Question, for lorehounds trying to convince Wizards to cut all the mechanics out of their books and fill them with narrative fluffery instead:
Why does my world have to work exactly like yours?
This, ladies and gentlemen; is what one calls "poisoning the well": I don't believe anyone has said anything to that effect at all (Most complaints I've seen include asking for more, rather than less rules-wise)... Indeed: it's always been within the power of DMs to take and leave any lore or element (including gameplay ones) that they personally didn't want to include at their table. That is the very point of "rule zero".
It is rather interesting though that people of the opposite persuasion from mine want, nay DEMAND that the lore NOT be included; thus imposing their preferred play style on others... And making a ruddy great headache for DMs who don't have the time to write an entire world or retrofit one into contemporary WotC's sparse books... Looking at you Hoard of the Dragon Queen, SPelljammer, Strixhaven, etc.
I find the entire “Wizards does not print enough lore nowadays” argument to be rather silly when the current banner advertisement is for a D&D product that has an entire recently-released novel as its lore companion piece, and when several recent D&D Beyond articles have been focused on the Dragonlance lore.
Additionally we have no real data on how setting books will be treated moving forward, so these threads are all speculating based on nothing substantial - we have not seen what a true setting book looks like in the “core books are setting agnostic” era (Spelljammer is weird for a number of reasons and cannot really be translated to Dragonlance and beyond).
So, we have a situation where we are speculating on no tangible information… and where the worst case scenario is “Wizards continues to publish setting information on D&D Beyond and in novels, and countless Wikis provide setting information and backstory from older sources, all at your fingertips.”
Not really a bad situation to be in, regardless of how Wizards handles lore in setting books moving forward.
Books like Fizban's Treasury of Dragons telling me how dragons have to be in the world, cramming Lore down my gullet with a steam hammer and telling me my own worldbuilding and personal fantasy can go f@#$ itself I'm using the real lore or my game is awful? Yeah, screw those books. I don't need some Dragonlance yaybo telling me dragons exist as multiversal omnipresent super-entities superior even to the gods, that doesn't even bloody make sense. You know what would have been super helpful to get in Fizban's? Ideas for "Titanic Combat" rules that help the players at a game actually feel like they're fighting a gigantic monster beyond the reach of most mortal arms. At no point should you be able to go after an elder dragon with a dagger and accomplish jack-monkey squat, let alone a rogue poking one in the toe for seventy damage on a fancy crit. There is not a six-inch blade in the history of mankind that can accomplish any-damned-thing against a monster larger than my house, and it would've been awesome if we'd gotten some new rules, ideas, and options for making battles against titanic foes truly feel titanic.
Buuuuuuut...well.
Just remember: not everybody wants deep, overdeveloped, highly restrictive and suffocating World Lore, and they don't necessarily not want it because they're offended by everything. I don't want lore because I can make my own at very little cost or effort, I need better rules instead. You don't care about rules, you want lore because to you it requires a lot of cost and effort to do yourself. Incompatible objectives, and yet Wizards has to meet both goals in as many books as it can.
How would you solve that, eh?
I for one, tend to agree with you here, and maybe some others on this thread, in that, I don't want the story part of lore hand delivered to me. Rather, as you said about Fizbans, it's more about interesting concepts and things that allow an instance to build lore off of. Things that make your players feel in-game. That said, it is also cool to have other people's ideas for lore (such as, I don't know, professional writers that work for a company or something), just so you have something to go off of. Like @Captain Corvid mentioned, ideas throughout history have been based, largely on, other ideas or experiences. As far as solving the dilemma you present...
I think you solve both issues by giving better rules and inspiration. If you give better rules for combat with dragons, and make dragons feel more fleshed out as villains, you encourage players to want to develop their dragon npc's more, thus becoming better lore writers. That is an extremely condensed version of the process, but, at the end of the day, you can't make everyone happy. Meeting demand means you have to make the masses happy. That also said, wizards, please frickin fix this. We want better rules. Please.
Any given book can only have so many pages. What do you take out for the extensive collections of worldbuilding you're looking to add? What gets removed so Wizards can add in all the worldbuilding you want? What are you willing to take away from everyone else to get world lore that is absolutely useless to anyone not looking to run a Red Box Canonical Faerun game?
