D&D General D&D as an lore fan vs a tools fan

[tetrasodium]

I went with tools. Settings & their lore are useful to me as both gym & player for the purpose of getting everyone at the table onto at least adjacent pages when it comes to building for & exploring within the shared fiction of the world being fun by the GM. Lore without the mechanical tools to do the lifting needed to support that setting is a waste though.

Even though the why behind my answer is effectively both, I went with tools because the balance between those two has been set so incredibly skewed that gm tools is underserved to the point that it seems like the need for mechanical GM tools has been unreasonably relegated to the level of a vestigial waste by someone someone with decision making power at wotc. From looking at the results at around 18/36/45% and reading all 7 pages so far I don't think any of this is a particularly outlandish take.

 

[TheHand]

I voted both. I like the tools when I’m playing D&D actual, but I’ve also used different game systems to run campaigns in D&D universes. Sometimes it helps to teach a new game engine with familiar trappings.

I’m not too big on Forgotten Realms (it’s fine), but I’ve run Dark Sun using a hacked Stormbringer system, Dragonlance using Dragonbane, and I have a very long running Planescape campaign that uses the 2e lore, but we’ve played with 4e, 13th Age, 5e, Level Up, and now Daggerheart.

 

[RainOnTheSun]

This may be a strange answer, but D&D as a toolset actively hinders D&D as lore for me. It's hard to explain, but I'm gonna try.

When I was very young, I was into D&D as a game, and I also read Forgotten Realms novels. A lot of Forgotten Realms novels. One day I read through one of the Forgotten Realms game sourcebooks, and I looked at the stats for NPCs. I looked at their levels, and I looked at the non-class special abilities many of them had, and I especially looked at their ability scores. Especially the 18s, sometimes two or more on a single character. I thought about the number of 18s I'd seen in games in my entire short life up to that point, and I got a sinking feeling that Forgotten Realms was not for me. I don't mean that it didn't suit my tastes, I mean that, if I was playing the way the toolset told me was the "right" way to play, I would never be able to keep up with the stories I enjoyed reading. It cuts both ways, too: the characters in those novels broke the rules of D&D the toolset all the time. This probably sounds like a very silly problem to anyone who isn't a small child just figuring out this structured imagination business, but it's a problem that other fiction doesn't have at all.

 

[Corinnguard]

This may be a strange answer

Maybe not. Taking a character out of a fantasy novel, a comic book or even a movie and making them into an NPC in D&D isn't an easy thing to do. Something is going to get lost in translation because there might not be any game mechanics for some of the abilities of that character. So, some ad-libbing is going to happen and not everyone is going to be satisfied with that version of the character. The best thing you can do is make your own version that satisfies you to some degree.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Maybe not. Taking a character out of a fantasy novel, a comic book or even a movie and making them into an NPC in D&D isn't an easy thing to do. Something is going to get lost in translation because there might not be any game mechanics for some of the abilities of that character. So, some ad-libbing is going to happen and not everyone is going to be satisfied with that version of the character. The best thing you can do is make your own version that satisfies you to some degree.

the greatest powers for all characters in books and novels: Narrative Structure and Contrivance!

 

[Mort]

It would have done better if they picked a format rather than mixing them, and not sending it direct to home video. The actors in it were bigger than any others so far.

What do you mean by mixing formats? Honor Among Thieves was a straight Forgotten Realms Story using Forgotten Realms lore.

And direct to home video?

Honor Among Thieves had a full, worldwide, big screen release. Or am I misinterpreting your comment?

 

[SothFan]

am I misinterpreting your comment?

Yes. I highlighted the word Dragonlance.

 

[Mort]

Yes. I highlighted the word Dragonlance.

Ah, you mean the animated Dragonlance movie.

Yeah, it had a good cast, and was pretty faithful to the source material. But, even being a pretty big fan, it was hard for me to get past the animation style. Not sure how it works have done with a bigger release.