D&D 5E What should be the 5E default setting?

Mishihari Lord · Sep 30, 2012

There were plenty of things in Basic and AD&D that I would consider default setting elements. Holmes Basic had an adventure in the back of the book, which IIRC had some details on the town. I think the AD&D DMG had something similar. The equipment list says a lot about the current state of technology. The artifact list in the AD&D DMG had a lot of setting. All of the names spells and magic items. The skill list says a lot about how the world works. The racial descriptions and class descriptions are a very important part of the setting, as are the monster descriptions. Sure, A DM can choose to include or exclude anything he wants, but the default assumption is that if it's in the book it's in the setting.

I have seen bare-bones systems without these elements, but I don't think that taking these things out would leave a satisfactory form of D&D.

Once I accepted that setting in the core could not easily be avoided, the question was "how much is appropriate?" My personal answer would be more than any previous D&D system, but less than Shadowrun.

Mattachine · Sep 30, 2012

I would like to point out that detailing one town doesn't necessarily describe a whole setting.

Likewise, though AD&D rule books used lots of names for magic items, spells, and artifacts, they were vague, evocative names. They were references to a setting, but that's all.

That's what I would like to see in DDN: references to settings, maybe even some sidebar examples, but that's it.

Li Shenron · Sep 30, 2012

I prefer no default setting, or a mix-n-mash of the material of many setting (which is almost equivalent).

If I absolutely had to pick one default setting, I'd probably go with Forgotten Realms, because it is a fairly standard and traditional D&D fantasy setting, and it is possibly the most popular already.