D&D General Do you care about lore?

[Scott Christian]

Lore is fluff. Mechanics are crunch.

Mechanics are crunch. They are embedded in the fluff.

They are like crunchy almonds in a fluffy cake.

 

[Malmuria]

I am surprised to see this here. Of all the fantasy books, setting books, adventures, etc. published by WoTC, we should agree that there are thousands of pages of lore. And of that lore, probably about 90% of it has been consistent over the past 20 years.

Lore for specific settings, especially settings that have fantasy novels, makes sense to me. It's the implicit-setting lore, like the kind you find in the monster manual, that I find a bit strange because it's world-building minus the world. I don't mean that it is strange in a bad way, just that because it is quasi-setting neutral I don't feel obliged in any way to adhere to it. Also, what I mean is that the lore itself is weird because it's a mash-up of so many different things.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Mechanics are crunch. They are embedded in the fluff.

They are like crunchy almonds in a fluffy cake.

Sure. But almonds also taste good in many different flavors of cake. It's very difficult to go wrong on the combination.

 

[Reynard]

Sorry. I didn't mean to have that come off as a harsh tone. You were clear. I just don't understand how lore and rulesets aren't graphed together. For some, it sounds like they aren't. Which seems somewhat of a foreign concept to me.

Here is one simple example: A cleric uses divine powers. Divine powers generally come from a deity. Remove all deities. Make the world agnostic. Where do those spells come from? I mean, sure you could make something up. It would take less than a minute. But then you have spell names to consider: augury, guardian of faith, prayer of healing, and scrying all come to mind. Again, sure, some don't care that a spell name is attached to lore. Then spell descriptions come into play. And holy symbols. On and on.

The point is, divinity is part of the ruleset. Same is true for much of the lore.

Except that's not even true in all official D&D settings. There may be NO divinities in Eberron, and the equivalent in Dark Sun is very different. What is true about clerics is that they gain their powers from belief, and I don't think that is detailed enough to be called "lore".

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

Exactly! The consistency of the lore isn't supposed to be important! The books are there to provide you tools and inspiration for YOUR next game. There are plenty of properties out there that exist to feed those for hunger for depth of setting lore, D&D does not need to be (and should not be) one of them. D&D is supposed to be about providing tropes to serve as building blocks for your own game, not to provide a long-term running narrative through decades and multiple editions of sourcebooks.

Then why have consistent lore at all?
Just have a list of different lore options
Lots of different tropes that allow you to pick the origin of orcs or gnolls

Why even have lore at all then? Just publish the hard rules and save space. There'd be a couple dozen extra pages in the PH if they dumped the lore

I think every game that's been published under the name "D&D" is D&D. I also think Pathfinder 1E is D&D, for all intents and purposes. The lineage is more important, to my mind, than the specific tropes or ruleset.

Why stop at Pathfinder 1e. If it counts, then Pathfinder 2e should count as well
And so should 13th Age and Shadow of the Demon Lord. How are those not DnD?

D&D lore doesn't matter. You can ignore however much of it you like, and make up your own thing. I do it all the time. It's quite fun and lets me use my creativity a lot more than just reading through dozens of Wiki pages. I like lore when it's for inspiring my campaigns and worlds. I don't like lore as much when it's "you must know this much lore to play", especially with settings that have way more than their fair share of lore. Mordenkainen's lore doesn't matter if you don't use it. It only matters if you use it.

If you like it, that's perfectly fine. However, it's not okay to say "You're no longer playing D&D if you change the lore", because that's gatekeeping and it's BS.

I disagree
DnD is more than just a set of rules published by a company. Just like the Marvel Universe is not just "comics published by Marvel"
The legacy stories are as much DnD as the rules. A novel or a game tale about surving the TOMB OF HORRORS is as much DnD as a rulebook

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

So--genuine question because I'm confused--in your opinion are homebrew settings not really "dnd"? Like, if someone were to make a homebrew setting and decide that Githzerai actually reside in the astral plane rather than in limbo, do those sort of changes make it feel less like "real dnd" for you?

Implied setting dnd lore is a quite weird phenomenon, because it's not really tied to any specific set of stories but has just been told through various rulebooks and modules. It's a pastiche of different fantasy subgenres and various real-world folklores and mythologies. Changing stuff never seems like a big deal, imo.

There's some wiggle room and every campaign is of course different
You can change a lot. As much as the rules changed between 1st Ed and 5th Ed really

But if you're playing a game where you replaced the d20 with 3d6 and use wounds and vigor rather than hit points as you adventure in a post apocalyptical Earth that resembles the FALLOUT games with monsters being radioactive mutants are you still playing DnD? Or just an unpublished OGL game?

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I disagree

Which is within your rights, just as it's within mine to disagree and explain why.

DnD is more than just a set of rules published by a company. Just like the Marvel Universe is not just "comics published by Marvel"
The legacy stories are as much DnD as the rules. A novel or a game tale about surving the TOMB OF HORRORS is as much DnD as a rulebook

That's the "brand" of D&D, not the game. There's a difference between liking the shoes that Nike makes and liking Nike the brand. The same applies to D&D. The game doesn't depend on the lore as much as the brand does.

 

[JEB]

It's that I feel trying to build decades-long consistent lore is actively detrimental to the development of new, exciting stories. I don't see a win-win position here that can be staked out by the IP developer.

Marvel Comics tries to keep things broadly consistent with past events, and when changes do become necessary, they favor retcons and reinterpretations and additions to past lore, over simply rebooting from scratch. Even their most reboot-y event, 2015's Secret Wars, didn't delete any substantive portions of the past. And Marvel Comics seems to do fine. (They certainly seem to be doing better than DC Comics, which reboots so often now that repetitive reboots have become part of their lore...)

Until now, D&D 5E largely did this as well, and it's been the best-selling edition since the 1980s, and possibly the best-selling ever.

In short, while lore certainly can become a straitjacket, it's also totally possible to have a win-win position, where lore is respected but the IP still thrives. Though it's certainly harder than doing a reboot from scratch, of course...

 

[delericho]

I care about lore, but refuse to be trapped by it - if I don't like something, out it goes.

I expect I'd care a lot more about continuity if I were a FR fan. As it is, most of the settings I care about have been out of print for years, if not decades.

I don't have a particular problem with things being changed, per se. Indeed, some changes are essential, as there is an unfortunate amount of problematic material out there. But the devil is always in the details - changes for the better are welcome; changes for the worse, not so much. Where "better" and "worse" are defined according to my whims of the moment, of course.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Almonds are terrible.

I will not be taking any further questions at this time.