I like Greyhawk. Played it in my younger days so it’s an old fuzzy. If I want to run something that is somewhere else I just adapt it accordingly. 

Greyhawk

I run things like Lost Mine of Phandelver when I have new people at the table. It's an excellent introduction to the game, and after a few laps as DM, run it on autopilot.

When I'm running with experienced players, it's a homebrew world that's an amalgam of anything I like. I always use elements of Birthright for national politics, MCDM's Kingdoms & Warfare for provincial politics, and then gameplay elements from other settings that entertain me. Mainly mechanics that I can mix into the lore. Defiling from Dark Sun is an example. Also, there's always a West Marches border to explore beyond the most immediate setting I build.

My gut tells me most experienced DMs do this and make the game more personal and fun for their specific players.

I've tried playing in 100% homebrew worlds before and it always felt a little empty to me. Maybe I'm just bad at world building. So I've always defaulted to the FR when I DM, just because I feel like it's easier for me to make the world feel alive and fleshed out. There are a lot of resources for factions, mapping, travel, demographics, hamlets, towns, cities, and so on. I just use the ones that I think will make a place more interesting to my players. So it's more like using Forgotten Realms adjacent. Like a branching timeline that eventually becomes completely disconnected to the actual lore of the Realms. 

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 ????

Why????

 

Because I haven't been playing D&D for fifty years, which means I have no idea how the fifty years of Byzantine, self-contradictory, non-Euclidean 'lore' for the Forgotten Realms works.  And if I ever ran a Realms game for anyone but my personal table, the Realms geeknerds would spend two thirds of every session "um, actually... "-ing me and correcting me on the finer points of lore from a Forgotten Realms book released in 1993 of which only twelve copies remain today.  Right up until the point where i strangle them to death with a plushy beholder.

Or, to put it short: it's impossible for new players to comprehend Forgotten Realms "lore" well enough to run or play a game in the setting, and Old Heads generally cannot wait to be complete jerks to anyone that doesn't measure up to their level of Forgotten Realms Jeopardy Trivia Mastery. 

 Thanks for the explanation.

I think that's mostly down to the kind of people one plays the game with, rather than the setting itself. Personally I find FR to be quite easy to get into, mostly because of the wiki. Yes, the lore is often contradictory, but I find that just means I can add/take away anything and it won't mess anything up. I think that, because of the setting's flaws, it makes the setting easier to make your own.

Yeah, I mean I'm sure there are folks who tell someone they're "doing the Forgotten Realms wrong" but I think they're a minority among the folks who play in 5e's present default setting.  Not sure what if anything happened in 3 and 4e, but when Forgotten Realms first came out, it wasn't to create some sort of overriding canonical narrative.  Now did TSR/WotC churn out a novel and gazetteer industrial complex that itself lacked consistency and could seem imposing to someone knowing that a lot of that stuff didn't matter?  Yeah, but really the only overriding events I can think of were the ones that redrew the literal map and pantheon.  Forgotten Realms is a collection of ideas, and since there's not a lot of "internal" consistency that's a clue to players and DMs to make of those realms what you will, kinda like it was encouraged when the grey boxed set with the big map came out.  

If anything, the other classic OG D&D worlds are the ones where you'll fine communities of fans gatekeeping lore and tradition.  Krynn and Greyhawk particularly, and moreso Krynn.  The Forgotten Realms is a mess of ideas, and in that way was and I'd say still is a giant sandbox.  

I've run most of my Games in Darksun, Ravenloft or Homebrew worlds. My best according to my players however was the time I full ripped off an old rpg setting from a computer game called Exile so shoutout to spiderweb software for cementing my place as resident forever GM in my group for my sins. 

Call me crazy, but I like the Forgotten Realms. It's a pretty generic but still cool world with lots of neat lore and even more adventures. Not wanting to play in that setting is understandable, but sometimes it's just fun to adventure in a generic fantasy world and fight monsters with friends.

