I'm reminded of the story of Garg and Moonslicer, and I wish more publishers would lean in to this approach to good and evil. A purely lore approach would be enough to frame the conflict around, some races are naturally social creatures, and some races are naturally antisocial. Both have hierarches, but not all races have the same natural concepts of fairness and justice. Any individual can embrace either world view or a mix, but one comes more naturally to each race. Even if humanity is naturally a good race (debatable, but whatever), members can obviously deviate significantly.
Ultimately it doesn't mater what race the slavers are, I'm not going to worry about the ethics of self-defensing a party of slavers to death as PC or GM.
Slightly unpopular opinion: All official lore is crap and should be generally ignored. (Even the stuff I kind of like) If I want to play in a world where what I can do is limited by the generic, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, crowd-pleasing writers at some corporation I'll just play a AAA video game. The ability to be participatory in the creation and evolution of the in-game world is what makes TTRPGs different from consumer media. Why would you give that part up, but still leave yourself with all the cognitive load?
Very strong agree on this.
I have the same reaction with the gameplay as well.
They somehow managed to add more crunch and complexity without improving neither the balance nor the turn-to-turn variety. I'm honestly impressed by their sheer incompetence.
Them: "We'll be taking advice from the community!!!!"
Me: Oh no. Oh well, Pathfinder it is!
Play Pathfinder, like an adult.
I'm over here enjoying Changeling: the Dreaming.
Let people play what they want to play.
Sure, but every time someone's like "I'm going to do a game of secret modern day vampires doing political intrigue in DND" I'm going to judge them.
Sorry, wanted it to come off as a joke. I think Pathfinder is better, but I love dnd too.
Branch out and play all kinds of systems!
Would love to, but I don't have that amount of time or money.
The best lore is lore made at the table with the players. The rest is just gm inspiration.
Yeah, my friends and I always used Forgotten Realms lore as a base in homebrew settings and then just do whatever on top of it, like that one time we had chocobos in a campaign LOL
Ergh, I always ignore the lore anyway.
I sometimes steal pieces of it, if only for inspiration, but I love worldbuilding and making up my own settings.
I'm currently running an adventure in a Spelljammer setting where most of the previous D&D campaigns I've run over the years exist on different planets, with elements of all of them now able to make cameos or interact with each other. It's wild.
Does D&D finally come with a lore?
Finally a playable game? (still the cost of 3?)
What do you mean, finally? Even 5e, the edition with the smallest amount of lore so far, has some.
Previous editions had a lot. The Forgotten Realms wiki is a pretty good place to go read through. And there's other settings too, even if they have less content. Greyhawk, Eberron, to only name those I have in my library.
