Yes, it reads a lot like edition warring - after I gave you a warning about such just yesterday.
Unless you want a vacation, dial it back several notches, please.
D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....
- Thread starter TerraDave
- Start date
Yes, it reads a lot like edition warring - after I gave you a warning about such just yesterday.
Unless you want a vacation, dial it back several notches, please.
For my part, Burning Wheel is the system I have in mind.
It has a mechanical detail of PC build that resembles RQ or RM (both systems that I have a lot of fondness for, and a lot of experience with in the latter case), plus rules for character beliefs and traits that introduce a "psychological/dramatic" definition for PCs that I think would provide the focus for change and conflict that I mentioned as an alternative to externalised, cosmological change/conflict.
I GMed a BW session last week, due to a lakc of quorom for my regular RM game. Here's a link to a write-up. It's a long post, but I think it illustrates what I am trying to get at.
Hussar
Legend
And, I'm honestly fine with the Great Wheel stuff. Saying demons come from the Abyss is fine. No different than saying Elves live in forests or kobolds live underground. It's pretty stock standard background material for monsters to say where they come from. Whether a given Abyss has 666 layers or is a big whirlpool, either works, or we can always add in something else on our own. Whatever works for that DM.
But telling me that a given creature hates another creature because their respective groups (which they now ALL belong to - kinda like saying all undead must have the same goals) are locked in an eternal war that also draws in every single other creature with the same type is a bridge too far for me. It's dictating too much of the setting. I want all that stuff contained in its own setting, same as it is done for every other setting.
I mean, I'm looking at the new Kobold Preview and I'm not exactly thrilled here. From the preview:
That's an awful lot of setting specific material there for a pretty generic critter. Where's my dog faced humanoid that runs around murdering unsuspecting badgers? Again, I realise I'm in the minority here and the group has spoken - they want more specific monster lore. I just prefer a more generic approach and let the DM decide how and why a critter behaves the way it does.
E
Elderbrain
Guest
So, demons can't hate devils, but you're o.k. with orcs hating elves, etc? What exactly is the difference? Should WOTC be prevented from mentioning such in its descriptions of orc? Should people who favor elf/orc warfare have to buy a separate campaign book...?!?
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Nivenus
First Post
If I should hazard a guess it's probably because orcs hating elves (and vice versa) has a lot of its basis in Middle-earth, which predates D&D. That isn't to say your analogy isn't completely off the mark though - there's a fair number of fantasy settings where orcs and elves aren't sworn enemies, both inside and out of D&D. But to a lot of players, it probably comes off as a more generic assumption.
I'm personally all for devils and demons hating each other - I'm not really sure what's the point of having both if they don't hate each other, given that the entire devil/demon differentiation is based off of D&D's axis of law vs. chaos - but I think that may be why some people see it differently.
My devils and demons don't necessarily hate each other. Devils are a race that sprang from fallen angels that became tainted with the same essence that tainted and created the demons. A taint that threatens to crawl out of the abyss and slowly consume and change the worlds of the multiverse.
Of course, the devils are kind of snotty and condescending to the "mere" demons, so they certainly don't "like" each other either.
Nivenus
First Post
And that's certainly a valid approach to take in a particular setting. But again, devils and demons wouldn't even exist as separate entities in D&D were it not for the game's early embrace of the idea that order vs. chaos is as significant a cosmological conflict as good vs. evil. Their entire raison d'etre is to provide an alternate to the heaven vs. hell / good vs. evil dynamic presumed in most cosmologies. In common parlance, "demon" and "devil" are close to synonymous (there's some wiggle room, but most non-gamers I think would be confused by the distinction).
Aldarc
Legend
I can attest this to be true in my experience when introducing new people to D&D.
Actually, I really appreciate this approach. I consider these detailed cultural write-ups and "canon" monster lore as a convenient fall back position when I can't be bothered to think of something else for a given monster in my campaign.
If a DM has a different idea for kobolds (or whatever monster), no one is stopping him from disregarding the info in Monster Manual. He is free to come up with any background/behaviour he can imagine. Nothing in the Monster Manual presents a barrier to that. Want kobolds to go around murdering unsuspecting badgers? More power to you! Want a different role for demons/devils as opposed to their canon role in the law/chaos axis? Again, go for it; no need to slavishly adhere to the fluff text in a book.
On the other hand, for those DMs that don't want to spend too much time on their own thinking about such things and who like interesting, flavourful lore to get their creative juices flowing, it's a great tool.
Best of both worlds, I'd say.
Desdichado
Hero
Thanks; I'll follow up on the link later today when I have a bit more time. I'm actually fairly curious.
Posts like this reiterate to me that--in spite of my general dislike for things like the OSR, for instance, or a lot of the ingrained D&Disms that are rife throughout D&D, at the end of the day, my RPing style is really quite traditional after all. I'm deeply suspicious of truly narrative approaches, with mechanics that impact character development of, say, the narrative of the game itself. I very strongly prefer that that be handled without mechanics--the narrative is just the after-the-fact telling of what happened, and character development is handled more like how a novelist handles character development; a personality sketch that evolves as events unfold in game. Character definition and description is limited to very physicals-based metrics; i.e., that can the character actually do and how likely is he to be successful at doing it. Whether or not to do it, though, or what impact that has on the game itself; that's not a mechanical consideration to me.
Although I have a very strong preference for playing this way, I'm quite curious about how other approaches work, what they do, and how it turns out, of course.
To me, there isn't any point in them being different. Their differences (as well as the differences between both and "daemons", demodands, and every other kind of fiend--as well as non-fiends but might as well be critters like efreet, oni or slaad) are purely mechanical and impact more what resistances they have rather than what the "story" of them in-game is. For my money, any type of "hell" plane could be peopled by any variety of fiend living and working side-by-side, as much as they work together at all, anyway.
I prefer the balkanized approach of the Abyss to the rigid hierarchy of Hell just because is facilitates actually using it in a game more, if nothing else, but I have multiple competing "hells" in my setting, with multiple competing arch-fiends. Devils, demons and more can have allegiance in game to any one of these arch-fiends as their nature permits.
Or, in other words--what's really the difference between tanar'i and obyriths? To me, that's pretty much the same difference between all the other varieties of fiends too. Members of one group obviously have some common point of origin--presumably--given a small bundle of shared mechanical traits, but other than that, what difference does it really make?
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