That's the question. Call it poisoning the well all you like, but I am awful sick of being accused of a great many thinly-veiled Not Nice Things because I have a preference for enough lore to serve as an inspiration and jumping-off point without needing a two hundred page dossier on the history of Waterdeep and how it is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL FOREVER that I include Waterdeep and thoroughly understand to a history master's level all of this lore......in my Spelljammer game.
If you don't like or want Waterdeep, throw it out. You can 100% do that. And in regards thinly veiled not nice things, perhaps we should all take a moment to look in the mirror. I at least am saying there's no reason I can't have my cake and eat it too, while the same should be true of you.
Also, if it was "everyone else," this conversation wouldn't exist. Personally I find many of the mechanics and new stat blocks to be superfluous.
The thing that urks me here is a lot of people seem to be framing this as an "either or" zero-sum game: as though every paragraph dedicated to worldbuilding or explaining factions and setting is one not spent making rules interesting.
If you WANT to just lift D&D's rules and invent your own setting; that's fine, it's always been fine; it's what I've mostly done. Absolutely nothing is stopping you; knock yourselves out... The thing is though: its worlds and lore is part of what makes D&D what it is. Tenser's Floating Disc is named that because it's literally named after a character. D&D's little collection of distinct and each individually different fantasy worlds are all a part of what makes it Dungeons & Dragons, why it's still around, and why it hasn't been dethroned by Keeps & Kobolds, or Mazes & Minotaurs, or Galleons & Gryphons.
On the other hand: if you just want a rules system and nothing else: those games exist. One that comes to mind from the old days being GURPS; literally :"Generic Universal Roleplaying System"; it's the system Fallout was based upon. Those styles of systems still exist; pick one.
The thing that urks me here is a lot of people seem to be framing this as an "either or" zero-sum game: as though every paragraph dedicated to worldbuilding or explaining factions and setting is one not spent making rules interesting
I find the entire “Wizards does not print enough lore nowadays” argument to be rather silly when the current banner advertisement is for a D&D product that has an entire recently-released novel as its lore companion piece, and when several recent D&D Beyond articles have been focused on the Dragonlance lore.
Additionally we have no real data on how setting books will be treated moving forward, so these threads are all speculating based on nothing substantial - we have not seen what a true setting book looks like in the “core books are setting agnostic” era (Spelljammer is weird for a number of reasons and cannot really be translated to Dragonlance and beyond).
Extrapolation ain't hard if you pay attention to the consistency within existing products. For one, Planescape is going to show up as a boxed set ... you think it's going to follow the precedent of Spelljammer? The Bigby's Giant book sounds like Fizban's but for Giants. As far as setting sourcebooks, Dragonlance will be a bit of established lore, character options (maybe a beastiary and magic item list) and a campaign ... sorta like variations of Strixhaven and WByW. The Book of Many, folks are seeing as a "treasury" sort of book of character and DM options ... sorta like Tasha's.... Oh, we'll also get another anthology, this one focused on "heist" genres. If nothing else, 5e has been pretty consistent in product formatting. Sure they sell everything as an innovation, but in practice it's iteration and trope computation through established production formula.
So, we have a situation where we are speculating on no tangible information… and where the worst case scenario is “Wizards continues to publish setting information on D&D Beyond and in novels, and countless Wikis provide setting information and backstory from older sources, all at your fingertips.”
Not really a bad situation to be in, regardless of how Wizards handles lore in setting books moving forward.
I agree that there isn't really a "lore problem", but I think claiming any discussion over what WotC has produced and what it will produce is baseless speculation is wildly off based and out of touched with info that came out and widely circulated just a few days ago.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
What are you willing to take out of current books to get more lore?
Again - book-binding is expensive. Every page you add to a book is a nontrivial cost added to the expense of producing that book, and that cost is not linear. The more pages you already have, the more expensive new pages get, and the more impractical the book becomes to make. Page 401 costs significantly more than page 52. You ever wonder why game books are so freakishly tall and wide compared to regular books, and why you never see Double-Massive Omnibus Edition books instead? It's not just to give them more space for art - it's because that gives them extra page space to cram more words into the limited possible practical space within a physical book, and because a too-big game book falls apart and cannot hold up to the rigors of actually being used in play. It's the same reason the PHB, DMG, and MM are sold as three separate books - putting all three together into one Master Volume would mean the Master Volume is very fragile and prone to falling apart, and that one single super-sized game book would cost way more than the combined 150 of the three smaller tomes.
