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

[jmucchiello]

Eberron's main political component is its a world very similar to Europe after WWI. A gigantic war that had caused untold deaths and the loss of an entire generation had ended, great empires had been reduced to newly-formed splinter states vying for sovereignty, fanatical groups were on the rise which threaten the fragile peace, and a new world has emerged, but it is not the glorious new future anyone was hoping for. Politically, its a setting rife for intrigue, spies, saboteurs, assassins, old grudges, and new rivalries to emerge, rather than the squabbles between landed gentry and well-defined borders most D&D settings have.

That's all well and good. But most people are not historians and know nothing of post WWI Europe (or at least most Americans don't). Just like most people don't know the mindset of 1400s villagers, they don't know what it's like to deal with a world post major war that didn't really settle anything.

 

[Blue]

L

I guess it depends what you mean by "core construct". Xen'drik is an important background element for many of the things in Eberron, but one can run a perfectly reasonable Eberron game with the PCs never setting foot on that continent. Although, I guess I'm not really a purist, since my Eberron has no Halflings in it.

There's a difference between "we never explored Xen'drik" and "it categorically doesn't exist".

 

[Lanefan]

I will even go so far as to call this a grognard attitude. The preface to the 1e AD&D DMG said (more or less) the more one strayed from the rules as written the more likely you were no longer playing AD&D. For some, that attitude has since become rule zeroed out, I think.

No, it's been Gygaxed out by his saying in the same book that the rules are but guidelines. I've been messing with his rules - to a rather massive extent - for well over 30 years yet I still consider my game to be (A)D&D; and on a good day I can be as grognardy as anyone.

Lan-"it's telling, I think, that neither the PH nor the DMG have the word 'rules' anywhere in their title yet one includes the word 'guide'"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

There's a difference between "we never explored Xen'drik" and "it categorically doesn't exist".

Depends. If you're one of those who holds that nothing in the game world exists until and unless the PCs interact with it...

Lan-"if a continent disappears in the forest and nobody notices, was it ever there at all?"-efan

 

[Ilbranteloth]

So like an idiot, I dipped into the last few pages of the Setting Canon thread, which seems to have long since gone off the rails, slipped the tracks, careened into the wilderness, and barrel-rolled two or three times before catching on fire and exploding. That said, though, something startling came up in recent posts that was so alien to my experience that I had to make sure I was reading it right: The idea that if gameworld "lore" (specifically of monsters in the discussion in question, but presumably exapndable to all other aspects) isn't utterly consistent, it's useless, and that if you allow exceptions for some aspect of it you might as well throw the whole rulebook out, cats and dogs living together, &c., &c.

In short, I was flabbergasted to find a subset of my fellow hobbyists who want setting lore to be another kind of rule.

Which, dude, I am not about to declare BadWrongFun on however you choose to relate to your gaming materials, but that seems to me like a setup for heartbreak. And I confess I don't understand the absolutism behind it. It feels like a misreading of the intent of that content - asking that a piece of the game does something it wasn't intended to.

To me, "lore" seems like it's meant to be more of a starting point than an end. It's a general understanding of how things are in the setting - or, at most, default assumptions that may or may not be valuable to your own version of the gameworld. Even as "canon," it's a way of saying "This is what's known to be true, except when it isn't." If it's done well, it should suggest things that could happen in the course of play, but not dictate them. Adhering to or ignoring the lore ought to depend on what's going to make a more interesting play experience.*

Expecting lore to operate as if it were another set of rules feels like mistaking (to use a couple of loaded and decidedly imperfect terms) fluff for crunch. Tipping the hat to the late Sir Pterry, the Lore is not the Law, even if your ideolect pronounces them the same way.

Or at least that's how I see it. If you disagree with me, I'd love to hear what experiences inform your different expectations, and what you feel it serves to treat that part of the game that way. I'd also be interested to learn what compromises, if any, you'd be willing to make as part of a table that views lore in a, well, fluffier way than you do. I don't know that I'll ever really grok this way of thinking, but I'd at least like to get a sense of how it looks from the perspective of someone whose default settings are so different from mine.

Because:
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*Words deliberately chosen because some of you out in forumland seem to be allergic to the word story, but that's what we're talking about here.

That's because "lore" isn't a fixed thing. Except when it is.

There's game world physics, rules, lore and such that is DM approved an accurate. Sometimes this includes crunch, but it doesn't have to.

Then there is everything else that the players know, or might know. This can be nebulous, and answered by a question to the DM, it could be published, like the settings books, novels, even video games, etc. Since I run in the Forgotten Realms, I encourage players to read as much as they want. It might not be exactly as it is in my campaign, but that shared world experience is one of the reasons I like the Realms. There's a lot of material that the players can already know.

So from the players perspective, lore is a mix of knowledge of the world, and the knowledge of their characters. But from the DM perspective it can be as important and "crunchy" as rules, even if it doesn't add anything mechanically. Organizations and alliances are good examples of something that is lore but has direct game influence.

I suppose that there could be an attempt to define when something shifts from lore to rule, but I don't think it's all that important.

I should also note that as a DM I modify both the rules and the lore to my purposes. Healing magic functions differently in my campaign.

The reason why some people take canon/lore very seriously is that it defines the setting, and it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. For folks who enjoy a world building or simulation approach, it's an important part of the process. The 4e changes to the Forgotten Realms, both directly and indirectly, are good examples as to how the lore also altered the nature of the setting. Some was direct, like dropping a continent of dragonborn on top of an existing continent. Not subtle, and not welcomed by all. Other was less direct, such as the rebranding of elves as eladrin, or the switch to all worlds using a specific concept for the outer planes.

It would be similar to Klingons appearing in the next Star Wars movie.

