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

[TwoSix]

I understand that people are different, but by and large, others I've encountered see things the same way that I do.

I believe it, but we have to remember there's some self-selection bias going on there too. Most people I play with aren't big on canon details, but people for whom continuity and details are important also wouldn't be happy with me as their DM!

 

[pemerton]

FR and GH are the very definition of generic high fantasy, and are just canvasses that you can easily mix and match and alter without any big deal.

FR I don't pretend to understand.

But GH I think I have a bit of a handle on: I think I own and have read most GH RPG supplements that have been published, and I've been running games set in GH for around half of the past 30-odd years.

I see GH as a version of the Hyborian Age: it gives us pseudo-historical locations all good-to-go for fantasy action adventure. It has ancient and magical cultures (esp the Suel) to be a source of Xaltotun and Thugra Khotan types. It has knights if we want them (Furyondy for feudal; Nyrond for somewhat more Byzantine). It has cities of thieves (eg GH, Hardby, Highport) which can contain as many Towers of the Elephant as a campaign requires. And, unlike REH's Hyborian age, it also has lots of Tolkienesque elves, dwarves etc, and even some handy forests (Suss Forest, Gnarley Forest) for our rangers (Aragorn, Sons of Elrond, etc) to do some serious orc-fighting in!

The middle of the map even puts all of these things within a handy 10 hex radius, or thereabouts, of Hardby: the Bright Desert for mysterious ruins and ancient Suel tribesmen; the Abor-Alz for hill tribes and badlands along the lines of People of the Black Circile; the Nyr Dyv and the Wooly Bay for saiing and pirates; numerous cities and towns of slighlty different flavour (the Leiber-style GH; Dyvers; Verbobonc; Hardby; Highport with its slavers; etc); the elves of Celene with its forest borderlands, the dwarves of the Lortmils and Kron Hills, and the orcs of the Pomarj and Wild Coast; etc.

There is stuff that doesn't really fit well with this world (eg a Sauron-style unified evil threat; if you want that it's Furyondy vs Iuz rather than the whole of the Free Peoples vs Sauron). But there is a heap of stuff that does fit with it: ruins, thieves, intrigue, ancient wizards/liches and the like; cults; etc.

And (not to beat too hard on a dead horse) I think a mysterious order of lunar wizards is not out of place. No snake cults and their temples. Nor grim barbarians of the north who worship doom-ful gods like Crom, or Kos from the Newhon chapter of DDG.

Give tnat GH is a pastiche of a pastiche, and deliberately so in order to support FRPGing, the idea that a GM treating it as such and adding to the pastiche is somehow mistreating the setting makes no sense to me at all. In fact, it verges on contradiction!

 

[pemerton]

But every campaign, to me, is its own thing; a collaborative story between the DM and the players. It's not an attempt to re-create someone else's lore.

It's not about recreating someone's lore... the lore is already there, for my group at least it's that we know the lore and have chosen to create new stories within the parameters of said lore.

I agree with [MENTION=6799753]lowkey13[/MENTION] - RPGing is not karaoke.

And as far as the idea that the lore is already there: when EGG needed a god, he just made one up (Silver Key of Dalt, anyone?). When REH needed "lore" for the Hyborian Age, he looked up one of his books (and Patrice Louinet has tracked down most of the references in the appendices to his critical edition of the Conan stories). A GM who adds something in - a new god, a new cult, some element of Perrenland that they stole from a B-documenary about Swiss halbedeers s/he once saw - is not breaking the canon, s/he's simply following the process that generated it in the first place!

In other words if I answer a flyer in the LGS that says D&D Greyhawk game and I get there and the are using FATE and have replaced the gods some of the major historical events and the factions but retain the map and broad lore I am going to feel like the claim was misleading and probably not stick around to play because IMO it's neither a D&D game or a Greyhawk game.

These comments keep coming up, in this and the other thread. They're red herrings.

Who in the history of RPGing has ever advertised their FATE game set in a GH adaptation as a "D&D GH game"? Or, to refer back to [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION]'s example, who has ever advertised his/her apocalyptic Mad Max-style game as a "D&D FR game"?

Me posting on a message board about my GH game, which happens to include WoHS, has absolutely zero in common with some purely imaginary false advertisement posted on a "players wanted" board.

