D&D 5E Whatever "lore" is, it isn't "rules."

[ProgBard]

We all seem to like lore, we just choose to use it differently.

This is true, and salient. I don't think you'll find may players, even in this discussion, on the side of "Lore is stupid! No settings! Trash it all!" (Well, I mean, that's kind of where you are with Dungeon World, I guess, but that's probably orthogonal to a 5e-centric discussion anyway.)

Make no mistake that I love lore. In my home campaign, our group's paladin started off with the concept that she was a secret heir to a throne; in our subsequent discussions, we lighted on "Well, the Dalelands are currently without a king ...." So I was delighted to find the sidebar in the FRCS about Aencar, the Mantled King, as an existing lore hook I could use - but as a place to inspire a creation of my own, Fenian Fitz-Mantle, Aencar's secret bastard and the progenitor of a hidden royal Dales bloodline that the PC was the iheritor of. (Well, one inheritor, anyway, since I also took the opportunity to make this backstory hook into a complication.)

In other areas, I'm happy to draw on lore that's extracanonical to the setting. My gang's currently trying to stop the ascension of the King in Yellow on Toril, which I suppose is canon only in the sense that it's heavily suggested the default D&D multiverse has ties to the Cthulhu mythos. But they've also faced the servitors of other, post-Lovecraft Great Old Ones: Cynothoglys, the Mortician God (invented by Thomas Ligotti) and Old Leech (invented by Laird Barron). So, again, I'm a syncretist and a magpie, throwing in whatever I find interesting that I think will work.

I think that another way of parsing some of the disagreements here, though everyone digs lore, is the distinction between those who view lore primarily as something that serves the needs of the DM versus those who see it as something the game ought to serve. The usual caveats apply here that those are gross oversimplifications, but as the saying goes, "All models are wrong; some are useful." I suspect those two categories map more or less to my descriptivist/prescriptivist divide, but may be a little more intuitive to someone who's not, well, me.

 

[Campbell]

This is true, and salient. I don't think you'll find may players, even in this discussion, on the side of "Lore is stupid! No settings! Trash it all!" (Well, I mean, that's kind of where you are with Dungeon World, I guess, but that's probably orthogonal to a 5e-centric discussion anyway.)

Dungeon World is a game that contains a good amount of lore embedded in things like Monster Settings, Monsters, and Play Books. It also depends on a certain amount of assumed knowledge of the D&D Zeitgeist. The Campaign Map is also a critical component of play. It's just that the map and lore are meant to be established as the result of play. Dungeon World is a fiction first game. It cares very deeply about the details. It just tends to have a slightly different relationship to when things get established.

Make no mistake that I love lore. In my home campaign, our group's paladin started off with the concept that she was a secret heir to a throne; in our subsequent discussions, we lighted on "Well, the Dalelands are currently without a king ...." So I was delighted to find the sidebar in the FRCS about Aencar, the Mantled King, as an existing lore hook I could use - but as a place to inspire a creation of my own, Fenian Fitz-Mantle, Aencar's secret bastard and the progenitor of a hidden royal Dales bloodline that the PC was the iheritor of. (Well, one inheritor, anyway, since I also took the opportunity to make this backstory hook into a complication.)

In other areas, I'm happy to draw on lore that's extracanonical to the setting. My gang's currently trying to stop the ascension of the King in Yellow on Toril, which I suppose is canon only in the sense that it's heavily suggested the default D&D multiverse has ties to the Cthulhu mythos. But they've also faced the servitors of other, post-Lovecraft Great Old Ones: Cynothoglys, the Mortician God (invented by Thomas Ligotti) and Old Leech (invented by Laird Barron). So, again, I'm a syncretist and a magpie, throwing in whatever I find interesting that I think will work.

These are both pretty awesome!

I think that another way of parsing some of the disagreements here, though everyone digs lore, is the distinction between those who view lore primarily as something that serves the needs of the DM versus those who see it as something the game ought to serve. The usual caveats apply here that those are gross oversimplifications, but as the saying goes, "All models are wrong; some are useful." I suspect those two categories map more or less to my descriptivist/prescriptivist divide, but may be a little more intuitive to someone who's not, well, me.

I would phrase it a little differently : Lore serves the needs of the game vs. the game serving the lore. For me the idea is that the fiction exists primarily to be a fertile ground for players (including the DM) to play around in - a means rather than an end.

