Baked-in setting assumptions include the Great Wheel, its gods, its alignments, and the cosmology in general. I find these intrusive organizing assumptions, impossible to escape from in too many pages in the core books.
The DMG has rules and advice for making your own cosmology that is distinct from the Great Wheel. Plus, the Great Wheel has been standard to all D&D settings for many years, and is really much more Greyhawk than FR (which uses a tree layout as often as not).
In 5e, I am also finding the ‘weave’, and how this setting assumption defines magic, such as versus psionics, likewise intrusive and constraining. I was frustrated when a 5e D&D player insisted the Wizard class can never be used to make a psionic option, because it would contradict the setting assumption that the Wizard must be ‘arcane’ using the ‘weave’, thus ‘can not’ be ‘psionic’ using the ‘mind’. These kinds of setting assumptions kill my enjoyment of 5e.
It's really "a weave" and not "the Weave". They just went with a familiar descriptor. If it referred to the Weave of the Realms it would have been capitalized.
This can be seen on page 205 which is in a sidebar and thus separated from the main rules (and really set in the Realms).
I resent the assumption of a ‘multiverse’, where all settings are ‘true’, because it forces unwanted and inappropriate settings assumptions to necessarily exist in every setting, albeit a distance away.
Being overtly part of the same multiverse didn't stop Dark Sun, Mystara, Ravenloft, and Dragonlance from being very different.
Dragonlance, Eberron, and Dark Sun even have different planar designs.
I want a return to the 1e ethic, where the players (DM and adventurers) are *supposed* to invent their own settings from scratch - for their own groups - without relying on the core rules to do the hand-holding or the heavy-handedness.
Again, that's really in the DMG. The PHB is the baseline - which is fairly reminiscent of the 1st Edition PHB which contained a list of the known planes and diagrams of said plains in Appendix IV (pages 120-121), although the Great Wheel was more boxy. So the 5e books isn't new in this regard, just more detailed and expansive. Then again, it's 2 1/2 times the size of the 1e PHB.
I want the setting gone from the rules.
Settings belong in a separate setting guide.
The core rulebooks need
some flavour. They cannot be entirely devoid of flavour and strictly rules. That's bland and makes for a dry read. Flavour text gets you excited for the content and generates character ideas. It's what hooks you as a player while you're still learning the rules.
The current 5e Players Handbook deserves to be renamed the ‘Forgotten Realms Players Handbook’. When the Dark Sun setting comes out, it needs a completely different Players Handbook, with the same core rules rewritten and deeply reflavored with different setting assumptions, called the ‘Dark Sun Players Handbook’.
They'd need to do that anyway. Even if the core rulebook was completely devoid of flavour. They would need to explain what a bard or wizard is like in Dark Sun. The existence or non-existence of flavour in the PHB is irrelevant and has no bearing on the work needed to describe the classes in Dark Sun.
Similarly, if your classes are different than the baseline the PHB adds nothing to your workload, as you would always have to describe those classes for your players. That information still has to be communicated. The difference is if you're NOT changing the lore, as the inherent flavour saves you a lot of work. It's super easy to say "just like in the PHB".
I dislike having to look up rules, only to be forced to adopt ‘wrong’ setting details that are dissonant and disruptive to the tone and outlook of the settings that I myself use.
I will not use a gaming system unless it is setting neutral - or in some unlikely event the setting is perfect so I love it in every way.
I require customizability of flavor.
That's great, but this has NEVER been D&D. It has never been a generic rule system like GURPs, Cortex, FATE, or AGE. If you want a game that's just rules then that's cool, but then play that system. And enjoy. There's no real reason to take a shot at D&D in the process.
D&D has always had a veneer of assumed flavour that has to be stripped away and ignored to make the game your own. From the choice or races (the existences of certain races, the absence of optional races, the inclusion of bonuses against races), design of the magic system (spellbooks and Vancian magic carry a lot of assumed flavour), and little details (such as elves not dying of old age but feeling a call to journey across the sea).
It's had
less flavour or the flavour has been less overt, but D&D has never been a generic ruleset. Using the 5e rules to tell stories in your own world really isn't any harder than using 1e.
