Originally Posted by robertthebard
Expecting players in a TT session, what was postulated, and responded to, shouldn't be controversial. That's why there are resources, published by TSR, WotC and now Hasbro, since the beginning of DnD, aimed specifically at players, including, but not limited to, the Player's Handbook. IF these resources had been aimed specifically at DMs, you'd have a point. They're not. There are materials aimed exclusively at DMs, and materials for everyone else, including DMs. I'm not sure what's so controversial about expecting players to read some of these materials, or all of them in cases of people that want to consider themselves lore hounds. Again, they are provided for exactly that purpose. It's not like they spent all the money that went into producing them for something to do between versions.
This is still just your opinion of how you want your games to be played and what the purpose of those books are.

The PHB doesn't go into much detail about Shar. There are all of two lines about her:
Originally Posted by PHB
"the [monastic] order of the Dark Moon is made up of monks dedicated to Shar (goddess of loss)" and "Shar, goddess of darkness and loss | NE, Death, Trickery | Black disk encircled with a border"
Aside from the lack of information, particularly about lore & history regarding Shar, it's unreasonable to expect all players in all games to completely memorize every single line in the PHB. It's even more unreasonable to expect players to have read and memorized every single D&D book on the off chance lore topic X is relevant to the game.

If you DM a game, it's ~fine for you to assign specific books as homework for your players to read, but it's wrong to generalize your preferred DM & gaming style to everyone and treat it like the only correct way to play.

Last edited by mrfuji3; 31/10/21 04:26 PM. Reason: "...expect all players in all games..."