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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6395244" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I can honestly say that this is the first time I have ever heard of anyone being confused, in the sense of thinking that 4e archons occupy the same story role as Jeff Grubb's archons.</p><p></p><p>The first time I used a nycadaemon it was allied with both a demon and devil to try to advance the cause of an evil god. There seemed to me that there was no greater barrier to demons and devils cooperating than dwarves and elves - and everyone knows that in extremis dwarves and elves will align against orcs and ogres, whereas we never see elves and ogres aligning against dwarves and (LE) orcs!</p><p></p><p>When I later acquired a copy of D3, I saw that, in it, mezzodaemons and nycadaemons were hanging out in the Vault much like demons. 4e's treatment harks back to that. (And that is no obstacle to nycadaemons playing both sides for those who want it - for instance, a nycadaemon could ally with a force of devils to betray a force of demons fighting on the Plane of 1000 Portals. Nothing in 4e makes that sort of scenario impossible.)</p><p></p><p>They'd probably have to rename one or the other. Just as in the Fiend Folio, creatures first published as Imps in White Dwarf magazine were re-labelled as "mephits". Or Balrogs got re-labelled as Type VI demons (with Balor as a proper name of one of them) and then re-labelled again as Balors.</p><p></p><p>Issues of continuity in FR aren't something that I personally worry much about. I don't have to edit a wiki about them, and I don't and never have used the campaign world.</p><p></p><p>When I do use published worlds - eg Greyhawk or Oriental Adventures - I pick and choose my material from the various versions I have (in the case of Greyhawk, 5 of them, or 6 if you count the City of Greyhawk boxed set as its own thing), and don't worry too much about what the precise popuation figures are (this being one of the things that varies across versions). These campaign materials are grist for my game; my game is not a vehicle for showing off these materials.</p><p></p><p>To the extent that WotC has to treat campaign world continuity as an important commercial reason - eg because it makes more money selling FR novels than it does selling RPG material - I think that has an unhappy, if unavoidable, effect on the game, as it subordinates the design of material that is well-suited for play to what <em>is</em> the authoring of (in effect) a series of chain novels.</p><p></p><p>This all rests on premises that I don't really accept.</p><p></p><p>For instance, I don't agree with your contrast between "continuation" and "adaptation". Todd McFarlane's Peter Parker married to Mary Jane is not in any meaningful sense a continuation of Ditko's nerdy photo-journalist getting beaten up by Flash Thompson. They're different riffs on the same character and his tropes.</p><p></p><p>I've never heard any of the criticism of First Class that you mention. They don't resonate with me at all. The point of the movies (or the comics) isn't, primarily, to present a history of an alternative universe. It's to tell stories, with the alternative universe background being a tool to that end.</p><p></p><p>4e didn't render past material "invalid". Material doesn't become <em>invalid</em>, because there is no relevant test of validity. It is all just story elements for use in an RPG. Did the Caves of Chaos become "invalid" when AD&D rewrote most of those humanoids as LE? Was its validity partially restored when 3E rewrote orcs as CE?</p><p></p><p>This is what I took to be (part of) [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s point (though, like [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION], I don't really see how he reconciles it with his apparent enthusiasm for preserving an ever-more detailed canon): if I am using orcs in my campaign for a certain purpose, and part of my use of orcs involves them using scimitars a la Tolkien, and then TSR publishes the Monster Manual which has a weapon list for orcs on which scimitars do not appear, the fact that TSR's new material doesn't contradict its older published material is irrelevant to me. Because the new material contradicts what I am doing in my game.</p><p></p><p>Conversely, if I am busy ignoring yugoloths because I think they're inane, and am using daemons in the same way that Gygax did in Vaults of the Drow, namey as variant demons, then when 4e comes out and makes that approach to daemons part of its lore I have an edition that is more suitable for my purposes, daemon-wise, than the two that preceded it, even if that new lore contradicts what came before.</p><p></p><p>This is why I have said that the criterion for evolution from what came before is not consistency of detail that may well be irrelevant to most players, but consistency of theme and story function which is likely to be what draws game players to particular elements. At least in my experience, D&D players don't use orcs, or goblins, or hobgoblins because they like the weapon and armour specs provided for them in Gygax's MM. They use orcs because they are familiar with Tolkien or Tolkien-derivative material.</p><p></p><p>As something of an aside, 4e doesn't have a metaplot - all the material you mention has <em>already happened</em> in the default setting, and is part of the background known by the players.