D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

The pushback you are receiving is because you insist that there is no world building advice in the DMG when in fact there is a lot, and a ton of it is good advice. If you had instead said something like, "The advice in the DMG is good/decent, but if they added a bit here, here, and here, it would be better. And it needs much improved organization," people here would have been agreeing with you and discussing possible improvements.

Pretty much everyone who has been arguing against you and/or agreeing with me(including me) has acknowledged that there is room for improvement and additions/changes should be made. Saying everyone wants the 5e DMG information to remain as is for 5.5e is a misrepresentation of what we have been saying.
I didn't say there was no world building advice.

I said it was bad advice for new DMs and tailored heavily to experienced DM. Especially for younger DMs who flooded 5e and have 5e as their first edition.

The poor organization is due to them putting no priority on the DMG because the emphasis was on old DMs who don't need much advice and only need conversions, tables, and the new rules.

And they are still doing it.

Where are the DMG UAs?
 

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I didn't say there was no world building advice.
This is you.


You then pushed back against all arguments of world building in the 5e DMG for quite a while.
 

This is you.


You then pushed back against all arguments of world building in the 5e DMG for quite a while.
I consider teaching worldbuilding and worldbuilding advice as different things. I said that before.

But I already gave up on explaining it.
 


New GMs might be new to world-building... but they aren't new to fantasy.

"What if I made a plane of existence that was entirely ranch dressing?" is a question they can ask themselves. They might be familiar with Nevermore or the Ever After or a dozen other things that have been created by hundreds of fantasy creators. You don't need the DMG to create a bunch of brand new things that never existed before, when you can rely on people that want those things.... to have read fantasy that includes them.

The DMG doesn't need to show me the Celestial Bureaucracy of the Jade Emperor. Plenty of books I've read have done a superior job. They just need to show me what goes into utilizing a plane of existence in game, and the types of mechanical hooks a plane of existence should have.
I call out Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness as baseline knowledge. Appropriate, since much of the original stuff was based on Doctor Strange comics.

If a player is going to change something though, I think it’s more likely to be “there is no multiverse, this world is all there is”. Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of a multiverse, and it clashes with some people’s belief systems.
 
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The pushback you are receiving is because you insist that there is no world building advice in the DMG when in fact there is a lot, and a ton of it is good advice. If you had instead said something like, "The advice in the DMG is good/decent, but if they added a bit here, here, and here, it would be better. And it needs much improved organization," people here would have been agreeing with you and discussing possible improvements.

Pretty much everyone who has been arguing against you and/or agreeing with me(including me) has acknowledged that there is room for improvement and additions/changes should be made. Saying everyone wants the 5e DMG information to remain as is for 5.5e is a misrepresentation of what we have been saying.
And some of us just flat out think the 5e DMG wasn't very good at all. What good bits there might be are buried in the book and very difficult to find. Additionally, the 5e DMG, as @Minigiant rightly points out, is meant for experienced DM's who are already steeped in DnD. There's an entire 26 page chapter on Creating a Multiverse (Chapter TWO?!?!?) that could be cut out. It certainly should NEVER have been the second chapter of the book. There's a couple of pages on how to develop a multiverse, then 20 some pages of Planescape Light describing the various planes in D&D.

This was a very bad idea. Number one, it shouldn't be in the DMG at all. This is something that doesn't need to be there. It should be in setting guides or a Planescape book. Additionally, it adds a bunch of mechanics - Color Pools! Psychic Wind! Ethereal Curtains! - that are 100% pointless to anyone who isn't already deep diving into planar stuff in D&D. It certainly is of zero use to anyone who is trying to learn how to DM.

Good grief, you're 70 pages into the book before they even start talking about writing adventures. Y'know, that thing that ALL DM's MUST DO. That FIRST THING that all DM's must do? That thing? Yeah, we're going to bury it nearly a quarter of the way into the book. Because it's vitally important that a new DM (or any DM for that matter) knows what happens if you travel on the Ethereal Plane before we teach you how to write an adventure. :erm:

Oh, and then we're going to spend over ONE HUNDRED PAGES detailing treasure and magic items. Then, finally, we get to Chapter 8- actually how to run a game. That thing that is probably the most important lesson for DM's after how to write an adventure? Yeah, we're going to bury that 2/3rds of the way into the back of the book. But, don't worry, it's vitally important. You know it's vitally important because we're going to spend just about the same page count that we used to describe the planes back in chapter 2.

And because placing something at the end of a book is a great way to highlight how important we consider it to be to the game, we're going to give you about 30 pages of half baked house rules that are mostly just suggestions. When adventures come out that actually need rules like these, we'll just ignore the DMG and write new rules.

Room for improvement is very much an understatement.
 

WotC has its multiverse. They aren’t likely to suggest world builders create a new one from scratch!

Frankly, what would be the point, anyway?
They already have!

"As described in the Player 's Handbook, the assumed D&D cosmology includes more than two dozen planes. For your campaign, you decide what planes to include, inspired by the standard planes, drawn from Earth's myths, or created by your own imagination."
 

They could probably solve a lot of issues with world specific heritage tables specifying locations where different races can be found and how others view them.
 

They could probably solve a lot of issues with world specific heritage tables specifying locations where different races can be found and how others view them.
Are you including everything in the Monster Manual too? Because it doesn't make sense to require PC species to come from a specific place, when all those other species are found anywhere.
 

They already have!

"As described in the Player 's Handbook, the assumed D&D cosmology includes more than two dozen planes. For your campaign, you decide what planes to include, inspired by the standard planes, drawn from Earth's myths, or created by your own imagination."
I expect this will be gone, along with all the planar stuff, which could reasonably be relocated to a new Manual of the Planes down the line.

It's a good example of how the old DMG failed to teach though.
 

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