D&D General Rules vs. lore preferences in D&D sourcebooks?

[Malmuria]

“Lore” encompasses a variety of things, and can be useful or not useful depending on presentation. Gameable lore/fluff are things I can drop into my game with minimal effort. Things like locations, npcs, factions, special items—all of that is great (depending on the writing at least). Detailed cosmology and ancient history are less useful to me in that way. Eg 2000 years ago there was a powerful wizard who built a tower in the land of whatever. That’s useful if the party is now exploring said ruined tower, in which case please give me a map and key, but less useful as a generic entry in a timeline. Or, god x forgot to give god y a birthday gift and now there is an eternal feud between them. Useful if you give me a roster and plots connected to the birthday cult, less useful if it’s a line lost amid sprawling, verbose prose.

bonus points if your lore gives me options. For example, the mm describes orcs as “savage raiders.” If I don’t want to use that lore, there’s no option number two. So I end up just using the stat block while making up my own lore, except now I have a book that’s padded out with a bunch of lore that I don’t want to use. I sold my copy of volos for this reason

I love rpg books, but I rarely sit down and read them cover to cover like a novel. So usually I want to grok the basic idea of the game and then let add things in, whether mechanics or setting info, piece by piece in a kind of decentralized fashion

 

[Scribe]

There are any number of systems, rules, or whatever.

Lore actually brings one into a setting.

 

[teitan]

I like lore with rules being a secondary thing or the rules supporting the lore with it being something that can be dropped in or ignored if I want. I like how Kobold Press handles their Deep Magic for example, it's solid rules material with lore attached to it than can be ignored and the rules still used. Some bits of it for example, can be used to emulate aspects of the Dungeon Crawl Classics magic system in 5e. They design some great stuff.

 

[Lyxen]

It’s “no rules, only lore” all the way. There’s tens of thousands of games with millions of systems and subsystems and rules. I don’t need yet one more book telling me what to roll or how to roll it. Just gimme the creative stuff. Worlds and stories. Relationship webs and intrigue. Plots and situations.

I completely second that. It also makes for enduring books across editions, and avoids cataclysm at edition change. It's also in line with the 5e philosophy of rulings over rules, since you can make the rulings that you like to model a situation.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Equal measures for me. Or really, more to the point... I don't care about the percentages either way. If a book is entirely lore and no mechanics, or entirely mechanics and no lore, or 70/30 or 45/55 or whatever... none of that matters to me. Because at the end of the day, in every case I'm going to take a look at the book and decide if I like it or can use it. If I do, then I buy it. If I don't, then I don't. And none of that will have anything to do with the percentages, because I will take what I want from it in whatever fashion I see fit.

If I really liked the dungeons found within Tomb of Annihilation and wanted to use some of them for my game... at that point it wouldn't matter in the least how much of the rest of the book was lore. If I wasn't going to use it, then it could 90%, 75%, 50%, 25% or whatever. Doesn't matter. I'm getting the book for that specific dungeon or two and the rest of it could be whatever it is.

I have never been one who thinks I need to get 100% use out of an entire book for it to be worth buying it... especially considering the math of spending vs time of use. If a book is going to cost $60 and there's a pair of dungeons in them that will give me and my players 20 hours of gameplay... I am perfectly happy spending $3 per hour to play the game in that way. To me, that is an exceedingly small price to pay for what is going to be a really cool dungeon experience (especially when you consider the fact that later on I might actually find uses for the other parts of the book I originally didn't care about, at which time the price-per-hour of use drops even lower that $3.)

 

[Jacob Lewis]

It depends on the quality of the mechanics, as well as the quality of the lore. If it's bad or useless to me, I don't want it.

 

[Reynard]

I voted a mix but I want them in separate sections so I can ignore one or the other.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Ideally, I would prefer to have a pure fluff book or gazetteer, like the Art of X for MTG releasing at the same time as the Threat to X setting containing the player options and the challenges (combat AND exploration AND social) a player might face.

 

[TwoSix]

Didn't vote, because I want different amounts depending on the sourcebook. For a player-focused book, I want rules with some inspirational text, but very little specificity. For a DM-focused book, I need either lore (for a setting gazetteer book) or leaning crunch (for a monster book).

 

[overgeeked]

I would call that a novel.

You would be wrong.