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That's the rub; a good player can make a Dragonborn warlock fit like a glove and and a bad player can make a human fighter stick out like a sore thumb.

Exactly. It's a mismatch of expectations that leads to a breakdown of the games lingua franca. And in this case, it really highlights the dangers of going against D&D's established tropes. You confuse players who hear their are a party of gnomes up ahead and think PHB gnomes only to discover...

I don't consider Starfinder a Pathfinder setting because it's essentially a different game with it's own PHB and Bestiary and unique classes and species. But I'll look into Labyrinth.

I've already said it's too late. The smoke isn't going back in the bottle. But I'm just reiterating the issue with players creating characters that don't fit with the DMs setting is almost exclusively a D&D problem and there is a reason you don't see it often in other RPGs.

But if it's D&D's greatest strength, why do we have threads like this where DMs bemoan how their player's characters are disconnected from the settings? That's my point.

You know, Tales of the Valiant and Pathfinder are both open gaming. How many other settings but Midguard and Golarion are there for either of them? They are certainly no harder to design for then D&D, and probably are a great deal easier. Then again, how much effort does KP or Paizo put in...

You realize that dates back to 2e Planescape, right?

And yet, Nerath was the default pick-up-and-go. If you bought the core three 4e books and nothing else, you could run a perfectly serviceable campaign on Nerath. In 2014, you couldn't even run the Realms without a fourth book. I guess 2024 has Greyhawk in the DMG, but nothing in the player...

I'm frankly shocked you aren't interested because that's exactly what 4e did with Nerath. A single setting scattered throughout the core books.

Maybe if D&D didn't sell an all encompassing "core three" but opted with smaller tailored player books that included the necessary lore and options for the setting. Something like that Dark Sun Players Handbook or the Ravenloft Players Handbook that have tailored classes and species for each...

Which of course ends both sides of the issue. The DM doesn't have to create anything more than a few monsters and a place to smack them in, and the player need not concern himself with anything more than what is needed to smack them with. You don't need extensive settings full of lore anymore...

Its a problem D&D needed to solve 30+ years ago. Its too late now. But the side effect of TSR deciding D&D didn't need a default setting is that everyone will have different ideas of what D&D is, and that will forever be a source of player/DM mismatching expectations.

CR used the 4e default deities (plus a Pathfinder one). If anything, Critical Role is the only place the original RQ is left and its status as being owned by CR/Darrington means its status in the multiverse is wholly dependent on the continued colab between the two companies. But for settings...

The strength of not having an identity is that everyone paints there own identity on it. Every DM doing things differently means there is no sense of overarching continuity. You can't just tell me "make a character" and direct me to the PHB and expect me create a full fleshed-out, well...

And I'm saying D&D's problem is having too many settings to be able to buy into. D&D needs one maybe two, fully developed settings, not 12 official and countless homebrew and 3pp. The opposite effect though is the generic PC so divorced from the setting that he could walk through a portal from...

The biggest problem was she was a deity who was far more popular than the setting she was created for, and she couldn't fill her role as a death goddess when every D&D setting already has a bespoke death god or goddess. So they tried to make her a planar entity and the rest was history.

Do they? I started playing D&D in the 90's and even in that paleothilic era, my intro to fantasy was Final Fantasy, not Lord of the Rings. I knew more about moogles than hobbits. And when I did start playing D&D, it was through BECMI where there was exactly one type of elf. A player today...

Golarion is IMHO world building done to perfection. Rather than a multiverse of settings that don't have anything in common, you have one world where each region gets it's own unique genre and flavor and crossing the streams is as easy as walking to the next region over. It would be amazing if...

Aka: "the first step to designing an interesting D&D setting is to first remove D&D from it."

That players rarely buy and read. Especially if it's for a single game and they have no interest in any mechanical elements in said setting book.