Should Dungeon craft have an Official setting?

[manikus]

Should DC have an official setting and if so, where should it be?

Please explain your vote on this issue. If you voted for other, please explain that vote in this thread.

[Uatu]

Hmm - this is a hard one! I guess that because of its background (a la FRUA), the Forgotten Realms would be the expected choice - but I do prefer Greyhawk for various reasons

If people wanted to do lots of specific transfers of campaign materials to DC, the Forgotten Realms is chock-full of campaign material, although nearly all of it is 2e.

As the Gold Box games were 1e, though, in many ways Greyhawk was the champion of that edition...

[manikus]

Here are my thoughts on the topic. (I know that's what you've all been waiting for...)
Unlimited Adventures used the Forgotten Realms. They used it because the majority of the GoldBox games were set in the Forgotten Realms, and they could reuse all hte art for those games (well it's actually the games that were using the FRUA art, but anyway) and they included a lot of NPCs that are from the GoldBox games set in the Forgotten Realms. But, it seems to me that very few of the designs/mods created by users are set in the Forgotten Realms (this is of course relative to the whole number of designs). There are designs set in the Greyhawk world, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Marvel and DC comic universes, many homebrew settings, and of course the major Oriental Adventures hack.
In all honesty, the biggest part of FRUA being set in the Forgotten Realms is the name. In all likelihood, DC would be much the same way. But, you never know. Just to be clear, I don't mean to imply that we would somehow change the name to include the setting, or anything else for that matter, it's just in relation to stuff being added.

So, Forgotten Realms, as Uatu pointed out, has more "stuff" and is very definitely the 2e gaming world. Greyhawk has more history and is generally thought of as the 1e world for AD&D. Dragonlance is not currently doable in DC. Homebrew could be fun, but that seems more 'personal' than an official release - though if we had all started of as a gaming group that would be a different story.
I don't know eough about the Birthright, Eberron or Sword Coast settings and the rest (Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Spelljammers, Al-Qadim, Oriental Adventures, etc) all seem to niche, though they would make cool world hacks.
Maybe what I really wanted to ask was what should the first world hack for DC be? They can all be worked on, and when they get enough work done (to be determined at some other time in some other thread - maybe in my forums ) they could be made Official and announced through SourceForge and everything.

[Uatu]

Well, Greyhawk would be the easiest hack (or one of the easiest) Basically, I guess one would need to add special clerics and druids (assuming all 1e classes/races are included).

Realms has a LOT of source material - some sources include funky character classes like dukars, runecasters, etc.; there are also lots of specialty priests.

Dragonlance does not numerically have all that much to add, but what needs to be added seems rather difficult to me

Dark Sun needs psionics, so I guess that would be the hard part for that...

[manikus]

As for adding stuff like classes and races, I can do the latter (my next design after Prohovost will have half-orcs as player characters); but classes are not working out so well. It seems that pretty much everything about them, except the name, is hardcoded into DC.

[Shadow Stranger]

As for getting around the hard coding, can we hack DC? If hacking FRUA was possible how much easier would it be to hack DC, we have the source code after all, so we know what we are looking for. I am getting the hang of it quite easily.

Official setting: there seems to be no one really good choice, just use a generic 2E or whatever format.

[Ziroc]

UA was Forgotten Realms, and the FR's are the best and most known by everyone. There are so many areas in the FR to make stories.. many new and unexplored regions!

[Shadow Stranger]

Does anyone have any figures on how many FRUA designs were actually set in the FR? I have no idea.

As for hacking the DC code, no-one seems willing to re-write the hard-coded parts to make them more flexible.

[Uatu]

Hmm - one thing about the old gold box games, though, was that although they were set in the Forgotten Realms, it was still 1e, which meant that there was very little color added in the actual systems (i.e. no special abilities depending on deity chosen as in Greyhawk 1e or Dragonlance 1e) - so the Realms were sort of chosen as a "vanilla" world for standard AD&D (fighters, clerics, etc.).

It also seems that some cities that appeared in the games were developed for those games, not the other way around - I remember Curse of the Azure Bonds had a module made for 1e AD&D, converting from the PC game (unfortunately, Secret of the Silver Blades never had that happen, and the town of New Verdigris is still not on any official map it seems ).

[manikus]

Hi Ziroc!

Hacking DC: The official line has always been, "why hack when you can write or change the actual code?" We only have one coder at a time it seems, so by necessity, we can only work on items that will get us to 1.0 right now (the same would be true if all of our coders were active right now). If we had 10 or 12 coders it would be a different story.

Do I mean to dissuade people from hacking? Nope. The way that I introduced myself to CocoaSpud was by asking for help in decoding the saved character files.

An option to think about is something like Tarlanon did (which is a saved character editor), a stand-alone program that can be used with DC. In fact if it's good - in the sense that it's Open Source - we might be able to host it SourceForge for you.

After DC reaches 1.0, one of the first tasks will be to make DC look to the text files and not to the hardcode for races, classes, skills, attributes, etc. This had always been a goal of CocoaSpud's and he had mentioned that the only reason he didn't do it now was the time it would take away from getting to 1.0. If only he would come back to us as a coder...