D&D General Joe Manganiello: Compares Early 5E to BG 3 . How Important is Lore?

Joe M, who proudly declared he was going to radically redesign Dragonlance's dragons and other elements, says "redesigning lore is why 5e is fading" or somesuch.
As far as I can tell, he didn’t actually say anything about lore changes. Seems more like he’s mad his Dragonlance show got dropped, so he decided to vaguely gesture at the D&D thing everyone likes right now and say it’s only good because [something, something, 4e, Mike Mearls, culture war].
 

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As far as I can tell, he didn’t actually say anything about lore changes. Seems more like he’s mad his Dragonlance show got dropped, so he decided to vaguely gesture at the D&D thing everyone likes right now and say it’s only good because [something, something, 4e, Mike Mearls, culture war].
When talking about the show he talked about the new things he was going to do with the dragons.

I have a look book with over 1,000 pages, but it's not what you expect. The design concepts I had for the world, for the armor, for the swords....I had a fresh take on what the dragons were going to look like, it was going to be nothing like anyone has ever seen
 

A few years back, I was tasked with ordering pizza for a a work lunch involving about twenty people. A few days before the scheduled lunch, I walked around the office and asked everyone what kind of pizza they wanted. "Whatever" was the most popular answer, but where people were specific I took note and made sure to include that in the order. On the day of our lunch, I heard a few of my coworkers complaining about the selection of pizza available to them which left me a bit perturbed. But then I shrugged my shoulders and stopped caring because I realized no matter what I did I could not please everybody.

You're absolutely right. Some people are going to scream bloody murder if you make any changes, others are going to scream if you don't make any changes, and still others are just going to scream no matter what. We just have to accept that someone is going to be unhappy no matter what.
Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they will catch flak from both sides.

I'm old enough now to no longer be upset by the concept of lore change. Things must evolve. I may disagree with a particular change or direction (coughcough Star Wars Sequels) but I am past the point of arguing legitimacy anymore. Things will evolve as new fans enter and new ideas arise. To want any product to remain timeless is folly. Even Shakespeare gets reinterpreted and altered to fit the times.
 

Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they will catch flak from both sides.

I'm old enough now to no longer be upset by the concept of lore change. Things must evolve. I may disagree with a particular change or direction (coughcough Star Wars Sequels) but I am past the point of arguing legitimacy anymore. Things will evolve as new fans enter and new ideas arise. To want any product to remain timeless is folly. Even Shakespeare gets reinterpreted and altered to fit the times.

I'm somewhere in the middle and execution can change my mind.

Cobra Kai love that show as it blends old and new well imho.
 

I'm old enough now to no longer be upset by the concept of lore change. Things must evolve. I may disagree with a particular change or direction (coughcough Star Wars Sequels) but I am past the point of arguing legitimacy anymore. Things will evolve as new fans enter and new ideas arise. To want any product to remain timeless is folly. Even Shakespeare gets reinterpreted and altered to fit the times.
To be quite honest, when it comes to 2nd edition AD&D, the golden age of settings, I only have vague memories and impressions of Dark Sun, Birthright, Forgotten Realms, etc., etc. There's a lot of I don't remember because I haven't read that material in almost thirty years, so I'm not going to be all that upset at changes. You could take psionics out of Dark Sun and I wouldn't give darn (sorry about the strong language). The only setting book I have for 5th edition D&D is Eberron, and it's not even a setting I care for that much. Most of the other setting books I've thought about picked up, like Spell Jammer, weren't really setting books so much as they were adventures with some setting information. i.e. WotC just isn't making a product I want. Which is fine, they don't exist to please me.

I'm trying to think of some games that have received updated settings that have turned me off from a game. There's Cyberpunk Red. I could probably live with the lackluster rules if I didn't hate the setting of Red so damned much. I'll probably never run a Star Wars game set during the sequel triology.
 


I guess it is not a complete spoiler if I warn the antagonist in the Dragonlance novel "Flint, king of Gullys" is a wizard dwarf. And it was still 2nd Ed.

The change and evolution is not bad, but we need it was in the right path. The reboot of "my little pony" has got a radically different style, but we know it has been more popular than the original generation 1 from the 80s.

The styles of the James Bond movies are radically different if we compare Sean Conery's and Daniel Craig's ages. Flash Gordon is a good example of differents styles throught the decades, or Buck Rogers.

If I was the order of the cronomancers ( = the D&D timecop) I would choose the Athasian Tablelands as battlefield against other faction of crononauts/time travelers because there the risk of collateral damages is relatively lower. (I mean we could find a reason to explain the possible reboot of Dark Sun).

Birthright in 5e had to be rebooted radically, among other reasons to erasure the limits about classes and species. My own suggestion is after Vecna event the wildspace of Cerilia was "rewritten", and this also caused a curious secondary effect. A lot of souls reincarnated into other world, closer to the Victorian age, where the historical events of the world of Aebrynis were only speculative fiction from fantasy novels. But later those souls from this second world are reincarnated again to the rewritten world of Aebrynis, remember the stories from those books. They believe they are within a fictional work but really they have traveled to the past.

