D&D (2024) Should There Be a Core Setting?

[Malmuria]

I think you need to read my post again, because at no point did I say that D&D reflects generic fantasy. It doesn't. It reflect "Heroic Fantasy," and even "Pre-Industrial Heroic Fantasy," but its not much more narrow in genre than that.

The core rules do make several assumptions, but few that are particularly setting-specific. In the cosmology section, it points out how you can run almost any cosmology you can imagine; it even gives an outline for how to do this.

The section on magic is much the same; the DMG provides questions for you to answer when making your world;

Consider these questions when fitting magic into your world;

• Is some magic common? Is some socially unacceptable? Which magic is rare?
• How unusual are members of each spellcasting class? How common are those who can cast high-level spells?
• How rare are magic items, magical locations, and creatures that have supernatural powers? At what power level do these things go from everyday to exotic?
• How do authorities regulate and use magic? How do normal folks use magic and protect themselves from it?

The answers to those questions result in a very wide number of possible settings, so I find it hard to accept there are enough "setting assumptions" that the core books result in a "Core Setting."

That's right, though currently I feel the books do a poor job of addressing how answering those fundamental questions might tangibly result in different settings. There's some gloss of "high fantasy" vs "sword and sorcery" etc in the dmg, but like everything in that book it is quite half hearted and not very useful beyond just saying, 'these genres exist.' They could do that by releasing setting books, in the way that Ravenloft seeks to be a more general toolkit for horror games.

The more I think about it what I really want a 20 pg starting adventure scenario (town, npcs, small region, 3-5 locations, simple plot) included in the core books, maybe annotated to teach new dms. I don't know why I'm invested in that because I could easily create such a thing myself, but I think it's because I see the many many OSR products producing succinct and evocative adventure environments, and I think that the more mainstream play culture could benefit from an ethos focused on emergent gameplay and creativity.

So, for me, what a core setting should not do is lock any of the implied setting into place, but what it should do, as others have noted, is provide a springboard for individual creativity. I think moving away from the FR would help along these lines, in the sense that a new points of light setting could do a better job of "drawing maps and leaving blanks."

 

[Neonchameleon]

Either have a core setting, and design the system around it, or don't and create a truly neutral rules system. Don't try to have it both ways.

A "truly neutral rules system" doesn't exist and indeed can not exist. GURPS tried and did a reasonable job.

But the entire D&D spell system including slots and levels dictates things about the setting. As does the way characters level and the power curve. As does the hit point and healing mechanics. What IMO you should do is develop the default setting around the rules.

 

[Jaeger]

I think you need to read my post again, because at no point did I say that D&D reflects generic fantasy. It doesn't. It reflect "Heroic Fantasy," and even "Pre-Industrial Heroic Fantasy," but its not much more narrow in genre than that.

I disagree. Heroic or pre-whatever; D&D does D&D style fantasy.

What is "Heroic Fantasy" ?
What is "Pre-Industrial Heroic Fantasy" ?

Strong definitions needed.

And I can almost guarantee that our definitions of what those genre's encompass will not line up.

The core rules do make several assumptions, but few that are particularly setting-specific. In the cosmology section, it points out how you can run almost any cosmology you can imagine; it even gives an outline for how to do this.

An outline... sure. That's not running the game as written. That's work. Also changing the magic and cleric classes to match the new hotness is more work...

The overwhelming majority are just gonna run with what is hardcoded into the rules and PC classes.

WOTC didn't change a thing about the D&D cosmology for Ravenloft; an allegedly "different setting".

The answers to those questions result in a very wide number of possible settings, so I find it hard to accept there are enough "setting assumptions" that the core books result in a "Core Setting."

Disagree:

But the entire D&D spell system including slots and levels dictates things about the setting. As does the way characters level and the power curve. As does the hit point and healing mechanics. ...

Magic to cosmology, to how HP affect the way players play their characters, D&D is Loaded with a combination of genre and setting assumptions.

It just does both with a broad enough brush that most don't bother to look at the man behind the curtain.

I feel the books do a poor job of addressing how answering those fundamental questions might tangibly result in different settings. There's some gloss of "high fantasy" vs "sword and sorcery" etc in the dmg, but like everything in that book it is quite half hearted and not very useful beyond just saying, 'these genres exist.'

And that is all that it is: "some gloss of".

It is all just a setting veneer over the core D&D gameplay.

 

[Malmuria]

Magic to cosmology, to how HP affect the way players play their characters, D&D is Loaded with a combination of genre and setting assumptions.

It just does both with a broad enough brush that most don't bother to look at the man behind the curtain.

For example, here's a question that might lead to different implied settings. If you play a high elf, you can choose a wizard cantrip. Does that mean that every high elf knows a cantrip, or just the PCs. For the latter, racial abilities just apply to the PCs and don't necessarily extend further (per last year's UA). If the former, then you have significantly increased the magic level of the world.

