"the multiverse" just means that when someone like Bigby describes the giants and the ordning, they're doing it 'within the multiverse' rather than within, for example, forgotten realms. however, then the devs go and include a useful per-setting section to say "here's how that looks in FR," and "mostly doesn't apply" for the rest of the settings on down the list. i don't want to call this a bait and switch, but in that book they're aiming for multiverse but facing The Realms. this layout suggests many things are still going to be targeted for a 'default setting' that is more specific than setting-agnostic or multiverse. i'm interested to see how that works for the PHB.
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I’m about certain they’ve said the default setting for 5e is “The Multiverse.” Personally, I think that’s a bit of a retcon, as I don’t remember them saying anything of the sort in 2014. I’m even pretty sure it was at least quietly, the FR, as that’s where all the early adventurers are set.
Either way, The Multiverse where we are going forward. And as many people have said whenever this lore in the PHB conversation comes up, when the setting is the multiverse, it makes it next to impossible to include cultural lore in the PHB. Look at orcs in eberron, wildemount and the FR, to choose one example. And do orcs even exist in Theros?
Keeping species setting neutral in the PHB and putting bits about them in various setting books is by far the best answer.
It also is easy to write, there doesn't have to be any lore of culture. Essentially turning the races and creatures into numeric numbers to fight or talk to. It really looks to be an interesting take. I'd love to see how far 6E goes with it. It will be very helpful for new DM's to have no lore to go off on, they just make it themselves up on the fly, it will so encourage creativity and make the load on new DM's so much easier.
I’m about certain they’ve said the default setting for 5e is “The Multiverse.” Personally, I think that’s a bit of a retcon, as I don’t remember them saying anything of the sort in 2014. I’m even pretty sure it was at least quietly, the FR, as that’s where all the early adventurers are set.
Either way, The Multiverse where we are going forward. And as many people have said whenever this lore in the PHB conversation comes up, when the setting is the multiverse, it makes it next to impossible to include cultural lore in the PHB. Look at orcs in eberron, wildemount and the FR, to choose one example. And do orcs even exist in Theros?
Keeping species setting neutral in the PHB and putting bits about them in various setting books is by far the best answer.
It also is easy to write, there doesn't have to be any lore of culture. Essentially turning the races and creatures into numeric numbers to fight or talk to. It really looks to be an interesting take. I'd love to see how far 6E goes with it. It will be very helpful for new DM's to have no lore to go off on, they just make it themselves up on the fly, it will so encourage creativity and make the load on new DM's so much easier.
The people who are good at making stuff up on the fly already do that just fine. Imo all this does is create more legwork for the people who can’t or don’t want to do that, since useful reference points are going to be more dispersed if they’ve truly committed to excising lore from core content.
I’m about certain they’ve said the default setting for 5e is “The Multiverse.” Personally, I think that’s a bit of a retcon, as I don’t remember them saying anything of the sort in 2014. I’m even pretty sure it was at least quietly, the FR, as that’s where all the early adventurers are set.
Either way, The Multiverse where we are going forward. And as many people have said whenever this lore in the PHB conversation comes up, when the setting is the multiverse, it makes it next to impossible to include cultural lore in the PHB. Look at orcs in eberron, wildemount and the FR, to choose one example. And do orcs even exist in Theros?
Keeping species setting neutral in the PHB and putting bits about them in various setting books is by far the best answer.
Frankly, defaulting to “the Multiverse” comes across as a bit of a cop-out/obfuscation. If the “default” is “whatever people want to include”, then by definition there is no default, and everything that follows describing this position might as well be word salad. It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I’m still not convinced this and the corresponding “setting neutral” core will improve dynamics instead of just spreading worldbuilding resources out over a larger area. It seems self-evident that the previous arrangement has not stifled people who want to write their own material, so I have trouble seeing how this boost is more than nominal for them. And they’re clearly still committing to overarching lore existing in sources like BP:GotG and FToD, so it’s not even a paradigm shift in their large scale writing. I dunno, whenever I look at this it just seems like some kind of empty and performative gesture rather than a meaningful action. Doesn’t seriously affect my opinion of D&D or inclination to buy the products that interest me, I just don’t understand what it is that people who already have clearly been doing just fine homebrewing for years before this are promoting/gaining from this change.
The most popular setting, according to WotC is homebrew. I tried to source it, but I can't seem to track it down, but I know they've said it. Besides homebrew, there's currently 10 published settings. (That number is actually tough to pin down. Do you count Greyhawk because its where saltmarsh is? What do you do with Radiant Citadel which arguably introduced something like dozen settings? For the 10, I did count Greyhawk, and did not count RC at all. If you only want to go with full-on setting books, we're down to 9. And that includes Spelljammer and Planescape which to my mind serve at least partly as ways to transit between settings than settings in their own right. Like I said, tough to pin down.) Certainly, there are more people playing in the FR than there are in, say Ravinca. But no matter how you slice it, the vast majority of people are not playing in the FR. If it's say, 20 percent, heck, even 30, why should they spend their resources (not only page count that everyone is so focused on, but also staff time which is going to be the more expensive part) developing lore that only a fraction of the players will use?
