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

[Hussar]

@el-remmen, my current game is similar. I'm running Out of the Abyss and it starts off with the PC's being prisoners of hte Drow and having been shanghaied into the Underdark. Essentially, nobody knows much of anything about the setting. The nice thing that I'm discovering about OOTA is that each location is more or less self contained and the lore needed for each setting is in really easy to digest bite sized chunks. It's really well done that way.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Heh. I gotta admit, I'd be perfectly happy with that.

I mean, one setting was all we had for almost a decade. It wasn't until the mid 80's that we started getting more settings. When I started playing D&D, there was The Known World (wasn't even Mystara then) which was a small continent and about ten pages of notes and Greyhawk, which was a (smallish) continent and about a hundred pages of notes. That was it. And even after Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms started getting rolling, it still wouldn't really be until 2e that you saw a bunch of settings for D&D. Not official settings anyway.

I would be very happy if WotC would just settle down, pick one setting and focus on that. Would have no problem at all with that.

Perhaps that is true--indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if a plurality of people would be happy with that. Maybe even a very slim majority! The problem is, that plurality/slim majority would not all pick the same mono-setting. Some people love Greyhawk. Some people love FR. I personally love Eberron (despite never having actually played a game set in it) and PoLand/"world of Nerath" etc.

So, who gets to decide the one existing setting to rule them all? Does any setting have enough popularity to sustain exclusivity?

And if you make a brand-new setting, how do you sell it to the fanbase so they accept that there will never be any official support for their efforts to play anywhere else?

 

[Remathilis]

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:

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.

I sit down to play Cyberpunk Red, I know I'm playing in Night City. I read the core book, I know exactly what options are allowed, where my character comes from, even what the slang my character is going to speak, choom. If I play Pathfinder, I'm almost overwhelmingly playing in Golarion and likewise, I know that gnomes bleach, Saranae is the goddess of light, and Absalom is the largest city for miles. I know all this from just one book. And while GMs CAN choose to alter the settings for either C:R or PF, the books are written with the expectation you probably won't and thus exceptions are explicitly spelled out from the norm. If the GM wants to ban rockerboys or set their campaign on Barsoom, it's explicit and obvious the GM is purposefully messing with the intentions of the game.

But good old D&D. You can't tell a player "we're playing D&D" and end that sentence there to fully explain where your game is set. If you invited me to play D&D tomorrow in your game, I could not just grab just the PHB and make a character that will fit in your campaign seamlessly. Well, that won't be utterly generic. And similarly, if I buy Tasha's, I can't even be assured that the material will even fit in your world. If you use an official setting, I either have to buy a second book to read on the setting (though if I'm lucky, on might find a wiki explaining what I need and hope it's accurate). If you are homebrewing, good luck even assuming the options in the PHB are available!

Thus we come to the division that is at the heart of this and many other discussions. D&D isn't a common language: it's a common alphabet and everyone is writing different words out of the same 26ish characters. My hello is your bonjour and despite me knowing every letter in bonjour, I can't understand it without knowing that language first. And people aren't speaking the same language to one another. Well no wonder you get players walking in with an American southern drawl and the DM is speaking Catalan!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If I play Pathfinder, I'm almost overwhelmingly playing in Golarion

Which is the problem - I hate Golarion. It's a pastiche of the Forgotten Realms with all the interesting rough edges filed off, is incredibly expensive to keep up to date with, and tries to cram a multiverse-worth of different themes onto one planet, so it's not unusual to see androids fighting ancient Egyptians and other ridiculousnesses.

Oh, and I think gods should be mysterious and unknowable. I hate it when they personally show up to dictate Sunday School lessons.

If it hadn't been for Golarion I might have still being playing Pathfinder rather than taking up 5e.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I sit down to play Cyberpunk Red, I know I'm playing in Night City. I read the core book, I know exactly what options are allowed, where my character comes from, even what the slang my character is going to speak, choom. If I play Pathfinder, I'm almost overwhelmingly playing in Golarion and likewise, I know that gnomes bleach, Saranae is the goddess of light, and Absalom is the largest city for miles.

