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

[TwoSix]

So my question is: Are you really saying that if I was going to do all that, I should've just invented my own world instead, or filed off the serial numbers and changed all the names? Even though that would've exponentially increased my workload? And please note that the question isn't whether or not you'd enjoy playing in my game; it's that, given that its intended audience seems to be having an outrageously good time, are you actually making the prescription for my table that you seem to be, and if not - in light of examples like my own - what is it that you do actually mean to say?

The obvious answer here is that you're bad and you should feel bad.

 

[Corpsetaker]

I think rules and lore should abide by each other when official products are being made.

For example: In the Forgotten Realms, Bladesingers are an elven art form that is highly guarded and only taught to other elves. Now I'm glad in the official rules they made the clas elf only because that actually gives the lore some meaning. Now they also threw in what I call "the homebrew clause" that reminds people you can do whatever you want in your home games.

 

[Blue]

Which is exactly what I'd be doing too...being lazy via saving myself all the work of designing those many parts which are already perfectly good, and only working on those bits I want to change.

BTW, there's no implied judgement that a published setting is better than a homebrew. I am ALL for making a homebrew and taking inspiration from all over the place. That's how I usually build my settings.

 

[Blue]

Hi Banana - you do great posts, but I think you hit upon a major fallacy so I'm going to use this as an example.

The difference isn't between one being OK to change and one being not OK to change. The difference as far as I'm concerned is more between what an individual table should change for that table (whatever they dang well please, lore and rules both) and what a publisher should change for everyone (significantly less than whatever they dang well please, for both lore and rules).

It's all okay, you can run whatever you want. Completely. This isn't at all about "what you can run". Run what makes you and your table happy.

It's a question of what defines a setting. If I run straight box Forgotten Realms, is it Eberron? I don't think it's a stretch to say I'd get agreement that it's not. The question is what defines a setting, and when do changes made to it start making it a variant, an alternate history, or even not the same setting.

And it's ALL GOOD to do any of those. Want to run an alt-history Forgotten Realms for your table? Go for it, there's no judgement.

But say you wanted to run an alt-history Dark Sun where Rajaat never learned arcane magic, and the Green Age never ended. It would be a richly verdant world with no sorcerer kings, no slaves. Again, could be really cool to run. But if you were putting up a poster in your local FLGS would you just call it a Dark Sun campaign? Or is it far enough away with next to no common points (not even the maps) that you'd feel the need to point out the ways it is not Dark Sun, just inspired by it.

That's all this is - no judgement about what you want to run. It's literally all good.

Just exploring what is a setting, which I believe to be the lore of it - the history, cultures, politics, etc.

 

[Blue]

..great description of a campaign removed...

But it's not just the "occasional exception" that I changed - I tossed out a bunch of things that probably feel like comfortable furniture to people who are super-familiar with the setting. Yeah, the canonical lore was my springboard, but it was only where I started, and I twiddled a bunch of knobs on that sucker to make it serve my needs. I am most definitely not "follow[ing] the established lore as much as possible" - I'm following it for as long as it's fun and supports the campaign I have in mind, and then I'm doing what I d!mn well please with it.

So my question is: Are you really saying that if I was going to do all that, I should've just invented my own world instead, or filed off the serial numbers and changed all the names? Even though that would've exponentially increased my workload? And please note that the question isn't whether or not you'd enjoy playing in my game; it's that, given that its intended audience seems to be having an outrageously good time, are you actually making the prescription for my table that you seem to be, and if not - in light of examples like my own - what is it that you do actually mean to say?

I'm not the person you were replying to, but I'm saying that at all. There no judgement in using strict settings, grabbign a setting and making it your own, or pure homebrew. Everyone enjoy what they want.

I'm just asking what defines a setting. And the part that seems controversial is when do changes to what define a setting instead make it a variant, an alt-history, a based-on, or just a homebrew? It's not about that it's not good to play those - by all means run whatever makes you and your table happy, there's no BadWrongFun for changing things and making it your own. That's practically the definition of what a campaign will do to a setting.

The FR is a bit of a beast because of the sheer weight of lore in it - you can toss out so much and it's still the Realms simply because you would never touch it.

Yes, I'm contradicting myself vs. the thread about dropping Xen'drik in Eberron. The FR has been assembled piecemeal and resembled again and again as they have advanced metaplots or just detailed an area they hadn't before and needed to retcon other bits that it doesn't hang together as tightly as a setting made in one piece. It's got the most you can massage withotu it having large ripple effects as long as you keep some iconics. If you said Waterdeep never existed people might look at you odd.

