Quote Originally Posted by Mark Hall View Post
See, I disagree. I think 3e did far more to make a setting, simply by having the ton of racial information and explicit names of deities and their various attributes. A BTB elf has an assumed culture, assumed deity, and even assumed alignment. The favored class mechanic, wonky as it was, also served as a cultural identifier. While 3.x may have been more vague on the whys for rules, it was a lot more specific on setting.
AD&D has all that too, but instead of "this is the god that made elves" we had "this is the god all elves explicitly worship in this specific way because that's what elves do" in this world".

All around though, implicit setting is something that infects D&D specifically. I'm hoping they'll move away from implicit in the future.

Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
Personally, I always took the fluff in the books as a suggestion. One that was pretty much always either modified or even discarded entirely from time to time.

So, what do we end up with, then? Different spellcasting attributes, better proficiencies on one class and different spell lists. That could mean anything, in the fluff.
That's the thing though; the fluff/crunch divide is a relatively recent invention. There was no discountable fluff. If it was in the book it was a rule.