Night City is on a very different scale to Golarion. One's a city with determined slang and an observable hierarchy. The other is a "kitchen sink universe" with literally dozens of countries, each one with a hat including "having been The Terror of the French Revolution for literal decades". I don't think "We're playing Pathfinder in Golarion" tells you much more than "we're playing D&D"

 

[Remathilis]

Night City is on a very different scale to Golarion. One's a city with determined slang and an observable hierarchy. The other is a "kitchen sink universe" with literally dozens of countries, each one with a hat including "having been The Terror of the French Revolution for literal decades". I don't think "We're playing Pathfinder in Golarion" tells you much more than "we're playing D&D"

It tells me a slight bit more than D&D. The elves work essentially the same across the world (there are no major differences such as Krynns dark elves vs drow), the gods are the same, every supplement is automatically compatible with the lore (no Dragonborn don't exist on Oerth arguments). Yeah the setting is absolutely a clusterchuckle of everything, but as the default, it works to at least establish the baseline. D&D gives you a dozen different options and tells you to make sense of it. Its no wonder why everyone draws different conclusions!

Essentially it's the difference between the GM telling me we're playing Pathfinder and I can say "ok, I'm playing a gnome cleric of Shelyn" even before I know what region or AP, while a DM telling me we're playing D&D doesn't allow me to make a gnome cleric of Garl Glittergold before I know if the setting has gnomes, clerics, or Garl Glittergold.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I sit down to play Cyberpunk Red, I know I'm playing in Night City. I read the core book, I know exactly what options are allowed, where my character comes from, even what the slang my character is going to speak, choom. If I play Pathfinder, I'm almost overwhelmingly playing in Golarion and likewise, I know that gnomes bleach, Saranae is the goddess of light, and Absalom is the largest city for miles. I know all this from just one book. And while GMs CAN choose to alter the settings for either C:R or PF, the books are written with the expectation you probably won't and thus exceptions are explicitly spelled out from the norm. If the GM wants to ban rockerboys or set their campaign on Barsoom, it's explicit and obvious the GM is purposefully messing with the intentions of the game.

But good old D&D. You can't tell a player "we're playing D&D" and end that sentence there to fully explain where your game is set. If you invited me to play D&D tomorrow in your game, I could not just grab just the PHB and make a character that will fit in your campaign seamlessly. Well, that won't be utterly generic. And similarly, if I buy Tasha's, I can't even be assured that the material will even fit in your world. If you use an official setting, I either have to buy a second book to read on the setting (though if I'm lucky, on might find a wiki explaining what I need and hope it's accurate). If you are homebrewing, good luck even assuming the options in the PHB are available!

Thus we come to the division that is at the heart of this and many other discussions. D&D isn't a common language: it's a common alphabet and everyone is writing different words out of the same 26ish characters. My hello is your bonjour and despite me knowing every letter in bonjour, I can't understand it without knowing that language first. And people aren't speaking the same language to one another. Well no wonder you get players walking in with an American southern drawl and the DM is speaking Catalan!

So we pick a setting.

What do we do with the 3/4 of the audience who aren't interested in that setting, or worse, outright hate it? Or 2/3, or 1/2, or whatever. What incentive is there for those people to stick around with a game that actively does not want their attention?

I fully agree with you that D&D is not the perfect ultra-generic toolbox folks have claimed it is for ages. You'll never hear me say otherwise. D&D is a specific flavor. It's just a specific flavor that can go in a lot of dishes. Like say, cumin, or maybe cinnamon is a better pick since it's more versatile than people give it credit for but not infinitely versatile. You wouldn't put cinnamon into carbonara, but you can put it into "savory" dishes and have it taste great. Chinese five-spice powder usually includes cinnamon, for example, and I love using that in stir fry.

Not being "perfectly generic Fantasy Game Engine" does not mean D&D is hyperspecific to a single setting. It has aimed for a chunk of the spectrum, not the whole spectrum. For a different analogy, "blue" is not a single color, it's a range of colors, and shades/tints/tones of that range. That doesn't mean you can now slot in "blue" wherever you would put "red", but it does mean that "blue" can mean things which are very heavily green (such as cyan), or things that are verging into purple (e.g. indigo or certain meanings of "royal blue"), even though blue is neither green nor purple itself.

There's flexibility in what D&D is offering. There's much less flexibility in what Cyberpunk 2077 is offering. There is value in CP2077 being focused. There's also value--different value--in D&D being diverse. If there is any good lesson to learn from the victory of the 3e partisans in the 3e/4e edition war, it's that over-specialization is a real risk and carries serious negative consequences. That doesn't mean we should shy away from all specialization entirely, it just means we have to choose specialization carefully and for very good reasons, not simply because of a blanket assertion that specificity is better than generality.