I use Forgotten Realms because there are a lot of resources out there for it which makes my job easier. I still homebrew stacks of stuff, so it's not all "as per the book", but it's handy having a well established setting.

I started playing in 1979 and started DMing in 1980. I still have those characters having transitioned them to each new edition as they appeared. Initially we all sort of ignored the settings and just played the the various modules without worrying about settings, downtime etc. reading thru this thread and others it seems like a lot of folks are doing that now. Over time I found I wanted more for my characters and for my player’s characters so I started homebrewing a world and converting those old PCs into NPCs. To do that well turns out to take a lot of time and effort and as life got more complicated that time dwindled. So I moved the old PCs over to the FR to draw on the horde of lore available. But then modified it greatly (The PCs pushed the Zhentarim out of Teshendale and Zhentil Keep and turned it into their own territory as well as creating a continent spanning trade organization with other PCs moving to Waterdeep, Aglarond and other places as well) I don’t generally run adventures in that area because those NPCs are there. But there is lots of other territory in the realms to place a campaign or three so the present campaign is a mashup of Saltmarsh and a relocated Phandalin sequence set in returned Luiren in the far south. I get lots of lore to work with but can also rework just about anything I want thanks to the spellplague and second sundering so it provides the best of both worlds without Useing up all my time and annoying my family severely. I plan on incorporating Spelljammer, the Feywild and Strixhaven into the mix in the future and thru them possibly other worlds as well.

Quote from MidnightPlat >>

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 ????

Why????

 

Because I haven't been playing D&D for fifty years, which means I have no idea how the fifty years of Byzantine, self-contradictory, non-Euclidean 'lore' for the Forgotten Realms works.  And if I ever ran a Realms game for anyone but my personal table, the Realms geeknerds would spend two thirds of every session "um, actually... "-ing me and correcting me on the finer points of lore from a Forgotten Realms book released in 1993 of which only twelve copies remain today.  Right up until the point where i strangle them to death with a plushy beholder.

Or, to put it short: it's impossible for new players to comprehend Forgotten Realms "lore" well enough to run or play a game in the setting, and Old Heads generally cannot wait to be complete jerks to anyone that doesn't measure up to their level of Forgotten Realms Jeopardy Trivia Mastery. 

 Thanks for the explanation.

I think that's mostly down to the kind of people one plays the game with, rather than the setting itself. Personally I find FR to be quite easy to get into, mostly because of the wiki. Yes, the lore is often contradictory, but I find that just means I can add/take away anything and it won't mess anything up. I think that, because of the setting's flaws, it makes the setting easier to make your own.

 

Yeah, I mean I'm sure there are folks who tell someone they're "doing the Forgotten Realms wrong" but I think they're a minority among the folks who play in 5e's present default setting.  Not sure what if anything happened in 3 and 4e, but when Forgotten Realms first came out, it wasn't to create some sort of overriding canonical narrative.  Now did TSR/WotC churn out a novel and gazetteer industrial complex that itself lacked consistency and could seem imposing to someone knowing that a lot of that stuff didn't matter?  Yeah, but really the only overriding events I can think of were the ones that redrew the literal map and pantheon.  Forgotten Realms is a collection of ideas, and since there's not a lot of "internal" consistency that's a clue to players and DMs to make of those realms what you will, kinda like it was encouraged when the grey boxed set with the big map came out.  

If anything, the other classic OG D&D worlds are the ones where you'll fine communities of fans gatekeeping lore and tradition.  Krynn and Greyhawk particularly, and moreso Krynn.  The Forgotten Realms is a mess of ideas, and in that way was and I'd say still is a giant sandbox.  

yeah, Greyhawk was a seriously challenged place that went through not just official revisions, but after the split was subject to drama that infected the player base.

Krynn has even more BTS drama, and there is a bit of a deal there with having the originals back.

