Wrote a new blog today about how much setting should go in a rulebook. It's different for every game, but I feel a lot of games put too much lore in with the rules.
I know it's really hip to have your setting lean on your mechanics and vice versa, so neither works great without another, but I am more of a fan of rules that support tone and play patterns that reinforce genre more than specific settings. Probably mostly because I am not big on learning a lot about a setting before I feel good about running a game.
I also like to have lots of room to improv and make a setting my own. I know you can do that with any setting, but I just feel more confident doing that with less definition in the setting.
I could probably drop a little something more into my rulebook as a stinger to get people excited about what kind of fiction the game presents. I guess that could be interpreted as setting, or at least adjacent.
Curious about what other think about this topic.
https://infantofatocha.itch.io/chronomutants/devlog/572397/whats-a-paradox-war-anyway
Personally I always prefer when the rules of a system can stand alone and don't make too many assumptions about the setting. One of the biggest adjustments I had to make when migrating my group from D&D 5e to Pathfinder 2e is that Pathfinder makes far more assumptions about setting compared to D&D.
In Pathfinder there are certain classes and game mechanics which are very tightly coupled to the setting of Golarion, particularly for the Cleric and the Champion. I personally am not a big fan of "loose Pantheon" and "interventionist gods" in my fantasy and spent a lot of time on my own custom setting for D&D which I've been porting into Pathfinder.
It's surprising given how much better PF is in other ways that it tries to force its (IMO kinda dumb) setting on the game. Like Pathfinder Champions and Clerics literally say that you have to worship an individual god, not a Pantheon, and that your god directly gives you powers. Whereas D&D Clerics and Paladins just say that you need to dedicate yourself to an idea, and that the religion may or may not be involved. IMO this is much better as a setting-agnostic system.
I think part of the reason D&D wins out here despite the fact that Pathfinder is the (again IMO) better-designed system overall is that D&D has a legacy of multiple settings being used for its adventures, whereas my understanding is that PF has always used the same setting. So when WOTC was creating 5e they built in a certain degree of setting-agnosticism from the ground up.
5e rulebook has a very weird balance of lore/rules. There is so much lore, like pages for each race, but they are fairly vague. I have a hard time imagining anyone using the loosely Tolkien races strictly as presented in the rulebook. So I ask why so many pages dedicated to that?
I think that, like with so much else in 5e, they lean heavily on the DM to fill in the blanks. And while I've come to disagree with that philosophy for mechanics design, I actually really appreciate it for the fluff. It allows me to fill in the blanks with stuff about my own setting rather than have to use theirs. 5e gives you just enough fluff to explain why each race/class gets the features it gets, but then leaves a lot open to interpretation and to the DM's world.
Almost every great 5e campaign I've ever played in or watched in an actual-play used a custom setting instead of Forgotten Realms. Whereas with PF2e, I was surprised when I first joined the community that virtually everyone in the online spaces seemed very familiar with all of the Golarion lore, which I suppose makes sense since it seems more "expected" for PF2e.