D&D 5E Gencon release?

[Kramodlog]

He said they would be the focus for a while;

Thus why it is de facto the default. I'm not even sure why this is being discussed.

but the Core Books are setting neutral,

And no one said they were setting books. What sort of argument is this?

and other settings remain supported.

With APs exclusively set in the FR, I would say no. Considering some people do not consider the info the APs to be setting support, the FR aren't even supported! For some people.

To call FR the default is not true.

Saying it is a fact is more accurate.

 

[Kramodlog]

Don't know the answer to that puzzle. Your guess is as good as mine. I figure if there is something to announce they aren't annoucing something on the off case the printing get mangled, or other events prevent an on time release.

So why announce the next AP six months in advance? Or all those licensed products? Or the brand new video game that might have all sorts of bugs and delays?

 

[Umbran]

Thus why it is de facto the default. I'm not even sure why this is being discussed.

Because of the second point, that you dismiss.

And no one said they were setting books. What sort of argument is this?

It is the sort that kind of dispels your position.

Let us step back a second. What is a "default setting"?

The default setting is the setting the game assumes you'll be playing in. The game is really defined by the core rulebooks, not by a couple of early adventures, or by setting supplements. If the core rulebooks do not have an assumed setting, there is none for the game as a whole. You have to do zero work to play the game in a setting that is not FR. Thus, FR is not the default. This is a more important "de facto" than the adventures, given the game's long history of homebrewing.

 

[Parmandur]

Actually, given dndclassics and the setup of the core books, I'd say it's easer to play Greyhawk now than in theme 3.x era...

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I'd be more sympathetic to the "FR isn't the default setting" position, if it wasn't for the the stuff on pages 30 & 31 of the Player's Handbook. Most of that text is pretty useless if you aren't running a FR game.

 

[Mercurius]

I'd be more sympathetic to the "FR isn't the default setting" position, if it wasn't for the the stuff on pages 30 & 31 of the Player's Handbook. Most of that text is pretty useless if you aren't running a FR game.

Are you upset about 2 pages out of 320?

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Are you upset about 2 pages out of 320?

Upset? Not really, I can easily ignore it. Although, in a truly setting neutral release I would expect info like that to be in an appendix, alongside details on playing an Oeridian, Solomnian, Brelander and such.

 

[Parmandur]

Upset? Not really, I can easily ignore it. Although, in a truly setting neutral release I would expect info like that to be in an appendix, alongside details on playing an Oeridian, Solomnian, Brelander and such.

All the races have info for multiple settings (specifically: Greyhawk, FR, Dragonlance and Ebereon). The human names are taken from FR partly because Ed Greenwood has developed a pretty solid list of names over the years, that can stand in for generic human ethnicities across the board in generic fantasy. Having pseudo-Spanish, pseudo-Viking and pseduo-Arab, etc. names for human PCs is actually fairly important for playing in a generic D&D setting. The Elf section goes into somedetail about Dragonlance and Greyhawk Elves, etc.

 

[Jester David]

I'd be more sympathetic to the "FR isn't the default setting" position, if it wasn't for the the stuff on pages 30 & 31 of the Player's Handbook. Most of that text is pretty useless if you aren't running a FR game.

Unless you need a fantasy-style name for your human PC.
It's not like they can use real world ethnicities or giant full page. The FR ethnicities give a nice range of appearance and cultures for names.

It's a necessary evil.

 

[redrick]

I'd be more sympathetic to the "FR isn't the default setting" position, if it wasn't for the the stuff on pages 30 & 31 of the Player's Handbook. Most of that text is pretty useless if you aren't running a FR game.

That's a pretty minor setting-specific detail for the whole book, and they introduce it right away by saying, "In the Forgotten Realms, nine human ethnic groups are widely recognized ... These groups, and the typical names of their members, can be used as inspiration no matter which world your human is in." In other words, they present the material as being one possibility, but not rote for the game as a whole. Compare to 4e, which established a uniform default pantheon, and many other default (though still very vague), setting expectations in its Core Rulebooks. The "points of light" setting was very open-ended and had maybe a few set locations, but the core rulebooks still presented a lot of "default" assumptions about the various species and their backstories, cosmology (shadowfell, feywild), pantheon, and probably other things as well. When I ran a homebrew campaign for 4e, I couldn't help but find myself adjusting the setting (as I originally envisioned it) to better match the expectations of the 4e core rulebooks.

5e is much more upfront about presenting several alternate approaches to pantheons, character species and background, as well as subspecies, with possible translations of those subspecies for different published settings. It's subtle, but it really does encourage the idea that D&D can be played in any world that you want to play it in.

And when I did create a character for Adventurer's League, it was very helpful to have those 2 pages, as I know nothing whatsoever about the Forgotten Realms, but I was able to quickly pick a human culture for my character with nothing more than my Player's Handbook.