Quote from: Omega;967308All I can assume from reading the first three is that either it gets worse later... Or a-lot of the hate for the modules is from people who have never actually looked at them and were just told to hate it. Because all this "play the novel" and "horrible railroad" isnt appearing in the modules or DL Adventures.

Im disappointed.

The first three are different than the others, they were written before the novel they were linked to.  After that, they kind of got worse, and then got better.  The one in the next trilogy where you fight Verminaard was horribly scripted and railroaded.  Probably the best ones are the final three, they all have Battlesystem components to fight the War of the Lance as well as adventures.  One of them, the Blood Sea one I think, has a deck the GM draws from to randomize the plot and events, kind of like Ravenloft, but with more options.  The final one gives lots of options for fighting and defeating Takhisis.

So the range goes from very limited railroad to a couple that are quite sandboxy with lots of mini-quests and ways to accomplish broad goals.  I think you're right in that a lot of people probably gave up after the couple of real stinkers in there and never got to the good ones.  They started off ok, went downhill, then got way better.  Of course the best way to run them is with player-made characters, assume they are the Heroes of the Lance, not the guys from the novels.

There's at least 3-5 of them that aren't in the novels at all.

Greyhawk.  They've stopped using it for anything major after a last gasp with 3.x and even then it floundered and died.

Greyhawk could be rebooted like any setting, they just need a strong concept, and good writers, something they can't seem to do in house at this point, so it's up to a freelancer to pitch it and get greenlit or write the whole thing and hope they buy it.  Greyhawk's worth more as a Name Graveyard at this point to WotC, so they can raid its corpse for names and ideas to do Realms Retread Adventures like Acererak in Chult.

I always played in Greyhawk since that's where we started as kids but I don't really care how close it cleaves to Gygax's original, although I do like his folio and boxset. It was always a default, near generic setting with some nice details if you spent enough time with it. I've praised the 2e Greyhawk City boxset many time already. I actually like Carl Sargent's Greyhawk material a fair bit although I was never one for world shaking events 'updating' a setting. But taken on their own From the Ashes, the Night Below, City of Skulls are excellent.

Quote from: CRKrueger;967485Greyhawk could be rebooted like any setting, they just need a strong concept, and good writers, something they can't seem to do in house at this point, so it's up to a freelancer to pitch it and get greenlit or write the whole thing and hope they buy it.  Greyhawk's worth more as a Name Graveyard at this point to WotC, so they can raid its corpse for names and ideas to do Realms Retread Adventures like Acererak in Chult.

I think the looting of Greyhawk's corpse for parts in both 4e & 5e really makes a reboot unlikely. We saw a similar thing in late 2e & 3e where Mystara adventures were looted & placed in Greyhawk, but this goes much further.

You never know, they had Mordenkainen show up in CoS and specified he was from another world that was clearly GH not FR.

My hope, which I grant is very faint, is that they keep the core 5e rules for at least 10+ years and release a series of settings hardcovers: DL Adventures, GH Adventures, Planescape, Dark Sun, even Spelljammer (madness).