The gullys from Dragonlance are an example of how changes can't be avoided. They were created for comical intentions, but today that type of humor is not wellcome for the current standards, and then or they are "cancelled" and erasured, or retconected softing their flaws.

Maybe Vecna was partially responsible of the Cataclysm of Krynn. By means of sleeping agents he tricked the king-priest to rebel against the Krynn pantheon. In the day of the Cataclsym the king-priest used a spell to summon Vecna, unknown he was opening the door to the Devil. That summoning spell created a planar rift, but accidentally this caused the fall of a meteor from the heaven, a fragment of Zivilyn when this was destroyed by fault of the local rebellion against the deities.

* If something I have learnt with Ravenloft is a D&D setting works better if it allows more space to add homemade ideas from the rest of players. And here old settings suffer a serious handicap, specially Dark Sun.

My suggestion is after the Vecna Event the Athasian Tablelands is a demiplane isolated as a quarantine zone. And latter other domains are added, with their own troubles, like a alien werevernim apocalypse, for example., or a failed experiment from the Gamma World.
 

I guess it is not a complete spoiler if I warn the antagonist in the Dragonlance novel "Flint, king of Gullys" is a wizard dwarf. And it was still 2nd Ed.

The change and evolution is not bad, but we need it was in the right path. The reboot of "my little pony" has got a radically different style, but we know it has been more popular than the original generation 1 from the 80s.

The styles of the James Bond movies are radically different if we compare Sean Conery's and Daniel Craig's ages. Flash Gordon is a good example of differents styles throught the decades, or Buck Rogers.

If I was the order of the cronomancers ( = the D&D timecop) I would choose the Athasian Tablelands as battlefield against other faction of crononauts/time travelers because there the risk of collateral damages is relatively lower. (I mean we could find a reason to explain the possible reboot of Dark Sun).

Birthright in 5e had to be rebooted radically, among other reasons to erasure the limits about classes and species. My own suggestion is after Vecna event the wildspace of Cerilia was "rewritten", and this also caused a curious secondary effect. A lot of souls reincarnated into other world, closer to the Victorian age, where the historical events of the world of Aebrynis were only speculative fiction from fantasy novels. But later those souls from this second world are reincarnated again to the rewritten world of Aebrynis, remember the stories from those books. They believe they are within a fictional work but really they have traveled to the past.

The gullys from Dragonlance are an example of how changes can't be avoided. They were created for comical intentions, but today that type of humor is not wellcome for the current standards, and then or they are "cancelled" and erasured, or retconected softing their flaws.

Maybe Vecna was partially responsible of the Cataclysm of Krynn. By means of sleeping agents he tricked the king-priest to rebel against the Krynn pantheon. In the day of the Cataclsym the king-priest used a spell to summon Vecna, unknown he was opening the door to the Devil. That summoning spell created a planar rift, but accidentally this caused the fall of a meteor from the heaven, a fragment of Zivilyn when this was destroyed by fault of the local rebellion against the deities.

* If something I have learnt with Ravenloft is a D&D setting works better if it allows more space to add homemade ideas from the rest of players. And here old settings suffer a serious handicap, specially Dark Sun.

My suggestion is after the Vecna Event the Athasian Tablelands is a demiplane isolated as a quarantine zone. And latter other domains are added, with their own troubles, like a alien werevernim apocalypse, for example., or a failed experiment from the Gamma World.

Dwarven wizards did start appearing in 2E . They were usually exceptions for reasons RAW you couldnt play one in phb and most settings I remember.
 

Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they will catch flak from both sides.

I'm old enough now to no longer be upset by the concept of lore change. Things must evolve. I may disagree with a particular change or direction (coughcough Star Wars Sequels) but I am past the point of arguing legitimacy anymore. Things will evolve as new fans enter and new ideas arise. To want any product to remain timeless is folly. Even Shakespeare gets reinterpreted and altered to fit the times.
But the original plays aren't replaced. No one sees West Side Story as straight-up replacing Romeo and Juliet.
 

To be quite honest, when it comes to 2nd edition AD&D, the golden age of settings, I only have vague memories and impressions of Dark Sun, Birthright, Forgotten Realms, etc., etc. There's a lot of I don't remember because I haven't read that material in almost thirty years, so I'm not going to be all that upset at changes. You could take psionics out of Dark Sun and I wouldn't give darn (sorry about the strong language). The only setting book I have for 5th edition D&D is Eberron, and it's not even a setting I care for that much. Most of the other setting books I've thought about picked up, like Spell Jammer, weren't really setting books so much as they were adventures with some setting information. i.e. WotC just isn't making a product I want. Which is fine, they don't exist to please me.

I'm trying to think of some games that have received updated settings that have turned me off from a game. There's Cyberpunk Red. I could probably live with the lackluster rules if I didn't hate the setting of Red so damned much. I'll probably never run a Star Wars game set during the sequel triology.
Neither Cyberpunk nor Star Wars changed existing lore to any significant extent. Both advanced and added to it.
 

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