There. Is. Only. So. Much. Room. In. Any. Given. Book.
People who keep complaining that Wizards is not printing enough lore are never willing to answer that question - what are they willing to give up to get more lore. Would you prefer they cut the bestiary in half, provide only half as many monsters in a book so they have room for historical treatises on Icewind Dale? Would you have preferred the Spelljammer book to have no actual spelljammers in it, remove all the details and information about different ships and ship types in order to use that space for a novella explaining Mordenkainen's astral exploration of the stars and how he scoffs at those so limited as to need a spelljammer to travel through Wildspace and the Astral Sea?
The thing that urks me here is a lot of people seem to be framing this as an "either or" zero-sum game: as though every paragraph dedicated to worldbuilding or explaining factions and setting is one not spent making rules interesting.
That's because that's the exact and unvarnished truth. Any book can only have so many words in it, and we only get so many books a year. So please, if you would be so kind - what are you willing to give up? Book printing IS a zero-sum game. So what are you willing to zero to get your preferred sum of worldbuilding?
Or maybe WotC could always be more economical about their page layout... that's a start... Some of these things have so much redundant language and over-use of text boxes and formatting that it's like reading the paper of a student desperate to hit a page requirement.
Take a look at the Explorers Guide to Wildemount. When it comes to a balance of things for a Campaign Setting, that is what I want. Also, please stop patronizing me and using your text to talk to me like an infant. It's insulting. Using periods at the end of every word. Acting as though I've never read a book before. I have far less interest in treating you with respect when you can't seem to return the favor.
Polls seem the only real solution sometimes, which is frustrating.
I wouldn't be to sure of that I got permabanned with no infractions, no warnings, no nothing from r/dndnext for making a poll that asked "as a black individual do you think that orcs/drow are racist caricatures"
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If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
Take a look at the Explorers Guide to Wildemount. When it comes to a balance of things for a Campaign Setting, that is what I want. Also, please stop patronizing me and using your text to talk to me like an infant. It's insulting. Using periods at the end of every word. Acting as though I've never read a book before. I have far less interest in treating you with respect when you can't seem to return the favor.
Please stop dodging and avoiding valid questions.
Note that Explorer's Guide to Wildemount - which is indeed an excellent campaign setting book - is extremely light on basically everything else. It has three subclasses (all of which players tend to hate, poor Mercer), a scant few pages of magical equipment, a relatively lightweight bestiary, and no special/expanded rulesets or new play options. That's fine for a campaign setting that exists primarily to anchor players in a given world, but the book is 100% balls worthless to anyone who has no real interest in playing in Wildemount. It is an absolute waste of time and money for anyone who isn't in that world - as we all heard, loudly, when the book was released. That's what they took out of the EGtW - half of everything else to make room for that gazetteer, the Heroic Chronicle, and four microadventures that didn't need to be there and could've been a companion PDF or even in a subsequent book.
I happen to be a Critter and I think Exandria is an excellent gateway setting for D&D so I don't mind. Just as I wouldn't mind if a similar book was released for Faerun. Hell, I want a similar book released for Faerun, with nothing it in except three hundred pages of Faerunian back lore, so the Faerunites can finally have their 5e updated information and let it be. That information has no business being in core rulebooks, but it should indeed absolutely exist. In a World of Toril/Historian's Guide to Faerun campaign setting book. Not in my Spelljammer books, not in my Eberron or Exandria books. I can cheerfully wave at everybody else scrambling to buy that book while I ginore it, but I have no reason to not want it to exist.
I just want other people to stop trying to bludgeon me and my games to death with it.
You should probably try to stop bludgeoning others yourself then. The point of this has been to provide your argument and move along, but you seem to post with questions on how I should convince you when I've already made my point. Heck, I've directly answered as with my response on Wildemount. Actually nvm, I think you and I have reached the end of any meaningful dialogue and I will no longer engage. As stated: the books will open themselves up an audience just as wide but surely more universally satisfied with the inclusion of more lore, story, and Mythology.
