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

[Maxperson]

Is there any way we can unpack and really examine this dichotomy between change vs addition from a design perspective? What particular value does it bring? Why should we care about the distinction?

It only really matters if you value canon. If you don't, it's not going to be a big deal to do either one.

 

[Mirtek]

I don't think that separating lore from rules achieves this goal. In fact, I think separating lore from rules undermines that goal. It creates a second class of game mechanics (the lore) that "doesn't matter" and so can be changed and trod on and disregarded and trivialized, while the "more important" rules (roll 1d20 to hit; six ability scores; fighters are a class) become unreasonably entrenched and unable to be changed. True diversity is, in part, a recognition of the value of different experiences - including the experience of lore being important.

I see it exactly the opposite way. The lore and rules should be separated and this means that the rules become the part that don't matter and can be can be changed and trod on and disregarded and trivialized, while the "more important" lore becomes entrenched and unable to be changed.

Whether a longsword deals 1d8 slashing damage or a fireball 10d6 fire damage doesn't matter for the lore. There may be some interactions, but mostly the lore is more timeless and can just entirely ignore the current way the rules try to translate into the game.

If your backstory isn't informing the motivation and role-playing of the character's current behavior, then it's as superfluous as the appearance of a queen in chess.

As far as rule impact is concerned, yes it's just as superlfuous as the appearance of any given chess piece

But most characters I know of have a history that informs how they currently play. The past also affects plot hooks, story details, lost empires, ruins...

None of which requires rules but exist on a level above and beyond any mechanical rules

Backstory is part of the rules of pretty much every D&D setting, and is part of the rules of character-building coded into race, background, and even class. Your character had a history before they became an adventurer that informed what they are, and the world had a history before your adventurer came along that informed what it is.

He had, but it doesn't need to be coded in game mechanics. Personally I find that the background rules add nothing to the game. The blanket "select a combination of X skills and proficiencies" would be fully enough. Tagging on specific background rules does nothing (neither enrich nor hinder the game, it just is)

 

[Mirtek]

Canon is determined by a particular community.

If you just define canons as "body of information considered authoritative for a given body of work" then you more or less can have infinite canons.

If you go by the colloquial use, as in the vast majority of dictionaries, then canon is reserved for the official publisher only.

Even if we apply your definition of nigh infinite canons, there's still only one of them refering to the official body of work while all other refer to unofficial works.

If there is only one canon then there would only be one biblical canon except there is not.

But there is no official publisher of any religion. There is only one official roman-catholic canon and that's what set by some group in vatican city. Any group can disagree with that and form their own branch of christianity with their own canon, but then they would no longer be roman-catholics under the pope in rome.

In this case "christianity" is like "roleplaying games", while roman-catholic and christian orthodox and protestant, etc. are different RPGs. Each one have their own canon, but each branch only has one official canon.

 

[Shasarak]

I see it exactly the opposite way. The lore and rules should be separated and this means that the rules become the part that don't matter and can be can be changed and trod on and disregarded and trivialized, while the "more important" lore becomes entrenched and unable to be changed.

Whether a longsword deals 1d8 slashing damage or a fireball 10d6 fire damage doesn't matter for the lore. There may be some interactions, but mostly the lore is more timeless and can just entirely ignore the current way the rules try to translate into the game.

That is interesting. I guess you could always argue the other way too, that as long as you keep the 10d6 fire damage that it does not matter if it comes from a fireball or a magic grenade or a summoned Red Dragon. If you are making up your own lore to fit the mechanics then you can really tailor them to your character more uniquely then just your standard fireball.

 

[Lanefan]

Not sure how to properly explain the concept of islands to you with out it seeming weird but it is kind of like how Tasmania is part of Australia without actually being physically attached to Australia.

Japan is part of Asia, much like Madagascar is part of Africa or the island I'm sitting on (Vancouver Island) is part of North America as are all of Canada's Arctic islands. The definition of a continent usually includes those islands close around it; oddballs such as Hawaii in the middle of oceans are...well...whatever they are.

Australia, however, is not a continent; both it and Tasmania are part of Oceania which is kind of its own mess when it comes to trying to define these things.

Lan-"I knew that degree in geography would come in useful some day"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

I don't agree that the consequence of defining these things makes it harder to engage. I think it makes it easier, because it helps define the experience you'll be in for.

Assuming, of course, you want that experience to be the same as what you had before. In chess, a valid expectation. In D&D, anything but.

Part of how you communicate better about expectations is by making those expectations less flexible, so that they can be safe assumptions.

Which, while it seems to be important to you, might not be nearly so relevant to others. My examples here would include [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 's game, where his players didn't seem to notice or care what he'd done to Greyhawk; or my own players who, when informed my previous campaign was using a much-modified version of FR, came back with a mighty (and paraphrased) "whatever, let's play".

