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

[Greenstone.Walker]

For me, lore and rules and setting are all part of predictable expectations.

An example of a "rule": Better AC means less chance to be hit. I can expect that if my character is wearing plate then I can expect to be hit less, so I can confidently wade into melee.

En example of a "lore": the world is high-magic. I can expect that if my character casts a spell then people around aren't going to freak out and go get pitchforks and torches.

If these expectations are broken, it breaks my fun. For example, the monster hits me and the GM says "oh, the ceremonial swords of the River Elves bypass the AC of plate armour" then my response will be "you know, it would have been nice to know that before I waded into melee!". Eventually, I'm going to stop trying to plan ahead, and just say "yeah, whatever, it's not like whatever I do makes any difference." That's no fun.

 

[Remathilis]

This whole debate, in my opinion, exposes the need to keep setting specific lore out of the likes of the PHB, DMG, and MM. MM less so because you can always include the little side bar. The rules themselves should be able to be plugged into any setting and off you go. Setting specific rules should be relegated to those books only.

They tried that. It was called AD&D 2nd Edition.

 

[Blue]

But does this mean it's not GH, or FR, or Eberron, unless it follows a script? And what if WotC publishes something tomorrow that changes the script?

I don't think a setting is a script. It's a bundle of names, places, tropes, events - more-or-less canonical, more-or-less paradigmatic.

I'm not sure how to say more. You brought up plays and shows as an example, but then when I reply using your exact examples you take something that isn't even close to what I said, that they follow a script, and use that as an argument again my point.

It's really a bit of a strawman to do that, and from your posts in other threads that doesn't seem to be the type of poster you are, so I assume we must be just missing each others points and accidentally talking past each other.

I submit that the point we're discussing has no cosmic importance and am more then happy to virtually shake hands and move on.

 

[Maxperson]

It puzzles me that this is what you take away from "the world is yours to change as you see fit and . . . to modify as you explore the consequences of the players' actions". Nor is there any suggestion that such modification makes it not Forgotten Realms.

Why are you puzzled? It just means that if they burn down Waterdeep, let it burn. That's a consequence to their actions. It doesn't meant that things have to have character importance in the way you run the game.

 

[Maxperson]

Where we differ, I think, is in how much alteration we accept before feeling the need to call it something other than Greyhawk.

Absolutely. I said earlier in this thread that everyone will have a different line where a setting becomes not that setting. Speaking from personal experience, I have never known someone to be so rigid that a setting loses its identity with a single change, though I bet there are some like that out there. Nor have I know anyone who would say a setting hasn't lost it's identity with a major re-write, say 25% of the setting is altered. The vast majority of players probably fall in-between those marks.

As has been mentioned, it's not really something people can quantify, but know when they see it. I couldn't tell you exactly where a setting would lose its identity for me, but I could sit down at a game and let you know from the changes whether it felt like that setting or not.

I know but little about Greyhawk's canon lore and thus as a player I don't really care what you do to it as long as the end result is reasonably consistent within itself. As a DM, not only do I not worry o'ermuch about sticking to the canon lore (see my Eberron examples upthread) but in fact I want to change it in order to make it new and different - and thus worth exploring and learning about - for anyone who's already familiar with that-setting-as-written who might wander into the game.

It depends on the changes. The vast majority of "changes" aren't changes to the canon itself, but rather additions to it. That's fine. The most detailed setting yet is 3e FR. With all the released books it details things more than any other setting ever released. Even so, each area has holes in the canon that you could simultaneously drive several mac trucks through. The DM can color to his hearts content inside of those holes and tell tons of stories. In fact, that seems to be the standard way settings are run.

On the other hand a true change to canon, such as making Elminster an evil druid who rules the Dales with an iron fist and is opposed by Fzoul Chembryl(sp), chosen of Oghma and his keep of sages, would get tons of people up in arms.

 

[pemerton]

what makes a setting a setting?

<snip>

The lore of a setting defines it.

<snip>

If you want to run Dark Sun but are meh on sorcerer kings and arcane desecration, Eberron but dragon marks and Houses don't interest you, of a happy shiny Barvarian for a better tomorrow, you aren't running those settings, just borrowing names from them.

I'm not sure how to say more. You brought up plays and shows as an example, but then when I reply using your exact examples you take something that isn't even close to what I said, that they follow a script, and use that as an argument again my point.

The reason I brought up Romeo and Juliet vis-a-vis West Side Story, or Conan Doyle's stories vis-a-vis Elementary, is because in each case the members of the pair are different (different locations, different names for protagonists, different eras, different words spoken, etc) but each is also recognisable as an instance of a common type.

In the RPG setting case, it seems to me that the same logic applies: if two campaigns use the same maps with the same names on them, the same basic historical logic/epochal events, etc - but in one the kidnapped prince of Furyondy is dead, murdered by elemental cultists; whereas in the other that kidnapped prince has been rescued and is now king of Furyondy following his father's death - then they are still both recognisably instances of a common type. Namely, they are still both GH games.

I took you to be denying this; and to be asserting that there is a "true" GH, such that anything that deviates from it is not really a GH game. This is why I mentioned a script: in the case of plays or similar productions, it is the script that one would point to to distinguish (say) Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet from West Side Story. I'm wondering what you take to be the analogue of the script in the setting case. I mean, I know from the first of the quoted posts that it is the lore, but how are you setting the parameters around that?

To link to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s quote from the 5e DMG: if the players in my FR game blow up Waterdeep, but WotC is continuing to publish material in which Waterdeep exists, does that mean my game has suddenly ceased to be a FR game?