Yurei1453: You seem to be utterly fixated on a problem that we literally aren't having. It isn't as though WotC is burying us in lore and rules as is. The Spelljammer set which started all this off, consists of 3 comparatively thin books, that when added up, amount to fewer overall pages than some prior source-books. The near universal thing I've sen expressed about the rules there-in are that they're incredibly lacking. So we aren't even getting the intricate systems you seem to think we lore-nerds don't want to see... Which isn't the case either.
Spelljammer wasn't a great release, no. Would've preferred much sturdier rules for star exploration myself. I'm not even in the camp that thinks the lack of enhanced styar naval ship battle rules is a travesty - Spelljammer is clearly aiming for a Pirates of the Carribean, over-the-top "Close to boarding!" Errol Flynn-era swashbuckling tone, and frankly I'm down for that. But yeah, Spelljammer is not an ideal release.
But even holdsing Explorer's Guide to Wildemount up as the excellent example of a campaign setting book that it is...EGtW doesn't give you dick-all if you're not looking to play in that setting. Expanding that to every single book ever released the way Appellion seems to be digging for,except for Faerun instead of Exandria, means nobody ever gets anything they need if they're not diehard, dyed-in-the-wool Faerun lore nerds that get their dopamine shot whenever Wizards prints one of the Old Names from the eighties. The argument I'm seeing is that Spelljammer should have been full of lore instead of rules, ships, species, and such - and it should've been Faerunian lore, not Spelljammer lore. Same with, say, Tasha's Cauldron - that book should've been stuffed with Faerunian lore instead of stuffed with things like classes, subclasses, spells, and items. Call of the Netherdeep, the Exandria adventure book? Half its content should've been Faerunian lore and ways to convert your Exandrian worldscape into Faerun.
It blows my mind and makes me wonder what the hell is even going on, and makes me wish like mad that Wizards would just get it done with and replace SCAG with a proper Faerun book already so people stop demanding that every other book Wizards releases be stuffed with Faerun lore that has NO DAMN BUSINESS being there.
I don't know if this is accurate, but coming onto this discussion from the outside, this is what I see:
Some people: We're worried this thing is being phased out and we like it and don't want to have to do it ourselves.
Some people: We don't like those things in the books, and we like making our own things, so you shouldn't have that thing.
I'm sorry if you feel like I'm targeting you, but I don't really understand the argument against lore. You don't have to use it! If a DM insists on using it, they were going to insist upon some kind of world building anyways, so why does it bother you that it comes from wizards of the coast? It just makes their job easier, if anything, because they don't have to make anything up on their own. If you want to make a new world, then you don't have to use the lore from books. Just let people know what you want, and discuss things with your fellow players.
If you have a valid issue against people wanting more story and world building in D&D books, please let me hear them, because that is information that would be legitimately useful to this discussion.
Edit: And I'm not saying any setting in particular. I really would not mind if Dragonlance replaced FR as official setting, because I don't even make my settings within the default setting anyways, I just love the stories and world building they give me for inspiration.
Hosted a battle between the Cult of Sedge and the Forum Countershere(Done now). I_Love_Tarrasques has won the fight, scoring a victory for the fiendish Moderators.
It's the same reason the PHB, DMG, and MM are sold as three separate books - putting all three together into one Master Volume would mean the Master Volume is very fragile and prone to falling apart, and that one single super-sized game book would cost way more than the combined 150 of the three smaller tomes.
What are you willing to give up?
Nothing at all. What I want them to do is publish two or three books that have it all between them - Lore & mechanics: never mind trying to decide what can or can't fit into only 1 book.
Kalimar managed to give me Lore, and classes, and monsters, and spells, and feats, and vehicles, and adventure sites; across a handful of books.
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Let us presume that 75% of all future D&D 5e/D&D 2024 RED books are filled with Faerunian lore. 25% of any given book's page count is allowed to be devoted to things that are not Faerunian lore, such as character options, bestiaries, adventure content, or rules plug-ins such as naval combat. This means that in an otherwise very large, 300-page book, only 75 of those pages will be of any practical, effective use to anyone who is not a diehard Faerunian lore nerd. Even books that presumably have nothing to do with Faerun are packed with Faerunian lore - things like Eberron, Spelljammer, and Exandria have the vast majority of their page count dedicated to the lore, history, geopolitical narratives, and historically significant figures of an entirely separate world that has nothing to do with the actual advertised content of the book.
