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

[Imaro]

And if there is, so what?

A good idea is a good idea regardless of whether it's someone else's, a modification of someone else's, or entirely your own. If what you end up with is a reasonably cohesive setting that provides a decent backdrop for a fun playable game, who cares where that setting's component parts came from or how they were mashed together? Ditto for rules and systems, for all that.

Lanefan

I do... if I enjoy the originality and inventiveness of homebrews (mainly things I haven't seen before or haven't been overly exposed too), I'm not going to be keen on a setting that's a rehash of LotR... regardless of how well constructed it is or that heavily adopts from settings I already have or know about... again this was about my preferences. If you're not interested in hearing about why I have them cool... but it's kind of rude and dismissive to answer my post with a "so what..." especially if other posters have stated their own preferences.

EDIT: I think LotR was a good story and a really good rpg... doesn't mean I want everything to be a copy, steal parts from or re-purpose stuff from LotR... doesn't matter how playable it is, how cohesive it is or how decent a backdrop it provides I'd rather have all of those and create/buy something original (personally I'm more into weird fantasy and non-eurocentric settings for my games now than eurocentric settings). It's not an either or proposition, especially in this day and age of gaming.

 

[ProgBard]

[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION]: Look, I'm an editor by trade. My entire working life rests on the idea that the words people choose to employ matter. So, yes, I do expect that my fellow posters write with care and precision and thoughtfulness about what they imply as well as any literal meaning they wish to convey. By which token, I think it bears pointing out that "these things have fuzzy boundaries and more overlap than you might think at first" and "these things are all essentially the same thing with different names" are distinct ideas, and reading one of them into what I wrote is ... a stretch.

All that said, I don't think I'm terribly interested in the fight you seem to want to have, so let's shake hands and call it a day, what what?

 

[Imaro]

[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION]: Look, I'm an editor by trade. My entire working life rests on the idea that the words people choose to employ matter. So, yes, I do expect that my fellow posters write with care and precision and thoughtfulness about what they imply as well as any literal meaning they wish to convey. By which token, I think it bears pointing out that "these things have fuzzy boundaries and more overlap than you might think at first" and "these things are all essentially the same thing with different names" are distinct ideas, and reading one of them into what I wrote is ... a stretch.

All that said, I don't think I'm terribly interested in the fight you seem to want to have, so let's shake hands and call it a day, what what?

Cool, I'm not trying to start a fight but I do feel you are being pretty pedantic for a forum about imaginary elf games... perhaps it is your profession, perhaps it's that I don't see the stuff we are talking about as all that important... but yeah we can agree to walk away from it at this point.

 

[ProgBard]

Dude, if you can't be pedantic on a forum about imaginary elf games, I don't even know what the internet is for.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

... imaginary elf games...

I thought this forum was about a real human game, not an imaginary elf one...

Though I am now going to spend some serious time thinking of a game that originates from the elves in one or more of the settings I use, so thank you for that.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[billd91]

I'm not saying that the 3rd moon is canon - of course it's not.

I'm saying that adding it doesn't make the game cease to be a GH game. Any RPGing will mean that the setting takes on non-canonical features/elements.

I think most Greyhawk GMs would agree with you there. There's a reason people often refer to Greyhawk as "My Greyhawk". Earlier publications were relatively sparse and that gave DMs a lot of room to define details to fill in the map/setting. I also think that's a substantial reason the Greyhawk Wars faced the disapproval it faced. It was substantially changing the published canon and not merely by the addition of detail, but by the transformation of the political landscape.

I think plenty of changes are tolerated as long as they aren't terribly jarring or disrupt what people already feel they know about the setting. That's the double-edged sword of playing with well-read/well-informed players. If they're interested in the lore of the setting as previously published and you drop the pantheon, that creates extra work as you have to realign the other players' expectations and reeducate them on the new elements of the setting that differ from the things they actually spent effort to learn. This is one reason I'm not a fan of publisher-driven reconceptions of things commonly known for years.

 

[Sacrosanct]

As everyone knows, the internet has only two uses-

1. Passionate pedantry about meaningless things; and

2. That, uh, other thing. ahem.

Pedantry about meaningless passion?

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[SkidAce]

And if there is, so what?

A good idea is a good idea regardless of whether it's someone else's, a modification of someone else's, or entirely your own. If what you end up with is a reasonably cohesive setting that provides a decent backdrop for a fun playable game, who cares where that setting's component parts came from or how they were mashed together? Ditto for rules and systems, for all that.

Lanefan

Quoted for truth.