D&D General Do you care about lore?

[Ralif Redhammer]

I love reading lore. Even if it's for a setting or game I'll likely never play, I find good lore interesting. It all feeds into my well of creativity that I draw from. Now, if I need to alter canon and have a dragon show up in Waterdeep in spite of the Mythal, I'll do it (in that particular example, I'm pretty sure other official works haven't followed that rule either). Lore should inspire, not restrict. Though sometimes restrictions can inspire, too, for that matter.

When I'm doing my own worldbuilding and developing my own lore, I try to make sure it's actionable - it either enriches the setting or is something that will relate to the adventurers and adventures. If the party is never going to see another continent, I don't need more than a few sentences worth of details about it that might come up in conversation.

 

[Burnside]

I care to the extent that it enhances the adventure I'm currently running and not a jot more.

 

[Reynard]

Without lore, D&D would be a board game.

A little off topic, but I don't think that's true. It isn't lore that makes D&D different than board games or computer games. Those both have lore, too, sometimes a LOT of it. Magic: The Gathering has tons and tons of lore, for example.

What makes D&D (and all TTRPGs) different is agency, and you can agency with next to no lore beyond "this is a dungeon."

 

[pogre]

For D&D I use lore as inspiration - typically to steal for my homebrew. So for D&D I might read it, but I am not concerned with changes.

If an RPG revolves around a certain campaign setting I will use lore as an anchor for some parts. For example, in WFRP I use the setting for things like understanding most of the cannon and the artillery school is Nuln and Altdorf is the capital of the Empire. If I was running Star Wars I would adhere pretty close to the lore - that seems like one of the main attractions for a game like that.

 

[Xeviat]

The cool, detailed D&D planar lore is the only thing that makes me ever want to run a generic D&D game. I can't quite follow all of an individual setting's lore, but I know a lot about the planes (maybe I should run planescape).

My own setting, though, doesn't fit in with the great wheel at all, so I don't get to use all that crazy lore when I run my home games.

 

[Asisreo]

Lore can be entertaining as a read. I also use Lore for inspirational purposes. Default lore places so much burden off my hands and mind and it helps the players feel like they can still keep up when they see familiar stuff.

Lore changes don't affect me. Actually, I kinda like lore changes as they give me more inspiration to take and modify.

 

[tommybahama]

Lore is basically history. We can't agree on our own history so it is no wonder that fights about fantasy lore should erupt. If WotC tries to change the lore, just consider it the product of some heretical offshoot cultist group and ignore it. So no, changes in lore don't bother me (unless done for political reasons).

 

[el-remmen]

I have never run in a published setting so yeah, I don't care. And when I have played in a FR or GH game, I count on the DM to tell me what the important lore is, so what the books say (even if I have happened to read them) doesn't matter to me.

Also, I think lore should be as edition independent as possible, so if you want your 5E game to take place in the 1E pre-Time of Troubles Forgotten Realms, just find a PDF of that stuff and go to town.

Ultimately, I think world-building is a heckuva lot of fun, but I agree with Matt Colville that lore is just dumb stuff we often like making up for ourselves and cannot ever expect anyone to care about for its own sake (though some will) and only ever really matters in relation to how the PCs must engage with it to make choices in game. In other words, lore the PCs can learn and can directly motivate them ("The only weapon that ever harmed the the Lord of Light is Black Razor, so we have to go find it in hopes of defeating his son the Effluviant Earl!") is all that really matters, not just some thing that happens to exist for flavor ("There was once was a powerful artifact sword named Black Razor but was lost in the previous age." Who cares?).

I mean that latter stuff can be great for our own sense of the setting, but is it really for a better game for our own amusement?

 

[el-remmen]

[oops duplicate post]

 

[Parmandur]

I enjoy the lore, but I'm not married to it, and it's all just a tool to build something of my own anyways.