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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8702987" data-attributes="member: 18">Definitely agree re: setting guides and not core books.The issue 5E has is how poor a number of the setting guides are as setting guides (not all of them to be clear, some are pretty great), and how it seems to be getting worse (though perhaps that is a blip).Also, by mentioning LotR/Star Trek/Star Wars etc. you remind us that these are actually pretty successful as RPG settings, and indeed that licensed settings from stuff with fairly heavy lore are pretty popular, so I feel like 5E is doing itself and its players a disservice by having no apparent strategy re: lore and just seeming to be almost randomly putting out setting information. I think a more ideal situation for 5E would have been to give players a choice of lore-light and lore-heavy official settings and to actually reason why certain settings were lore-heavy or lore-light, as well as to produce stuff which was a bit more tightly designed. SCAG is a particularly sad example. On one level maybe I shouldn't fault it too much because early-edition books can be hard to do, on the other hand, 2E had amazing setting/lore-work coming right out the gate (c.f. Taladas, for example). But SCAG is a poor resource on a number of levels, and is particularly bad because it's neither fish nor fowl, in that it's an incredibly cursory guide to the FR, but also doesn't really cover the Sword Coast in the kind of detail you might expect from a Sword Coast focused book. Picking a lane would have been better, but I think a Sword Coast focus was sacrificed because WotC thought the blowback from setting 5E in the FR (essentially) but not having coverage of the great FR setting might have been a problem.</blockquote>

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