Does this sound fair and equitable to you? Because this is what is, more or less, being proposed by all of the 'STOP CUTTING LORE' threads I've seen everywhere. Nobody cares about any lore save Faerun's lore. Every time we get a new book release, we get a deluge of "WHERE'S ALL THE LORE?" and complaints about all the notable Faerunian things that aren't in the new book even if the new book has nothing whatsoever to do with Faerun. even in this thread, people are complaining that there's not enough Faerunian lore in the SPELLJAMMER BOOKS.
Why? Why does every book need to be nothing but Forgotten Realms junk?
By all means, Wizards is long overdue for putting out a book chock heccin' thicc with Forgotten Realms lore. Faerunian diehards deserve their Explorer's Guide. But can we please stop complaining that all that junk isn't shoved into every other book out there?
Nothing at all. What I want them to do is publish two or three books that have it all between them - Lore & mechanics: never mind trying to decide what can or can't fit into only 1 book.
Kalimar managed to give me Lore, and classes, and monsters, and spells, and feats, and vehicles, and adventure sites; across a handful of books.
So you want Wizards to give up on ever producing any non-Forgotten Realms books ever again because you need every single book in their yearly release cadence to be a new FR lore tome, or you want the company to increase its release cadence back to 3.5 levels and release several dozen books a year? is that correct?
Where, in the multi-verse is this obsession with "you only want Forgotten Realms content!!!" coming from!? Nobody has said that; you are arguing against a point nobody has argued for. The "these books are thin on the ground as far as lore, worldbuilding and story goes" complaint applies more or less across the board: to every setting. If WotC brings out a Dragonlance book; then fill it with lore for the Dragonlance setting; ditto Dark Sun, Eberon, Greyhawk or Planescape!
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This, ladies and gentlemen; is what one calls "poisoning the well": I don't believe anyone has said anything to that effect at all (Most complaints I've seen include asking for more, rather than less rules-wise)... Indeed: it's always been within the power of DMs to take and leave any lore or element (including gameplay ones) that they personally didn't want to include at their table. That is the very point of "rule zero".
It is rather interesting though that people of the opposite persuasion from mine want, nay DEMAND that the lore NOT be included; thus imposing their preferred play style on others... And making a ruddy great headache for DMs who don't have the time to write an entire world or retrofit one into contemporary WotC's sparse books... Looking at you Hoard of the Dragon Queen, SPelljammer, Strixhaven, etc.
I find the entire “Wizards does not print enough lore nowadays” argument to be rather silly when the current banner advertisement is for a D&D product that has an entire recently-released novel as its lore companion piece, and when several recent D&D Beyond articles have been focused on the Dragonlance lore.
Additionally we have no real data on how setting books will be treated moving forward, so these threads are all speculating based on nothing substantial - we have not seen what a true setting book looks like in the “core books are setting agnostic” era (Spelljammer is weird for a number of reasons and cannot really be translated to Dragonlance and beyond).
So, we have a situation where we are speculating on no tangible information… and where the worst case scenario is “Wizards continues to publish setting information on D&D Beyond and in novels, and countless Wikis provide setting information and backstory from older sources, all at your fingertips.”
Not really a bad situation to be in, regardless of how Wizards handles lore in setting books moving forward.
I for one, tend to agree with you here, and maybe some others on this thread, in that, I don't want the story part of lore hand delivered to me. Rather, as you said about Fizbans, it's more about interesting concepts and things that allow an instance to build lore off of. Things that make your players feel in-game. That said, it is also cool to have other people's ideas for lore (such as, I don't know, professional writers that work for a company or something), just so you have something to go off of. Like @Captain Corvid mentioned, ideas throughout history have been based, largely on, other ideas or experiences. As far as solving the dilemma you present...
I think you solve both issues by giving better rules and inspiration. If you give better rules for combat with dragons, and make dragons feel more fleshed out as villains, you encourage players to want to develop their dragon npc's more, thus becoming better lore writers. That is an extremely condensed version of the process, but, at the end of the day, you can't make everyone happy. Meeting demand means you have to make the masses happy. That also said, wizards, please frickin fix this. We want better rules. Please.
Updog
Any given book can only have so many pages. What do you take out for the extensive collections of worldbuilding you're looking to add? What gets removed so Wizards can add in all the worldbuilding you want? What are you willing to take away from everyone else to get world lore that is absolutely useless to anyone not looking to run a Red Box Canonical Faerun game?
