D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

[Faolyn]

Why would a newbie think that Goliaths living with Giants isn't true if the setting says it is true? Why would a newbie who has NEVER read a single piece of lore about Greyhawk think that Goliaths don't already exist and are integrated into the setting? You keep arguing both sides,

I think you're just misunderstanding here. Perhaps you've forgotten the actual purpose of this sub-thread.

Let's pretend that this hypothetical chapter in the DMG on how to build your own campaign setting uses Greyhawk as an example (remember: we're not talking about a Greyhawk sourcebook here). What it should do is take each of the PC races and show how they are integrated into the campaign--even if this only requires no more than a simple "elves typically live in the forest, so they'll go here and goliaths typically live in the mountains so they'll go there."

(I have no idea how 5.5 is doing elf subraces, if they're doing them at all. But Greyhawk had grey, grugrach, valley, snow, and aquatic elves in addition to the standard high, wood, and drow elves, which can be a problem for some if this isn't addressed.)

What this hypothetical chapter should also do is talk about how these elves and goliaths live. What sort of society do they have? What sort of government? Do they get along with outsiders? Remember, this isn't a setting book; this is a chapter designed to teach DMs to how to make their own worlds, and therefore, these things are important. Even if these things can be reduced to a sentence or two, they're important: if you say "goliath communities nearly always have a ruler with absolute authority, tend to be wary of outsiders, are prone to xenophobia, and grow their food" it paints a much different picture than if you say "goliath communities nearly always are ruled by a council of the wise, tend to be wary of outsiders but welcoming of outsiders who earn their trust, and who hunt and gather their food."

Again: this is important for worldbuilding, the purpose of this chapter. There's a lot of overlap between DMing, worldbuilding, and writing, and learning what words to pick is important. And the sentences I wrote to describe an entire society? Short and to the point. Easily written by people who learn how to do it. Minimal chance that the writer is going to go delve too deeply into too much worldbuilding, like some people here have feared. Useful for players to build their character's backgrounds and personalities around.

So this chapter could, and should, have several examples of this. If it also acted as a primer for Greyhawk--which again, I say is a bad idea--then this would be a good instance to use all of the "new" (not in 1e) species in the examples, in addition to one or two of the standard ones. This way people who know Greyhawk from the past get the info they need as to where the new species go and people who are new to worldbuilding learn what to do. This is useful both for people who are creating their own setting and people who want to add additional species to Greyhawk.

Do you need help building worlds? Category 6 is utterly useless in my mind, because this chapter isn't about whether or not you decide to adopt Greyhawk. That is like saying we need a category 7 for Fashion Designers looking for inspiration, that isn't the point of the chapter, so whether or not it meets that goal is immaterial.

Again, you misunderstand. I'm didn't say that what goes into Greyhawk needs to meet my standards of coolness. I said that different people read sourcebooks for different reasons and have different needs.

You know who matters for this chapter? It isn't the rules lawyers, the long-term fans, the greenhorns who don't know what a d20 is. This chapter is for people who want to world-build, and are looking for advice and guidance. That's it. Those are the people who matter for this chapter. No one else does. If someone wants to pull out their Greyhawk Folio from 1983 and shake it at the DMG screaming that back in the day The scarlett Brotherhood was run by this guy, and how dare they change it to that woman!... who cares? That's not the point of the chapter. It isn't an encyclopedia on Greyhawk. It is a chapter on how to world-build, using Greyhawk as an example.

Which is why I and some others have been saying it's a bad idea to use Greyhawk as the sample setting for this worldbuilding chapter. You are the one who keeps insisting it should be.

So, when you tell people where the orcs are and what they are like? You are literally talking about telling. Showing would be having the PCs meet a demon-worshipping orc and interacting with them. Pointing to a map and just saying that's where they live and this is how they behave is literally telling. It is an info dump.

You are again misunderstanding. Or rather, you're confusing worldbuilding with actual play.