 

[pemerton]

if I want that type of freedom my group and I would run a homebrew and not claim it was Greyhawk or Dragonlance or any other official setting.

<snip>

if I am making up anything I want and changing anything I want I find it disingenuous to claim that I am running Greyhawk.

People on these boards use the word "disingenous" a lot. You do realise that it means lacking in honesty and instead being deceptive, don't you?

I call my game a GH game because it is set in the World of GH, it uses GH mapes and timelines, GH names and GH tropes. The fact that I don't care what Roger E Moore said about the colour of Warne Starcoat's Hat in his Circle of 8 module doesn't change that.

 

[Maxperson]

OK. My WoHS in my GH game make no specific reference to one any setting but GH. Hence they are a GH-specific mystical order. QED.

Wizard of High Sorcery is itself a setting specific reference. It's no different than Ranger of Ithilien.

 

[Shasarak]

People on these boards use the word "disingenous" a lot. You do realise that it means lacking in honesty and instead being deceptive, don't you?

Is there much difference between lacking in honesty and being deceptive?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Or, to refer back to @I'm A Banana's example, who has ever advertised his/her apocalyptic Mad Max-style game as a "D&D FR game"?

It really depends on personal genre definitions.

"Our game is headquartered in Waterdeep with excursions to Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter. And there's also that Drow city. And one of our players is basically Elminster. And Drizz't showed up to help. It's basically FR, just, like, custom cars covered in spikes instead of horses."

For a few less absurd examples, consider the DM who runs a Dark Sun game, only arcane spellcasters are no big deal. Or a Primeval Thule game only there's no cantrip-users allowed in the party, but you can be a monk or a paladin if you want. Or a Dragonlance game with a dark and brooding tone of hopelessness. Or an Eberron game where the Last War never happened. Or a Planescape game that's just an excuse for plane-hopping on an otherwise generic Get the McGuffin adventure. Or a game that's very, very medieval in tone...only there's kung-fu monks....

Are any of those games truly "as advertised?" Well, that depends on personal subjective definitions of the thing. For some folks, no paladins in Primeval Thule might be a defining characteristic of the setting, something that sets it apart from other settings. For others, it's just a detail. Whether or not the game is truly the game you signed up for depends on how close your definition of the thing is with the DM's definition of the thing and the definition of the thing used by the other players at the table.

The broader and less coherent that definition, the bigger the chance of someone saying, "Hey. This isn't really what I expected when you said we'd be playing a Forgotten Realms game, because we're basically Crusaders in Al-Quadim, and honestly my buddy's game where Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter, and Mezzoberanzan were all in the Australian wasteland and we all drove custom cars with spikes all over them to fight Thay."

 

[pemerton]

The minute you put something in that isn't Greyhawk and claim it is... you're arbitrating. If I stick to what is branded Greyhawk by the owners of said brand I am not arbitrating anythying.

This has been discussed upthread. If you don't include the brand-owners latest publication then you are arbitrating.

Which has the odd consequence that every FR player who ignored the 4e changes they didn't like is, by your criterion, no longer playing a FR game.

Likewise, every FR player who had some event happen in their game (eg Waterdeep got blown up by some shade in a flying citadel) which is contradicted by later published material (which assumes that Waterdeep is still there) is, by your criterion, no longer playing a FR game.

I take these sorts of examples to be sufficient to show that your criterion is flawed.

While Greyhawk campaigns aren't the exact Gygax setting, we do know his vision for it, because he set it out in the setting canon. Significant departures from that canon alter the setting he gave to us called Greyhawk.

<snip>

When I play in Greyhawk, I expect for there to be Iuz and The Grand Duchy of Geoff.

Just as there are in my GH game!

On the one hand, someone saying that anything branded GH is, ipso facto, GH. On the other hand, someone saying that GH is the Gygax vision of the campaign. Both argue the "strong" lore position.

<snip>

Gygax was famously forced out of TSR in '84-'85

<snip>

after that, TSR (and later WotC/Hasbro) did as they pleased to GH. In some cases, they did things that were deliberately anti-Gygax (infamously, Castle Greyhawk). Other things were just ... a different direction. Now, the reason that this matters is that the very things that Gygax published as GH ... his philosophy of it, if you will, were undermined by later publications.