</p><p></p><p>To the extent that this is more than just an aside, the point would be this: as with my comments upthread about "chain novels", I don't regard metaplot as conducive to RPG play. It tends to turn RPGing just into another form of experiencing someone else's story, which reduces what is peculiar to RPGs - namely, participant authorship - whilst driving home what is perhaps weakest about RPGs - namey, the stories typically aren't all that good. A bit like jamming with one's friends, being a participant author goes a long way towards making an otherwise ordinary story enjoyable and interesting. Whereas being a reader/viewer of someone else's story removes those pleasures of creation, at which point the story better be pretty good! And in my personal experience this is not true for most RPG metaplot.</p><p></p><p>Perhaps it is true that, for the majority of D&D players, the most salient fact about eladrin is that they are from the planes of Beastlands, Arvandor and Ysgard (planes that have, in their canoncial Planescape labels, already lost much of what made them engaging in their original AD&D presentation). WotC have the market research to know whether or not this is so. But a story in which the plane of origin of a being - rather than, say, its role as a mercurial, magical elven being - is the most important thing about it is in my view a story that has already degenerated into an encylopedia entry.</p><p></p><p>When I play 4e, Kord lives on Mt Celestia with Bahamut (who, in the original MM, lived behind the East Wind) and with Moradin. But if WotC were to publish a version of the game in which they reimagined these things - and, say, put Kord (= Thor) into Ysgard (= Asgard) and placed Moradin in the deep caves beneath Thor's home, and made Bahamut the guardian of the rainbow bridge, that wouldn't bother me. I could even have both stories be legends in the same campaign world if I wanted to! Or adapt them in some other way. Or even ignore them if I wanted to.</p><p></p><p>The bottom line, for me, is that TSR/WotC is not engaged in worldbuilding. They are presenting me (and other D&D players) with the material to put together my (our) games.</p><p></p><p>No. I'm saying that a version of the game that develops AD&D assumptions in a certain direction isn't "disrespecting" or "disregarding" what came before. It is building on it.</p><p></p><p>I'm also saying that, in my view, D&D is not primarily a "metaplot" or campaign world. It is primarily a set of tropes and themes, and the job of the monsters and the cosmology is to express those tropes and themes in ways that players can use to play their own games.</p><p></p><p>When you think of the game in that way, changing the details of the lore in the pursuit of better expressions of those tropes and themes is good design. And prioritising details over tropes and themes is getting things backwards.</p><p></p><p>Obviously I don't think my opinion is a universal one. But I think it's a tenable one. And I think it's that the 4e designers seem to have shared, or at least adopted as a working hypothesis. Which was the basis of my point, stated upthread, that they were not "disrespecting" what had gone before, or (as is often said) changing it for change's sake. They were trying to make it the best version of what it already was.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6395244, member: 42582"] I can honestly say that this is the first time I have ever heard of anyone being confused, in the sense of thinking that 4e archons occupy the same story role as Jeff Grubb's archons. The first time I used a nycadaemon it was allied with both a demon and devil to try to advance the cause of an evil god. There seemed to me that there was no greater barrier to demons and devils cooperating than dwarves and elves - and everyone knows that in extremis dwarves and elves will align against orcs and ogres, whereas we never see elves and ogres aligning against dwarves and (LE) orcs! When I later acquired a copy of D3, I saw that, in it, mezzodaemons and nycadaemons were hanging out in the Vault much like demons. 4e's treatment harks back to that. (And that is no obstacle to nycadaemons playing both sides for those who want it - for instance, a nycadaemon could ally with a force of devils to betray a force of demons fighting on the Plane of 1000 Portals. Nothing in 4e makes that sort of scenario impossible.) They'd probably have to rename one or the other. Just as in the Fiend Folio, creatures first published as Imps in White Dwarf magazine were re-labelled as "mephits". Or Balrogs got re-labelled as Type VI demons (with Balor as a proper name of one of them) and then re-labelled again as Balors. Issues of continuity in FR aren't something that I personally worry much about. I don't have to edit a wiki about them, and I don't and never have used the campaign world. When I do use published worlds - eg Greyhawk or Oriental Adventures - I pick and choose my material from the various versions I have (in the case of Greyhawk, 5 of them, or 6 if you count the City of Greyhawk boxed set as its own thing), and don't worry too much about what the precise popuation figures are (this being one of the things that varies across versions). These campaign materials are grist for my game; my game is not a vehicle for showing off these materials. To the extent that WotC has to treat campaign world continuity as an important commercial reason - eg because it makes more money selling