D&D (2024) How Important Is The Lore

[Reynard]

So, you want to proscribe 3ft tall artificers do you not?

What are you talking about?

You need to start from the position that a new player knows nothing whatsoever about any playable species, and provide enough lore for them to know what they are choosing.

I think you are conflating "description" with "lore" and I already explained the distinction.

 

[Reynard]

Lore is a funny thing. I'm much more interested in "real" lore, like the Kalevala or Norse Eddas. Or even the Silmarillion than pages about the Moon Elves of Toril.

Personally, I just need enough to get immersed in a setting that I'm running. But that's just me.

Just for clarity, I am not talking about setting book lore, or even adventure book or race splat or anything else. I am talking about core rulebook lore.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think you are conflating "description" with "lore" and I already explained the distinction

You need more than a physical description in order to roleplay a character.

And even a physical description is lore. Do the elves have pointed ears? Gold eyes? Beards? Immortality? These things are lore, and might be different in different settings. But a default is needed for the game to be playable, even if it ends up being changed.

 

[Reynard]

You need more than a physical description in order to roleplay a character.

So you didn't read what I wrote and are just arguing for fun?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So you didn't read what I wrote and are just arguing for fun?

I read what you wrote. It’s nonsense.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Another aspect I just thought of. As a DM I already have a lot of things on my plate. I don't want to have to make up the lore for every single thing on my own. I'd rather have a baseline to deviate from if I choose as opposed to no context whatsoever for what a creature is.

As for the idea of not needing to be told what an elf or whatever was, I was one of those people who started running D&D without being a Lord of the Rings fan. Fantasy for me was JRPGs, so for me I didn't really have context for what an orc was, and the idea of dragons being intelligent rather than just huge beasts of animal intelligence was weird.

 

[Scribe]

If I'm buying D&D today, I expect certain aspects. Essential to the world building of what modern D&D is.

 

[Remathilis]

You can be as contrarian as you want. My point is that you don't need LORE to establish what elves ARE.

I'm responding to what you think was an appropriate amount of description and lore, which is three sentences, one of which is what languages they speak. (Which is clearly more important than what they look like). That example is bunk because it assumes you already know what an elf is and looks like. You will fill in the details that they are tall, thin, beardless, pointy eared, and beautiful. And I bet if you handed me that as a description of an elf for your game and I created Santa Claus (that jolly old elf) you and I would have a difference of opinion even though MY interpretation of what is there is no more wrong than yours.

You can attempt to explain why a description is different from lore, but in your "this looks about right" example, you gave neither. It's a tagline masquerading as body text. It's functionally useless unless you already know what it's describing.

 

[aco175]

The more I think about it, the more I think the lore presented is needed. I know that I can make my game anything I want, up until I play with anyone not in my group. Then, everything needs to be explained or changed. If I want to play in a convention or at the LFGS, I need to know what lore there is.

My game might have orcs as the 1e version and then I want to play with others and there comes a friction with the new lore.

 

[MerricB]

Lore is tremendously important to the game. And here's the amount of lore that setting books have for 99% of monsters in the game: None.

It all comes from the core books and the monster books.

Setting books change the default lore for a tiny fraction of creatures, because those are the ones really important to the setting. But you're not going to find that the Bulette works greatly differently between Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun or Ravenloft. (You might choose not to include it, but setting books aren't going to explicitly exclude lots of creatures).

And how many games don't use a published setting? (More than 50%?) Those ones default to the core books lore and then get changed as required. But you want that baseline.

Now, you probably don't want 2E levels of detail on creature ecology and the like. Probably. (Some definitely do!) But especially when creatures have certain abilities, there's a lot of implied lore there that occasionally works a lot better when explicitly described.

Cheers!