D&D 5E Do you care about setting "canon"?

[Maxperson]

In the case of the "rebels against Gondor" scenario, you have to posit behavior from the Gondorian army that I don't think fits into the canon world in order to justify the attitude of the PCs. So in that sense, I still think it can be called non-canon.

I'm guessing quite a few "let's play the bad guys" games would similarly invent transgressions on the part of the "good guys." Not all; sometimes people just want to cut loose and be bad. But often enough.

The Gondorian people aren't saints. They are descended from the Numenorians and normal humans of the area, both of which were prone to normal human failings. Being faithful didn't mean holy goodness. Being faithful meant not worshiping Sauron.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not sure whether I'd view the themes presented in some of the fiction set in a particular setting as a requirement for whether something is "canon" or not.

<snip>

I can certainly see a distinction. A light-hearted game of the kick-in-the-door exploits of Murderhobos inc. could be set in Ravenloft, and be canon Ravenloft. But it wouldn't be what many people would associate with the phrase "A Ravenloft game."

You Ravenloft example is a good one using a familiar D&D setting rather than the literary examples like Middle Earth, REH's Hyborian Age, or even DL.

Different fictional settings bring different degrees of theme/tone with them. Eg GH has less than REH, but still - would a notionally GH game that didn't involve any of the S&S tropes (ancient wizards, Bright Deserts, oracular priests, etc) be a genuine GH game? This is partly why From the Ashes was contentious - it was seen as contradicting the tone.

And to echo something I mentioned upthread, I think that - of the established D&D settings - FR might have the least degree of theme/tone, and so the one for which "canon" correlates most strongly to an atlas and a chronicle. Which, I think, is one reason why it's never grabbed me.

 

[pemerton]

Another example about theme/tone as part of canon:

Suppose someone asks you to play an "Underworld" game (I think I've got that right - the B-movies with Kate Beckinsale in a trench coat). Well, the world of "Underworld" is, on its surface, our world. So it presumably contains accountants, librarians, sanitation workers, lab assistants, etc. But if you sat down to play Underworld, and the GM hands you the pregen PCs who are an accountant, a librarian, a sanitation work and a lab assistant - not a vampire or werewolf or even a monster-hunter among them - and most of the early part of the session is the four of you planning your holiday at Disney World, and then the action sequence involves a Disney World ride crashing because of poor maintenance - well, in what sense would that be an Underworld game?

I would think that, at a minimum, an Underworld game needs conflict between monsters and action scenes that (i) happen at night, and (ii) involve a fair bit of interpersonal violence.

 

[pemerton]

Just because you're looking at the setting from the opposite direction doesn't make a treatment of it non-canonical.

Well, this is the whole question, isn't it?

Marvel used to occasionally publish comics written from the point of view of ordinary people who watch superheroes do their thing and have to clean up after them. But there was a reason those comics were presented as ironic spoofs.

 

[pemerton]

You wanted to know who was being "forced" to use material and I wanted to know who would have to be.

I can not think of a TSR product where that was the case.

You are the one who talked about some publisher/writer trying to force an idea on others. I asked what you had in mind. Because I don't know what you were referring to.

 

[pemerton]

In the case of the "rebels against Gondor" scenario, you have to posit behavior from the Gondorian army that I don't think fits into the canon world in order to justify the attitude of the PCs. So in that sense, I still think it can be called non-canon.

I'm guessing quite a few "let's play the bad guys" games would similarly invent transgressions on the part of the "good guys." Not all; sometimes people just want to cut loose and be bad. But often enough.

A more subtle example - should a truly canoncial Middle Earth game have Hobbits in it?

In the stories, Hobbits are the vehicles for self-insertion into Middle Earth on the part of the reader (hence the Hobbits correspond to an idealised version of JRRT's conception of his readers - a certain group of English people). It's telling that most of Middle Earth is new to them (as it is to the reader), and that they likewise are unknown to most of Middle Earth (except Gandalf, who at times is a quasi-authorial figure).

In a RPG, the participants don't need this sort of vehicle for self-insertion, because they have their PCs. So the Hobbits become redundant, and a distraction.

This is why I think it is not coincidental that Burning Wheel - the elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, wolves, and spiders of which are very faithfully modelled on JRRT's conception (both in their overt traits, and their thematic elements like elven grief, dwarven greed and orcish hatred) - has no halfling PC race.

I'm curious what [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION] thinks of this, too.

