D&D 5E Whatever "lore" is, it isn't "rules."

Maxperson said:

Correct, but only one of us is dismissing all other peoples idea of significant. That's the point.

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Considering [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] continually responds to your posts, it's hard to see how he's dismissing you or your ideas. It appears to me that he simply thinks you're wrong in your belief as to what constitutes "significant". (Not to put words in anyone's mouth, that's simply how I read the posts.) It's OK to think other people are wrong!

pemerton said:

When I run a Greyhawk game, I use the GH maps. [...]

What the maps give me is a basic geography (physical and political) and some names to go with it. The centre of the maps, in particular, gives a lot of adventuring geography in a fairly small space - the Bright Desert; the hills north of that; GH city for European urban adventuring; Hardby and the Wild Coast for more Conan-esque, Zamora-esque urban adventuring; the Gnarley and Suss Forests; the Woolly Bay for ship-borne adventuring; Highport for slaver galleys; Furyondy and the Shield Lands for knights and paladins; and Celene, the Lortmils etc for elves, dwarves and other standard fantasy elements.

Why would I bother reinventing and renaming all this, when Gygax et al have done all that work for me?

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You shouldn't! There's nothing wrong with using the GH maps regardless if you are running strict Greyhawk or a setting with entirely different lore. It's not "wrong" to use the GH maps - please do so!

The question isn't if you need to run a setting strictly or if you need to write up your own stuff. Not at all. It's a question of the definition of a setting - if you used Greyhawk maps and some Eberron history and culture, mapping the last war and the mournland and some of the rest onto Greyhawk, are you running Greyhawk? My guess is most people would say no. Are you running Eberron? Most people would also say no. Are you running a kick-arse camapaign? Sure thing.

Lanefan said:

Back to Eberron: as one example of many, the Warforged (never liked that name, but whatever) would still be exactly what they are but would certainly have come about via a different sequence of events than Eberron canon suggests. Still looks, walks, talks and plays like Eberron at the table...but I can't call it Eberron?

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Okay, let's ignore all of the mechanics of a race called a warforged. That's been realized in multiple game systems, has nothign to do with the lore.

So the lore of a Eberron warforged are created objects that were never seen as people (not even as slaves), created as soldiers to fight on multiple sides of a war. Then the war ended, and the Treaty of Thronehold both recognized these self-propelled weapons as people even they had no experience in being people, and also commited delayed genocide by shutting down all of the creation forges. But there is the Lord of Blades, a warforged rebel who is trying to start a warforged civilization out in the Mourneland and start up creation forges so the race can continue.

Take out all of the lore and what do you have? A set of rules for a race. You do not have an Eberron warforged. You can replace their lore just fine - it's all allowed. A camapign I'm currently running calls them the Dwarfforged and has a very different creation story for them, and they are their own unique thing. But no one would mistake it for an Eberron Warforged, because they are not. Because the lore is different, and the lore is the component that makes them that.

Again, reuse them, make them your own - that's all for the good. Stand on the shoulders of giants and pygmies. This isn't a judgement that you can only use them in their undiluted original form. But an "Eberron Warforged" is a specific thing, and maybe what you have is a Lanefan Warforged", inspired by the originals but fit to what you want.

Blue said:

[regarding Warforged]
Again, reuse them, make them your own - that's all for the good. Stand on the shoulders of giants and pygmies. This isn't a judgement that you can only use them in their undiluted original form. But an "Eberron Warforged" is a specific thing, and maybe what you have is a Lanefan Warforged", inspired by the originals but fit to what you want.

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Yet to the player at the table it's still a Warforged just like all the others, in an Eberron setting that in play mostly looks and acts and feels just like all the others.

I guess I'm just not that hung up on lore-as-canon. Eberron as published (and for that matter any published setting) is to me no more than someone else's game world writ large and put out there for others to use as they will...and I don't at all feel like I have to hew close to the published - i.e. that particular DM's - backstory in order to say I'm running a game in that setting. An "Eberron Warforged" is what's sitting here in front of me, as in a Warforged being played in Eberron; I don't care how it got here lore-wise other than that lore being something for the players to discover if they so choose (in which case it's better NOT to use canon as where's the discovery in learning something you already know?).

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And now, let's look at the other side of the coin: mechanics.

Many (nearly all?) DMs change some rules and mechanics to suit their game. Picking on poor ol' Eberron and its Warforged again for a moment, let's say I'm using Eberron's lore, backstory, etc. as written but when I look at Warforged I decide:
- there's no way something so heavy and cumbersome can ever move any faster than a slow walk (unless tumbling down a hill, or in free fall) and adjust their movement rate to reflect this;
- flip side: they can carry much more than their strength score would indicate thus their encumbrance numbers get a big boost
- <various other changes to the mechanics of Warforged and other races>

and when I look at the game overall I decide
- I want a longer game thus level advancement is going to be very greatly slowed
- a bunch of spells are going to work differently, or be introduced, or banned - all due to experiences from previous campaigns
- <lots of other rule tweaks>

Am I still running Eberron?

