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

[Minigiant]

You said that legally they had to or they’d lose the IP. That statement was not true. What you’re saying now is something very different.

Never mind.

Legally was the wrong word.

Contractually (to the shareholders) is more accurate. People want the design heads to do things that would get them all fired.

 

[MGibster]

D&D needs a perfect lore if it is wanted it to become a multimedia franchise but the lore is too "one-shot" to sell sourcebooks. When I bought my books of World of Darkness...it had got a fabulous fluff, but after I read once... I was only interested into the crunch part.

I'm convinced those metaplot laden sourcebooks that were all the rage in the 1990s were designed more for reading than they were for game play. It's not the least bit surprising to me that you lost interest in the fluff because those metaplots were fairly narrow and might not be at all applicable to your game. An additional problem with WoD's metaplot was watching all the NPCs do the cool stuff while your characters say back and twiddled their thumbs.

We are in the age of internet, where we can get lot of lore from different fandom wiki pages, and not only about TTRPGs but also videogames, comics or novels.

I've thought about this. The last time I ran a game in the Forgotten Realms I just went to the Forgotten Realms Wiki.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then don't complain if they don't make new books of your setting and stop supporting those settings

Because that's usually the issue.

That assumes that they are somehow required to change the history of a setting if they're going to make new product at all.

Not the case.

 

[schneeland]

I'm convinced those metaplot laden sourcebooks that were all the rage in the 1990s were designed more for reading than they were for game play. It's not the least bit surprising to me that you lost interest in the fluff because those metaplots were fairly narrow and might not be at all applicable to your game. An additional problem with WoD's metaplot was watching all the NPCs do the cool stuff while your characters say back and twiddled their thumbs.

Yeah, meta plot is really a double-edged sword. On the one hand it's great if everybody is really into the setting and there's the feeling that you can participate in big events. But as you say, it was a) a lot of reading material (often not of the highest quality) and b) it kind of defies the purpose of playing a roleplaying game if you mainly watch other protagonists do the cool stuff in the story.

So even as someone who would has fond memories of a number of 90s settings and prefers well-considered evolution of past settings to more radical approaches, I don't think I would want to go back to shelves full of setting material and meta plot buried in both adventures and novels.

 

[Vaalingrade]

A lot of the problem with 90's metaplots was that they were written in the EXTREME 90's, not so much with metaplots as a concept.

That and the rise of the popular understanding of 'canon' and people giving canon too much value when it butts up against interactivity. And god help you if the people doing that are the writers. Looking at you, Stone. )If you know, you know)

 

[DarkCrisis]

Mega plot was great for coming up with fun adventure ideas. Now you get that spoon fed to you with the big adventure in the book.

Good example in the Dragonlance book. No real lore to work with aside from what’s needed for the adventure.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Mega plot was great for coming up with fun adventure ideas. Now you get that spoon fed to you with the big adventure in the book.

Literally what metaplot is, but okay.

 

[Remathilis]

Yeah, I don't agree. Again, I will point to the additions that 2e made to prior edition lore for monsters, and for most of the various campaign settings; and to a lot of the stuff added in 3e. The difference is when you discard old lore and pretend it wasn't there, or when you make massive changes that alter the tone, themes, and fundamentals of something. Changes that invalidate previous lore are not the only type of change that can be made, but they are the type of change that people are most likely to dislike. "Here's a new cosmology, your old one never was and doesn't count, even if it came up in your game" is a far cry from "Here's more information and expansion about the cosmology".

1e to 2e Realms killed several deities and had every "assassin" in the game simultaneously die. 2e to 3e changed the cosmology from the Great Wheel to World Tree and several NPC classes (such as wizards becoming sorcerers). Both of these changes are made when design notions changed, such as TSR's desire to remove "evil" PC options from the game and the second to highlight the new take on setting-specific cosmology (which was walked back come 4e and 5e...).

 

[Micah Sweet]

1e to 2e Realms killed several deities and had every "assassin" in the game simultaneously die. 2e to 3e changed the cosmology from the Great Wheel to World Tree and several NPC classes (such as wizards becoming sorcerers). Both of these changes are made when design notions changed, such as TSR's desire to remove "evil" PC options from the game and the second to highlight the new take on setting-specific cosmology (which was walked back come 4e and 5e...).

How did any of that invalidate previous lore? Everything from before still happened. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, but if it's, "you shouldn't care about this stuff" well...good luck.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Literally what metaplot is, but okay.

You don’t see the difference between a setting book and an adventure book?