Or what about if there is some bit of lore that we don't know about, and end up contradicting completely inadvertently? Eg suppose someone doesn't know the GH lore (from one of the old Oerth Journals, I think, or maybe an online post by Gygax) about the god Dorgha Torgu, who caused the Rain of Colourless Fire; and so, at their table they make up some other explanation for it? Or what if someone started playing a GH game with the Folio, and that game has advanced into the timeline of the LGG but has quite a different recent history, political geography etc from that of FtA, the Flight of Fiends, etc? Are these, therefore, not GH games?

It seems to me that an answer of "No, they'r not FR/GH games" would be weird. Hence why I think "recognisable instance of a common type" rather than "instantiation of defining lore" is the more apt criterion for identifying whether or not a particular campaign is set in GH, FR or some other published setting.

 

[Lanefan]

To link to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s quote from the 5e DMG: if the players in my FR game blow up Waterdeep, but WotC is continuing to publish material in which Waterdeep exists, does that mean my game has suddenly ceased to be a FR game?

I don't think anybody is saying anything about what might happen during (and-or caused by) the run of play in any game or setting. Your PCs blow up Waterdeep? It's still FR, only down one great big city.

The question is whether FR is still FR if you as DM have blown Waterdeep up during your design phase such that it either never existed at all or is a smoking ruin before play begins.

Lan-"there's parts of FR that need blowing up way more than Waterdeep does, but I digress"-efan

 

[pemerton]

I don't think anybody is saying anything about what might happen during (and-or caused by) the run of play in any game or setting. Your PCs blow up Waterdeep? It's still FR, only down one great big city.

The question is whether FR is still FR if you as DM have blown Waterdeep up during your design phase such that it either never existed at all or is a smoking ruin before play begins.

But that can't be any point of significant difference, can it?

If I ask (say) [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION] to join my FR game, and Waterdeep is blown up, what difference does it make to Remathilis whether I as GM blew it up off-screen or whether the players blew it up in some previous escapades? If the absence of Waterdeep is enough to make it misleading to describe my game as a FR game, then that seems to be the end of the matter, regardless of who was responsible for the authorship.

 

[Maxperson]

But that can't be any point of significant difference, can it?

Of course it is. Gameplay is a nearly universally accepted means of altering the game world. I say "nearly" because I suppose it's possible that there are a few people out there who would play without being able to change anything. The DM changing things, though, is less accepted the more drastic those changes become.

 

[ProgBard]

To pick at a thread from a day or two ago: With the effort to make 5e's rulebooks as plain-language and straightforward as possible, I think it's safe to say that if the DMG had meant to say, "Change what you want in the official settings, but then they won't be the 'real' D&D worlds anymore," it would've come out and said so. Instead, the text goes out of its way to say, "These are your toys to play with, and you shoudln't feel constrained by the 'canonical' versions in any way." I think inferring that the point of that passage is a subtext that runs contrary to the surface meaning is ... a stretch that likely says more about the reader than the text.

(As a sidenote: My professional life is concerned deeply with both instructional text and plain language, and so I'm saying this with a perspective that arguably goes beyond Some Dude On The Internet; while I certainly can't speak ex cathedra about the intent of the DMG, I do feel confident, looking at it as one professional considering another's work, in saying that it's a book we can take at face value in terms of the passages like the one in question.)

Nonetheless: the issues of predictibility and expectations are important; and as we've come round to a couple of times, those are going to have different values for different tables. To go to the Romeo and Juliet parallel again, some playgoers are going to feel like it isn't "real" Shakespeare if a production uses modern dress, or colorblind casting, or cuts to the text, or modern instead of period pronunciation, or the assumption that the author was indeed a fellow from Stratford and not the Earl of Oxford. I think all those dismissals are wrong, myself, in some cases offensively so; but I'm also not inclined to make people go to the theatre who aren't going to have a good time.

Also as we've hit on now a couple of times, it feels like communication is key. If I advertise that my production of Romeo and Juliet is a painstaking as-it-would-have-been-seen-at-the-Globe recreation, but then I put it on with modern dress and pronunciation, elaborate sets, and women in the cast, that's a pretty crappy bait-and-switch. Thankfully, the conventions of modern theatre don't require you to detail every way in which you're departing from the original staging, but your press should at least give audiences an idea what to expect out of it, especially if you're adding something that might be construed as a "gimmick" (the play's being reimagined as a Sichuan opera, or staged with ersatz Muppets, or has been translated into LOLcat).

Most tinkering with established settings is pretty easy to communicate, though. And that's true even if your changes are kinda gonzo. I can imagine sending a message to a prospective group that ran something like, "Hey, guys, we're going to be playing in Greyhawk with the following changes to canon: The Duchy of Geoff is run by werewolves; Wee Jas has been replaced by the Great Old One Nyarlathotep; and I'm swapping in Freeport for the Sea Barons. Everything else will be more or less as the most recent setting books have it, with any other minor differences worked out as we get to them. If any of that messes up a character concept you were married to, send me a note and maybe we can work something out."

I mean, that seems easy enough. And it has the value of both establishing expectations and giving anyone for whom that doens't feel like "real" Greyhawk to opt out. (As well as giving folks with prior knowledge the chance to inquire further - how long have the lycanthropes been ruling Geoff? - and poke at the various implications and ripple effects, which may in turn lead the DM to shore up details they hadn't thought of yet.) And that, for me, is an end on't for practical purposes. Anything beyond that, in terms of figuring out whether those changes are enough to make it not "really" Greyhawk, is an academic, philosophical exercise that we're unlikely to reach consensus on. And frankly, if I may, a little wank-y to boot.