D&D 5E Should 5e have a "default setting" and cosmology?
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Kobold Avenger
Legend
I'd prefer it if they had the Great Wheel cosmology back, with parts of 4e's World Axis that was interesting. Throw in Feywild and Shadowfell and the Far Realms into the Great Wheel, and make it a little more flexible is what they should do.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
The Far Realm originated in late 2E, and was in 3E (though not prominently), before it appeared in 4E.
Belphanior
First Post
Uhh.. ok, if you say so. I mean, only like two sentences in the Dragonborn pages refer to the Bael Turath/Arkhosia thing so I guess it must bother you really really much, but I still don't see it.
In the case of the spell, there is a bit of fluff which you can remove by ignoring one or two words.
In the case of the Dragonborn, there is a bit of fluff which you can remove by ignoring one or two sentences.
Again, I do not see the difference. But I'll take your word for it.
Your absurdly bothered by that and i honestly have no idea how anyone can think its that big of a deal. I gave you several examples of how the woody elves can also be a piraty elf or a slaver-y (thats not right.....) elf. You dont have to actually use the name in the book you know? Its just a label for the bag of mechanics. Which in that case is a elf warrior with semi-mystic enviromental bonuses.
You could call them the flowery pot elves of sillydom if you wanted and then let them steal souls. Doesnt matter the name. its just more fun.
Without fluff mixed in these books start to read like a college text book. and that is something that truly and deeply sucks. "
1. Its their JOB to tell you how to play the game and have fun. Thats why they got paid to write a 300 page book for you. And you admitted that when you bought their 300 page book. So thats a null point.
2. Again, no one should have to buy extra stuff just to play a few adventures. If they do have to buy anything beyond the 3 core books in order to play then the game has failed.
Thats all complete nonsense.
No one is jamming anything, anywhere. it is expressing that elves are a semi-mystical race with a powerful connection to their environment along with an example of how that works.
Not only doesnt it limit anything, its a clear example of how to customize things within a general racial theme.
Its no different then giving elves a bonus to dexterity which naturally led to people picking them for rogue type classes before. If anything its LESS limiting then that. Its a tool to customize your entire world and a sample of how you can treat any race or class to make them more special.
Besides, since your such a big fan of having to buy extra stuff. Why dont YOU go online and find some non-themed elves for your game? Why are you and your viewpoint more entitled to the basic game concept then the people who do want something setting specific.
Because thats a great 1st adventure for a group, and anything after that it starts to suck. Quickly.
Your examples did not earn 10$.
Ultimately when you have game designers like they do who have been playing since the very beginning and by all accounts run awesome games I would like to see some of what goes through their heads creatively and not just turn them into number crunchers.
WoTC could hire accountants to create a system that mathematically works and is balanced with a D20 roll if thats all that matters.
Andor
First Post
Game design works better with some explicit assumptions.
Iron age technology.
Common spirits/magic beasties.
Distant gods.
Unreliable but powerful magic.
Feudal social structures are most common.
Trade guilds.
Standardized coinage.
These are almost always the implicit assumptions for D&D. They make more sense if you slot them into an assumed and explicitly detailed setting.
It would be a mistake however to cram one down your throat, or tie it so closely to the mechanics as to stiffle creativity or setting portability.
There should be a default suggested setting like Greyhawk or FR. There should be a default cosmology. These things are useful to new players, and do not hinder experienced players.
It should not be written into every sentence of every class and race description in every book, that would be annoying, and a waste of design space.
Iron age technology.
Common spirits/magic beasties.
Distant gods.
Unreliable but powerful magic.
Feudal social structures are most common.
Trade guilds.
Standardized coinage.
These are almost always the implicit assumptions for D&D. They make more sense if you slot them into an assumed and explicitly detailed setting.
It would be a mistake however to cram one down your throat, or tie it so closely to the mechanics as to stiffle creativity or setting portability.
