handbook were freely open to them. We later converted to D&D 3.5 and continued the game, although the feel changed when adopting the new options in the later core rules. Choices the players made led to nailing the campaign to the Greyhawk Setting. Although this setting is generic enough to use there are some instances where campaign-specific material began intruding.

My own homebrew campaign world suffers from the race and class mix of the Core Rules. In order to accommodate some of the players I had to allow certain races and classes into the world and then explain why and how they came to be there, sometimes retro-fitting things into the campaign. I needed to develop a campaign world where all the choices were available with none of the baggage of the older material. I'm beginning to think that simply choosing a campaign and working within its bounds is the way to go - but choosing the right campaign world for your group is the key.