FR is perhaps the most developed, as well, and is a fine basic world and while I don't find it to my taste, that doesn't mean there is anything rong with it at all. If anything, the aforementioned drama around FR is waaaayyyy lower, lol.

Quote from Jathom >>

I've tried playing in 100% homebrew worlds before and it always felt a little empty to me. Maybe I'm just bad at world building. So I've always defaulted to the FR when I DM, just because I feel like it's easier for me to make the world feel alive and fleshed out. There are a lot of resources for factions, mapping, travel, demographics, hamlets, towns, cities, and so on. I just use the ones that I think will make a place more interesting to my players. So it's more like using Forgotten Realms adjacent. Like a branching timeline that eventually becomes completely disconnected to the actual lore of the Realms. 

Quote from Jathom >>

I've tried playing in 100% homebrew worlds before and it always felt a little empty to me. Maybe I'm just bad at world building. So I've always defaulted to the FR when I DM, just because I feel like it's easier for me to make the world feel alive and fleshed out. There are a lot of resources for factions, mapping, travel, demographics, hamlets, towns, cities, and so on. I just use the ones that I think will make a place more interesting to my players. So it's more like using Forgotten Realms adjacent. Like a branching timeline that eventually becomes completely disconnected to the actual lore of the Realms. 

An alternate timeline!

I have mostly been playing in homebrew worlds along. Next most is Wildemout/Exandria.  Honestly it was not until recently that I actually got to play in Forgotten Realms, though even then it is a bit mixed as well with Homebrew stuff.

I voted for Ravenloft because it is my favourite setting, and previous to 5e I mostly ran homebrew, but in 5e times I've been using Forgotten Realms as our base setting.

I disagree with the (overly dramatic) criticisms of FR and its "bloated" lore. As DMs we are free to ignore any or all of that lore and use the adventures as written and make up our own lore. I strongly doubt there is a plague of grognards crashing through walls like the Koolaid Man, pushing up their magical glasses and shouting "That's not correct! You're doing FR wrong!1!1!11!!!"

The only "official" setting I've played D&D in for the last... I'm not sure, twenty years? is Birthright. And I put that in quotes since there hasn't been an official version since AD&D. I know there are a few fan adaptations to later versions, and when we play now, our usual DM has his own homebrew adaptation to 5e; we only switched to 5e from 2nd when we started keeping track of characters on dndbeyond instead of on paper or in roll20. It wasn't that I was actively avoiding any of the others, Birthright is just our group's favorite so every new game ends up there.

I also play in a lot of fully homebrew settings. Sometimes in those Planescape creeps in, but only in settings where the DM has decided their homebrew is part of the larger D&D plane-based cosmology.

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I strongly doubt there is a plague of grognards crashing through walls like the Koolaid Man, pushing up their magical glasses and shouting "That's not correct! You're doing FR wrong!1!1!11!!!"

 I’ve met a few folks who are indeed like that—but they’re in the minority.

The problem, however, comes not from these folks, but the folks who are using meta knowledge at a player level to inform their choices at the character level.  That is a fairly common occurrence, and one that is nearly impossible for most players with meta knowledge to avoid.  In turn, that creates gameplay problems - things being spoiled because the player(s) already have the information, players being able to skip ahead on certain things because they have information their characters would otherwise have to discover, some players feeling left out because player A seems to have all the right answers, etc.

That’s a problem in any premade setting, of course, but it’s a particular problem with FR given how much information is out there and how many folks likely have experience with things like Baldur’s Gate or such.

(Which, again, I’ve had some good FR experiences—so I don’t vehemently dislike the setting at all, but I can understand fully why folks wouldn’t want to deal with Meta Knowledge Abounds: The Setting.) 