 

[pemerton]

I also think the requirement for characters to want the return of the gods is not clear at all from the setting information, and some of the folks who know DL better than me are pointing out that it's not necessarily the case. So at the very least, the setting information is awful at producing that outcome. It's possible that you and Hussar are just dead wrong about what the intent of game play should be in DL - that it is more open and flexible than you suggest. I don't know what's right because I'm new to the setting, and the sources used to create my PC didn't really mention it. They did mention that most people weren't faithful, and that the original reason for this was that people turned from the gods because the gods slaughtered millions of innocent people in the Cataclysm, but it didn't indicate in the slightest that this was a bit of the setting that the PC's should want to change, or that the PC's should believe that the gods were right. If the intended result was PC's who wanted to restore the gods, we have a pretty catastrophic design failure.

I think the language of "requirement" is too strong.

Is it a requirement of performing Henry V that one celebrate the English? Probably not. Would a performance of Henry V that deliberately set out - through staging, through tone of dialogue, etc - to be an ironic condemnation of the English count as canonical? I don't think so - and at the very least it would be quite non-standard.

I'm not sure what the sources were that you used. If they were fan sources, I'm not surprised that they didn't touch on the theme and tone of DL, because - as this thread itself shows - the idea that canon in an RPG is something that should be thought of in broadly literary terms, rather than broadly "list of elements" terms, is probably not the majority approach. (Which, I think, is a particular consequence of broader features of RPG culture.)

 

[Hriston]

See above. LotR has characters who revere Sauron - but would a game in which such characters are framed as the heroes and protagonists be canonical? It doesn't seem to me that it would.

It depends what you mean by "heroes and protagonists". I could see a campaign as consistent with canon in which the PCs are Dunlendings, or Haradrim, or Easterlings, or Variags of Khand, or Orcs of Mordor, or any of the other peoples that are on the wrong side of the conflict over the fate of Middle-earth. I don't think that's necessarily going to go against the canon, which I would define, for the purpose of setting, as the geography and history of Tolkien's created world as represented in his works. But while additions to the setting might not directly contradict canon, they do run the risk of upsetting the carefully constructed themes that places and events have in Tolkien's world. For example, the riding to their deaths at the Battle of the Crossings of Poros of Folcred and Fastred in T.A. 2885 is not the first nor the last time the Rohirrim rode to the defense of Gondor, honouring the Oath of Eorl, and fell in battle. Eorl himself fell in 2545, fighting an invasion of Easterlings in the Wold. He is the archetype of which Folcred and Fastred, and after them Theoden himself, are types. If we imagine that Folcred and Fastred honored the Oath of Eorl by raping and pillaging, what does that say about the sacrifice of Theoden?

The same thing is going on when @Maxperson tells me and @Hriston that it is perfectly canonical to play a Middle Earth game in which people of South Gondor take revenge against Minas Tirith for those Gondorian soldiers raping and pillaging. I'm sure that Maxperson read the same words that I did, but he obviously took them to convey something utterly different from what I did.

The LR doesn't say that Aragorn and Theoden are not rapists, but what does it say about the thematic significance of elements of the setting if our play involves imagining that they are? If we imagine that Aragorn is a rapist, it seems to me that it would disrupt central conceits of the setting, such as the notion that the rule of Aragorn is actually preferable to that of Sauron.

 

[Shasarak]

You are the one who talked about some publisher/writer trying to force an idea on others. I asked what you had in mind. Because I don't know what you were referring to.

On one hand you have the 3e Forgotten Realms Guide and on the other you have the 4e Forgotten Realms Guide.

One is arguably one of the best Campaign Guides of all time and the other is the 4e Forgotten Realms Guide. So it is obvious that trying to force your ideas does not work.

 

[Shasarak]

You Ravenloft example is a good one using a familiar D&D setting rather than the literary examples like Middle Earth, REH's Hyborian Age, or even DL.

Different fictional settings bring different degrees of theme/tone with them. Eg GH has less than REH, but still - would a notionally GH game that didn't involve any of the S&S tropes (ancient wizards, Bright Deserts, oracular priests, etc) be a genuine GH game? This is partly why From the Ashes was contentious - it was seen as contradicting the tone.

And to echo something I mentioned upthread, I think that - of the established D&D settings - FR might have the least degree of theme/tone, and so the one for which "canon" correlates most strongly to an atlas and a chronicle. Which, I think, is one reason why it's never grabbed me.

I would disagree that GH needed to invoke any S&S tropes when it could just invoke DnD tropes and be perfectly adequate. I am playing in a GH game with no ancient wizards, bright Deserts, oracular priests, etc but plenty of DnD tropes as well as GH NPCs and locations. Likewise I have played plenty of Dragonlance with absolutely no focus on the Gods or Dragon armies and it seemed just as Dragonlance as anything Tanis and friends did.