D&D 5E How Much Lore is Enough?

[ExploderWizard]

Is everyone comfortable with WOTC dictating this degree of your setting?

They would indeed be wizards of more than just the coast if they could do that.

I may not agree with all the lore presented in the same way that I might not want to eat a portion of every item from a buffet bar. I use the bits that I think are cool and ignore the rest. Other DMs may do the same but the bits they like may differ.

I much prefer that monsters are thought about by the designers as having a place in the world, instead of just being piles of combat stats even if I don't use all of the content.

 

[Desdichado]

D&D has a spirit that pervades all of D&D. Greyhawk is D&D; Forgotten Realms is D&D; even Dark Sun and Eberron are still D&D. You can make a homebrew world that goes out of its way to not be D&D but I just don't understand why you would bother. There are much better options, if you are uninterested in the spirit of the game.

I don't understand what you mean by the "spirit of the game" but it sounds like it's pretty much the antithesis of what I understand to be the spirit of the game. To whit, and I'm paraphrasing from pretty much every edition of D&D ever published: "Here's a bunch of stuff that we thought was pretty cool and you may like too. Use this stuff as best suits you and your group. Feel free to change whatever you need to." The "Spirit of D&D" isn't at all about having enough of the proper elements all lined up in their proper context so that it "feels" sufficiently like D&D, and if you don't have them, then you should play some other game. That's exactly how countless pointless fantasy heartbreakers have been designed. In spite of my dissatisfaction with a great many D&Disms, I'm not on the lookout for another game to replace D&D, I'm perfectly fine modifying D&D to suit my needs, and I'm perfectly comfortable knowing that that was the design intent of D&D from the get-go. (Of course, I also don't really care what the design intent is, since none of the designers is in my game at home.) Late in the 3.5 era, I ran a game in which I disallowed all of the core player races except human, replaced them with a bunch of others (goblin, hobgoblin, orc, shifter, etc.) and disallowed any class that had any kind of spell-progression at all, replacing all magic--divine and arcane both--with psionics. The players didn't once see a single dungeon, or a single dragon. As far as they know, neither exist anywhere whatsoever in the setting. We had crazy house-rules; a gun that was basically the Colt from Supernatural. Expanded use of action points. At one point, I even temporarily had a rule where if a character could quote 80s pop song lyrics in character in a way that didn't seem too forced and fit the action going on at the time, then they could get temporary benefits. Was that not D&D? Sure it was.

I admit that there is some kind of Platonic Ideal of what a game would look like, perfectly tailored to my tastes and preferences. There's probably also a Platonic Ideal of a gaming group that is perfectly in synch with my tastes and preferences, and to us, that Holy Grail Platonic Ideal game would be perfect. But in the real world, we play D&D more often than not. It's not some thing that has a "spirit"--it's a tool with which we have lots of fun. Often by using it in ways that the designers may not at all have intended that we take those specific elements.

In that sense, the 3e Manual of the Planes and even moreso the 3e Unearthed Arcana were the books that best encapsulated the spirit of D&D; because they not only gave us tons of examples of how to change the game, even fundamentally, but they also explicitly condoned such an approach, for those amongst gamerdom who needed an official nod before they felt comfortable doing so.

I really do think D&D occupies a unique niche in this regard. Greyhawk and Nerath and Eberron and Planescape /impact/ D&D as a whole in a way that all the dozens of settings for FATE and Savage Worlds simply do not impact their core system. And I think this is a /strength/.

I'd say rather that D&D has always borrowed, stolen and regurgitated material from any source. Most recently, it borrows, steals and regurgitates from itself more often than not. This isn't a bad idea. Ryan Dancey once proposed that one purpose of the OGL was to allow third party designers to be innovative in ways that the official ones might not be, and that ideally, D&D itself would therefore evolve constantly towards perfection, incorporating the best rules over time. This didn't actually happen, as it turned out, the OGL either produced derivative works, or works that specifically departed from D&D too much to really be reincorporated.

But from a setting perspective, this has happened, at least from a certain point of view. Halflings are no longer hobbits, they're now basically all kender. The Planes have essentially become Planescape. And more. I don't know for sure if it's a strength, or just a thing. Certainly a great number of gamers seem to like to see familiar elements rather than new ones. But the right new ones really take off. I don't think Gary Gygax would have anticipated the cult following of the tiefling race, for example. But there it is.

On the other hand, this notion that we have to play D&D with enough of the proper elements in the proper context, and respecting the spirit of the game... that's not the spirit of the game. That sounds more like "purge the heretic" to me.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Egg Shen: We take what we want and leave the rest, just like your salad bar.

 

[Dausuul]

I've been looking at the Monster Manual previews and something has really struck me. WOTC is really going to town including very, very specific lore in monster write-ups. Kobolds are now slaves to dragons, salamanders are slaves to efreeti, so on and so forth. The writeups are chock a block with proper nouns - naming gods and specific places like the City of Brass or the Plane of Ash.

I have to admit, the more I'm seeing of the Monster Manual, the less I'm liking it. I don't mind some lore, that's a good thing. But, this lore has a very strong tone, and is authoritatively written. It's not rumour or hearsay or "some sages believe" but rather, this monster is X, it lives in Y, and it has the history of Z.

Is everyone comfortable with WOTC dictating this degree of your setting?