 

[Hussar]

I think Hussars claim is wrong. He claims that the reason we do not have 15 different types of Vrock because of Planescape. But then how does he explain the 15 different types of Elves that we have - is that because of Plaescape as well? How many different types of Bird Demons does he need when the Abyss is supposed to be infinite?

How does he handwave the attempt to roll several different types of Elves into the "Eladrin" category? Does that not run counter to his argument for having so many different types of the same creature? The whole 4e debacle centered on getting rid of different creatures and rolling them all into one type because the unwashed masses did not know the difference between them I guess so they would never know they were gone.

Sorry, not quite tracking that. The reason we have 15 different types of elves, both in core and in various settings, is because no one version of elf is considered "true". We don't have fifteen different kinds of Vrock because there is apparently only one type of Vrock - a soldier demon in the Blood War, because Planescape is considered the "true" version of the planes, regardless of any other setting.

Eladrin were an attempt to modify one existing type of elf - High Elves - and give them a more distinct profile. Nothing was said that all elves had to be eladrin. In fact, the PHB DOES contain two kinds of elves right from the get go. It's unfortunate that they chose an existing name and I highly suspect, based on how well the 5e elf has been received, that had they chosen another name that didn't step on canon the way it did, we'd have a lot fewer issues with Eladrin. I mean, Magic Fairy Elf is perfectly acceptable - 5e elves are tied to fae and have innate spell casting. Had they called them something other than eladrin, say, simply, High Elf, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

See, you say that the Abyss is supposed to be infinite. Ok, fair enough. Then why is it that all Vrocks and all demons for that matter, must be tied to the Blood War? That's a campaign specific thing. Granted 4e tried to tie everything into the Primordial War, but, then again, that was supposed to be so far into the past that it really didn't have much of an impact on any ongoing campaign.

Me, personally, I'd love to see a Manual of the Planes that shows about six different example planar concepts - The Great Wheel, maybe Eberron's cosmology, Norse Cosmology, Krynn Cosmology (for a greatly simplified one), the Astral Plane, and maybe something else and then a honking big section on how to build your own cosmology. Included in all those cosmologies would be variations on existing planar creatures so that those planar creatures fit within the framework of those specific settings.

The main reason I have such an issue with the Eladrin thing is that the argument against Eladrin is based mostly on canon. It's not that Eladrin were poorly written, or a bad idea or too powerful or anything like that. They were bad because they were different. And, again, it's an argument you can't really counter. They really ARE different. That's the whole point. But, we're not allowed to have anything different because the canon police jump out and scream bloody murder as soon as something different, that they don't like, gets tried.

 

[Hussar]

I'd be kinda curious to see you unpack this a little. It doesn't jive with my read of PS, so I'd be interested to know what you're seeing that I'm not.

We saw this primarily in 4e, but, it's hardly new. Any time anyone tries to change demons, devils, whatnot, the PS police jump out of the woodwork to tell all and sundry how wrong this new version is and how it is bad because it changes what was established in PS.

See, for example, the arguments about Succubus being changed to devils. Changes to Modrons. Changes to Elementals. Changes to the cosmology. Etc.

My point is, in every setting, most of the creatures are adapted to that setting. So, elves and dwarves and orcs and giants etc. are changed/modified to fit within that setting. A Greyhawk orc and a Forgotten Realms orc and an Eberron orc is different. But, the second we step into the planes, it's 100% Planescape all the way or nothing at all.

Why is a Forgotten Realms Vrock the same as an Eberron Vrock - both soldier demons in the Blood War? If it's no problem that everything else gets modified for settings, why are planar creatures, and thus Planescape, given such a privileged position?

 

[Hussar]

/snip
I think that another way of parsing some of the disagreements here, though everyone digs lore, is the distinction between those who view lore primarily as something that serves the needs of the DM versus those who see it as something the game ought to serve. The usual caveats apply here that those are gross oversimplifications, but as the saying goes, "All models are wrong; some are useful." I suspect those two categories map more or less to my descriptivist/prescriptivist divide, but may be a little more intuitive to someone who's not, well, me.

Now, this I agree with 100%.

Note, and this is something I think gets lost in the scrum. I'm NOT saying that lore is pointless. I'm saying that dogmatic adherence to lore is pointless.

 

[ProgBard]

Dungeon World is a game that contains a good amount of lore embedded in things like Monster Settings, Monsters, and Play Books. It also depends on a certain amount of assumed knowledge of the D&D Zeitgeist. The Campaign Map is also a critical component of play. It's just that the map and lore are meant to be established as the result of play. Dungeon World is a fiction first game. It cares very deeply about the details. It just tends to have a slightly different relationship to when things get established.