And your examples of Fizbans and Bigby's are actually good ones. They are specialty books which include lore in them, and that's what many of us are sying is how it should be. If you want it, you can use it, and if you don't, its way, way easier to ignore the Elegy for the First World and the Ordning than it is to ignore the PHB saying elves act like X while orcs act like Y. And then you pick up Wildemount, and find out, all that stuff about orcs in the PHB, that's not true, here's how orcs are. Putting lore in the PHB sets up contradictions.
The people who are good at making stuff up on the fly already do that just fine. Imo all this does is create more legwork for the people who can’t or don’t want to do that, since useful reference points are going to be more dispersed if they’ve truly committed to excising lore from core content.
"The information exists in a book I haven't read" is less useful than "the information doesn't exist at all", because either way as a DM you have to come up with something on the fly, the only difference is that in the first case you might be wrong.
I’m about certain they’ve said the default setting for 5e is “The Multiverse.” Personally, I think that’s a bit of a retcon, as I don’t remember them saying anything of the sort in 2014. I’m even pretty sure it was at least quietly, the FR, as that’s where all the early adventurers are set.
Either way, The Multiverse where we are going forward. And as many people have said whenever this lore in the PHB conversation comes up, when the setting is the multiverse, it makes it next to impossible to include cultural lore in the PHB. Look at orcs in eberron, wildemount and the FR, to choose one example. And do orcs even exist in Theros?
Keeping species setting neutral in the PHB and putting bits about them in various setting books is by far the best answer.
Frankly, defaulting to “the Multiverse” comes across as a bit of a cop-out/obfuscation. If the “default” is “whatever people want to include”, then by definition there is no default, and everything that follows describing this position might as well be word salad. It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I’m still not convinced this and the corresponding “setting neutral” core will improve dynamics instead of just spreading worldbuilding resources out over a larger area. It seems self-evident that the previous arrangement has not stifled people who want to write their own material, so I have trouble seeing how this boost is more than nominal for them. And they’re clearly still committing to overarching lore existing in sources like BP:GotG and FToD, so it’s not even a paradigm shift in their large scale writing. I dunno, whenever I look at this it just seems like some kind of empty and performative gesture rather than a meaningful action. Doesn’t seriously affect my opinion of D&D or inclination to buy the products that interest me, I just don’t understand what it is that people who already have clearly been doing just fine homebrewing for years before this are promoting/gaining from this change.
The most popular setting, according to WotC is homebrew. I tried to source it, but I can't seem to track it down, but I know they've said it. Besides homebrew, there's currently 10 published settings. (That number is actually tough to pin down. Do you count Greyhawk because its where saltmarsh is? What do you do with Radiant Citadel which arguably introduced something like dozen settings? For the 10, I did count Greyhawk, and did not count RC at all. If you only want to go with full-on setting books, we're down to 9. And that includes Spelljammer and Planescape which to my mind serve at least partly as ways to transit between settings than settings in their own right. Like I said, tough to pin down.) Certainly, there are more people playing in the FR than there are in, say Ravinca. But no matter how you slice it, the vast majority of people are not playing in the FR. If it's say, 20 percent, heck, even 30, why should they spend their resources (not only page count that everyone is so focused on, but also staff time which is going to be the more expensive part) developing lore that only a fraction of the players will use?
And your examples of Fizbans and Bigby's are actually good ones. They are specialty books which include lore in them, and that's what many of us are sying is how it should be. If you want it, you can use it, and if you don't, its way, way easier to ignore the Elegy for the First World and the Ordning than it is to ignore the PHB saying elves act like X while orcs act like Y. And then you pick up Wildemount, and find out, all that stuff about orcs in the PHB, that's not true, here's how orcs are. Putting lore in the PHB sets up contradictions.
None of this answers my question; what does the act of claiming that D&D is “setting agnostic” actually do for the game? In addition to the examples I gave, the assertion struggles to hold up because unless they’re willing to set aside the entire cosmology of the inner, elemental, outer, etc. planes then they’re still using a single defined setting while clumping the worlds of the material plane together as “the Multiverse”, which is an imperfect use of that term. The fact that people already prefer homebrew honestly just highlights how empty the action is to me; they just seem to be “officially announcing” what was already the state of the game. And clearly the “contradictions” one finds in the PHB have not presented any serious impediment in any case if homebrew is the majority, so why not leave some examples in there so those people who aren’t natural world builders or can’t afford the time or money to pull information from multiple secondary or tertiary sources have building blocks they can use to facilitate consistent worldbuilding? The more I hear about it, the more it just comes across as a publicity stunt on Wizard’s part to show how “in touch with and responsive to the community” they are, even though they’re actually doing little to nothing. And the end of the day it just seems to be meaningless noise in their part and moving tools out of easy reach in terms of actual worldbuilding and roleplay rather than “opening the field” when there is clearly space to spare already.
The people who are good at making stuff up on the fly already do that just fine. Imo all this does is create more legwork for the people who can’t or don’t want to do that, since useful reference points are going to be more dispersed if they’ve truly committed to excising lore from core content.
"The information exists in a book I haven't read" is less useful than "the information doesn't exist at all", because either way as a DM you have to come up with something on the fly, the only difference is that in the first case you might be wrong.
Except by definition the DM is not wrong unless they specifically wanted to conform to the information, ergo making the information more disparate just makes it harder on those DMs. Why is it that the same people who seem quite ready to set aside lore that conflicts with their worldbuilding also treat the risk of not matching that lore as a threat to their worldbuilding?