So you've got a kick-arse campaign, and that doesn't stop no matter what you call it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hi Banana - you do great posts, but I think you hit upon a major fallacy so I'm going to use this as an example.
It's all okay, you can run whatever you want. Completely. This isn't at all about "what you can run". Run what makes you and your table happy.

Fair enough! I think [MENTION=6803722]ProgBard[/MENTION] talked a lot about individual tables in his OP, but it's pretty true that "you can do what you want at your table" is perhaps not the most revealing point for D&D.

It's a question of what defines a setting. If I run straight box Forgotten Realms, is it Eberron? I don't think it's a stretch to say I'd get agreement that it's not. The question is what defines a setting, and when do changes made to it start making it a variant, an alternate history, or even not the same setting.

And it's ALL GOOD to do any of those. Want to run an alt-history Forgotten Realms for your table? Go for it, there's no judgement.

But say you wanted to run an alt-history Dark Sun where Rajaat never learned arcane magic, and the Green Age never ended. It would be a richly verdant world with no sorcerer kings, no slaves. Again, could be really cool to run. But if you were putting up a poster in your local FLGS would you just call it a Dark Sun campaign? Or is it far enough away with next to no common points (not even the maps) that you'd feel the need to point out the ways it is not Dark Sun, just inspired by it.

That's all this is - no judgement about what you want to run. It's literally all good.

Just exploring what is a setting, which I believe to be the lore of it - the history, cultures, politics, etc.

If you're looking at a definition, I think the best definition is a strict definition. If you change the history of Dark Sun, you're playing your version of a Dark Sun game, and that might change the kinds of characters and stories you're telling there.

I think that practically speaking, in play, there's little expectation of "setting purity," however. The assumption is that you'll make the setting your own. Change elements. How many elements you change before it becomes "not the same setting" is pretty subjective. Is a Dark Sun that doesn't hate arcane magic still Dark Sun? Is a Dragonlance with gnome wild mages still Dragonlance? Well, by a strict definition, maybe not. But in terms of what you're sitting down to play on Sunday, sure. And certainly the events that happen during play are going to change the setting in all sorts of small and large ways.

It's kind of like the RAW/House-rule distinction. Every game is going to have some house-rules, some rulings a DM makes to keep the game flowing. That's just how the game is played. But when talking about what the game is, the RAW is a useful starting point, and it sets expectations.

Which gets back to the main thrust of my point: the rules are no less or more flexible than the setting material is. So in contrast to the OP, I'd say that lore is rules, and rules are lore: a change to one is no more or less dramatic than a change in another.

 

[ProgBard]

I think that practically speaking, in play, there's little expectation of "setting purity," however. The assumption is that you'll make the setting your own. Change elements. How many elements you change before it becomes "not the same setting" is pretty subjective. Is a Dark Sun that doesn't hate arcane magic still Dark Sun? Is a Dragonlance with gnome wild mages still Dragonlance? Well, by a strict definition, maybe not. But in terms of what you're sitting down to play on Sunday, sure. And certainly the events that happen during play are going to change the setting in all sorts of small and large ways.

It's kind of like the RAW/House-rule distinction. Every game is going to have some house-rules, some rulings a DM makes to keep the game flowing. That's just how the game is played. But when talking about what the game is, the RAW is a useful starting point, and it sets expectations.

Which gets back to the main thrust of my point: the rules are no less or more flexible than the setting material is. So in contrast to the OP, I'd say that lore is rules, and rules are lore: a change to one is no more or less dramatic than a change in another.

In light of all the well-reasoned and thoughtful responses like this one, I'm starting to think I should've called this thread "Whatever 'lore' is, it isn't 'rules' (except when it is)."

There's something in my mind that still keeps me from seeing things like "a morningstar does 1d8 piercing damage" and "orcs are followers of Gruumsh" as being of a kind, even if for practical purposes they work the same way.* But as I noted upthread, it's entirely possible that's my hangup and my problem.

And anyway, I suppose my real point is that I think it's probably a mistake to see either one as an inflexible, monolithic thing. Which is probably a relatively uncontroversial opinion. Except, clearly, when it isn't.

*...sort of. I guess the difference for me is that "pure" crunch doesn't feel to me to have as much of an implied caveat that sometimes it applies and sometimes it doesn't, where that seems to be something like a default property of lore - at least when we're talking about something like the environment you're likely to find a particular monster in. But maybe that says more about the way I think about crunch than it does anything else.