I don't find FR very interesting, not to DM when I could homebrew or use a better different setting, but I haven't been DMing super long and have mostly run published (i.e. FR) material (my first game was homebrew, though; it was one of those "objectively a bit of a mess but everyone had fun" games, hence my current caution about practicing on published). I'd like to do more homebrew, Eberron, or Ravenloft in the future. For a standard-fantasy setting, homebrewing seems both the easiest and the most likely to give you exactly what you need because you can just... design it that way. But Greyhawk feels less "every square inch has at least three novels you need to have read" than Forgotten Realms while still having many of the same top-level ideas and a more nebulous/general "classic D&D" mood that's a bit hard to define. I don't really know much about any given setting's playerbase or out-of-universe history, though, so I can't speak to those points.

(All that said, one advantage of FR is that if you're looking for a specific answer to a specific question, FR is often the easiest one to find that answer for because the wiki is actually thorough and well-maintained. Sometimes it has more information on other settings than those settings' own wikis - Spelljammer, I'm looking at you.)

So, I do pure homebrew, but anyone knowledgeable enough can spot where I took some stuff and dropped it in my own from official material. My very first attempt at a campaign was a greyhawk based effort, and after that I never used an official again -- I localize existing modules when needed to the setting.  

I have had variations in the same setting for 40 years, though -- the current version in development features legendary heroes who were PCs in the 80's, and 90's. Much of what I do is a mix of the player interests and requests, the current pop culture stuff, and the challenge of doing something interesting.

For several years, I ran a public game every weekend, six hours at a shot, where anyone could come in with an existing character or a new one, and so the setting was really reduced a lot to the city or towns and the dungeons or adventures that they wanted to play. Learned a lot then about what works and what doesn't *in general*, and having to come up with a way that someone walking in a with a totally homebrew, maybe vaguely referenced in a Dragon or Dungeon magazine article could fit into things gave me a lot of flexibility (as did the having to keep it PG 13, lol, because players varied from 9 year olds to 35 year olds).

By the late 80's I had settled on three basic campaigns with more developed stuff, and now I've spent four years (with the rest of this one to go) developing a whole set up of setting and full campaign (1st to 20th) with all the supporting material for all of them.  And 80% of the "what goes in" comes from my players -- currently around 27 more or less regulars, with a couple add ons).

I don't have anything against the existing settings -- they just don't work for me and my players.  We tend to prefer different ways of seeing the same things, but all of us Love D&D (and that comes from trying out at least three dozen competitors, lol).

I pay attention, though.  Currently I am dealing with a lot of anime influence, lol. Not from the most popular shows, though. Paranormal urban adventures.  A question I often have to wonder about it is "when does it stop being D&D" -- and not asking here because there is no good answer for that, lol.

Forgotten Realms is oatmeal. It is as generic a fantasy setting as it's possible to make. It's by no a bad campaign setting, it's ... better than average let's say - but it's uninventive and bland.

That said, I've used it plenty, for years, before entirely dropping published material in favor of my own.

I guess settings are like junk food: The worst has the widest reach, it's palatable to almost everyone. Fat and salt tastes nice together, and that's all it takes. The gourmet stuff is rarer, and is often something of an acquired taste. 

So Forgotten Realms is oatmeal (or a McFeast with fries and a diet coke), Planescape is rib-eyes with potatoes and a chili sause (or a proper restaurant), and my homebrew is (to a select few - maybe mostly to me) a 7 course meal cooked by a world class chef. But in the grand scheme of things, more oatmeal is consumed than the other two combined.

Having sherry with my steak instead of red wine, and grilled vegetables and cabbage rather than potatoes - not a sauce but a glaze. Now I'm hungry, dammit!

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I love Theros as a setting, but I haven't gotten around to running a Theros campaign.

 Yup, exacly the same for me.

To answer the OP's question: The only campaign I've DMd was in the Eberron. I really like the setting, It has enough lore to get you started but not too much so you have a plenty of room to make it you own (and it kinda forces you to do it, at least a bit), plus the general premise and it's specifics (Talenta plain halflings e.g.) are just cool.

Mystara, Greyhawk, are not on the list  why