Also, it is not a binary division between “can worldbuild from scratch” and “shouldn’t even be DMing”; as I’ve said multiple times, in the abstract lore examples are building blocks. One can grab the pieces one wants and assemble them with one’s own pieces into a desired final form with less effort than having to come up with all of one’s own pieces. Saying that being able to worldbuild from scratch is almost a hard requirement for playing is almost another form of gatekeeping.
Edit: The second paragraph is in response to a different post, lost track of which was the bottom-most comment at the time on my phone.
And they cannot just watch the LotR trilogy ? Or read any number of fantasy novels, of which there are a great many really well written examples? Or watch fantasy Anime?
And if they really cannot make anything up themselves, they are going to struggle running any sort of a campaign.
If I want to play Lord of the Rings, I'll go play The One Ring, which handles the setting far better. I'm playing D&D because I want what works well in the 5e engine.
As note to the wider thread, different people have different strengths. "If you can't or struggle to do this thing that I can, then you aren't going to be able play so you shouldn't be supported" has a term. If the premise were true, I suspect there'd be a lot fewer adventures being written. Struggling to come up with an interesting and immersive world or even story is a different skillset to being able to come up with interesting interpersonal interactions and scene descriptions.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Except by definition the DM is not wrong unless they specifically wanted to conform to the information, ergo making the information more disparate just makes it harder on those DMs. Why is it that the same people who seem quite ready to set aside lore that conflicts with their worldbuilding also treat the risk of not matching that lore as a threat to their worldbuilding?
It's actually more of a problem when you try to not do worldbuilding. Part of the reason homebrew is so common is because the FR have too much accumulated cruft to make a good gaming setting (not a problem that's limited to the FR by any means, gameworlds in general become increasing unusable the longer they exist, because an important aspect of a setting is "blank areas in which you can fit adventures").
I’m about certain they’ve said the default setting for 5e is “The Multiverse.” Personally, I think that’s a bit of a retcon, as I don’t remember them saying anything of the sort in 2014. I’m even pretty sure it was at least quietly, the FR, as that’s where all the early adventurers are set.
Either way, The Multiverse where we are going forward. And as many people have said whenever this lore in the PHB conversation comes up, when the setting is the multiverse, it makes it next to impossible to include cultural lore in the PHB. Look at orcs in eberron, wildemount and the FR, to choose one example. And do orcs even exist in Theros?
Keeping species setting neutral in the PHB and putting bits about them in various setting books is by far the best answer.
Frankly, defaulting to “the Multiverse” comes across as a bit of a cop-out/obfuscation. If the “default” is “whatever people want to include”, then by definition there is no default, and everything that follows describing this position might as well be word salad. It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I’m still not convinced this and the corresponding “setting neutral” core will improve dynamics instead of just spreading worldbuilding resources out over a larger area. It seems self-evident that the previous arrangement has not stifled people who want to write their own material, so I have trouble seeing how this boost is more than nominal for them. And they’re clearly still committing to overarching lore existing in sources like BP:GotG and FToD, so it’s not even a paradigm shift in their large scale writing. I dunno, whenever I look at this it just seems like some kind of empty and performative gesture rather than a meaningful action. Doesn’t seriously affect my opinion of D&D or inclination to buy the products that interest me, I just don’t understand what it is that people who already have clearly been doing just fine homebrewing for years before this are promoting/gaining from this change.
The most popular setting, according to WotC is homebrew. I tried to source it, but I can't seem to track it down, but I know they've said it. Besides homebrew, there's currently 10 published settings. (That number is actually tough to pin down. Do you count Greyhawk because its where saltmarsh is? What do you do with Radiant Citadel which arguably introduced something like dozen settings? For the 10, I did count Greyhawk, and did not count RC at all. If you only want to go with full-on setting books, we're down to 9. And that includes Spelljammer and Planescape which to my mind serve at least partly as ways to transit between settings than settings in their own right. Like I said, tough to pin down.) Certainly, there are more people playing in the FR than there are in, say Ravinca. But no matter how you slice it, the vast majority of people are not playing in the FR. If it's say, 20 percent, heck, even 30, why should they spend their resources (not only page count that everyone is so focused on, but also staff time which is going to be the more expensive part) developing lore that only a fraction of the players will use?
And your examples of Fizbans and Bigby's are actually good ones. They are specialty books which include lore in them, and that's what many of us are sying is how it should be. If you want it, you can use it, and if you don't, its way, way easier to ignore the Elegy for the First World and the Ordning than it is to ignore the PHB saying elves act like X while orcs act like Y. And then you pick up Wildemount, and find out, all that stuff about orcs in the PHB, that's not true, here's how orcs are. Putting lore in the PHB sets up contradictions.