Yes, right, that's also true. DW makes a lot of the same assumptions as old-school D&D about the kind of world you're exploring, and a back-loaded relationship with lore is still a relationship with lore - it's just, in addition to "play to see what happens," "play to see what's here."

I would phrase it a little differently : Lore serves the needs of the game vs. the game serving the lore. For me the idea is that the fiction exists primarily to be a fertile ground for players (including the DM) to play around in - a means rather than an end.

Thank you, yes. That's a much better way of putting it, and comes closer to the heart of what I was getting at.

 

[ProgBard]

We saw this primarily in 4e, but, it's hardly new. Any time anyone tries to change demons, devils, whatnot, the PS police jump out of the woodwork to tell all and sundry how wrong this new version is and how it is bad because it changes what was established in PS.

See, for example, the arguments about Succubus being changed to devils. Changes to Modrons. Changes to Elementals. Changes to the cosmology. Etc.

My point is, in every setting, most of the creatures are adapted to that setting. So, elves and dwarves and orcs and giants etc. are changed/modified to fit within that setting. A Greyhawk orc and a Forgotten Realms orc and an Eberron orc is different. But, the second we step into the planes, it's 100% Planescape all the way or nothing at all.

Why is a Forgotten Realms Vrock the same as an Eberron Vrock - both soldier demons in the Blood War? If it's no problem that everything else gets modified for settings, why are planar creatures, and thus Planescape, given such a privileged position?

Ah, see, I wasn't plugged in to the conversation in the days of previous editions, so I missed all that. If that's the word I'm looking for.

Now, me, I love the heck out of Planescape, which pushes a huge number of my Cool Stuff buttons, but I'm no more eager to beat people over the head with its canon than any other setting. And it does strike me as a bit of ... missing the point of a setting whose premises are 1) the cosmos is filled with infinite wonders, and 2) reality is affected by your point-of-view to try and use it to impose a narrower vision of what the Multiverse-at-large contains.

 

[Maxperson]

Sorry, not quite tracking that. The reason we have 15 different types of elves, both in core and in various settings, is because no one version of elf is considered "true". We don't have fifteen different kinds of Vrock because there is apparently only one type of Vrock - a soldier demon in the Blood War, because Planescape is considered the "true" version of the planes, regardless of any other setting.

Vrocks have at least two versions, maybe more. They are not the same from edition to edition, so your example is flawed.

See, you say that the Abyss is supposed to be infinite. Ok, fair enough. Then why is it that all Vrocks and all demons for that matter, must be tied to the Blood War? That's a campaign specific thing. Granted 4e tried to tie everything into the Primordial War, but, then again, that was supposed to be so far into the past that it really didn't have much of an impact on any ongoing campaign.

Outside of 2e, they weren't tied to the Blood War. Inside of 2e, it depended on if the DM chose to tie them to the Blood War by opting to use the Planescape setting.

 

[ProgBard]

Me, personally, I'd love to see a Manual of the Planes that shows about six different example planar concepts - The Great Wheel, maybe Eberron's cosmology, Norse Cosmology, Krynn Cosmology (for a greatly simplified one), the Astral Plane, and maybe something else and then a honking big section on how to build your own cosmology. Included in all those cosmologies would be variations on existing planar creatures so that those planar creatures fit within the framework of those specific settings.

I'd jump right onto something like this too, which would be a nice way to supplement the build-your-own-multiverse stuff in the DMG using a bunch of worked examples. And you wouldn't half need to leave Planescape behind to use any or all of it, either.

Like, in my campaign, there's a dwarf who's a cleric of Odin. He's been to Sigil; he knows that the Great Wheel is true. But when he had a brief moment of communion with his god, he saw the High One pierced and hung on the World Tree, its branches stretching up into infinity.

Which of those models is "right"? Some of the available answers are both, neither, depends on where you're standing, define 'right,' and wrong question.

 

[Greg K]

See, for example, the arguments about Succubus being changed to devils.

For myself, my dislike for this had nothing to do with Planescape ( I strongly dislike Planescape). To me, it felt like an unnecessary change made for change sake and affected other settings going back to 1e. If the designers had left the default Succubus as a demon and created a setting specific variant for the 4e setting that sat alongside the demon version, the change would not have bothered me.