If cantrips and 1st level magic were even somewhat available in the real world it would solve a whole bunch of problems (and probably create new ones). But I feel most groups don't really play this way, and instead inhabit a medieval times world where only the PCs, and not everyone, can spam goodberry and minor illusion.

This video is interesting on this topic:

And that is all that it is: "some gloss of".

It is all just a setting veneer over the core D&D gameplay.

It is weird how self referential dnd has become. In 1e the touchstones were appendix N. Now the touchstones are just other versions of dnd. For me it produces, at times, a somewhat hollow experience

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Yes. D&D is the only non-generic RPG I know of that doesn't have an implicit setting. Pathfinder has Golarion, D&D should have a similar. Be it Realms, Nentir Vale or Greyhawk, they're should be a default in the core.

It's Dungeons & Dragons, not Generic Fantasy Simulator d20.

IMHO, that's a distinction without a difference. D&D is a fantasy TTRPG. It's the first one, the one that has had the largest impact on the fantasy genre in general. It's the most popular one, the one with the most resources for it to get products and expansions, and is the easiest for new players to get into (largely due to simple rules, it being more popular and easier to find games/tables for, and it having a vast range of playstyles and subgenres). Its overall genre is Fantasy. Its genre isn't "Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk/Exandria/Dragonlance fantasy", because Dark Sun, Eberron, Ravnica, Ravenloft, and Theros are official D&D settings in 5e, and they all have very different subgenres and themes. Fantasy is the genre, and all types of fantasy should be available to play in D&D, and most should be supported by the core rulebooks so people that want to play X-subgenre of fantasy don't have to buy further books. There should be equal support for most (if not all) general subgenres of fantasy in the core books of D&D 5.5e/6e.

 

[cmad1977]

The secret is this:

The core setting was inside YOU all along!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In It's defense, D&D has done a fairly good job at taking advantage of its market leader status, and having its cake and eating it too. D&D has always been very coy with its implied settings... It has always tried to have it both ways. Luckily being the market leader; most players squint or ignore what they want so that they can say that they are playing in their 'unique' setting. But in reality the 'unique' D&D setting = "Parts of D&D I restricted or house-ruled to do what I want, keeping the rest of the base D&D setting and genre assumptions, and calling it 'unique'."

While I take your point that D&D (like all systems) imposes certain shapes and ideas on the games people play with it, I think you're being more than a little excessively strident here. Having things in common, even with every other D&D setting, is not the same as being effectively equivalent. E.g., Shadowrun is very clearly influenced by D&D concepts, but has a substantially different theme, tone, and primary goal than most D&D settings today, hewing closer to the old-school "heist" approach. Then my Dungeon World game (a PbtA system specifically aiming for the feel its designers remember of old-school D&D) takes inspiration from Al Qadim, GURPS Arabian Nights, the actual Thousand and One Nights, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Muqaddimah of Abd Ar Rahman bin Muhammed ibn Khaldun, and my (limited) knowledge of the Islamic Golden Age and Al-Andalus: monotheism, genies, political intrigue, financial motivation, saving face being sometimes more important than combat victory...

You can still do a lot, and still have actually unique settings. Just because there are structural similarities doesn't mean they aren't unique. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, mustard seed, and turnip are all from closely-related brassica species (the first four are all the same species, brassica oleracea), but I'd call broccoli and cabbage unique vegetables nonetheless. I mean, with one you eat the leaves, and another you eat the unbloomed flower buds!

D&D is not 'generic fantasy' by any measure. It has been and always will be its own style of 'D&D fantasy'.

I have to agree with the above poster that I'd call it "heroic fantasy" rather than narrowly "D&D fantasy." "D&D fantasy" IS a thing, and it's had a huge influence on (for example) the MMO genre. But even games heavily influenced by D&D, such as Final Fantasy, can end up somewhere pretty radically different despite sharing that common root. FFXIV, a game I play frequently, has a cosmology that would never work in a D&D system, and explicitly notes that all forms of combat discipline, including the "purely physical" classes like Monk and Warrior, manipulate aether (="do magic") in order to function, they just do so by channeling that aether through their own bodies, rather than into external collections of magic. And even "pure magic" classes sometimes do the same, e.g. Black Mage has to carefully spool up fire-aspected aether (fire magic) inside their own bodies before deploying it--a small mistake can potentially kill the user, burning them from the inside out. (The player character is protected by their "job stone," the soul crystal that you use to learn how to be a Black Mage.)

But as in my reply to King barber, TSR and now WOTC D&D has done a fairly good job of selling 'D&D Fantasy' = 'Generic Fantasy'.

I don't think it's all on their shoulders. Tolkien basically rewrote the book on fantasy settings. He didn't mean to, mind; he was just very serious about world-building and really making use of his knowledge as an expert on Anglo-Saxon literature. (His Beowulf translation is still fairly authoritative, as I understand it.)

