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I agree that many people make poor choices around what to make important, yes. But I'm certainly not going to tell you that using the back-end of your screwdriver to hammer in a nail is a correct choice, and just as good as a hammer.

If that's the only reason to have lore, why are you banning races? The only impact on the player is to deprive them of a choice. I've played with 8 other DMs over the last decade or so. They've ranged from decent to very good. All of them have made choices I've disagreed with, or have...

Well, "burn down" is metaphorical. Usually. :) I'm more emphasizing the greater point that the rationale for a setting is to give the players and their characters a backdrop for their actions.

Exactly. The work you do for a campaign setting frame is like building a bonfire. You stack a bunch of pieces together to give the players something satisfying to burn down.

What kind of GM needs a statblock just to run a NPC? Just improvise!

I GM as often as I play. GMs don't need some special form of empathy. If you're GMing for people who don't appreciate your efforts, stop GMing. There's no Prisoner's Dilemma around people engaged in a shared hobby activity.

I DM as often as I play, probably a little more. The setting simply isn't that important.

And the point I'm making is that building a setting that isn't anchored in a group of players' interests and choices is a waste of time. Go outside, touch some grass, connect with friends, volunteer at a soup kitchen....anything besides spending effort on Tolkien Pastiche #12014172. And when...

Players still don’t care about lore. They might care about lore if the game is a licensed property they’re familiar with. Or if you present some lore that gives them a clear and demonstrable character-impacting choice within the game. But no one wants to read your game notes to figure out why...

Much like Pam in the Office, I can’t find the difference between these pictures. All 3 of those rationales are terrible.

And that’s totally fine. If a player agrees to a game with a tight premise, and later on decides they don’t want to do that anymore, the onus is on them to step aside gracefully.

85.7%, of course.

You can do whatever you want, of course. But I view Dolmenwood as a setting you play exactly once, and a lot of the joy in it comes from using the detailed character creation rules embedded in the six races of the setting. It’s the exact opposite of what D&D offers, which is centered around a...

Yes, Scott. Obviously when I use a general term I mean absolutely everyone, with no exceptions.

Sure, that sounds like a lot of fun. I’m a fan of tightly specified campaign frames like that. What I’m against is DMs who think only have a setting with six races somehow turns their game into a tightly specified campaign frame instead of just being “normal D&D game, but more annoying”...

Point taken. :). But I meant more in a “don’t try to play a tortle in Dolmenwood.” For Dolmenwood, better to stick to the intended play space because the whole of the game is integrated with those concepts.

We should recognize that some game systems are better for some styles than others. If you’re playing Dolmenwood, you absolutely should NOT be cosmopolitan and allow a bunch of weird races. If you’re playing D&D, you absolutely should. D&D is meant to provide a wide amount of options to the...

It’s the only style we should be encouraging. “Allowed” is a meaningless descriptor, who would have authority to enforce that? But yes, if you’re trying to make a LOTR-style setting while using D&D as your system, you definitely failed to understand the assignment.

Because as a DM, you shouldn’t be having fun by excluding things. Like, just don’t be that guy. Here’s a fun magic trick. You can exclude dozens of races if none of your players pick them. Just don’t use them as NPCs! No one else even needs to know!

I mean, the real thing you can do is make sure to mention in online discussions that cosmopolitanism and inclusion of fantasy tropes should be the default in D&D and D&D-like games, and that the idea of defining settings via strict species curation is an outdated and moldy approach. And you can...