There should be a default suggested setting like Greyhawk or FR. There should be a default cosmology. These things are useful to new players, and do not hinder experienced players.
It should not be written into every sentence of every class and race description in every book, that would be annoying, and a waste of design space.
catsclaw227
First Post
Personally, I don't mind if there's a generic default setting (preferably closer to GH than FR), just make sure the core mechanics aren't tied to its fluff. Let there be a module for that, then other settings will have their own modules for mechanics and default assumptions, like Iron Kingdoms, for example.
As for cosmology? I wasn't really gaga over the Great Wheel, even though I used it for many, many years. Personally, I like the 4e cosmology. It made more sense to me. But my favorite cosmology, one I used for 3 years in the 3.5 era, was Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous. That was a well developed, plug-n-play cosmology with tons of flavor.
As for cosmology? I wasn't really gaga over the Great Wheel, even though I used it for many, many years. Personally, I like the 4e cosmology. It made more sense to me. But my favorite cosmology, one I used for 3 years in the 3.5 era, was Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous. That was a well developed, plug-n-play cosmology with tons of flavor.
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I think 4E's default setting was just about perfect. Just enough to have various concepts that could easily be mapped into other settings, but not so much to be unwieldy. And I think the cosmology is great, both on its own, and as something that can easily be mapped into other cosmological structures.
I always disliked the Great Wheel for making alignment a cosmically essential thing, when that directly contradicted my philosophy that alignment should be an RP aid, nothing more. 4E's cosmology makes a lot more sense to me.
I always disliked the Great Wheel for making alignment a cosmically essential thing, when that directly contradicted my philosophy that alignment should be an RP aid, nothing more. 4E's cosmology makes a lot more sense to me.
JohnSnow
Adventurer
"Imagine: it is another place, anoter time. The world is much like ours was, long ago, with knights and castles and no science or technology - no electricity, no modern comforts of any kind.
"Imagine: dragons are real. Werewolves are real. Monsters of all kinds live in caves and ancient ruins. And magic really works!
"Imagine: you are a hero, a famous but poor adventurer. Day by day you explore the unknown, looking for monsters and treasure. The more you find, the more powerful and famous you become.
"Your home town is just a small place with dirt roads. You set off one morning and hike to the nearby hills. There are several caves in the hills, caves where treasures can be found, guarded by monsters. Adventure awaits!"
The preceding is cribbed, almost word for word, from the introductory couple pages of the 1983 D&D Basic Set. And to my mind, that's the only kind of "implied setting" the game needs. Tell us it's a world like ours was, long ago, with little technology and where monsters are real and magic works. The rest can be left up to the DM.
Now, a couple basic assumptions have to be made when you design monsters, like "goblins are bad." Or "drow align with spiders." But beyond the well-established legacy stuff, leave it alone. Let it be defined when you publish an adventure. 4e had some fun with faeries, but they tried a little too hard to shoehorn a particular view of the world down people's throats. And that's said as someone who LIKED a lot of it.
Religions and cosmology are probably the thorniest problem, because you have a class or two (clerics and paladins) that implicitly are tied to gods. But I think it would be best to throw in a few (small) sample pantheons, like, say, Greek, Norse, PoL, and Greyhawk. Mention you can use one of those, create your own, or just ignore it completely and have characters serve a particular philosophy, like "good and law." Keep the channel divinity feats generic based on spheres of influence (good, law, nature, war, weather, etc.) and call out those spheres for the example deities. Yeah, it's a little more work, but in the end, it's probably more useful to the average gamer. Since it's natural that an individual deity might offer a unique power, you could include deity-specific channel divinity powers in setting books down the road.
As far as art goes, I don't want to always see the "same world." Elmore always managed to depict evocative clerics without being precisely clear on which deity they served. And when it comes to adventures, tie them to a town or a world location without saying exactly where that town is. All of the classics did this, from The Village of Homlet to Keep on the Borderlands, from Castle Ravenloft to Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and from Against the Giants to The Sunless Citadel.