As it stands (I can't believe I have to repeat this), D&D spends most of its time talking about how evil orcs are. Their descriptions in the MM and VGM is evil. Changing their alignment to "usually chaotic evil" doesn't change any of this. It just means that the one lawful good orc you meet is "one of the good ones."

So if you (meaning WotC and worldbuilders) want orcs to be not always evil, that needs to be built into the world itself. If you say that the Orcish Empire of the Pomarj isn't chaotic evil, then you need to write it so that it's not chaotic evil, and that needs to be more than just noted in the alignment section; the Pomarj would have to actually reflect that. If you want the Pomarj to be evil but the tribes that live in this other part of Greyhawk aren't, then you need to write that as well.

To compare this to a sample character, your worries and accusations read to me like demanding that the sample character of Bruenor Battlehammer in 5e needs to explain why his stats and abilities are different from his 3.5 version, then declaring that "because this is him at a different point of his life" is a horrible explanation, and that instead of using Bruenor as an example character, the example character would be far more effective if it was someone entirely new with no history or baggage, because rules-lawyers are going to point out that Bruenor used to have a different character sheet and this is a retcon.

Well, then, this is a good example of you misunderstanding what I wrote.

Your concerns don't make sense. You can teach people how to world-build using Greyhawk. It can be done.

"Can" and "should" are two different things.

Why use Greyhawk as the sample setting to teach people how to worldbuild when you know that it's going to anger and confuse people? Why not just make a new setting from scratch?

 

[Faolyn]

Quite frankly, I'm not interested in changing the assumptions of D&D, which do not include group worldbuilding. As I told @pemerton , you can do that if you want to, but as an assumption of play it belongs in other, non-D&D games. There is no need to change older games to fit the ever-changing leading edge of the cultural zeitgeist. That's what new games are for.

There is zero reason why group worldbuilding could be made either a base assumption or listed as an option other than an appeal to tradition. "Because it's tradition" is a bad reason to include something.

If you think something needs to remain in D&D, you better have a reason to convince me other than "it's the way we've always done it."

 

[Demetrios1453]

Tieflings come from wherever the heck Iuz is from? Except, don't the 5.5 tieflings have the option of demon, devil, and yugoloth heritage? Iuz is half-demon, right? So does that mean devil and yugoloth tieflings come from somewhere else? Or are we pretending they're all demon-blooded, just different types?

The devil ones would mostly come from the Great Kingdom, which has historically been infamous for devil-human pairings.

The yugoloth ones wouldn't have a specific origin, but yugoloths are sneaky like that.

 

[pemerton]

Why use Greyhawk as the sample setting to teach people how to worldbuild when you know that it's going to anger and confuse people? Why not just make a new setting from scratch?

I very much doubt that the use of GH will confuse anyone.

I'm sure it will anger some people. But it will gratify others (because they enjoy seeing some GH stuff in their rulebook - this attitude was evinced by many posters in the earlier part of this thread). WotC are, presumably, estimating that the gratified will be more numerous than the angry.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I very much doubt that the use of GH will confuse anyone.

I'm sure it will anger some people. But it will gratify others (because they enjoy seeing some GH stuff in their rulebook - this attitude was evinced by many posters in the earlier part of this thread). WotC are, presumably, estimating that the gratified will be more numerous than the angry.

I liked the earlier part of the thread, where there were a lot of different, nuanced posts on a full spectrum of opinion. Now we've reached the terminal portion of the thread, which, like most of others of its length, is reduced to "I hate the idea and cannot be assuaged by any argument, and will loudly and incessantly say so" and the "Here, let's try again to give you some context and facts". By this point, anyone with an intermediate viewpoint has long since fled, and the the arguments of the vehement detractors are like Melkor/Morgoth and his crew as the Ainur sang in front of Eru Illuvitar at creation in Tolkien's works: "it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice."

 

[Hussar]

It's not me thinking WOTC are incapable.

It's a mindset. WOTC doesn't want to tell DMs what to do and offers a little advice on DMing to this day.

Since no one answered my question..