None of this answers my question; what does the act of claiming that D&D is “setting agnostic” actually do for the game? In addition to the examples I gave, the assertion struggles to hold up because unless they’re willing to set aside the entire cosmology of the inner, elemental, outer, etc. planes then they’re still using a single defined setting while clumping the worlds of the material plane together as “the Multiverse”, which is an imperfect use of that term. The fact that people already prefer homebrew honestly just highlights how empty the action is to me; they just seem to be “officially announcing” what was already the state of the game. And clearly the “contradictions” one finds in the PHB have not presented any serious impediment in any case if homebrew is the majority, so why not leave some examples in there so those people who aren’t natural world builders or can’t afford the time or money to pull information from multiple secondary or tertiary sources have building blocks they can use to facilitate consistent worldbuilding? The more I hear about it, the more it just comes across as a publicity stunt on Wizard’s part to show how “in touch with and responsive to the community” they are, even though they’re actually doing little to nothing. And the end of the day it just seems to be meaningless noise in their part and moving tools out of easy reach in terms of actual worldbuilding and roleplay rather than “opening the field” when there is clearly space to spare already.
So, they realize that most people play the game a certain way, and then take steps to accommodate that playstyle, to serve their customers, and that's a bad thing? A publicity stunt? Should they go back to the model of trying to force everyone to play in the same world even though that's not what the players want? And then which setting do they use, the one that 7 out of 10 people don't use or one of the smaller ones? Or should they go back to the TSR model of cranking out piles and piles of lore and setting books even though hardly anyone bought them? Because that didn't end well.
And who do you envision using this lore? If you're not a "natural world builders or can’t afford the time or money to pull information from multiple secondary or tertiary sources" then you're just using a published campaign, which has all the lore you need right in the book. So, who's benefitting from this? People who are homebrewing a world but somehow also want someone else to write the lore for them? How many folks out there are like that, I wonder?
I’m about certain they’ve said the default setting for 5e is “The Multiverse.” Personally, I think that’s a bit of a retcon, as I don’t remember them saying anything of the sort in 2014. I’m even pretty sure it was at least quietly, the FR, as that’s where all the early adventurers are set.
Either way, The Multiverse where we are going forward. And as many people have said whenever this lore in the PHB conversation comes up, when the setting is the multiverse, it makes it next to impossible to include cultural lore in the PHB. Look at orcs in eberron, wildemount and the FR, to choose one example. And do orcs even exist in Theros?
Keeping species setting neutral in the PHB and putting bits about them in various setting books is by far the best answer.
Frankly, defaulting to “the Multiverse” comes across as a bit of a cop-out/obfuscation. If the “default” is “whatever people want to include”, then by definition there is no default, and everything that follows describing this position might as well be word salad. It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I’m still not convinced this and the corresponding “setting neutral” core will improve dynamics instead of just spreading worldbuilding resources out over a larger area. It seems self-evident that the previous arrangement has not stifled people who want to write their own material, so I have trouble seeing how this boost is more than nominal for them. And they’re clearly still committing to overarching lore existing in sources like BP:GotG and FToD, so it’s not even a paradigm shift in their large scale writing. I dunno, whenever I look at this it just seems like some kind of empty and performative gesture rather than a meaningful action. Doesn’t seriously affect my opinion of D&D or inclination to buy the products that interest me, I just don’t understand what it is that people who already have clearly been doing just fine homebrewing for years before this are promoting/gaining from this change.
The most popular setting, according to WotC is homebrew. I tried to source it, but I can't seem to track it down, but I know they've said it. Besides homebrew, there's currently 10 published settings. (That number is actually tough to pin down. Do you count Greyhawk because its where saltmarsh is? What do you do with Radiant Citadel which arguably introduced something like dozen settings? For the 10, I did count Greyhawk, and did not count RC at all. If you only want to go with full-on setting books, we're down to 9. And that includes Spelljammer and Planescape which to my mind serve at least partly as ways to transit between settings than settings in their own right. Like I said, tough to pin down.) Certainly, there are more people playing in the FR than there are in, say Ravinca. But no matter how you slice it, the vast majority of people are not playing in the FR. If it's say, 20 percent, heck, even 30, why should they spend their resources (not only page count that everyone is so focused on, but also staff time which is going to be the more expensive part) developing lore that only a fraction of the players will use?
And your examples of Fizbans and Bigby's are actually good ones. They are specialty books which include lore in them, and that's what many of us are sying is how it should be. If you want it, you can use it, and if you don't, its way, way easier to ignore the Elegy for the First World and the Ordning than it is to ignore the PHB saying elves act like X while orcs act like Y. And then you pick up Wildemount, and find out, all that stuff about orcs in the PHB, that's not true, here's how orcs are. Putting lore in the PHB sets up contradictions.
None of this answers my question; what does the act of claiming that D&D is “setting agnostic” actually do for the game? In addition to the examples I gave, the assertion struggles to hold up because unless they’re willing to set aside the entire cosmology of the inner, elemental, outer, etc. planes then they’re still using a single defined setting while clumping the worlds of the material plane together as “the Multiverse”, which is an imperfect use of that term. The fact that people already prefer homebrew honestly just highlights how empty the action is to me; they just seem to be “officially announcing” what was already the state of the game. And clearly the “contradictions” one finds in the PHB have not presented any serious impediment in any case if homebrew is the majority, so why not leave some examples in there so those people who aren’t natural world builders or can’t afford the time or money to pull information from multiple secondary or tertiary sources have building blocks they can use to facilitate consistent worldbuilding? The more I hear about it, the more it just comes across as a publicity stunt on Wizard’s part to show how “in touch with and responsive to the community” they are, even though they’re actually doing little to nothing. And the end of the day it just seems to be meaningless noise in their part and moving tools out of easy reach in terms of actual worldbuilding and roleplay rather than “opening the field” when there is clearly space to spare already.