That kind of handwaving works, and works well. Sure, if you want to put the Hand and Eye of Vecna as examples of artifacts in the DMG, go nuts. That kind of stuff is evocative and interesting - and easily ignorable by those who don't want to use it.
"Imagine: dragons are real. Werewolves are real. Monsters of all kinds live in caves and ancient ruins. And magic really works!
"Imagine: you are a hero, a famous but poor adventurer. Day by day you explore the unknown, looking for monsters and treasure. The more you find, the more powerful and famous you become.
"Your home town is just a small place with dirt roads. You set off one morning and hike to the nearby hills. There are several caves in the hills, caves where treasures can be found, guarded by monsters. Adventure awaits!"
The preceding is cribbed, almost word for word, from the introductory couple pages of the 1983 D&D Basic Set. And to my mind, that's the only kind of "implied setting" the game needs. Tell us it's a world like ours was, long ago, with little technology and where monsters are real and magic works. The rest can be left up to the DM.
Now, a couple basic assumptions have to be made when you design monsters, like "goblins are bad." Or "drow align with spiders." But beyond the well-established legacy stuff, leave it alone. Let it be defined when you publish an adventure. 4e had some fun with faeries, but they tried a little too hard to shoehorn a particular view of the world down people's throats. And that's said as someone who LIKED a lot of it.
Religions and cosmology are probably the thorniest problem, because you have a class or two (clerics and paladins) that implicitly are tied to gods. But I think it would be best to throw in a few (small) sample pantheons, like, say, Greek, Norse, PoL, and Greyhawk. Mention you can use one of those, create your own, or just ignore it completely and have characters serve a particular philosophy, like "good and law." Keep the channel divinity feats generic based on spheres of influence (good, law, nature, war, weather, etc.) and call out those spheres for the example deities. Yeah, it's a little more work, but in the end, it's probably more useful to the average gamer. Since it's natural that an individual deity might offer a unique power, you could include deity-specific channel divinity powers in setting books down the road.
As far as art goes, I don't want to always see the "same world." Elmore always managed to depict evocative clerics without being precisely clear on which deity they served. And when it comes to adventures, tie them to a town or a world location without saying exactly where that town is. All of the classics did this, from The Village of Homlet to Keep on the Borderlands, from Castle Ravenloft to Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and from Against the Giants to The Sunless Citadel.
That kind of handwaving works, and works well. Sure, if you want to put the Hand and Eye of Vecna as examples of artifacts in the DMG, go nuts. That kind of stuff is evocative and interesting - and easily ignorable by those who don't want to use it.
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IanB
First Post
This thread continues to conflate the idea of a sample setting with a default one and it is driving me crazy!
I would propose the following nomenclature to make it clear which one you *actually* want when you say you want a default setting:
Sample setting - like the Known World in the Expert Set. It provides a map, some details about countries, maybe a pantheon, a sample cosmology, etc., but none of this is baked into the actual races/classes/themes.
Default setting - like 4e. Specific details about the world are already there in channel divinity feats, race descriptions, class power names, paragon paths, etc.
I *think* a lot of you people saying "5e MUST HAVE A DEFAULT SETTING" actually only want a sample setting. But I can't tell for sure.
I would propose the following nomenclature to make it clear which one you *actually* want when you say you want a default setting:
Sample setting - like the Known World in the Expert Set. It provides a map, some details about countries, maybe a pantheon, a sample cosmology, etc., but none of this is baked into the actual races/classes/themes.
Default setting - like 4e. Specific details about the world are already there in channel divinity feats, race descriptions, class power names, paragon paths, etc.
I *think* a lot of you people saying "5e MUST HAVE A DEFAULT SETTING" actually only want a sample setting. But I can't tell for sure.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
Frankly, I don't see a practical difference. If you use the same sample setting in all of your materials (which I strongly recommend), it is the default setting.
