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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6646757" data-attributes="member: 37579">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). 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). 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. 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.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. 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". 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.</blockquote>

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