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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6415202" data-attributes="member: 22779">Note just for clarity. No one is arguing for a "no flavour" core. That's Remalthaus's personal strawman. What I want is a "setting light" core where favor is not set in stone. I want qualifiers like "sages believe" or "tavern tales say".  That sort of thing. What I don't want is a complete setting in core that every supplement must adhere to./edit Something that occurs to me laterWhile I certainly started playing D&D in 1e, I was pretty young and probably didn't understand half the game.  Really, it was 2e where I learned how to DM and really got into the depths of the game.  So, I'm realising that a lot of my views are coloured pretty strongly by that experience. See, if you go back to the 2e books, there's a metric butt load of flavour in those books.  Mechanics designed by concussed gerbils, but there was just so much flavour material.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />But, if you look at the original Monstrous Compendiums (the loose leaf ones) you'll see exactly what I'm talking about above - "Sages think" and whatnot.  While there are tons of flavour, all of it is very setting light.  It's meant to be dragged and dropped into your setting, because the presumption was that you would be creating your own setting, not using what they necessarily provided.  Endless Dungeon articles on the Art of Dungeon Mastering and Campaign Design bears that out.And if you look at the Complete Class books, again, you'll see tons and tons of flavour, but very, very little setting.   I adore those old class splats.  The kits were fantastic for evoking all sorts of flavour and they were presented as a sort of menu of options that you picked and chose to your hearts content and built into a campaign of your own.  There was little or no sense that there was one single, overarching "story" of D&D.  Rather there were tons of short stories, scattered all through the material, with the detailed, meaty stuff loaded  into the specific settings.  This is really what I would like to see the game return to.  I talked about it earlier as being a resource, rather than a setting.Remalthalis mentions the Eye and Hand of Vecna as an example of D&D's story.  Thing is, in thirty years of gaming, under dozens of DM's, and as a DM for years as well, I've never once seen either used in the game.  Not once.  I've never even heard gaming stories, outside of jokes about the Head of Vecna, of anyone using either.  Heck, there's a couple of centuries worth of DMing experience between the people in this thread alone - have any of you used or seen used, either the Hand or Eye of Vecna?  Has anyone seen it used more than once?AFAIC, you could drop the both of them out of the DMG and no one would ever notice.  IMO, it's the people who like to read D&D that care about stuff like this.  For me, I don't particularly want to read D&D stuff.  I want to play it.  Having something like the Eye and Hand of Vecna in the books does pretty much nothing for me.  I'll never use it and it means nothing to me.</blockquote>

Verification