It's not that everything that affects the experience of play is a rule. If all the queens in your chess game were slick with human saliva, that would affect the experience of play pretty profoundly, but it's not a rule of chess that queens not be coated in a layer of drool. It is, perhaps, a very important aesthetic.

It wouldn't surprise me if there is in fact a rule against foreign substances on the pieces.

But if the white pieces are all yellow and the black pieces are all red...doesn't break any rules I know of but changes the look of things.

According to at least one formal definition, all rules for all games have the following characteristics:

1 They limit player action.
2 They are explicit.
3 They are shared by all players.
4 They don't change during play.
5 They are an authority.
6 They are portable (in that anyone can use them to play the same game).

(numbers added above for clarity)

Except in D&D (and most RPGs?). In D&D only 1, 3 and 5 above are universal, and even 3 comes with an added "at the same table". D&D's rules are sometimes anything but explicit (have you SEEN the rule-related threads in here lately?). They sometimes do change during play, either in the short term when a DM has to rule on the fly or in the long term when the DM kitbashes the rules into something she can live with. And they aren't necessarily portable, for example if I go from a table using a rules-lite 5e to a table using all the 5e crunch they can find it's going to be a very different game.

Now, as you say...

"Roll 1d20 to make an attack roll" and "Dwarves stand well under 5 feet tall" both fit that.

Some rules are more robust than others and fit all the 6 points above. But if one table has a rule saying you threaten a fumble on a 1/d20 and another does not then points 3 and 6 above have just gone out the window.

And the same is true of lore or canon. It's out there, it's got some official weight behind it, but - as we've all too clearly seen over the 860+ posts in here - it's not necessarily shared, and it's not necessarily portable. Further, unlike some of the more mechanical rules, you can safely shove it way into the background and - depending on your particular group - leave it there.

I don't see any qualitative difference between them. "As a hill dwarf, you have keen senses, deep intuition, and remarkable resilience" is equal to "As a hill dwarf, you have +1 WIS and +1 MAX HP."

Where I see a massive difference.

The first is no more than a guideline: here's what makes a typical Dwarf tick as a starting point, run with it or not as you will for deciding how you'll play your Dwarf PC.

The second is a hard-coded mechanical rule that affects your Dwarf PC whether you want it to or not.

And both, of course, are equally malleable by any DM.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

You have specifically changed where magic comes from. Wizards of High Sorcery get their magic from god moons. Greyhawk wizards don't have god moons that supply their magic.

Huh? Nothing in canon GH makes it impossible that some magicians should draw magical power from a moon. The folio/boxed set even talks about the astrological significance of heavenly bodies!

(Not to mention, nothing in GH makes it impossible that the moons are foci for energy from the positive material plane.)

 

[pemerton]

archons went from lawful good denizens of the upper plains to chaotic evil beings of elemental chaos. That's in no way, shape, or form backward compatible. It's not an addition - it's a change.

It's not a change to archons. It's inventing a new thing and calling it an archon.

No one - no designer (as per W&M), no player - thinks that the elemental forces of the primordials are a new version of the beings of the Seven Heavens first published in Jeff Grubb's MotP.

This is a contrast with (say) the 4e changes to eladrin - again, per W&M, this is a change. 4e eladrin are presented as a reimagining of the 2nd ed PS beings.

 

[pemerton]

They invite you to change all the rules, which includes the height of dwarves as much as it includes what you add to something you're proficient in

The height of dwarves has never been a rule, though, in the sense in which RPGs present themselves as containing rules. No D&D book has ever presented it as such; and even when I first read Moldvay Basic it was obvious that stuff like the colour of a halfling's hair is not a rule in the same way as the stat requirements for playing a halfling.

The ways in which this is so are myriad, but here's one salient one: the rules for stat requirements for races in Moldvay Basic and AD&D are clearly meant to play some sort of balancing function as well as ensuring that races hue to archetypes; the descriptions of hair and skin colour are flavour.

There are outer boundaries somewhere - halflings and dwarves, inherently in their names and in the former's STR limits in AD&D, are clearly shorter than humans. Elves, given their CON penalty in AD&D, must be slighter than humans. But if some AD&D-er or Moldvay Basic player decided to follow JRRT and have elves be as tall as or taller than humans, that would not be a change in the same category as changing the stat requirements for playing an elf.

Well, for one, remember that a list of Corymrean noble houses that you can plug into your character's own history *is* a rule. So if that's all we got, that might be enough support.