Some people are just playing D&D. That is, it's a relatively generic setting (although now it's explicitly set in the Forgotten Realms), and they have no problem with a mash-up of races, cultures, villains, monsters, etc. appearing within "their" Forgotten Realms. But for many of us, we've had decades of time spent in and building our own Forgotten Realms. While there's always a bit of modification for home campaigns, if you said you ran your game in the Forgotten Realms you had some general understanding of what they meant. Just like if they were running a Dragonlance campaign, or Dark Sun campaign.

Now when somebody says they run in the Realms, it's not as clear. Many run a continuation of their 3.5e or earlier campaign, ignoring everything since 4e's release. Others are playing in the 5e Realms, but ignoring the 4e changes. Others play in the current Realms including all of that. The release of what turned out to be very unpopular lore split the setting into a number of groups.

The "story" part of lore can also have a huge impact. Again, the 4e Realms is a good example. The story presented by the CS was that this great magical plague affected the realms, changing how magic worked, destroying lands, dropping in new ones, all sorts of stuff. Now it's nearly 100 years later, and all that has stabilized, you may continue with your Forgotten Realms campaign with the new lore.

OK, except that all of the human characters in your campaign are now dead because, you know, the story says it's 100 years later.

 

[Gardens & Goblins]

What is lore? Baby don't learn me, don't learn, no more!

Doo doo doo do doo doo doo do doo doo...

 

[Blue]

Depends. If you're one of those who holds that nothing in the game world exists until and unless the PCs interact with it...

Lan-"if a continent disappears in the forest and nobody notices, was it ever there at all?"-efan

So, deleting Xen'drik with no other changes means you've just deleted Aerenal Elves. You've taken out the decline of Giant civilization after the war with the Quori? But if you're not playing that Giants are still in control that means you'll also deleting that whole civilization. Which means ...

My guess is that if you're describing your game as Eberron, you probably are playing with something like the default history and how it's shaped the lands to they are now. Which wouldn't be the case in Xen'drik never existed.

So it's an easy answer - if the general shape of Eberron history is intact, then Xen'drik existed because the players interacted with the results of it existing.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

There are other settings that definitely put their lore into the special rules category like Dark Sun while settings like Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms just use the standard DnD rules as their base line. I use Spelljammer as an example of Lore defining the rules because if I remember correctly the whole setting is based on an image of a Knight on the deck of a Sailing Ship heading into Wild Space.

Yes except that when they decided that Forgotten Realms was the default setting for D&D and started dumping everything they came up with into the Realms. The race and class bloat of 3/3.5e led to the Spellplague and homogonization of 4e, to somewhat reigning things back to the 3.5e approach.

It's not the same Realms that it used to be, although with the exception of Erin Evans' work, the novels still present largely the same Realms as ever. And the Realms has had quite a bit of its own unique lore that differentiated it from the other settings - shellfire, the seven sisters, the magister, and the relationship between the Deities and their world is significantly different from Greyhawk for example, which was much more the default D&D game until probably mid-2e and enormous amount of material for the Realms, along with the rise of the splat books with kits and 2.5e with skills and powers the core rules began to feel more like the Realms. That would have been fine, but they just didn't know where to stop...

 

[Lanefan]

So, deleting Xen'drik with no other changes means you've just deleted Aerenal Elves. You've taken out the decline of Giant civilization after the war with the Quori? But if you're not playing that Giants are still in control that means you'll also deleting that whole civilization. Which means ...

Or moved those events (and the Elves) to somewhere else...

My guess is that if you're describing your game as Eberron, you probably are playing with something like the default history and how it's shaped the lands to they are now. Which wouldn't be the case in Xen'drik never existed.

First, a disclaimer: my knowledge of Eberron could fit in a thimble, probably with space left over.

That said, let's say I decide to more or less use the Eberron maps, cities, cultures, people, races, classes, quasi-steampunk feel, and all the rest for my game but toss out nigh every shred of its "canon" history and replace it all with something of my own devising for whatever reason. Is it still Eberron? (my answer: yes)

Lan-"truth be told, if I ever did end up running a game in Eberron this is very close to exactly what I'd do"-efan

 

[Ilbranteloth]

And yet Sorbo's Herc was indeed Hercules to a great many people, whether your friend approved or not. Which is not the same thing as saying he ought to have enjoyed something for which he clearly wasn't the audience (and nor was I for that particular show). But none of us get to be the gatekeepers and arbiters of Real True $Thing for the stuff that's gone out into the culture, even when that culture is as small and weird as ours is. That's probably doubly true for RPG settings, enjoyed as they are in mostly private circumstances.

Remember: Our valorization of "authenticity" is a distinctly modern thing, not an eternal jewel of truth and beauty. Taken to an extreme, valuing authenticity for its own sake is no more virtuous than rules lawyering, and potentially as toxic.

And FWIW, the knob-twiddling you describe here for various settings sounds to me like any of them could produce interesting results that might be fun to explore, if I knew in advance that those changes were being made. I'm not about to tell someone their alternate-universe version of a setting is a bad idea, and I'm going to go out on a rare prescriptive limb here and say that, really, you shouldn't either.

But we do get to be gatekeepers and arbiters of the Real True Thing for the stuff in our own home campaign.

The declaration of something as "authentic" or more appropriately "approved" does have a purpose and a value. As you said, it informs the rules. My only real issue about what is published when it differs significantly from established lore in a setting is that it now creates a potential dividing line. Do I allow something I don't agree with in my campaign, or do I tell somebody they can't choose that option? For a home campaign, not a big deal. But when I run public campaigns I prefer to run extensions of my home campaign. They are adding additional characters and lore to the Realms. But in that environment, restrictions and denial of races, classes, rules, and such is not always as welcome.