Lanefan

Blue said:

YThe question isn't if you need to run a setting strictly or if you need to write up your own stuff. Not at all. It's a question of the definition of a setting - if you used Greyhawk maps and some Eberron history and culture, mapping the last war and the mournland and some of the rest onto Greyhawk, are you running Greyhawk? My guess is most people would say no.

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Blue said:

So the lore of a Eberron warforged are <snip lore details>

Take out all of the lore and what do you have? A set of rules for a race. You do not have an Eberron warforged. You can replace their lore just fine - it's all allowed. A camapign I'm currently running calls them the Dwarfforged and has a very different creation story for them, and they are their own unique thing. But no one would mistake it for an Eberron Warforged, because they are not.

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It seems to me that when you say "most people would say no", or that "no one would mistake it for an Eberron Warforged", you may not be primarily making empirical conjectures about how RPGers would use labels.

It seems that maybe you have a view about what it is for something to be a GH game, or an Eberron warforged, and you think that what is described doesn't fit you conception of these things.

Which is fine, but I'd be interested to hear you elaborate a bit more what your conception is. And also what, exactly, is at stake.

To elaborate on what I mean by "something being at stake" - suppose we debate whether cubism should be seen as a form of post-impressionism, or rather as a type of anti-impressionism. What's at stake? Well, we're trying to make sense (intellectual sense, historical sense, aesthetic sense) of trends in modern, post-the-invention-of-photography visual arts.

Or for a completely different context: when the staff at WotC debate whether or not some module or adventure or supplement should be released under the FR label, what's at stake? For them, it's a commercial issue - how can they (i) monetise the FR "brand", without (ii) diluting that brand so that monetisation becomes harder. It's a type of optimisation problem which turns on the fact that publishing stuff under the FR label simultaneously exploits and shapes certain consumer preferences.

But when we ask whether or not my GH game - which I freely describe as a GH game, both to my friends and online - is "really" a GH game, what is at stake? What question are we trying to answer, or problem are we trying to solve, by reaching the view that it is or isn't? (And likewise for the warforged.)

For what it's worth, when I tell my players we're playing in GH, and then one of them who has no prior familiarity with GH Googles some maps; and fills in the Ancient Languages slot on his PC sheet as "Ancient Suel" because Google told him that, in GH, the Suel are the ancient magical cutlure; I count that as a labelling success. Labelling it a GH game provided some effective short cuts to establishing some elements of the shared fiction.

Maxperson said:

You once again seem to be allowing your biases to cloud the way you present things. You preferred style of "informed roleplay" is a good one, but in this case it has caused you to state the bolded above. The bolded portion may be true for your game, but it's not true as a general rule.

The PCs will have different reactions to a bear, cow or log. Those different roleplayed reactions add to the enjoyment of the game, which is significant.

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TwoSix said:

Considering [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] continually responds to your posts, it's hard to see how he's dismissing you or your ideas. It appears to me that he simply thinks you're wrong in your belief as to what constitutes "significant". (Not to put words in anyone's mouth, that's simply how I read the posts.) It's OK to think other people are wrong!

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To add to what TwoSix said: not all beliefs are biases.

The GM's choice of colour can produce different reactions at the table, sure. That's true of non-RPGs also: you could have a game mechancially identical to M:tG which has, as it's flavour text, administration within a government department rather than a conflict between magicians in a magical world. Probably that game would not be as popular as Magic is.

But when I think of what is significant in RPGing, I don't think of those sorts of responses to flavour. I think of the actual choices that the players make in the play of the game - for instance, how they decide to respond to the challenge presented by the ogre in front of them. Whether the ogre throws a cow or a log has (at least as presented in the thread I referenced) no effect on that.

And that's not a bias. It's a belief, about what makes RPGing distinct as an activity from board-type games (which includes M:tG) and from listening to someone tell you a story (which can also have flavour/colour that produces some sort of response from the audience). To put it another way: thinking of GMing as being about adding cows or logs to your ogre encounters is thinking about GMing as performance to entertain an audience (the players) in virtue of colour/flavour. When I think of significance in RPGing, though, I'm thinking of the players as participants/co-authors in relation to the shared fiction, not primarily as audience.

Lanefan said:

Am I still running Eberron?

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Well, at this point, you've changed the mechanics of warforged, omitted psionics (and by doing so, Quori monsters, the Inspired, the Path of Light, the dreaming dark, the entire continent of Sarlona, and the kalashtar race) and nearly all the history of the world.

You are still using (assumed): Dragonmarks/Dragonmarked houses, artificers, dragonshards, changlings, shifters, the various religions, the continents of Khorvaire, Xen'drik and Argonnessen, Areneal and valenar elves, the remaining factions (like Morgrave University, the Lords of Dust, or the Gatekeepers), daelkyr, and most of the planar arrangement (though 5e itself doesn't use the last one).