So, they realize that most people play the game a certain way, and then take steps to accommodate that playstyle, to serve their customers, and that's a bad thing? A publicity stunt? Should they go back to the model of trying to force everyone to play in the same world even though that's not what the players want? And then which setting do they use, the one that 7 out of 10 people don't use or one of the smaller ones? Or should they go back to the TSR model of cranking out piles and piles of lore and setting books even though hardly anyone bought them? Because that didn't end well.
And who do you envision using this lore? If you're not a "natural world builders or can’t afford the time or money to pull information from multiple secondary or tertiary sources" then you're just using a published campaign, which has all the lore you need right in the book. So, who's benefitting from this? People who are homebrewing a world but somehow also want someone else to write the lore for them? How many folks out there are like that, I wonder?
Regarding your first point, there is no causal or even correlative link between the popularity of something and it being good. By the logic of “giving the fans/customers what they want”, the best Star Wars movie ever made is clearly The Rise of Skywalker. A fanbase doesn’t always know what it actually wants from a company, which is why the upcoming 5e update’s design-by-popularity approach has me apprehensive.
Published campaigns actually don’t always have all you need to run in a premade world, or at least not in a fulfilling manner. Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen outright bowdlerizes parts of Lord Soth’s backstory, leaving a reader or player who has little to no knowledge of the setting often wondering just why exactly this death knight is so heinous.
To answer your last two questions, “more than you think”; it is often useful to have default lore even if one outright rejects it, as many DMs take pleasure in subverting tropes and expectations, and even those who don’t may like to have the option of a default in their back pocket rather than having most of a book just telling them “I 'unno, you figure it out.”
... technically, we don't actually know that most tables homebrew. we only know that the kind of game participant who would notice a survey and then take the time to contribute to a survey and then finishes contributing to a survey is the sort of person who at that time identified as a homebrew participant. and that's without digging into what homebrew means to each person.
also, if i recall correctly, the failure of the TSR business model was in the costs and debts (something about dumping money into buck rodgers). a brief glance at google says sales were brisk. whatever monetary downside to being prolific at printing splat books in 1990 seems like it would be offset present-day by a larger/wider audience, access to digital sales, and innovations like print on demand.
I’m about certain they’ve said the default setting for 5e is “The Multiverse.” Personally, I think that’s a bit of a retcon, as I don’t remember them saying anything of the sort in 2014. I’m even pretty sure it was at least quietly, the FR, as that’s where all the early adventurers are set.
Either way, The Multiverse where we are going forward. And as many people have said whenever this lore in the PHB conversation comes up, when the setting is the multiverse, it makes it next to impossible to include cultural lore in the PHB. Look at orcs in eberron, wildemount and the FR, to choose one example. And do orcs even exist in Theros?
Keeping species setting neutral in the PHB and putting bits about them in various setting books is by far the best answer.
It's not a retcon at all, it's always been there. 2014-PHB pg 5:
"The worlds of the Dungeons & Dragons game exist within a vast cosmos called the multiverse, connected in strange and mysterious ways to one another and to other planes of existence, such as the Elemental Plane of Fire and the Infinite Depths of the Abyss. Within this multiverse are an endless variety of worlds. Many of them have been published as official settings for the D&D game. The legends of the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Mystara, and Eberron settings are woven together in the fabric of the multiverse. Alongside these worlds are hundreds of thousands more, created by generations of D&D players for their own games. And amid all the richness of the multiverse, you might create a world of your own."
Similarly, 2014-DMG pg. 4:
The world where you set your campaign is one of countless worlds that make up the D&D multiverse, a vast array of planes and worlds where adventures happen. Even if you’re using an established world such as the Forgotten Realms, your campaign takes place in a sort of mirror universe of the official setting where Forgotten Realms novels, game products, and digital games are assumed to take place. The world is yours to change as you see fit and yours to modify as you explore the consequences of the players’ actions.
(Bold theirs in both cases.) It's been front and center from the beginning.
Frankly, defaulting to “the Multiverse” comes across as a bit of a cop-out/obfuscation. If the “default” is “whatever people want to include”, then by definition there is no default, and everything that follows describing this position might as well be word salad. It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I’m still not convinced this and the corresponding “setting neutral” core will improve dynamics instead of just spreading worldbuilding resources out over a larger area. It seems self-evident that the previous arrangement has not stifled people who want to write their own material, so I have trouble seeing how this boost is more than nominal for them. And they’re clearly still committing to overarching lore existing in sources like BP:GotG and FToD, so it’s not even a paradigm shift in their large scale writing. I dunno, whenever I look at this it just seems like some kind of empty and performative gesture rather than a meaningful action. Doesn’t seriously affect my opinion of D&D or inclination to buy the products that interest me, I just don’t understand what it is that people who already have clearly been doing just fine homebrewing for years before this are promoting/gaining from this change.
For me the change seems to be to try focusing on what members of a given species having common across worlds rather than starting from one specific portrayal and presenting that as a default. Dwarves for instance are known for having a knack for tools, affinity for earth, darkvision and poison resistance; the PHB can talk about the common origin that imbued them with those traits (i.e. Moradin, who goes by other names like Reorx in other settings) and then they can leave stuff like hating goblins and giants to FR or being greedy miners to Middle-Earth etc.