 

[ProgBard]

I'm just asking what defines a setting. And the part that seems controversial is when do changes to what define a setting instead make it a variant, an alt-history, a based-on, or just a homebrew? It's not about that it's not good to play those - by all means run whatever makes you and your table happy, there's no BadWrongFun for changing things and making it your own. That's practically the definition of what a campaign will do to a setting.

The FR is a bit of a beast because of the sheer weight of lore in it - you can toss out so much and it's still the Realms simply because you would never touch it.

Yes, I'm contradicting myself vs. the thread about dropping Xen'drik in Eberron. The FR has been assembled piecemeal and resembled again and again as they have advanced metaplots or just detailed an area they hadn't before and needed to retcon other bits that it doesn't hang together as tightly as a setting made in one piece. It's got the most you can massage withotu it having large ripple effects as long as you keep some iconics. If you said Waterdeep never existed people might look at you odd.

Well, as we touched on earlier, I think different worlds are likely to have different breaking points to where they're no longer effectively the thing you started with. FR can take a lot of torque, as it were.

Which isn't to say you can't turn one of the big knobs* on Eberron and still have something you can recognize as Eberron, but you'd have a lot more questions to answer as far as the ripple effects. Which, as we discussed before, might be a fascinating AU reflection of the world, in the same way that alternate-history settings of our own world can be a lot of fun. But the buy-in required for your group goes up too.

It occurs to me that one of the emergent themes of this discussion is probably "Change whatever you want, just be aware of the consequences."

*I've invoked this metaphor a couple of times now, and it's probably worth disclosing that I'm stealing it from one of the big influences on my thinking about this kind of thing: Douglas Hofstadter's essay "Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity," collected in Metamagical Themas - a work I admittedly don't have to hand, so I'm relying in part on my faulty middle-aged memory of it. But I recommend it unreservedly for anyone who wants to explore the underpinnings of this topic further.

 

[I'm A Banana]

There's something in my mind that still keeps me from seeing things like "a morningstar does 1d8 piercing damage" and "orcs are followers of Gruumsh" as being of a kind, even if for practical purposes they work the same way. But as I noted upthread, it's entirely possible that's my hangup and my problem.

FWIW, I don't think you're alone, and it's probably easier for most people to imagine what a change in lore would look like and why you would do it than what that same change in mechanics looks like or why you would do it.

Like, it's not hard to imagine a cockatrice that lives on glaciers. Just that sentence probably put the idea in your head, and it's easy to see how it might be similar or different to the "standard" cockatrice (maybe it has blue-white feathers! maybe it turns things it pecks into ice!). You could even imagine why I'd want to do that, probably.

But, if I say that a morningstar deals 2d4 damage...like...why? And what effects might that have on play? Maybe none? Maybe now everyone's wielding morningstars? How do I predict that?

People think naturally in terms of lore - the meanings it has and the change in meaning when you change it are pretty clear. Mechanics are at least a degree removed from "what happens to your hero in the world," so changing them and knowing what effects those changes have is a little more opaque.

This ultimately leads to lore changes being more frequent and easier to accept for most tables than mechanics changes.

I just think that's more of a difference of degree than a difference of kind.

 

[Remathilis]

It's kind of like the RAW/House-rule distinction. Every game is going to have some house-rules, some rulings a DM makes to keep the game flowing. That's just how the game is played. But when talking about what the game is, the RAW is a useful starting point, and it sets expectations.

100% this.

I think this is also a great lens to discuss other flavor-based elements of the game. Specifically, things like "how much change before it stops being X?" questions. I mean, I can tinker with D&D's skill systems, ban classes, or remove alignment from the game and the game still resembles D&D, but I go and remove SDCIWCh or levels from the game, should I really be calling the game D&D anymore?

The same is true of fluff. Few people will care if your orcs worship Gruumsh, Orcus, or Bane, but if you make the LG pacifist farmers and then say you run "Forgotten Realms", it starts to smell a little funny. The same goes for other radical changes (say, founding a the Grand Empire of Bruce in the middle of the Sword Coast or removing ALL non-human PC races from the world). Yeah, maps are hard to draw and all, but saying such a world is "Forgotten Realms" is like making a classless, level-less game and calling it "D&D". At a certain point, it stops looking like stock and start becoming kitbash.