D&D General Do you care about lore?

[Xetheral]

I don't care about the lore of published settings precisely because of the lack of continuity between editions. If I could count on there being continuity, I might have considered using a published setting for my campaigns. But I don't see any advantage to running games in a persistent setting if the lore is being changed each time they iterate the game rules.

That said, I love persistent settings, so I use a single homebrew campaign world for all my D&D campaigns. If a given iteration of the D&D rules doesn't play nicely with the lore of my homebrew world, I simply don't run games using that edition, and pick one that is more useful to me instead.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

I'm curious how you both address things like the multiple inconsistent versions of I6 (Ravenloft, House of Strahd, Expedition, Curse of Strahd) or blatantly contradictory things (like Tristan Hiregaards origin in the Black Box vs. Ravenloft Monster Compendium 2 vs. The Enemy Within, or the Lord of Necropolis novel)?

Most of the time I just choose whatever seems most appropriate for my own taste, but I believe I do have some criteria, usually picking the biggest authority (Ed has precedence on Realms matters, for instance), novels over modules and modules over monster entries, third-person accounts over first-person ones, and newer sources over older ones. In the end, though, how I feel about a specific choice is not so easy to rationalize. The only one of those that I have a hard time ignoring is the criteria of authority. If Keith Baker says something in Eberron happened in a given way, there's a 99% chance that I'll accept that as objectively true.

 

[Reynard]

This probably should have been a poll.

In my experience, polls threads do not invite as much discussion as those that ask questions and do not provide simple binary answer buttons. Plus, there are never enough respondents to make the poll statistically significant, so they serve little purpose.

 

[Mercurius]

But board games have lore.

Just barely, and mostly as background.

A little off topic, but I don't think that's true. It isn't lore that makes D&D different than board games or computer games. Those both have lore, too, sometimes a LOT of it. Magic: The Gathering has tons and tons of lore, for example.

What makes D&D (and all TTRPGs) different is agency, and you can agency with next to no lore beyond "this is a dungeon."

I didn't mention computer games, but the lore in board games--as I said to Morrus--is minimal, and mostly just "flair" for whatever the premise of the game is.

I would argue that board games and computer games have agency, and that the key difference--and what separates TTRPGs from the other two--is use of imagination, and how the lore (and other story elements) are interacted with. But that's all a bit off topic, as you said.

 

[Reynard]

Just barely, and mostly as background.


I didn't mention computer games, but the lore in board games--as I said to Morrus--is minimal, and mostly just "flair" for whatever the premise of the game is.

I would argue that board games and computer games have agency, and that the key difference--and what separates TTRPGs from the other two--is use of imagination, and how the lore (and other story elements) are interacted with. But that's all a bit off topic, as you said.

There is no agency in either board games or computer games because neither allows you to do anything that isn't already scripted into the resolution system. RPGs don't have that problem -- unless they are crappy railroads that everyone constantly complains about.

And I think it is a little extreme to just ignore all the effort put into lore for other kinds of games.

 

[Shiroiken]

I think that lore is an important aspect of an RPG, making the world more than just a blank backdrop for the PCs. Settings in particular require lore, since the point is to save the DM time. Even generic lore is useful to provide new DMs some direction and ideas.

However, as I've gotten older I've gotten more cantankerous about lore*. I've seen quite a bit of lore change over the editions, and most of the changes have been detrimental IMO. Some of it has become downright stupid, and I just don't want to deal with it anymore. This is why I partially don't want a new Greyhawk setting book, because I fear they're going to just screw it up more (I pretty much keep to the Gygaxian timeline).


* get off my lawn!!!

 

[Mercurius]

There is no agency in either board games or computer games because neither allows you to do anything that isn't already scripted into the resolution system. RPGs don't have that problem -- unless they are crappy railroads that everyone constantly complains about.

And I think it is a little extreme to just ignore all the effort put into lore for other kinds of games.

It is a matter of degree: TTRPGs have more agency than computer games, which have more agency than board games. But I wouldn't say "no agency," although it depends on the game. There's agency in Monopoly, in Wrath of Ashardalon, Catan, etc - it is just less than a sandbox CRPG and far more less than a TTRPG.

As for the last, you're talking in extremes. I'm not "ignoring all the effort." I'm expressing the view that it lore is mostly cosmetic in board games. It is more style than substance. Nothing wrong with that, but it is orders of magnitude less than TTRPGs.

 

[Iry]

I will never let Lore restrain me from doing whatever is best for the Story, but I often find ways to tell great stories AND be true to the lore. Usually this is for my own personal satisfaction, but sometimes a player who is familiar with the lore gives me a big payout of surprise and delight when I bring something up from the lore and they notice. It can also give you interesting tidbits that can be used in game.

For example: Just looking at the entry for Strahd, you might never know he is proficient in heavy armor and martial weapons. You almost might never know he prefers to dual wield over sword & board, that he despises thieves and will go out of his way to torture them, that he is a brilliant tactician like they say in his entry, but he can also recklessly charge in when he thinks he has the advantage, or that he is prone to years and years of apathy between sudden flurries of activity. Heck, you might never know he has a Ring of Invisibility that even works against scent and sound, a Ring of Mind Shielding, and magical dagger (Ba'al Verzi) that ignores armor completely.

You don't need to know ANY of that to run Strahd, and your Strahd might be completely different, but I am pleased to know these things.

 

[Malmuria]

I use official lore as a starting point for generating ideas, but I always change or remove things. I think lore is best when it conveys the tone and atmosphere of a setting or world. The details don't matter to me as having a set of images and reference points in my head that I can use to make something up at the table. Art is as important as the lore itself for this reason (Planescape and Dark Sun were great examples of this, or Mork Borg recently). I also like Appendix Ns, or when RPGs include music/film/tv touchstones.

So it doesn't matter to me if the Dr. Frankenstein derivative is male or female; the Frankenstein reference point gives me a sense of the tone, characters, and central issues, and I can take it from there. If anything I'd like gameable lore ('here's d6 mad scientists, take it or leave it').

 

[MGibster]

This came up in one of the Ravenloft threads and I am just curious: do you care about official aka "canon" lore for D&D, either the implied setting or a specific campaign world? Does it bother you if that lore is changed with editions? Should a new version of a setting be "required" to not contradict a previous version?

Not really. I honestly couldn't tell you what the difference between Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms are because they're essentially the same to me. And with that statement I just know that somewhere a grognard is clutching his chest and doesn't know why. And for most D&D settings like Ravenloft or Dark Sun I'm fine with changes to the lore. Honestly, it's been so long since I've played some of them that I've largely forgotten the lore anyway.