That's the question. Call it poisoning the well all you like, but I am awful sick of being accused of a great many thinly-veiled Not Nice Things because I have a preference for enough lore to serve as an inspiration and jumping-off point without needing a two hundred page dossier on the history of Waterdeep and how it is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL FOREVER that I include Waterdeep and thoroughly understand to a history master's level all of this lore......in my Spelljammer game.
Please do not contact or message me.
If you don't like or want Waterdeep, throw it out. You can 100% do that. And in regards thinly veiled not nice things, perhaps we should all take a moment to look in the mirror. I at least am saying there's no reason I can't have my cake and eat it too, while the same should be true of you.
Also, if it was "everyone else," this conversation wouldn't exist. Personally I find many of the mechanics and new stat blocks to be superfluous.
The thing that urks me here is a lot of people seem to be framing this as an "either or" zero-sum game: as though every paragraph dedicated to worldbuilding or explaining factions and setting is one not spent making rules interesting.
If you WANT to just lift D&D's rules and invent your own setting; that's fine, it's always been fine; it's what I've mostly done. Absolutely nothing is stopping you; knock yourselves out... The thing is though: its worlds and lore is part of what makes D&D what it is. Tenser's Floating Disc is named that because it's literally named after a character. D&D's little collection of distinct and each individually different fantasy worlds are all a part of what makes it Dungeons & Dragons, why it's still around, and why it hasn't been dethroned by Keeps & Kobolds, or Mazes & Minotaurs, or Galleons & Gryphons.
On the other hand: if you just want a rules system and nothing else: those games exist. One that comes to mind from the old days being GURPS; literally :"Generic Universal Roleplaying System"; it's the system Fallout was based upon. Those styles of systems still exist; pick one.
Exactly
Extrapolation ain't hard if you pay attention to the consistency within existing products. For one, Planescape is going to show up as a boxed set ... you think it's going to follow the precedent of Spelljammer? The Bigby's Giant book sounds like Fizban's but for Giants. As far as setting sourcebooks, Dragonlance will be a bit of established lore, character options (maybe a beastiary and magic item list) and a campaign ... sorta like variations of Strixhaven and WByW. The Book of Many, folks are seeing as a "treasury" sort of book of character and DM options ... sorta like Tasha's.... Oh, we'll also get another anthology, this one focused on "heist" genres. If nothing else, 5e has been pretty consistent in product formatting. Sure they sell everything as an innovation, but in practice it's iteration and trope computation through established production formula.
I agree that there isn't really a "lore problem", but I think claiming any discussion over what WotC has produced and what it will produce is baseless speculation is wildly off based and out of touched with info that came out and widely circulated just a few days ago.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Appellion.
What are you willing to take out of current books to get more lore?
Again - book-binding is expensive. Every page you add to a book is a nontrivial cost added to the expense of producing that book, and that cost is not linear. The more pages you already have, the more expensive new pages get, and the more impractical the book becomes to make. Page 401 costs significantly more than page 52. You ever wonder why game books are so freakishly tall and wide compared to regular books, and why you never see Double-Massive Omnibus Edition books instead? It's not just to give them more space for art - it's because that gives them extra page space to cram more words into the limited possible practical space within a physical book, and because a too-big game book falls apart and cannot hold up to the rigors of actually being used in play. It's the same reason the PHB, DMG, and MM are sold as three separate books - putting all three together into one Master Volume would mean the Master Volume is very fragile and prone to falling apart, and that one single super-sized game book would cost way more than the combined 150 of the three smaller tomes.
There. Is. Only. So. Much. Room. In. Any. Given. Book.
People who keep complaining that Wizards is not printing enough lore are never willing to answer that question - what are they willing to give up to get more lore. Would you prefer they cut the bestiary in half, provide only half as many monsters in a book so they have room for historical treatises on Icewind Dale? Would you have preferred the Spelljammer book to have no actual spelljammers in it, remove all the details and information about different ships and ship types in order to use that space for a novella explaining Mordenkainen's astral exploration of the stars and how he scoffs at those so limited as to need a spelljammer to travel through Wildspace and the Astral Sea?
What are you willing to give up?