The fact is that the game tropes of D&D have been so influential on the fantasy genre that D&D forms many people perceptions of what fantasy is. So to many people 'D&D Fantasy' does = 'Generic Fantasy'!

It makes for a nice self reinforcing feedback loop that has allowed D&D to have it both ways for decades now.

Well, let's be real. "Generic Fantasy" is probably a phantom to begin with anyway. That is, what could ever qualify? "Fantasy" literally means "imagination unrestricted by reality" or "imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained." "Generic Fantasy" would literally just be "whatever you can come up with." Nothing that has a context can ever be "Generic Fantasy."

So when people speak about a "generic fantasy setting," they're implicitly talking about something embedded in a context. In this case, "a fantasy setting in which role-playing a character is well-supported." That's still pretty broad, and I'd still grant that D&D narrows things further than that...but not so much further as to be radically excluding huge parts of that shared context. Now, I find that a lot of players artificially limit even what D&D actually does provide access to (and then many of them try to present this as "true" D&D or as "actually" generic, when truly it's just "the stuff I grew up with, so its assumptions dissolve into the background rather than seeming aggressively brought to the surface.")

This is an interesting point. Before DnD got truly huge, it still had influence on the fantasy genre by, through game developers that played, having a huge influence on the design and assumptions in countless Fantasy video games that were (and are) played by tens of millions of people, shaping how people see fantasy even if only 1/1000 of the people who played those video games actually played old DnD.

I mean, while that's fair, D&D "got truly huge" in the 80s. The early to mid 80s is when we had the D&D cartoon, for example, which reached millions of people even if they didn't play the game. A lot of the people who played D&D in the early 80s were out of college no later than the late 90s, and that's when you started seeing the profusion of MMOs, which are pretty clearly one of D&D's two biggest impacts on video gaming as a medium (the other being single-player RPGs). I fully grant that you can see D&D's influence at least as early as 1987, with Final Fantasy, but...well, video gaming in general had only had two generations of consoles at that point, and PC gaming itself was still in its infancy.

More or less, I'm saying there really weren't that many video games that pre-date D&D getting "truly huge." D&D looms so large over the market in large part because its boom-times were literally right at a formative juncture for video gaming, and then that boom time heavily influenced a whole generation of story-heavy, mechanically-heavy gaming experiences. (There had been classic Adventure games before that, but RPGs took those in a new direction, marrying in elements of action and statistical improvement that have become core traits of CRPGs today.)

For goodness' sake, Pong as a home-playable game didn't come out until the mid to late 70s--and indeed it was originally proposed within Atari the same year D&D was published. So....yeah. D&D got big at almost exactly the same time video games got their act back together (after the crash of '83). And that timing could not possibly have been better for centralizing D&D concepts into the video gaming sphere.

 

[Jaeger]

It is weird how self referential dnd has become. In 1e the touchstones were appendix N. Now the touchstones are just other versions of dnd. For me it produces, at times, a somewhat hollow experience

It’s actually not that "weird", In that it was an intentional design decision made during the creation of 3e that WOTC has stuck to since.

I do however agree with you that in many areas it has gotten to be a pastiche of a pastiche, i.e. a copy of a copy, to the point that a lot of the lore and fantasy assumptions have become so divorced from the touchstone of myth and legend that they have a very hollow ring to them for me.

 

[tetrasodium]

IMHO, that's a distinction without a difference. D&D is a fantasy TTRPG. Its genre is Fantasy. Its genre isn't "Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk/Exandria/Dragonlance fantasy", because Dark Sun, Eberron, Ravnica, Ravenloft, and Theros are official D&D settings in 5e. Fantasy is the genre, and all types of fantasy should be available to play in D&D, and most should be supported by the core rulebooks so people that want to play X-subgenre of fantasy don't have to buy further books. There should be equal support for most (if not all) general subgenres of fantasy in the core books of D&D 5.5e/6e.

I strongly agree with most of this, especially the bolded bit. The core rulebooks for 5eitself are so deeply tuned to that "Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk/Exandria/Dragonlance" end of the spectrum* that having some of it split into a second book would probably be an improvement.

* Unfortunately wotc tuned it to about an 11 for a very specific style of that by cutting the needs of settings like "Dark Sun, Eberron, Ravnica, Ravenloft [I didn't read much of Theros]" down to like a 4-6 without caring how deep into the point of diminishing returns they were the more they focused exclusively on supporting the "Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk/Exandria/Dragonlance" end of the spectrum

 

[Neonchameleon]

It is weird how self referential dnd has become. In 1e the touchstones were appendix N. Now the touchstones are just other versions of dnd. For me it produces, at times, a somewhat hollow experience

I think this might be why I'm far more interested in the Tasha's subclasses than the Xanathar's ones or even the PHB's; Tasha's feel a lot fresher while with the exception of the Warlock, Barbarian, and Paladin the PHB subclasses were all trying to be D&D (and even there they were mostly being 4e rather than trad D&D).