Old Farts Demanding Swords : Well Why Didn’t He Just Do That From The Beginning!

Forgotten realms has a bad rap.  It’s a rap earned from the fact that the campaign has ‘big names’ in it. Names like Khelban, Elminister, and Drizzt. Like in a Star Wars campaign, people playing a Forgotten Realms game want to encounter these people, they want to touch on the wealth of fiction and depth of character design that runs throughout the setting. When done properly, this can feel engaging, and one feels like one is a hero amongst heroes. Like Spiderman running into Wolverine. When done improperly, as it is done very frequently, one feels like he’s Krillin in Dragonball Z.

Krillin, for those with lives, and not into very old anime, is a character in a series based on supernatural martial arts. He’s an “ok” fighter in a realm of people who can punch through time, spontaneously teleport, and throw the personification of life energy at people. He accomplishes stuff, he’s the strongest human alive, he does his part, but nobody watches the show for him.

Forgotten Realms has a reputation of DMs putting players into situations where they have to be saved by Elminister at the last minute out of the blue, or where they have to watch Drizzt walk in and solve their problems, or even beat the bad guy for them.  Adventures where the PCs ‘open the gates’ for a Drizzt, or ‘unbind Eliminister’ were distressingly common back in the day. Essentially our heroes act like valets for people of some obscenely over leveled state (in 3^rd edition, Elminister was something like a 35^th level mage and 8^th level cleric or some nonsense).  They were walking cut scenes.

The DM wanted to make sure he didn’t undersell the ‘heroes of the realm’ but did so by underselling the real heroes of his realm, the PCs. This again, ties to the world building problem, that leads to again, our high level problems.

When you buy into ‘Elminister solves the problem’ all problems get very small. Dark Lord Simon Antfarmer is the man who burned your village to the ground, and caused terrible things, but he’s an eighth level fighter to Eliminister, who blasts him out of hand before puffing on his pipe and telling uncomfortable stories about how he sleeps with his foster daughters.

Your player’s drama gets subsumed, crushed, and overwhelmed by an NPC who has no buy in, no interest, and no concern. This is because the world wasn’t properly designed, and because you aren’t selling the 8^th level bad guys enough. And since you didn’t sell the 8^th level guys enough, when the party gets to higher level, they won’t either. There are people I’ve seen, since third edition came out, who think 9^th level is ‘low.’  

So. Our real problem is, the players are glaring at Elminister and saying ‘Why didn’t he just show up from the beginning and take out Simon?’ Why did they have to fight through legions of fire ants, down through orcs, and then just have a red robed pervert show up and splatter the guy. Why didn’t Elminister do that from the start? He obviously could!

In Forgotten Realms we get a lame brinksmanship answer ‘if Elminister did that, then Manshoon would do it too, and blah blah.’ This is lame. Its bull. It’s also a corruption of the real reasons why high level characters don’t smash all the orcs, and get the crappy swords themselves.

That’s for next time though.