Two New Settings For D&D This Year

Zeromaru X said:

In appendixes you can easily ignore. I don't see these gods ingrained in the racial backgrounds, unlike in the PHB, were Corellon is mentioned in the elves section, and Moradin in the dwarves section.

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Everywhere, race, class, spell, etcetera.

Yaarel said:

Everywhere, race, class, spell, etcetera.

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Rather than ‘ignore’ it.

I require it to be absent in the first place.

There is an important difference between opting in to something one wants, versus the effort to opt out of something one never wanted in the first place.

Then you may need another game.

For 5e, there is a necessity for it to have a compelling and cohesive narrative with unique setting elements. This wasn't necessary for 1e because D&D wasn't competing with other franchises such as Warcraft.

Now, people want detailed fantasy worlds, with unique traits and such. Myself, I won't have played D&D if I didn't like its background elements.

Zeromaru X said:

Then you may need another game.

For 5e, there is a necessity for it to have a compelling and cohesive narrative with unique setting elements. This wasn't necessary for 1e because D&D wasn't competing with other franchises such as Warcraft.

Now, people want detailed fantasy worlds, with unique traits and such. Myself, I won't have played D&D if I didn't like its background elements.

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If that is the case, that market forces make it financially impossible for WotC to support the D&D tradition of world building, then that would be a deep loss. Even a profound one.

The tools to teach a person how to create a different reality − a better one − is an existential insight, gained in a context of playfulness, that is difficult to learn elsewhere.

Yaarel we already saw you admit the reason for this is because you are mad the Sun Elf is the same thing as a High Elf.

Also did you not look at the DMG which has an entire section on creating your own world.

Also I vastly prefer that D&D has default Lore rather then nothing. It makes it it's own thing that has inspired other stuff. And I prefer that to a blank canvas, were you might as well be playing a different game or making your own game up. A complete canvas that you can modify in any areas you want rather then a Blank one is much more appealing to me.

Yaarel said:

Rather than ‘ignore’ it.


I require it to be absent in the first place.


There is an important difference between opting in to something one wants, versus the effort to opt out of something one never wanted in the first place.

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Then that is being mean to the people that wanted it in. It's far easier to ignore something you don't like in a book, then to put it in after for the people that want it.

[MENTION=58172]Yaarel[/MENTION], it seems you are offended by polytheism in particular, yes? Or at least dislike WotC using it as the default theological assumption, and feel that it overly flavors the rulebook for you? In that regard, you are a very small minority (afaik), and from a publishing perspective I think the benefits of "hard-baking" flavor--which I see less as hard-baking and more as offering examples as possible defaults--as far out-weighing the cons.

The main benefit is that it brings the rules to life and provides those folks who don't want to or have the time to flesh out a new setting and flavor for their game with something pre-made; the only con that I can think of is for the 1 in 100 (or less) such as yourself that finds it distasteful for personal, perhaps religious, reasons. If that is the case, I don't understand why you are so bummed out that WotC is not serving your particular and rather rare proclivities.

Mercurius said:

@Yaarel, it seems you are offended by polytheism in particular, yes? Or at least dislike WotC using it as the default theological assumption, and feel that it overly flavors the rulebook for you? In that regard, you are a very small minority (afaik), and from a publishing perspective I think the benefits of "hard-baking" flavor--which I see less as hard-baking and more as offering examples as possible defaults--as far out-weighing the cons.

The main benefit is that it brings the rules to life and provides those folks who don't want to or have the time to flesh out a new setting and flavor for their game with something pre-made; the only con that I can think of is for the 1 in 100 (or less) such as yourself that finds it distasteful for personal, perhaps religious, reasons. If that is the case, I don't understand why you are so bummed out that WotC is not serving your particular and rather rare proclivities.

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Also @Yaarel is overly obsessed with Elves and won't be happy with them if they are not completely broken.

Yaarel said:

If that is the case, that market forces make it financially impossible for WotC to support the D&D tradition of world building, then that would be a deep loss. Even a profound one.

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Look, man, I don't want to seem like I'm piling on you, but this is simply untrue.

WotC research shows that, by far, the majority of campaigns are still homebrew. D&D has always had some built-in flavor--even 1E and BECMI; and 5E certainly doesn't have any more than 3E had. And yet most DMs are quite comfortable making up their own world if that's something they want to do.

I'm not going to say you're the only one--I'm sure there are others who share your view--but the idea that it's not enough to ignore flavor you don't like? That it must be absent from the get-go? Is an extreme minority, a statistical outlier. The problems and objections you're citing simply aren't issues in the minds--or the creative processes--of most D&D players.

If 5E isn't the game for you, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But the idea that 5E is somehow killing the ability for us to create our own settings is simply inaccurate on the face of it.

Yaarel said:

Rather than ‘ignore’ it.

I require it to be absent in the first place.

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Sorry to tell you; there were always assumptions built into D&D. There were fewer of them in the beginning. I've played since 1974 and my campaign setting started a couple of years before that as an excuse for fantasy battles using the Chainmail fantasy appendix. We were tired of point buy armies and didn't want to redo battles from fiction, so I built a war game campaign setting to generate battles for us. Campaigns were popular for anything from medieval to Napoleonic miniatures. When D&D came along in 1974 it was natural to port it into the setting I had built for Chainmail fantasy miniatures. Anyway, "baked in" flavor included Tolkien inspired Hobbits, Orcs and Goblins, Trolls from Poul Anderson, Law and Chaos from Michael Moorcock and so on. It wasn't always specifically mentioned, but it was obvious to us. And those books were d@mned thin. Space for every word was precious The only thing about the early game that required creativity and "home brewing" was the large gaps in the rules. So we built the settings we wanted (but pretty much everybody had Hobbitts, Orcs, Trolls, and so on). Some people created based on whole cloth, others borrowed heavily from history and others from mythology and various fantasy books. Mostly a bit of "all of the above". You still can walk that path. The "filler" in the newer edition probably makes it more difficult, but if you like the system and want to change / add / subtract elements you have to do the spade work. I was in high school when I started with a fascination for fantasy (and science fiction), mythology and history. I've added 4 college degrees since then and never stopped reading It's all added into my game. It will continue to do so. It's work, but it's still fun. And my setting rules; not the rules. I've home brewed and bent the rules to fit my setting with each edition, and, occasionally, bent my setting a bit when I liked what the rules offered.

Yaarel said:

There is an important difference between opting in to something one wants, versus the effort to opt out of something one never wanted in the first place.

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See the above It always required some "opt in", if nothing else in choosing to use the rules.

So, craft the world you want. Be prepared for it to take time (a lot of it), and be prepared for it to be a permanent work in progress. I'd say it is worth it.

Ancalagon said:

"Planescape doesn't exist in my campaign." Tada. Done. Case closed.

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Nope. Because you are still implicitly assuming that it otherwise would be. You are just restating the Thanos Problem that was floated earlier. You are suggesting that one should "snap it out of existence" rather than "snap it into existence."

Edit: To be clear. I do not mind the existence of Planescape. I mind when certain settings touch, particularly when they try to touch Eberron. I mind because I would never want to read an adventure from WotC about characters from the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, or Planescape suddenly showing up in Khorvaire.