EDIT:
That's because that's the exact and unvarnished truth. Any book can only have so many words in it, and we only get so many books a year. So please, if you would be so kind - what are you willing to give up? Book printing IS a zero-sum game. So what are you willing to zero to get your preferred sum of worldbuilding?
Please do not contact or message me.
Or maybe WotC could always be more economical about their page layout... that's a start... Some of these things have so much redundant language and over-use of text boxes and formatting that it's like reading the paper of a student desperate to hit a page requirement.
Yurei
Take a look at the Explorers Guide to Wildemount. When it comes to a balance of things for a Campaign Setting, that is what I want. Also, please stop patronizing me and using your text to talk to me like an infant. It's insulting. Using periods at the end of every word. Acting as though I've never read a book before. I have far less interest in treating you with respect when you can't seem to return the favor.
I wouldn't be to sure of that I got permabanned with no infractions, no warnings, no nothing from r/dndnext for making a poll that asked "as a black individual do you think that orcs/drow are racist caricatures"
If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
Please stop dodging and avoiding valid questions.
Note that Explorer's Guide to Wildemount - which is indeed an excellent campaign setting book - is extremely light on basically everything else. It has three subclasses (all of which players tend to hate, poor Mercer), a scant few pages of magical equipment, a relatively lightweight bestiary, and no special/expanded rulesets or new play options. That's fine for a campaign setting that exists primarily to anchor players in a given world, but the book is 100% balls worthless to anyone who has no real interest in playing in Wildemount. It is an absolute waste of time and money for anyone who isn't in that world - as we all heard, loudly, when the book was released. That's what they took out of the EGtW - half of everything else to make room for that gazetteer, the Heroic Chronicle, and four microadventures that didn't need to be there and could've been a companion PDF or even in a subsequent book.
I happen to be a Critter and I think Exandria is an excellent gateway setting for D&D so I don't mind. Just as I wouldn't mind if a similar book was released for Faerun. Hell, I want a similar book released for Faerun, with nothing it in except three hundred pages of Faerunian back lore, so the Faerunites can finally have their 5e updated information and let it be. That information has no business being in core rulebooks, but it should indeed absolutely exist. In a World of Toril/Historian's Guide to Faerun campaign setting book. Not in my Spelljammer books, not in my Eberron or Exandria books. I can cheerfully wave at everybody else scrambling to buy that book while I ginore it, but I have no reason to not want it to exist.
I just want other people to stop trying to bludgeon me and my games to death with it.
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You should probably try to stop bludgeoning others yourself then. The point of this has been to provide your argument and move along, but you seem to post with questions on how I should convince you when I've already made my point. Heck, I've directly answered as with my response on Wildemount. Actually nvm, I think you and I have reached the end of any meaningful dialogue and I will no longer engage. As stated: the books will open themselves up an audience just as wide but surely more universally satisfied with the inclusion of more lore, story, and Mythology.
Yurei1453: You seem to be utterly fixated on a problem that we literally aren't having. It isn't as though WotC is burying us in lore and rules as is. The Spelljammer set which started all this off, consists of 3 comparatively thin books, that when added up, amount to fewer overall pages than some prior source-books. The near universal thing I've sen expressed about the rules there-in are that they're incredibly lacking. So we aren't even getting the intricate systems you seem to think we lore-nerds don't want to see... Which isn't the case either.
Spelljammer wasn't a great release, no. Would've preferred much sturdier rules for star exploration myself. I'm not even in the camp that thinks the lack of enhanced styar naval ship battle rules is a travesty - Spelljammer is clearly aiming for a Pirates of the Carribean, over-the-top "Close to boarding!" Errol Flynn-era swashbuckling tone, and frankly I'm down for that. But yeah, Spelljammer is not an ideal release.
But even holdsing Explorer's Guide to Wildemount up as the excellent example of a campaign setting book that it is...EGtW doesn't give you dick-all if you're not looking to play in that setting. Expanding that to every single book ever released the way Appellion seems to be digging for, except for Faerun instead of Exandria, means nobody ever gets anything they need if they're not diehard, dyed-in-the-wool Faerun lore nerds that get their dopamine shot whenever Wizards prints one of the Old Names from the eighties. The argument I'm seeing is that Spelljammer should have been full of lore instead of rules, ships, species, and such - and it should've been Faerunian lore, not Spelljammer lore. Same with, say, Tasha's Cauldron - that book should've been stuffed with Faerunian lore instead of stuffed with things like classes, subclasses, spells, and items. Call of the Netherdeep, the Exandria adventure book? Half its content should've been Faerunian lore and ways to convert your Exandrian worldscape into Faerun.