The sole advice that WOTC gives on running a noncaster in Strixhaven is "an ancestral guardian barbarian might study there".

Not how a noncaster can pass magic classes. Not the value of fighters and barbarians to a wizards school. No creation of a magical military police or having army in official partnership with the school. "You're the DM. Figure it out

I'll admit to never having read Strixhaven, so, I cannot comment on that.

But, in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, they have an entire chapter devoted to the setting and how to embed the characters into it.

In Dragonheist, they have the Enchirodon - another entire chapter devoted to building Waterdeep.

Now Candlekeep? Yeah, that one's pretty sparse for hooks. Not much DMing advice there at all.

 

[Chaosmancer]

You're right. Clearly I and a tiny number of pre-5e Ravenloft fans are the only people who didn't love VRG. Really, expressing such opinions at all is a cultural faux pas for which we should be harshly judged.

Do you know people from Ohio hate the Baltimore Ravens? They have good reasons too. There is an entire history.

It also has nothing to do with the 2024 DMG and the world building chapter of Greyhawk. Just like the 2021 Van Richtens guide has nothing to do with the discussion of the 2024 DMG and the world building chapter of Greyhawk, which this thread is about, other than you are mad they changed things in a way you don't like.

If I started spouting off about NFL teams for the next week, I would expect people to get miffed at me. Why shouldn't they get miffed at you for continuing to harp on a creative decision from three years ago that has nothing to do with the topic beyond "sometimes WotC does things I don't like"

We knew that. That isn't adding to the conversation.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Quite frankly, I'm not interested in changing the assumptions of D&D, which do not include group worldbuilding. As I told @pemerton , you can do that if you want to, but as an assumption of play it belongs in other, non-D&D games. There is no need to change older games to fit the ever-changing leading edge of the cultural zeitgeist. That's what new games are for.

Origin of the cleric -- Player from Gary's Game wanted to play a vampire hunter.

The Circle of Eight, a fixture of Greyhawk -- Former PCs from Gary's Game.

Melf, Mordenkainen, Bigby, Tenser -- Former PCs from Gary's Game, who used spell creation rules to make the spells that are now in the PHB.

How many DOZENS of things could we find, if we dug down, that are now considered part of DnD or part of Greyhawk could be traced back to a PC doing something, and it becoming canon in the world? Now, that did change, once WoTC took over and the settings and books were not written off of personal campaigns, but don't act like DnD has never worked this way. That's how DnD STARTED

 

[Chaosmancer]

Your argument seems to be that the setting is so generic that there's really no way WotC could screw it up. Note that I'm not saying you're wrong, just theorizing on your perspective.

No. My argument is that I, a person who has never played in Greyhawk and am not a professional game designer, could "fix" the setting to match with 5e, with a little help, a wiki, and achieve results on par to the original level of detail. Therefore, people who have actually played greyhawk, doing it professionally, with access to far greater resources... can theoritically do the same thing. Or better!

Which means it is not impossible to achieve.

 

[pemerton]

Origin of the cleric -- Player from Gary's Game wanted to play a vampire hunter.

The Circle of Eight, a fixture of Greyhawk -- Former PCs from Gary's Game.

Melf, Mordenkainen, Bigby, Tenser -- Former PCs from Gary's Game, who used spell creation rules to make the spells that are now in the PHB.

How many DOZENS of things could we find, if we dug down, that are now considered part of DnD or part of Greyhawk could be traced back to a PC doing something, and it becoming canon in the world? Now, that did change, once WoTC took over and the settings and books were not written off of personal campaigns, but don't act like DnD has never worked this way. That's how DnD STARTED

So, to be pedantic: the cleric is from Arneson's Blackmoor game; the Circle of Eight was invented by some TSR author (in Gygax's game it was the Citadel of Eight, and they were not all MUs); and (as least as I understand it) most if not all of the "named" spells were invented by Gygax as part of game design, with the PC names plonked onto them.

But I agree that RPGing is generally more fun when the players are involved in establishing the fiction.