NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 8846566" data-attributes="member: 58416">I think lore is helpful to give a default starting position from which a group of people can come to an imagination-based collaborative storytelling exercise with a shared set of expectations.In some cases, that can be as simple as understanding what constitutes an "elf" or a "dwarf." It's useful shorthand for More broadly, it can set genre, game, and group expectations. My default assumptions for a Dragonlance game are different than those for an Eberron game. Even when playing a homebrew setting, choices about what to include or not to include (in addition to the DM communicating expectations) can help me understand what the game will be about. In a similar way, movie previews can give me some insight into what to expect from a movie.Can a home group alter what's printed as "official." Certainly, and a group should do what is best for their enjoyment of a product. At the same time, why bother printing setting materials for different settings if nothing is unique about the respective settings. It's weird to me that contemporary D&D wants to re-publish different settings in a way which makes them all fit more-or-less the same vision for the game. From a publishing and marketing standpoint, I believe that lore and settings could have been a way to introduce the "modular" design which was talked about during early 5e. It's possible to do that without specific settings and lore too. I believe there's a happy medium between making dogmatic lore and stripping away the lore to the extent that I'm just doing math with my friends.</blockquote>

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