It blows my mind and makes me wonder what the hell is even going on, and makes me wish like mad that Wizards would just get it done with and replace SCAG with a proper Faerun book already so people stop demanding that every other book Wizards releases be stuffed with Faerun lore that has NO DAMN BUSINESS being there.
Please do not contact or message me.
I don't know if this is accurate, but coming onto this discussion from the outside, this is what I see:
Some people: We're worried this thing is being phased out and we like it and don't want to have to do it ourselves.
Some people: We don't like those things in the books, and we like making our own things, so you shouldn't have that thing.
I'm sorry if you feel like I'm targeting you, but I don't really understand the argument against lore. You don't have to use it! If a DM insists on using it, they were going to insist upon some kind of world building anyways, so why does it bother you that it comes from wizards of the coast? It just makes their job easier, if anything, because they don't have to make anything up on their own. If you want to make a new world, then you don't have to use the lore from books. Just let people know what you want, and discuss things with your fellow players.
If you have a valid issue against people wanting more story and world building in D&D books, please let me hear them, because that is information that would be legitimately useful to this discussion.
Edit: And I'm not saying any setting in particular. I really would not mind if Dragonlance replaced FR as official setting, because I don't even make my settings within the default setting anyways, I just love the stories and world building they give me for inspiration.
Subclass Evaluations So Far:
Sorcerer
Warlock
My statblock. Fear me!
Hosted a battle between the Cult of Sedge and the Forum Counters here(Done now). I_Love_Tarrasques has won the fight, scoring a victory for the fiendish Moderators.
Nothing at all. What I want them to do is publish two or three books that have it all between them - Lore & mechanics: never mind trying to decide what can or can't fit into only 1 book.
Kalimar managed to give me Lore, and classes, and monsters, and spells, and feats, and vehicles, and adventure sites; across a handful of books.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
The issue would be this, Yharim.
Let us presume that 75% of all future D&D 5e/D&D 2024 RED books are filled with Faerunian lore. 25% of any given book's page count is allowed to be devoted to things that are not Faerunian lore, such as character options, bestiaries, adventure content, or rules plug-ins such as naval combat. This means that in an otherwise very large, 300-page book, only 75 of those pages will be of any practical, effective use to anyone who is not a diehard Faerunian lore nerd. Even books that presumably have nothing to do with Faerun are packed with Faerunian lore - things like Eberron, Spelljammer, and Exandria have the vast majority of their page count dedicated to the lore, history, geopolitical narratives, and historically significant figures of an entirely separate world that has nothing to do with the actual advertised content of the book.
Does this sound fair and equitable to you? Because this is what is, more or less, being proposed by all of the 'STOP CUTTING LORE' threads I've seen everywhere. Nobody cares about any lore save Faerun's lore. Every time we get a new book release, we get a deluge of "WHERE'S ALL THE LORE?" and complaints about all the notable Faerunian things that aren't in the new book even if the new book has nothing whatsoever to do with Faerun. even in this thread, people are complaining that there's not enough Faerunian lore in the SPELLJAMMER BOOKS.
Why? Why does every book need to be nothing but Forgotten Realms junk?
By all means, Wizards is long overdue for putting out a book chock heccin' thicc with Forgotten Realms lore. Faerunian diehards deserve their Explorer's Guide. But can we please stop complaining that all that junk isn't shoved into every other book out there?
EDIT:
So you want Wizards to give up on ever producing any non-Forgotten Realms books ever again because you need every single book in their yearly release cadence to be a new FR lore tome, or you want the company to increase its release cadence back to 3.5 levels and release several dozen books a year? is that correct?
Please do not contact or message me.
Where, in the multi-verse is this obsession with "you only want Forgotten Realms content!!!" coming from!? Nobody has said that; you are arguing against a point nobody has argued for. The "these books are thin on the ground as far as lore, worldbuilding and story goes" complaint applies more or less across the board: to every setting. If WotC brings out a Dragonlance book; then fill it with lore for the Dragonlance setting; ditto Dark Sun, Eberon, Greyhawk or Planescape!