There is an artifact in D&D far more insidious than any part of Vecna or Blackrazor. The concept of Alignment is an artifact of the early game and it is filled with problems. It is time to either radically change it or get rid of it altogether.
So, this was the subject of conversation. Why are people not playing high-level D&D? This was prompted by this post on ENWorld, which was based on stats found on D&D Beyond drawn from users making characters using their tools.
The short version of the analysis is that after 10th level, the number of characters drops off dramatically. The majority of the characters are between 3rd and 6th levels.
This has prompted a bunch of people to put forth their own ideas as to why. Far be it for me to buck a good gaming trend. Here is my list of reasons why people are not making characters for higher-level play.
I am sorry it took so long to get this last but together. I was sick for the better part of a month and it pretty much ate my brain. Who knew you needed to be able to breath to write?
Anyways, in this case, we are wrapping up our look at official D&D settings (The first post found here) by looking at the licensed setting. These are officially published settings based on previously published works and presented as D&D versions. Before I get too into that, I should talk about Deities and Demigods and other early products which kind of involved improper use of settings they didn’t have permission for or the permission was murky.
I recently offered to run the alternate, off-week, D&D game for the group I play with on Tuesdays. I would be the fill in guy for weeks when the normal DM did not want to run. My offer was generally greeted with some enthusiasm. The normal DM and another player expressed a desire for Eberron. Now, I love me some Eberron. I could wax rhapsodic about it for days. It is a setting with a wider range of setting conventions than are found in Forgotten Realm. And then there is Sharn: City of Towers.
That said there are some issues with running it in 5th edition, at the moment. Some things just haven’t been written yet. They only now released The Mystic (see also Psionics) and the Artificer. They do have some race stats for some of the races, like the Warforged, on the Wizards of the Coast site. Others have not been done. Also Dragonmarks have been accounted for, but I feel like they need some clarification. I will tackle those another time, but the race I was asked for was Kalashtar. There are some fan versions out there, but nothing definitive. I figured I would take a pass at it.
