D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

[Hussar]

And you need to recognize that there are players--quite a lot of them IME--who don't want to seriously deal with any setting's lore. And no, not playing with such players is not a functional option for everyone.

I think this, right here, is the basic issue. This is something that is quite common IME. It's not that players don't care. It's that they will never care as much as you do about your setting. If you're DMing, you're thinking about this stuff all the time. When you design a scenario, the setting is something you're drawing on a lot of the time and you're probably spending some mental effort trying to make whatever scenario you're building fit within the campaign.

IOW, a DM won't deliberately (most of the time) make material that is totally divorced from the campaign. That's kinda that point of a campaign. You are making material for that campaign which means you are making material for that world. As a player, you never have that level of involvement in the setting. Not in D&D at least. Which means that the players are automatically a step or two removed from the setting.

And we see that remove in the characters they bring to the campaign.

 

[Azzy]

Really, I have the impression that a setting should be lightly sketched out and malleable, with the lions share of the setting lore being introduced during play (because most players' eyes seem to glaze over when you give them even short documents on lore) and verbally during Session 0. Also, during Session 0, the DM and players need to have a two-way conversation during character creation so that all the players and the DM are on the same page and pass ideas between them.

 

[plecostomus]

Look, i can respect wanting to stick to a setting’s lore, but for all the horror stories I’ve heard online about kender players being, well, kender players, I’m just a little surprised i still hear GMs choosing to enforce using kender over halflings in DL when a player wants to play a halfling.

Oh don't worry, he was stealing things even before I explained to him that kender have some notoriety in that direction. Maybe the player did not know in his brain what he was, but it seems his heart has always known.

 

[TwoSix]

Really, I have the impression that a setting should be lightly sketched out and malleable, with the lions share of the setting lore being introduced during play (because most players' eyes seem to glaze over when you give them even short documents on lore) and verbally during Session 0. Also, during Session 0, the DM and players need to have a two-way conversation during character creation so that all the players and the DM are on the same page and pass ideas between them.

Unless we’re doing a game based on established IP and all the players have a decent amount of background with the IP, that’s how I run all my games.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Players who don't want to deal with a setting's lore shouldn't play in that setting.

Players who don’t want to deal with a setting’s lore don’t care about playing in a setting.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And yet, Nerath was the default pick-up-and-go. If you bought the core three 4e books and nothing else, you could run a perfectly serviceable campaign on Nerath. In 2014, you couldn't even run the Realms without a fourth book. I guess 2024 has Greyhawk in the DMG, but nothing in the player facing side remotely connects to it.

Then again, D&Ds Greatest Strength is apparently bringing a cleric of Corellon to a Dragonlance campaign...

It provided a very loose-sketch core setting which supported all the existing features, giving them functional thematic roots.

It did not reduce all of D&D to only one or two settings. That was never the goal of Nerath...nor the result. So...yeah I just don't agree in the slightest.

Making a single example setting, so folks can see stuff in action? Sure, that seems pretty reasonable. But a big part of the problem with doing that is that it's (demonstrably) hard for the designers to see what setting would be implied by the rules they've produced. I don't know why that's such a problem, but it clearly is. Eberron could not have been created until after folks knew the 3e rules and their...foibles, shall we say.

But creating One Setting To Rule Them All and telling folks that homebrew and such isn't what the game is for? Absolutely not. And yes, you did draw that distinction:

And I'm saying D&D's problem is having too many settings to be able to buy into. D&D needs one maybe two, fully developed settings, not 12 official and countless homebrew and 3pp.

No homebrew settings. No alternate-take settings. No steampunk. No Eberron. No Dark Sun. You were very specific about "countless homebrew" being a problem, not a positive.

There will be one setting--or maybe two if they absolutely must--and nothing else. I'm sorry, but that's simply not going to fly.