Taking a portrayal of a given species specific to one setting and presenting it as though it's some inalienable quality of that species in every campaign world has had harmful results in the past (cf Orcs and Drow) so this approach will allow them to avoid perpetuating such staid stereotypes in the core game going forward.
I don't really care to tell you the truth. D&D will still be played long after WotC crashes or whatever you folks think will happen. Best case scenario, Disney buys it. All things considered the last D&D movie was almost a complete rip off of how Disney portrays comedy in Marvel and Star Wars,
Worst case scenario, no one buys it. But people continue playing just like they still play Basic D&D and AD&D.
If nothing else I think this thread shows why the question “do you think WotC are making the right decisions” can never be answered as a question. Half the people here don’t want any lore at all in any releases so that everything is setting agnostic and the other half are demanding lore with everything until you can barely move without checking a wiki. No matter what WotC release they’ll end up pissing off one group or the other and if the internet teaches us anything the result will always be the group that are happy will be too busy using what they’ve been given to make a noise while the group that are pissed off will complain so loudly that you’re left with the impression the entire fan base is unhappy. This means WotC are left with a hopeless situation that feels like no matter what they do the response will be negative
And they cannot just watch the LotR trilogy ? Or read any number of fantasy novels, of which there are a great many really well written examples? Or watch fantasy Anime?
And if they really cannot make anything up themselves, they are going to struggle running any sort of a campaign.
If I want to play Lord of the Rings, I'll go play The One Ring, which handles the setting far better. I'm playing D&D because I want what works well in the 5e engine.
As note to the wider thread, different people have different strengths. "If you can't or struggle to do this thing that I can, then you aren't going to be able play so you shouldn't be supported" has a term. If the premise were true, I suspect there'd be a lot fewer adventures being written. Struggling to come up with an interesting and immersive world or even story is a different skillset to being able to come up with interesting interpersonal interactions and scene descriptions.
I suggested these as sources of inspiration, NOT as anything that has to be copied wholesale. The cosmology of my campaign is heavily influenced by Tolkien's "The Silmarillion" but a long ways from a copy (particularly from the 'evil' side of the pantheon, where it differs rather a lot).
Inspiration =/= a ready made world. Changing the Silmarillion enough to not be a Tolkien world that is still interesting and original is not something a lot of people have the time and/or skill to do. Just because you do doesn't meant they do.
If someone is struggling to come up with an interesting and immersive world, again, handing them a world is going to be of limited benefit. Unless the players in that campaign are into heavily scripted (and thus restrictive) play, that DM will have to be able to deviate from anything written, likely within the first two sessions.
Non sequitur. The ability to improvise interactions or consequences of players' actions is not the same as the ability to create a rich and meaningful world with plenty of history. I know a DM who is absolutely fantastic at the table...his world building is absolute crap though. I hold the record for the longest running campaign ever in my FLGS (touch wood)...using a module that is apparently the worst thing invented since the Spanish Inquisition according to several posters here that can't hear it's name.without going on a rant about how bad it is. But it's still going strong because while my world building may not be very good...I can tweak things very easily and ad lib encounters and run combat very well, as well as arbitrate the rules.
Could I learn to world build and do it well? Probably. With time. As a father of several young children, studying part time, have a volunteering responsibility, working, playing D&D and other hobbies...I don't have that time. I'd rather spend my time printing and painting minis and outsource world building.
Again, my viewpoint here is coming from a time before settings were even published. The game thrived even without them. To the extent they were published over time, the most benefit I saw DM's getting from them (outside of specific modules), were maps. The only times I have had a DM try meaningfully to stay within setting as written has been an attempt at a Dragonlance campaign, or in very specific localized settings such as Ravenloft.
Was D&D more popular then, or now that WotC has provided support for DMs? Is the difference negligible?
No one is saying anyone has to obey lore strictly. I don't. I change things all the time. What a not insignificant number of people want is enough lore have that world that they can adjust to their needs.
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"the multiverse" just means that when someone like Bigby describes the giants and the ordning, they're doing it 'within the multiverse' rather than within, for example, forgotten realms. however, then the devs go and include a useful per-setting section to say "here's how that looks in FR," and "mostly doesn't apply" for the rest of the settings on down the list. i don't want to call this a bait and switch, but in that book they're aiming for multiverse but facing The Realms. this layout suggests many things are still going to be targeted for a 'default setting' that is more specific than setting-agnostic or multiverse. i'm interested to see how that works for the PHB.
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
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It also is easy to write, there doesn't have to be any lore of culture. Essentially turning the races and creatures into numeric numbers to fight or talk to. It really looks to be an interesting take. I'd love to see how far 6E goes with it. It will be very helpful for new DM's to have no lore to go off on, they just make it themselves up on the fly, it will so encourage creativity and make the load on new DM's so much easier.
The people who are good at making stuff up on the fly already do that just fine. Imo all this does is create more legwork for the people who can’t or don’t want to do that, since useful reference points are going to be more dispersed if they’ve truly committed to excising lore from core content.
