D&D General Joe Manganiello: Compares Early 5E to BG 3 . How Important is Lore?

[Remathilis]

How did any of that invalidate previous lore? Everything from before still happened. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, but if it's, "you shouldn't care about this stuff" well...good luck.

So you think the 4e changes to the Realms was acceptable because everything before it still happened?

 

[Micah Sweet]

So you think the 4e changes to the Realms was acceptable because everything before it still happened?

The 4e changes were bigger than a lot of people liked (myself included), but they didn't alter the past so they were ok by my primary metric.

My point is every change in lore is not fungible to every other change in lore, and the ones that change the past are a much bigger problem for me.

You're going to keep arguing with me about it though, because you don't care about what I care about, and don't seem to understand how or why anyone would care.

 

[Zardnaar]

1e to 2e Realms killed several deities and had every "assassin" in the game simultaneously die. 2e to 3e changed the cosmology from the Great Wheel to World Tree and several NPC classes (such as wizards becoming sorcerers). Both of these changes are made when design notions changed, such as TSR's desire to remove "evil" PC options from the game and the second to highlight the new take on setting-specific cosmology (which was walked back come 4e and 5e...).

Scalpel approach vs dynamite. 2E FR also want that good relative to FRCS or 1E imho.

4E Realms was nit well received.

No one's saying no changes ever. 3.0 brought back Babe and Shades tvat was restrained vs 2E and 4E.

FR isn't the only setting to get blown up nor was 4E the only offender 2E was also very bad with it.

Here's this new cool campaign. 2 years later BOOM.

 

[Remathilis]

The 4e changes were bigger than a lot of people liked (myself included), but they didn't alter the past so they were ok by my primary metric.

My point is every change in lore is not fungible to every other change in lore, and the ones that change the past are a much bigger problem for me.

You're going to keep arguing with me about it though, because you don't care about what I care about, and don't seem to understand how or why anyone would care.

Because a change is a change regardless of if there is a BS explanation attached to it or not. I don't find the lack of one a dealbreaker like you do. Because people will find fault with it regardless.

 

[Hussar]

So in other thread people have talked about how WotC has butchered Spelljammer, Dragonlance and Ravenloft with their reimaginings.

Seems like sales are down as well from the bookscan sata.

The first two lines of the OP are simply factually incorrect.

Sales are not down. They may not be increasing as fast as they were previously, but, they are still increasing by all accounts.

If you took every Spelljammer book published previous to 5e's Spelljammer, added together all their lifetime sales, you might, might, just equal the sales of 5e Spelljammer. IOW, 5e Spelljammer is a thousand times more successful than Spelljammer ever was. So, I'm not sure that you can say they "butchered" Spelljammer. Ravenloft is by far considered one of the best 5e offerings out there. One of the most highly regarded adventures, and quite possibly one of the best selling adventures of all time.

I am constantly baffled by this never ending stream of thought that thinks that 5e WotC D&D is somehow not doing well. When you have double digit growth, year on year for TEN FREAKING YEARS, at some point we should probably say they are doing things right as far as the hobby goes.

All this, "Well, they butchered this or that" stuff is just people confusing their personal preferences with objective value.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Speaking of Baldur's Gate 3 and its githyanki lore, I was very surprised to hear Lae'zel state that silver swords were made from fragments of the Living Gate, which as far as I'm aware has only ever been mentioned during 4E.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Because a change is a change regardless of if there is a BS explanation attached to it or not. I don't find the lack of one a dealbreaker like you do. Because people will find fault with it regardless.

As you say, I find an explanation in-universe vital, and I won't apologize for feeling that way.

 

[Mecheon]

As you say, I find an explanation in-universe vital, and I won't apologize for feeling that way.

They really should just drag out the multiverse explanation because I also suspect most people just, don't care enough at this point. There's multiple Faeruns. Just go the Transformers/Marvel way on this and just say that. It'd solve the problem in one fell easy swoop and be any easy way to drag in the end of the universe stuff when you want to pull it in.

Regardless though like, I'm just more surprised no one's really brought up the fact Dragonlance sales may be down (which, per above they're probably not) because, let's be honest, the only people who care about Dragonlance are people who are already ride or die for it. The series' reputation is basically a has-been setting at this point in time and its generally known as "The Mormonism setting" or "The one with the dumb joke races" or, if they're really hardcore, "A watered down Warcraft that doesn't even have orcs" if they know some authors who wrote for both. It hasn't had any big wins for decages. The best it had was the cartoon and... Yeah. In pop culture at the moment its basically considered a stepping stone to Warcraft, and if even the Warcraft movie didn't go well, what was basically Warcraft but worse probably won't either

 

[Queer Venger]

The first two lines of the OP are simply factually incorrect.

Sales are not down. They may not be increasing as fast as they were previously, but, they are still increasing by all accounts.

If you took every Spelljammer book published previous to 5e's Spelljammer, added together all their lifetime sales, you might, might, just equal the sales of 5e Spelljammer. IOW, 5e Spelljammer is a thousand times more successful than Spelljammer ever was. So, I'm not sure that you can say they "butchered" Spelljammer. Ravenloft is by far considered one of the best 5e offerings out there. One of the most highly regarded adventures, and quite possibly one of the best selling adventures of all time.

I am constantly baffled by this never ending stream of thought that thinks that 5e WotC D&D is somehow not doing well. When you have double digit growth, year on year for TEN FREAKING YEARS, at some point we should probably say they are doing things right as far as the hobby goes.

All this, "Well, they butchered this or that" stuff is just people confusing their personal preferences with objective value.

Im currently running CoS, its never been so much fun for me and my group, even more so than any other 5e adventure Ive run.
Same for SJ, It is what it is, could WotC given us more? Yeah, they got lazy, they banked on nostalgia. Still, Its one of my favorite settings along with PS and Im having a blast with the 5e sanitized version because I have the internet, wiki and my PS/SJ boxed sets. Yeah, I know most 5e players don't have those, but we also live in the era of the internet so nothing is out of print.

 

[Hussar]

Im currently running CoS, its never been so much fun for me and my group, even more so than any other 5e adventure Ive run.
Same for SJ, It is what it is, could WotC given us more? Yeah, they got lazy, they banked on nostalgia. Still, Its one of my favorite settings along with PS and Im having a blast with the 5e sanitized version because I have the internet, wiki and my PS/SJ boxed sets. Yeah, I know most 5e players don't have those, but we also live in the era of the internet so nothing is out of print.

I mean, yeah, seriously. If you want to know anything about Spelljammer lore, it's a Google search away. If you want to run a fairly "canon" SJ game, it's all right there.

OTOH, I'd think that SJ is probably one of the least canon required settings. After all, the point of the setting is that you use magic space ships to travel between various settings. Sure, the Rock of Bral, for example, has a ton more material out there in the wild. But, at the end of the day, if you need it, you can certainly find it.

See, I think that's the point that the lore bunnies seem to miss. People bounce off of settings when there's a library full of material you need to absorb before you start play. For those of us who've played for years, we want more. But, for those who are just getting into things? I can totally see not wanting hundreds of pages of setting lore.

The one thing that 5e has demonstrated quite clearly is that lore isn't actually all that needed.