I'd be down for that, if one of the responses didn't say "I don't care".
Well I'm sorry to have to cut out a line again but I'm going to need you to explain why that option changes anything. That's not the player saying "I don't care" or an option for players who do not care about the lore. That's the character saying "I don't care". In the scenario of the OP, it doesn't change a single thing because OP still doesn't have the understanding to know whether his character cares about it or not. Choosing the "I don't care" option is just an as uninformed choice at that point as choosing any of the other options because they're all dependant on the same context -- knowing about Shar -- and that context has not been given to you.
And no, narration is not going to be considered worse than the status quo, and that thread existing (that despite it's name is not about the removal of the narrator but bringing back the ability to silence the narrator's voice) isn't an argument against the lack of set up being provided for this scene. I'm not even sure why you bothered to bring that thread up, do you think everyone on the internet except you is a single person? I'm not against narration -- in fact I consider the feature of a narrator to be one of the main pros of modern games like BG3 and the Pathfinder games over, say, the old BG games specifically because it enables a greater ability to deliver information and contextual clues to the player.
And again, the information existing in some book or other somewhere within the game is not enough setup for this scene. Even a player that reads every books they pick up might overlook those few, and this isn't some random fact about the setting that you don't need to know -- this is central to Shadowheart's plot, this scene is presented as a big act one moment, in fact the scene is, very much in contrast to how easily said book could be overlooked, decidedly hard to miss out on -- there are dozen of paths set up to lead to that reveal. And in order for the player to be able to react to that reveal, they need knowledge of who Shar is. Therefore, it is to me obvious that the establishment of who Shar is should be just as hard to miss out on as that scene itself -- the context of a story should be delivered inside that story's narrative and not be dependant on the player having happened to have opened an ingame book or not (especially a book in a sidequest location!). It's just storytelling 101 to me -- that moment is presented as far too momentous for what we have now to be adequate.
Compare for example with how well the game establishes the Mindflayers and the tadpole as evil. First you have the intro cinematic with the tadpoling and the abducting of people and the obvious evilousity of the design of it all, then you have the ship you start the actual game on and all the obvious evilousities on it establishing the transformations and also the mind control and, then you have all the other characters from party members to NPCs going on about it and being ready to kill you over it, and so on. The game really, really wants to make sure that you understand this. And of course, this is the central plot of the game. It deserves more set up than the central element to a single companion's plot, I'm not saying anything else. But the lack of establishing who Shar is very similar to if we had gotten no establishment as Mindflayers and tadpoles as being bad, and then were expected by the game to somehow already have this information in a later scene. And "but there is a book about that ingame" wouldn't have satisfied me then either because the game has to actively provide you with what it wants you to know. And it absolutely does expect you to already know who Shar is, that's why the "narrative dissonance" that the OP is describing comes to the forefront in that scene.
That's the point. Now maybe my perception is colored, because while I'm not a lore hound, I do understand that a cleric of an evil Goddess could be bad news. However, "I'm a cleric of Shar, the Goddess of Darkness and Loss, she's Neutral Evil, and has Death and Trickery as her Domains" would be worse than what we have.
Originally Posted by mrfuji3
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.
Yet that's exactly what's being asked for here, except that it's someone else's preferred style. So you've just escaped from a Mindflayer ship, you have a tadpole that's going to turn you into one, and you find out that a party member worships an evil Goddess, with Death and Trickery domains, using just the information from the PHB, what is your reaction? You see, that's the basic information that a player should have going into a campaign, and is exactly why that book was printed.
As it applies to this topic, however, if one is truly interested in the lore, one reads the lore books that are scattered about the maps. In games with a codex, it's assumed that the character actually does this, as it's added to the codex, and the player can read it at their leisure, aka Player's Handbook. However, that codex is useless, unless the player actually uses it. The same is true for the lore books, but at what point is a player that's new to an IP expected to do some basic "homework"? I prefer the term "footwork" here, because it's about exploring, and finding stuff. Since, in a new IP, it behooves one to at least give the books a cursory read, especially if they're concerned about lore. If you think it's bad now, what if Jaheira shows up, or Minsc and Boo? There's two games worth of explanation that is going to be required, since someone coming in new to BG 3 won't have a clue about what came before. There's a lot that's going to have to be "taken on faith" there, or it's going to take a long time to get "caught up". I would not suggest that players need to play those games, but I will also not be insisting that Larian provide a 10,000 foot overview. I'm sure there'd be some background dialog going on, some of it may even be tied to how the Act(s) before their introduction is handled, Jahiera may not be very happy if you sided with the Shadow Druids, for example, or the Goblins. Will "well duh, she's a druid" be insufficient? Being an evil Goddess is, according to this thread.