The most popular setting, according to WotC is homebrew. I tried to source it, but I can't seem to track it down, but I know they've said it. Besides homebrew, there's currently 10 published settings. (That number is actually tough to pin down. Do you count Greyhawk because its where saltmarsh is? What do you do with Radiant Citadel which arguably introduced something like dozen settings? For the 10, I did count Greyhawk, and did not count RC at all. If you only want to go with full-on setting books, we're down to 9. And that includes Spelljammer and Planescape which to my mind serve at least partly as ways to transit between settings than settings in their own right. Like I said, tough to pin down.) Certainly, there are more people playing in the FR than there are in, say Ravinca. But no matter how you slice it, the vast majority of people are not playing in the FR. If it's say, 20 percent, heck, even 30, why should they spend their resources (not only page count that everyone is so focused on, but also staff time which is going to be the more expensive part) developing lore that only a fraction of the players will use?
And your examples of Fizbans and Bigby's are actually good ones. They are specialty books which include lore in them, and that's what many of us are sying is how it should be. If you want it, you can use it, and if you don't, its way, way easier to ignore the Elegy for the First World and the Ordning than it is to ignore the PHB saying elves act like X while orcs act like Y. And then you pick up Wildemount, and find out, all that stuff about orcs in the PHB, that's not true, here's how orcs are. Putting lore in the PHB sets up contradictions.
"The information exists in a book I haven't read" is less useful than "the information doesn't exist at all", because either way as a DM you have to come up with something on the fly, the only difference is that in the first case you might be wrong.
None of this answers my question; what does the act of claiming that D&D is “setting agnostic” actually do for the game? In addition to the examples I gave, the assertion struggles to hold up because unless they’re willing to set aside the entire cosmology of the inner, elemental, outer, etc. planes then they’re still using a single defined setting while clumping the worlds of the material plane together as “the Multiverse”, which is an imperfect use of that term. The fact that people already prefer homebrew honestly just highlights how empty the action is to me; they just seem to be “officially announcing” what was already the state of the game. And clearly the “contradictions” one finds in the PHB have not presented any serious impediment in any case if homebrew is the majority, so why not leave some examples in there so those people who aren’t natural world builders or can’t afford the time or money to pull information from multiple secondary or tertiary sources have building blocks they can use to facilitate consistent worldbuilding? The more I hear about it, the more it just comes across as a publicity stunt on Wizard’s part to show how “in touch with and responsive to the community” they are, even though they’re actually doing little to nothing. And the end of the day it just seems to be meaningless noise in their part and moving tools out of easy reach in terms of actual worldbuilding and roleplay rather than “opening the field” when there is clearly space to spare already.
Isn’t “coming up with stuff on the fly” part of the DM’s job description?
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Except by definition the DM is not wrong unless they specifically wanted to conform to the information, ergo making the information more disparate just makes it harder on those DMs. Why is it that the same people who seem quite ready to set aside lore that conflicts with their worldbuilding also treat the risk of not matching that lore as a threat to their worldbuilding?
Also, it is not a binary division between “can worldbuild from scratch” and “shouldn’t even be DMing”; as I’ve said multiple times, in the abstract lore examples are building blocks. One can grab the pieces one wants and assemble them with one’s own pieces into a desired final form with less effort than having to come up with all of one’s own pieces. Saying that being able to worldbuild from scratch is almost a hard requirement for playing is almost another form of gatekeeping.
Edit: The second paragraph is in response to a different post, lost track of which was the bottom-most comment at the time on my phone.
The operative word there being “part”; having references can make it easier and allow for more consistency to the setting.
If I want to play Lord of the Rings, I'll go play The One Ring, which handles the setting far better. I'm playing D&D because I want what works well in the 5e engine.
As note to the wider thread, different people have different strengths. "If you can't or struggle to do this thing that I can, then you aren't going to be able play so you shouldn't be supported" has a term. If the premise were true, I suspect there'd be a lot fewer adventures being written. Struggling to come up with an interesting and immersive world or even story is a different skillset to being able to come up with interesting interpersonal interactions and scene descriptions.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
It's actually more of a problem when you try to not do worldbuilding. Part of the reason homebrew is so common is because the FR have too much accumulated cruft to make a good gaming setting (not a problem that's limited to the FR by any means, gameworlds in general become increasing unusable the longer they exist, because an important aspect of a setting is "blank areas in which you can fit adventures").
So, they realize that most people play the game a certain way, and then take steps to accommodate that playstyle, to serve their customers, and that's a bad thing? A publicity stunt? Should they go back to the model of trying to force everyone to play in the same world even though that's not what the players want? And then which setting do they use, the one that 7 out of 10 people don't use or one of the smaller ones? Or should they go back to the TSR model of cranking out piles and piles of lore and setting books even though hardly anyone bought them? Because that didn't end well.
And who do you envision using this lore? If you're not a "natural world builders or can’t afford the time or money to pull information from multiple secondary or tertiary sources" then you're just using a published campaign, which has all the lore you need right in the book. So, who's benefitting from this? People who are homebrewing a world but somehow also want someone else to write the lore for them? How many folks out there are like that, I wonder?
Regarding your first point, there is no causal or even correlative link between the popularity of something and it being good. By the logic of “giving the fans/customers what they want”, the best Star Wars movie ever made is clearly The Rise of Skywalker. A fanbase doesn’t always know what it actually wants from a company, which is why the upcoming 5e update’s design-by-popularity approach has me apprehensive.