Depending on exactly what your "revised history" entails, I'm sure there is plenty of other things that would fall to the wayside: the Last War and the splintering of Galifar, the Draconic Prophecy (and the role of dragons in Eberron), House Vol, the Origin of the Mournland and Treaty of Thronehold, etc.

So depending on how extensive the rest of your changes are, I think you're starting to border on "Eberron's map, but not its setting" territory. Another couple solid changes to the above list (such as removing dragonmarks or Xen'drik) and your solidly in "Eberron in name only".

pemerton said:

Consider the suggestion on another thread that an ogre encounter might begin with the ogre throwing a half-eaten cow carcass at the PCs: the GM is using the lore to inform the set-up of the encounter. It's colour (or, if you prefer, flavour) that provides richness to the encounter set-up. But it probably doesn't inform the resolution of the encounter: eg nothing significant would change about the encounter if it was a half-eaten bear rather than a half-eaten cow; or even if the ogre through a log instead of a half-eaten carcass.

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Ahh, but it could be a sign of surrender, or one of friendship since everyone knows an ogre would never give up food!

pemerton said:

Which is fine, but I'd be interested to hear you elaborate a bit more what your conception is. And also what, exactly, is at stake.

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You invite me to play in an Eberron game. I know about Eberron, and decide I'm going to play a Warforged Cleric of the Silver Flame named Silvertouched. He was a solider of Thrane who found a calling from the Voice of the Silver Flame and seeks to spread the faith to the heathens and smite evil in all its forms.

You then tell me in your Eberron, there was no Last War, Thrane has existed for 1,000's of years and is now mostly a nation of corrupt bishops who detest warforged as "unnatural" and seek their destruction. Warforged are to be destroyed on sight. My character concept is now in shambles.

This continues throughout the game: I suggest we go to Sharn, and you inform me Sharn to get some magical assistance is under the control of a Vampire Lord and is more like the Walking Dead than a Noir city. A shifter walks down a trail and as I pass him, he attacks me since shifters are servants to lycanthropes and usually Chaotic Evil. Anywhere where I think I can apply my knowledge of Eberron, I find it is counter to what "your" Eberron is.

If this was Pemetonia, I'd probably ask questions and solicit info. However, calling it "Eberron" assumes, at the very least, that the ECS is mostly a viable resource for the world. By using it, you're saying "at least the general info is true, if not entirely the whole truth, and I'm not going to deviate heavily from the book".

(FWIW: I have the same general opinion of house rules in general: invite me to D&D and, in light of no additional info, I'll assume my halfling warlock is kosher. Don't tell me when I get to game you don't allow halflings and limit cantrips to 3/day).

So for me, the name "Eberron" is a kind of contract; you're going to be running the world that is described in the books or on the wiki.

pemerton said:

For what it's worth, when I tell my players we're playing in GH, and then one of them who has no prior familiarity with GH Googles some maps; and fills in the Ancient Languages slot on his PC sheet as "Ancient Suel" because Google told him that, in GH, the Suel are the ancient magical cutlure; I count that as a labelling success. Labelling it a GH game provided some effective short cuts to establishing some elements of the shared fiction.

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Absolutely. But it also highlights the problem of "non-Canon" games. For example, I was starting a public campaign set in the Forgotten Realms. Although I'm now in the process of bringing my ongoing campaigns back to the AD&D-era feel in the Realms, I still keep up with most of the lore in some fashion or another. That is, most of the stories (novels, publications, etc.) occurred roughly as published, but there may be differences. Essentially I treat them as bards' tales that may have grown a bit in their telling.

But, I wasn't (and I'm still not) up to speed on all of the 4e changes, and of course the post-Sundering Realms has only been described in broad terms, and not eliminating everything 4e. Wisely, I might add, no sense in making the same mistake again and shutting down existing campaigns with new lore.

So when a new player searched the internet, he came back with a backstory and character concept that didn't make any sense to me because it was from a 1-page entry about a distant land that was part of Returned Abeir.

This is exactly the issue that a lot of us has with the 4e Realms, in that it dramatically changed the world in ways we don't like. But leaving out those portions, especially for more public campaigns has its risks. I don't have dragonborn (at least not as described) in my campaign, and had mentioned that for the public campaign I'd prefer to stick to the more common races, but had somebody come in with a dragonborn (of course), and a son that brought a warforged.

On one hand, WotC owns the FR and can go in whatever direction they want with the brand. But part of what makes a setting a setting is the differences. Klingon = Star Trek, stormtrooper = Star Wars, Cylon = Battlestar Galactica. So altering that setting too much takes it away from what makes it a setting, and risks (as they did) alienating the core fan base.

Overall, the main reason I play the Realms, is because the access to the lore is readily available, but I do have to provide more guidance nowadays than I used to.