Crazy Jerome
First Post
There should be at least three sample settings developed concurrently with the initial rules. These should be as different as possible, and contain mutually exclusive element. Unless one of them turns out to be completely non-viable, they should all have setting material released at or shortly after launch (i.e. within the first year, with teaser material earlier, if it takes that long.)
The core rules should use examples liberally from these settings, without favoring one or the other.
Reasons:
Edit: And before someone even tries to tell me this is too much work, my answer is that if "professional game company" is going to have any meaning, this kind of work is right up there with good proofreading, testing the rules, etc. Yes it is work. It's the same difference you expect when a business pays a software company $250,000 for a custom solution, versus hiring a the CTO's nephew to write an Access app in 12 weeks. In any case, the thing will pay for itself simply in the increased playtesting capabilities, and should be done for that reason, even if none of the above stuff applied.
The core rules should use examples liberally from these settings, without favoring one or the other.
Reasons:
- Designers and developers are human too. If they don't need to consciously support mutiple settings every day, setting assumptions will creep into their rules. These will cause trouble immediately for homebrew fans (a large chunk of people) and later for the WotC itself.
- With less than three settings, you won't get enough differences in enough places. Ideally, you'd have far more than that, but practical limits means that it has got to be no more than 4-6 setting concepts, and a subset of those more fully developed. Practically, this means you might get 4 viable ones, but 3 is more likely.
- This teaches new players right from the beginning how to distinguish between rule elements and setting elements.
- From object-oriented software development, a hard won truth--a thing is not guaranteed resuable until you have reused it. Meaning, if you want people to swap out this kind of wood elf for another kind of wood elf, you don't know that you have achieved that until you actually do the swap. This means you need two types of wood elves to test it.
Edit: And before someone even tries to tell me this is too much work, my answer is that if "professional game company" is going to have any meaning, this kind of work is right up there with good proofreading, testing the rules, etc. Yes it is work. It's the same difference you expect when a business pays a software company $250,000 for a custom solution, versus hiring a the CTO's nephew to write an Access app in 12 weeks. In any case, the thing will pay for itself simply in the increased playtesting capabilities, and should be done for that reason, even if none of the above stuff applied.
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IanB
First Post
You don't see a difference between 3e domains (generic) with some suggested sample gods, and 4e's Channel Divinity feats (specific, with no generic alternative)?
Serendipity
Explorer
Throw in a small, largely generic region (like Nentir Vale or Thunder Rift) in a single chapter in the DMG where the assumptions of the ruleset hold true, that you can drop into an existing setting or build a new one around, with lots of sidebars as to how you can shift things around if you don't like the initial setup.
No muss, no fuss.
No muss, no fuss.
Either works for me. I would prefer the first with slightly more detail then there was in that though since a lot of that game did have setting crunch in the mechanics from what i recall
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
That's a failure of the feat design, not the difference between sample and default worlds. Greyhawk was the default world for 3e. That was the terminology generally used at the time.
TwinBahamut
First Post
This is undoubtably the best way to do things. I know that D20 Modern made an attempt at this by providing several example settings like Urban Arcana, Shadow Chasers, Genetech, and Agents of PSI (I think these were them...). It helps establish the main rules as setting-independent, introduces to new players a wide variety of inspiration and a clear idea of how far you can push the main rules, and creates room for a lot of fun crunch that doesn't have to be appropriate for every setting (like Psionic, Magic, and Moreau rules in D20 Modern).
I would love for the 5E rules to give a traditional setting, a low-magic humans-only setting, and a totally crazy setting with flying continents, robots, and airships.
JohnSnow
Adventurer
So, like, for example, you could include The Forgotten Realms, Sanctuary, and Eberron?
IanB
First Post
Sure, except people are talking back and forth past each other using 'default setting' and meaning different things all over this thread. Clarity is important.
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