I'm glad that someone else noted the contrast between those two posts!

It's completely fine if you like your lore as-is. That's great! But don't tell people that run Greyhawk that they are doing it wrong because they are running it as it was originally intended.

QFT.

I think you're focusing too much on Greyhawk specifically and not enough on the question as it relates to the wider realm of campaign and gaming settings... Greyhawk was just an example... again replace it with LotR, Star Wars, Eberron, Dragon Age and so on...

The reason the discussion is focusing on GH is because various posters (you, Maxperson) have been telling me that I my GH game is not actually a GH game. Maxperson has even told me that some of my choices in relation to worldbuilding for that game are very poor GMing. (Because they might confuse him and his friends, although I don't see how given they never even had heard of my game until I posted about it here.)

If you now want to say that the varous criticisms of my game, and the suggestions that it is is disingenousness of me to refer to it as a GH game, are wrong - and that really you meant to be making some point about Krynn, or LotR, or Eberron - well, then, come out and make that clear!

Again, I'm not against such changes. I just feel that they need to be given to the players ahead of time and that they make that particular setting an alternate Greyhawk, not just Greyhawk.

This is a bizarre suggestion. So I can't come out and have Ivid IV in fact be a lich; or King Belvor of Furyondy to secretly be a werewolf (and that's the explanation for why Furyondy is in decline - its once-paladin ruler is made and tortured by his lycnathropy); without running that by my players first, because it is a departure from what is written in the books?

That's taking RPGing as karaoke to new heights!

 

[Campbell]

It seems like some people are taking issue with the context-sensitive nature of communication. Words and phrases do not necessarily have a singular meaning. Look at any word in any dictionary. You will most likely find multiple definitions. Now, look at the same word in a different dictionary. It is likely to differ in exact usage. We look at words within their context, and if we are unsure what people mean we can always ask them. If I say I'm going to run a game of Dungeons and Dragons I could mean several things. I could mean I'm running any number of the editions of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons line. I could be using either Holmes or Mentzer Basic. I could be using the Rules Cyclopedia. What lore is in use can also be variable. I could be running one of any given official settings, using any of their iterations of lore. I could be using an unofficial setting like Scarred Lands. I could be running a homebrew setting. I'm not being disingenuous in my communication no matter which version I'm running. What I am doing is not being terribly precise.

There isn't one Dungeons and Dragons. There are multiple games that share some cultural elements, genre conceits, and play procedures. There are also other games that share some of the same traits, published under different names that if they are not Dungeons and Dragons are at least pretty close. Games like Pathfinder, Swords and Wizardry, Dungeon World, ACKS, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and Shadow of the Demon Lord all definitely share a cultural relationship to Dungeons and Dragons in a way that most roleplaying games do not. Some of them basically are imperfect copies of other D&D games.

At the end of the day, what matters is that we achieve a level of understanding in our conversations. I do not think there is any confusion about anyone's games in this thread. What I am seeing is an insistence that people are not allowed to mean slightly different things with the same words.

 

[pemerton]

Wizard of High Sorcery is itself a setting specific reference. It's no different than Ranger of Ithilien.

But if I called them Wizards of Heavenly Power it would have made all the difference?

Is there much difference between lacking in honesty and being deceptive?

Very little. Are you querying my semantics, or just editing for redundancy?

The substantive point is that I'm getting a bit sick of being accused of dishonesty ("disingenuously" descfribing my game as GH") when - as far as actual play reports go - I'm one of the frankest regular posters on these boards - and also of being told I'm engaged in very poor GMing because I ran a game for me and my friends that would have caused the heads of [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] and his friends to explode had they known about it (or maybe there heads explode only when they are forced to participate in it - the exact critera for my GMing being judged poor are still a bit opaque to me).

It really depends on personal genre definitions.

"Our game is headquartered in Waterdeep with excursions to Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter. And there's also that Drow city. And one of our players is basically Elminster. And Drizz't showed up to help. It's basically FR, just, like, custom cars covered in spikes instead of horses."

And are you suggesting that that is a good analogy for my GH game?

That is, are you suggesting that there is no difference (either of kind or of degree) in dropping a DL-inspired magical order into GH and turning the genre of FR from D&D fantasy default to post-apocalyptic sci-fantasy road warriors?

Or is it just another red herring.