Published campaigns actually don’t always have all you need to run in a premade world, or at least not in a fulfilling manner. Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen outright bowdlerizes parts of Lord Soth’s backstory, leaving a reader or player who has little to no knowledge of the setting often wondering just why exactly this death knight is so heinous.
To answer your last two questions, “more than you think”; it is often useful to have default lore even if one outright rejects it, as many DMs take pleasure in subverting tropes and expectations, and even those who don’t may like to have the option of a default in their back pocket rather than having most of a book just telling them “I 'unno, you figure it out.”
... technically, we don't actually know that most tables homebrew. we only know that the kind of game participant who would notice a survey and then take the time to contribute to a survey and then finishes contributing to a survey is the sort of person who at that time identified as a homebrew participant. and that's without digging into what homebrew means to each person.
also, if i recall correctly, the failure of the TSR business model was in the costs and debts (something about dumping money into buck rodgers). a brief glance at google says sales were brisk. whatever monetary downside to being prolific at printing splat books in 1990 seems like it would be offset present-day by a larger/wider audience, access to digital sales, and innovations like print on demand.
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
It's not a retcon at all, it's always been there. 2014-PHB pg 5:
"The worlds of the Dungeons & Dragons game exist within a vast cosmos called the multiverse, connected in strange and mysterious ways to one another and to other planes of existence, such as the Elemental Plane of Fire and the Infinite Depths of the Abyss. Within this multiverse are an endless variety of worlds. Many of them have been published as official settings for the D&D game. The legends of the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Mystara, and Eberron settings are woven together in the fabric of the multiverse. Alongside these worlds are hundreds of thousands more, created by generations of D&D players for their own games. And amid all the richness of the multiverse, you might create a world of your own."
Similarly, 2014-DMG pg. 4:
The world where you set your campaign is one of countless worlds that make up the D&D multiverse, a vast array of planes and worlds where adventures happen. Even if you’re using an established world such as the Forgotten Realms, your campaign takes place in a sort of mirror universe of the official setting where Forgotten Realms novels, game products, and digital games are assumed to take place. The world is yours to change as you see fit and yours to modify as you explore the consequences of the players’ actions.
(Bold theirs in both cases.)
It's been front and center from the beginning.
For me the change seems to be to try focusing on what members of a given species having common across worlds rather than starting from one specific portrayal and presenting that as a default. Dwarves for instance are known for having a knack for tools, affinity for earth, darkvision and poison resistance; the PHB can talk about the common origin that imbued them with those traits (i.e. Moradin, who goes by other names like Reorx in other settings) and then they can leave stuff like hating goblins and giants to FR or being greedy miners to Middle-Earth etc.
Taking a portrayal of a given species specific to one setting and presenting it as though it's some inalienable quality of that species in every campaign world has had harmful results in the past (cf Orcs and Drow) so this approach will allow them to avoid perpetuating such staid stereotypes in the core game going forward.
I don't really care to tell you the truth. D&D will still be played long after WotC crashes or whatever you folks think will happen. Best case scenario, Disney buys it. All things considered the last D&D movie was almost a complete rip off of how Disney portrays comedy in Marvel and Star Wars,
Worst case scenario, no one buys it. But people continue playing just like they still play Basic D&D and AD&D.
Isn’t that what setting books are for?
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At the end of the day, the higher the wall gets around the garden, the more important official published lore becomes.
I still believe Caerwyn's POST is the best, but least likely to be implemented, solution.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
If nothing else I think this thread shows why the question “do you think WotC are making the right decisions” can never be answered as a question. Half the people here don’t want any lore at all in any releases so that everything is setting agnostic and the other half are demanding lore with everything until you can barely move without checking a wiki. No matter what WotC release they’ll end up pissing off one group or the other and if the internet teaches us anything the result will always be the group that are happy will be too busy using what they’ve been given to make a noise while the group that are pissed off will complain so loudly that you’re left with the impression the entire fan base is unhappy. This means WotC are left with a hopeless situation that feels like no matter what they do the response will be negative
Inspiration =/= a ready made world. Changing the Silmarillion enough to not be a Tolkien world that is still interesting and original is not something a lot of people have the time and/or skill to do. Just because you do doesn't meant they do.
Non sequitur. The ability to improvise interactions or consequences of players' actions is not the same as the ability to create a rich and meaningful world with plenty of history. I know a DM who is absolutely fantastic at the table...his world building is absolute crap though. I hold the record for the longest running campaign ever in my FLGS (touch wood)...using a module that is apparently the worst thing invented since the Spanish Inquisition according to several posters here that can't hear it's name.without going on a rant about how bad it is. But it's still going strong because while my world building may not be very good...I can tweak things very easily and ad lib encounters and run combat very well, as well as arbitrate the rules.
Could I learn to world build and do it well? Probably. With time. As a father of several young children, studying part time, have a volunteering responsibility, working, playing D&D and other hobbies...I don't have that time. I'd rather spend my time printing and painting minis and outsource world building.
Was D&D more popular then, or now that WotC has provided support for DMs? Is the difference negligible?
No one is saying anyone has to obey lore strictly. I don't. I change things all the time. What a not insignificant number of people want is enough lore have that world that they can adjust to their needs.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.