You know, I was against having such specific lore in the Monster Manual... until I actually got my hands on the Monster Manual. Now I've changed my mind. This Monster Manual is a blast to read; all that detail really brings the monsters to life and gets me excited to use them. I haven't enjoyed reading a monster book so much since 2E. My main complaint is that the danged thing is too short.

Does that mean I will be using the lore as written for every monster? Certainly not. I have every intention of taking an axe to the stuff that doesn't fit my campaign or my personal tastes. But even when I have no intention of using the lore for a given monster, it gets my brain fired up with ideas. And when the lore does suit my needs, it adds a lot of depth to my campaign world without me having to lift a finger.

 

[Mercurius]

I don't have the book yet but you've only further sold me on it, [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]! [MENTION=1288]Mouseferatu[/MENTION] pretty much expressed my view but I will add that I always see flavor as suggestive and not directive, with the underlying idea of "Do it as you want, but here's how we do it, which you can use if you like."

No arm-twisting, no Thou Shalts, just some ideas to sort through.

On a side note, I do have to occasional remind my players that everything in the books is subject to customization for my own world. I never (or very rarely) say no, but will often change flavor. For example, I had a player who wanted to play a cleric of Demeter. I'm a bit of a stickler for verisimilitude so there is no "Demeter" in my world as there is no Greece, but there is a region that is similar to Greece so we figured that the cleric could be of a local agricultural deity, Demetara. Only a slight tweak, but it accommodated both of our needs.

 

[Hussar]

As I said before, I'm not worried about the players in the group. Like everyone says, the DM can change things, no problem. My particular beef is that with creatures with pretty specific lore, any supplements that come out about that creature will have to incorporate that lore.

So, if you have a Dungeon adventure with Kobolds, you can bet dollars to donuts, it's going to have a tie to a dragon. If you have an adventure featuring Salamanders, it will come part and parcel with Efreeti.

I just find that the more specific lore that you have, the more limited any further support will be.

 

[ExploderWizard]

As I said before, I'm not worried about the players in the group. Like everyone says, the DM can change things, no problem. My particular beef is that with creatures with pretty specific lore, any supplements that come out about that creature will have to incorporate that lore.

So, if you have a Dungeon adventure with Kobolds, you can bet dollars to donuts, it's going to have a tie to a dragon. If you have an adventure featuring Salamanders, it will come part and parcel with Efreeti.

I just find that the more specific lore that you have, the more limited any further support will be.

I think that those who put in the effort to customize their own lore have limited use for official support products anyhow. As of the moment I'm enjoying running 5E with just core materials. I would have liked to try running the Phandelver adventure but by the time our schedule allowed for it a couple players were already playing it with another GM on a different night and another player had seen so many play podcasts that the adventure would have almost seemed like a re-hash actually playing it.

I have some gung-ho fanatical D&D fans as players, which is not a bad thing but it does mean that official adventure support material is of limited use.

 

[Savage Wombat]

As I said before, I'm not worried about the players in the group. Like everyone says, the DM can change things, no problem. My particular beef is that with creatures with pretty specific lore, any supplements that come out about that creature will have to incorporate that lore.

So, if you have a Dungeon adventure with Kobolds, you can bet dollars to donuts, it's going to have a tie to a dragon. If you have an adventure featuring Salamanders, it will come part and parcel with Efreeti.

I just find that the more specific lore that you have, the more limited any further support will be.

This sounds like one of those issues where you have to look at sales numbers. Did modules intended for generic campaign worlds sell better or worse than modules set in specific campaign worlds? (Although the best indicators would be from 2e, where records are poor.)

 

[Hussar]

This sounds like one of those issues where you have to look at sales numbers. Did modules intended for generic campaign worlds sell better or worse than modules set in specific campaign worlds? (Although the best indicators would be from 2e, where records are poor.)

Absolutely yes generic modules sell far better than campaign specific ones. See [MENTION=42043]Eric[/MENTION] Mona in several Dungeon editorials where he states exactly that - any time they ran campaign specific modules in Dungeon, sales were noticeably worse. My Google Fu is weak, but, i'm fairly sure I've seen him state the same thing here on the forums as well.

Which makes sense really. Not everyone runs Forgotten Realms or Eberron. But, everyone plays D&D. A module set in an underground dungeon, sans any setting specific material, is far easier to adapt than a module set in the Underdark which references all sorts of Forgotten Realms stuff.

Note, it's not impossible to do, of course. See the setting conversions for Paizo's Adventure Path modules for excellent examples on how to do it. But, the more specific the lore is on game elements, the more work it becomes to strip that out in order to fit it into a home-brew campaign.

Heck, if you want more evidence, look at the Top 30 Modules of All Time and the first truly setting specific module comes in at #14 with Dead Gods. Yes, I realise that the 1e modules were ostensibly set in Greyhawk, but, the setting specific material was very, very sparse. Sure, in the GDQ modules, you are given the quest by the Duke of Geoff, but, after that, there's no real Greyhawk references. ((Although, to be fair, much of those modules BECAME Greyhawk canon after the fact.))

 

[Teflon Billy]

Is everyone comfortable with WOTC dictating this degree of your setting?

Utterly fine with it. I always like more fluff to be included as it can be used for inspiration if nothing else.

But did I ever think that Lore would make the mechanics useless in other contexts? No, I did not.

It honestly never would have occurred to me when I was looking for a small humanoid creature to serve as canon fodder in an encounter (or even a whole setting) to exclude them based on Lore saying thy were "Slaves to dragons" or whatever.

I re-skin monsters all the time, and will continue to do so.