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
Play Pathfinder, like an adult.
Pathfinder is superior to D&D ethically, morally and mechanically. Fight me.
I agree, but D&D's simpler mechanics means newer players won't get overwhelmed and will let them learn how to do the other, less crunchy parts of RPGs that they would have little to no experience in. Its popularity also means there are more sources to look for help. (If anyone yells at me to look at a simpler TTRPG, Utopia is amazing and is simple enough (excepting the crafting). I would just like newer players to have more resources they can research).
Let people play what they want to play.
Branch out and play all kinds of systems!
Would love to, but I don't have that amount of time or money.
I'm over here enjoying Changeling: the Dreaming.
If I could get a group together to play Promethean: the Created, that would be awesome
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?
I disagree. I think having a base to work from is helpful, both to players and DMs.
For example I don't want to create a pantheon of gods. I might want to create a few unique gods within my setting, and if they conflict I'll change some rules accordingly, but I want something to build off of. Similarly if a player wants to create a paladin or cleric they can just pull from the standard list.
Also if the official lore is fun, it's more fun to build off of. I'll enjoy reading it more and I'll enjoy using it.
Absolutely agree. I set a game in the real(ish) world once, so it was a setting where everyone knew the base "lore." It was so nice! I could reference things, name-drop countries, and introduce old grudges without having to exposition it all. People just got things. We've since done enough games on the sword coast that that works too, now.
Slightly surprised I didn't get more disagreement.
A prebuilt system has one benefit: the players and DM come to the table with a shared set of expectations. This is crucial for things like adventurer's league, where the players are all strangers, more or less engaging in a tournament without winners, each using the others to get their RPG rocks off, and can be useful to skip the mechanical design level of play-making. It also makes sense for a corporation to try to hit that lowest common denominator to maximise their audience.
However, I maintain, if no one at the table is creative enough to want to world-build beyond that, they might as well all just stick with consumer media. Those who don't feel the drive to create aren't suited to DMing, and a table without a DM is a hetero orgy without a woman.
Very strong agree on this.
This is probably why Greg Stafford, the guy most responsible for Runequest and Glorantha's deep and wide lore came up with his sort of prime directive: "Your Glorantha Will Vary". He presented his version of the lore but wanted people to re-write it to their hearts' content.
Old world of darkness lore slapped though
There was a bit too much of it, but that actually was the reason I included the 'even the ones I like' part. Old WoD didn't pull its punches, and generally was not middle-of-the-road.
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!
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.
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.
I swear if this is more whining about the Orcs....
I mean, in another comment I whine about people whining about orcs
Alright I'll bite. What did they do to it?
Okay, I want to start by saying that I do appreciate that WotC is trying really hard to treat the playable races as people. However, they haven't been sticking the landing well. For example, i do understand why they changed all instances of the word Race with Species, but making all the playable races canonically separate species just trades one yikes for a new yikes. As a player, sometimes I want to settle down with an Orc and make a bunch of Half-Orc Babies, but seeing the word "species" gives me pause. I know in real life cross-breeding different species of animals rarely goes well and the children are as a rule sterile, so can i ethically bring a baby into the world that I know is going to be sterile and is probably doing to have serious health problems?
Anyway, most people aren't mad about that anymore, and decent people aren't generally mad about the Mexican orcs or whatever. What has been a problem is that they are trying to get rid of the concept of Monsterous Races, which would make the average D&D setting a generally more pleasant place to live in. Here's the game-design issue with this: D&D is fundamentally about combat, and 5.5's design leans into the more crunchy aspect of that. A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with. Goblins and orcs and the like fill this role of being sentient pincushions. In addition, rp-wise players often like being special, and an easy way to do this is being a Good Drow or a Forgiving Kobold or a Pacifist Orc.
The specific way they are going about this is retconning the lore to make the societies of the Monsterous Races less Evil or outright just normal human-ish societies. Personally, as a DM I do not like this. I like to make my orcs and goblins distinct from mainstream D&D by doing pretty much exactly this, because it's a low-effort way to make my setting look Nuanced or Morally Grey. The point is more to do something that pops out of the wider dnd culture more than to actually say anything about, say, how indigenous people tend to be treated as speed-bumps to "progress" throughout history, because I dont usually run games where colonialism happens anywhere near the players. So not only does this make WotC's writers look incredibly lazy (and more importantly, spineless) to me, but now the laziest way to make a DnD setting pop is to have goblins and orcs be non-persons that are there to be treated as Rome treated the Gauls or sent to Oklahoma.
And what's sad is that if they had just put in any amount of effort into the worldbuilding, we could have the nice pleasant world full of non-evil cannon fodder without this problem. Unfortunately, in order to do that the setting has to actually make a statement about something. Here, I'll do some right here:
- Let's start with the obvious. Goblins specifically parallel Native Americans in the way that from the perspective of "civilized" races they seem to just exist out there in the land we want. Let's lean into that. Maybe the reason Maglubiyet is their only God isn't that he killed all the others but that when left alone Goblin religion is more like hero-worship. Each tribe has their own little pantheon on local saints and heroes, and Maglubiyet is distinct in that he is recognized globally.
- Drow are pretty clearly fascist. I am sure they don't see themselves as evil, though. However, most of their lore doesn't go much into how their society functions day-to-day. Fleshing them out would allow them to point out how just existing in a fascist country does in fact mean that you almost certainly have blood on your hands. We could see drow that try to oppose their regime by running a literal underground railroad or by just passively not complying with obviously evil laws, and we could see drow that are completely oblivious to how a seemingly harmless beaurocratic rule can result in people being enslaved or killed.
- Orcs in fiction stem from a long line of faceless evil raiders inspired by the Mongols invasion of Europe. People alive at that time had wild ideas about why the Mongols were here and where they came from, and the general consensus was that they came from some lifeless wasteland like Mordor where crops couldn't grow, so they had to pillage and plunder to get basic food and water. This is obviously not true, but it makes sense. All they had to do is make the orcs frigging steppe people! Actual Caucausians! Just copy and blend Mongolian and Georgian culture and traditions, give them cloth with colorful beading to wear instead of scraps of untanned leather, and let them be people in their homeland while the rest of the world cowers in fear of these incomprehensible alien raiders who like horsies and dressing up nice.
See, it's not hard! But saying something, anything at all, might offend some customers and make their profits go down. So they go with the safe, bland option of "everyone is basically a normal human like you, the player, so you can plop yourself into any race and not have too much cultural dissonace."
Anyway. That was a wall of text. I'm going to log off now.
As a player, sometimes I want to settle down with an Orc and make a bunch of Half-Orc Babies, but seeing the word "species" gives me pause. I know in real life cross-breeding different species of animals rarely goes well and the children are as a rule sterile, so can i ethically bring a baby into the world that I know is going to be sterile and is probably doing to have serious health problems?
I don't get your problem here. Either the world that has half orcs declares if they are fine, or you are free to decide for yourself. Why bother yourself with some "knowledge" about the "real world"?
A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with.
I'm a bit confused by this. Why not have them be any other species, or combination of them? If they're capable of being negotiated with shouldn't the players feel as bad about killing them as anyone else? I feel like "self-defense" can do a lot of heavy lifting in dungeon crawls, I've never really noticed my players feeling bad about killing bandit dwarves or whatnot.
