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Meh, I started playing D&D with The Known World. That's about exactly the size I was talking about and it had everything you needed for D&D. 🤷 To me, all that other stuff is just a waste of time. I was asked what my preferences are. Well, that's my preference. Keep it small, focused and...

Heh. I gotta admit, I'd be perfectly happy with that. I mean, one setting was all we had for almost a decade. It wasn't until the mid 80's that we started getting more settings. When I started playing D&D, there was The Known World (wasn't even Mystara then) which was a small continent and...

Because while EVERY other PC can have a connection to a NPC through a background, ONLY certain PC's can have a connection through species because only those species are actually represented in the canon of the setting. That's what I've been arguing for all the way along. Yes, there are MANY...

And, whiff, there goes the point off over the horizon again. It's not the only way. Good grief. Of course not. But, if I choose to play a human or an elf or a drow or a dwarf or a gnome or any other PHB race, I can connect to an existing, canon NPC in the setting IF I SO CHOOSE. There is...

OMG. That's the point. You're getting there. You're so close.

Meh, why would you have playable Easterlings? They barely appear in the stories and have pretty much no role. Like I said, the point isn't to play Middle Earth Role Play. We already have that. The point is that in the area that the Lord of the Rings takes place in includes half a dozen or...

Missing the point. I'm not talking about my own character. I'm talking about the connections my character has to an NPC. The NPC has zero connections to the setting because the NPC Dragonborn doesn't actually exist in the setting. I have to not only make up my character, I also have to make...

What lore? That there's a Dragonborn in the Flaming Fist? Whoopee. What rank? Where does that dragonborn come from? When did he/she join the Flaming Fist? What has he/she done for the Flaming Fist? What can you tell me about that Dragonborn? Where does he/she live? What are his/her...

Missing the point. If I want to LEVERAGE EXISTING LORE, then I NEED EXISTING LORE. How can I leverage existing lore that does not exist?

Well, put it this way. If you knew the CEO and CFO of a hundred different companies, and they were all white, would you assume that there are non-white CEO's and CFO's? Because that's far closer to what we have for Forgotten Realms. Hundreds and hundreds of named NPC's. And zero (or close to...

Well, kinda/sorta. Most Romans didn't come from further afield. But, that's not really the point. In a setting that large - say a very large island about 1000 miles in diameter (that's damn near a continent really), you have MORE than enough space to plonk down all 11 races, have enough...

I think stepping away from the D&D family might be a good idea here. Something like Ironsworn-Delve would fit your bill perfectly. I've never played it, but @pemerton has recommended Five Torches Deep many times. Although, as you say, that's OSR. But, there are games out there that are light...

I think this, right here, is the basic issue. This is something that is quite common IME. It's not that players don't care. It's that they will never care as much as you do about your setting. If you're DMing, you're thinking about this stuff all the time. When you design a scenario, the...

But, generally, that's not the issue. No one has a problem with having objectively evil sapient beings in D&D. The dev's certainly don't and neither do any of the critics. The problem is when you have objectively evil sapient NATURAL beings. As in stuff that is an actual species that...

Oh, totally. I was all set on this very Kafka-esque adventure where things were very, very weird, and the players were just totally lost. Not only did they completely expect a totally different adventure based on their own assumptions of the Feywild, they didn't even agree with each other what...

But, if you read the team roster of the team, and a player isn't mentioned on the roster, why would you assume that that player plays for that team? When we have multiple examples of various people in the mercenary guilds of Baldur's Gate, and have had several examples presented in other cities...

Yes, that's the point isn't it? If low magic/low fantasy is your bag, I really, really couldn't imagine using D&D for it. There are so many other systems out there that are much better suited to that kind of campaign. While I get the idea of wanting to pound square pegs into round holes...

I remember years ago in my 2e days running into this. I billed my campaign as low magic because I didn't use a lot of casters and magic items were pretty rare. My player pointed out that it really wasn't very low magic since there were all sorts of fantastic monsters running around, many of...

Heh. Thank you so much Planescape. :( And people get annoyed with me for complaining that Planescape has forced so much onto other settings.