<snip>

I don't think that separating lore from rules achieves this goal. In fact, I think separating lore from rules undermines that goal. It creates a second class of game mechanics (the lore) that "doesn't matter" and so can be changed and trod on and disregarded and trivialized, while the "more important" rules (roll 1d20 to hit; six ability scores; fighters are a class) become unreasonably entrenched and unable to be changed.

<snip>

If your backstory isn't informing the motivation and role-playing of the character's current behavior, then it's as superfluous as the appearance of a queen in chess.

I find all this pretty hard to follow.

First, lists of noble houses aren't "rules" in the typical way that word is used to describe RPGing. It's a piece of setting information. Someone who changes the list isn't chaning a "rule" in the way that would be the case to grant Cormyrean nobles a +1 to hit with mounted lance attacks.

But the idea that such a list somehow improves the play experience, or fills an otherwise problematic gap, is also something I find weird. The original Oriental Adventures book has no list of noble houses to follow. It has rules (relatively confusing, perhaps even contradictory ones) for determining a character's family background and some elements of that family's members and history. But the group also has to make stuff up (eg if the Ancestry table tells you that one of your ancestors was a great general, you have to make up the details of that).

Oriental Adventures wouldn't be better if it just had a list of noble houses. It would be worse. It's system for generating families, despite its flaws, is fun and produces interesting results that generate immediate play buy-in. It's a much more engaging way to generate backstory, in my experience, than looking down a list of noble houses that reflect someone else's play experience and authorial ambitions.

Part of how you communicate better about expectations is by making those expectations less flexible, so that they can be safe assumptions.

Who does the "you" here refer to?

Presumably not WoTC: they want the expectations of customers to be as flexible as possible, so as to foster sales.

And not me - why do I want my players to have narrow expectations? Maybe I want to try different things with different games (eg I'm hoping my 4e Dark Sun game will play differently from my 4e default cosmology game).

At this point you seem to be going beyond the Burkean conservatism that [MENTION=6799753]lowkey13[/MENTION] has been engaging with to a claim that any deviation from a pre-given script is a threat to the stability of game play. Your conception of RPGing, as it is coming across in these threads, seems to take aim at just about everything that I think is worthwhile about the activity!

 

[pemerton]

Did you specifically refer to the stats for African Lions?

Gygax's MM has stats for lions. It describes lions thus (p 61):

Lions generally inhabit warmer climates - warm temperate to tropical. They will thrive in any region, from desert to jungle, swamp to savannah. Lions hunt in packs (prides), the males seldom doing any actual stalking/killing of prey. The lioness is the real huntress. . . . Lions do not climb trees well and they dislike swimming.​

What animal do you think this is describing, if not the African lion? Yet the gameworlds that this creature is used in by default do not include Africa. (As I posted, the real-world geographical references in the MM are confined to Sumatra, Japan, China and India.)

So if you, as a D&D player, are shocked by having your PC encounter these creatures outside of Africa, I think you're in a minority.

Minions in 4e do half the damage a regular creature of their level would do, because this befits their place in the story (ie of little individual significance).

I remember them doing a fixed damage because DMs are too stupid to handle things like hit points and random damage for lots of monsters at once. But I guess you could have remembered the lore explaining minions differently to me.

The fixed damage is simply to ease handling. My point is that their fixed damage is half the average damage for a standard creature of that level (eg a 2nd level standard does an average of 10 damage - say, 2d6+3 - whereas a 2nd level minion does fixed 5 damage).

Except that this does not really answer my questions at all and hardly clarifies the change to the magic system to whit that it is trivial to port one magic system from one game to another.

Huh?

Your (non-FR specific) questions (in post 775) were: "Is the magic system like DL or not? If it is now an opt in or opt out choice then did I get that choice when I created my Wizard? Is there some Wizards guild hunting me down because I am casting spells wrong or not? . . . Can I play one? "

And I answered: the WoHS magic depends on the phases of the moon, and is robe-specific; they are a distinct order; you can play one (5 WoHS PCs over the life of that campaign, maybe even a couple more that I'm forgetting); and they are a political force in the Great Kingdom but not as important in the City of GH.

I don't see what's so confusing. Certainly none of the players in my game were the least bit confused.

I think the biggest mistake you make is assuming that because there was no such mechanic for "most of DnD history" that we should not have such a mechanic.

I didn't say we shouldn't have it. I said it's not required to have a mechanic to draw a distinction in the fiction. One fighter can be of peasant background, the other of noble background, without there being any calling out of that in the PC building mechanics.

Except that there is a cost because now you have to remember that in your game GH Vikings are actual Vikings. It may seem insignificant but what happens if you have another 10 changes like this that you have to remember.

This is ridiculous. It's like saying living in a house is a cost because I have to remember my address; or having a job is a cost because I have to remember where I work.

Keeping track of stories and the fiction isn't a cost in RPGing. It's a core part of the experience.