FR novels than it does selling RPG material - I think that has an unhappy, if unavoidable, effect on the game, as it subordinates the design of material that is well-suited for play to what [I]is[/I] the authoring of (in effect) a series of chain novels. This all rests on premises that I don't really accept. For instance, I don't agree with your contrast between "continuation" and "adaptation". Todd McFarlane's Peter Parker married to Mary Jane is not in any meaningful sense a continuation of Ditko's nerdy photo-journalist getting beaten up by Flash Thompson. They're different riffs on the same character and his tropes. I've never heard any of the criticism of First Class that you mention. They don't resonate with me at all. The point of the movies (or the comics) isn't, primarily, to present a history of an alternative universe. It's to tell stories, with the alternative universe background being a tool to that end. 4e didn't render past material "invalid". Material doesn't become [I]invalid[/I], because there is no relevant test of validity. It is all just story elements for use in an RPG. Did the Caves of Chaos become "invalid" when AD&D rewrote most of those humanoids as LE? Was its validity partially restored when 3E rewrote orcs as CE? This is what I took to be (part of) [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s point (though, like [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION], I don't really see how he reconciles it with his apparent enthusiasm for preserving an ever-more detailed canon): if I am using orcs in my campaign for a certain purpose, and part of my use of orcs involves them using scimitars a la Tolkien, and then TSR publishes the Monster Manual which has a weapon list for orcs on which scimitars do not appear, the fact that TSR's new material doesn't contradict its older published material is irrelevant to me. Because the new material contradicts what I am doing in my game. Conversely, if I am busy ignoring yugoloths because I think they're inane, and am using daemons in the same way that Gygax did in Vaults of the Drow, namey as variant demons, then when 4e comes out and makes that approach to daemons part of its lore I have an edition that is more suitable for my purposes, daemon-wise, than the two that preceded it, even if that new lore contradicts what came before. This is why I have said that the criterion for evolution from what came before is not consistency of detail that may well be irrelevant to most players, but consistency of theme and story function which is likely to be what draws game players to particular elements. At least in my experience, D&D players don't use orcs, or goblins, or hobgoblins because they like the weapon and armour specs provided for them in Gygax's MM. They use orcs because they are familiar with Tolkien or Tolkien-derivative material. As something of an aside, 4e doesn't have a metaplot - all the material you mention has [I]already happened[/I] in the default setting, and is part of the background known by the players. To the extent that this is more than just an aside, the point would be this: as with my comments upthread about "chain novels", I don't regard metaplot as conducive to RPG play. It tends to turn RPGing just into another form of experiencing someone else's story, which reduces what is peculiar to RPGs - namely, participant authorship - whilst driving home what is perhaps weakest about RPGs - namey, the stories typically aren't all that good. A bit like jamming with one's friends, being a participant author goes a long way towards making an otherwise ordinary story enjoyable and interesting. Whereas being a reader/viewer of someone else's story removes those pleasures of creation, at which point the story better be pretty good! And in my personal experience this is not true for most RPG metaplot. Perhaps it is true that, for the majority of D&D players, the most salient fact about eladrin is that they are from the planes of Beastlands, Arvandor and Ysgard (planes that have, in their canoncial Planescape labels, already lost much of what made them engaging in their original AD&D presentation). WotC have the market research to know whether or not this is so. But a story in which the plane of origin of a being - rather than, say, its role as a mercurial, magical elven being - is the most important thing about it is in my view a story that has already degenerated into an encylopedia entry. When I play 4e, Kord lives on Mt Celestia with Bahamut (who, in the original MM, lived behind the East Wind) and with Moradin. But if WotC were to publish a version of the game in which they reimagined these things - and, say, put Kord (= Thor) into Ysgard (= Asgard) and placed Moradin in the deep caves beneath Thor's home, and made Bahamut the guardian of the rainbow bridge, that wouldn't bother me. I could even have both stories be legends in the same campaign world if I wanted to! Or adapt them in some other way. Or even ignore them if I wanted to. The bottom line, for me, is that TSR/WotC is not engaged in worldbuilding. They are presenting me (and other D&D players) with the material to put together my (our) games. No. I'm saying that a version of the game that develops AD&D assumptions in a certain direction isn't "disrespecting" or "disregarding" what came before. It is building on it. I'm also saying that, in my view, D&D is not primarily a "metaplot" or campaign world. It is primarily a set of tropes and themes, and the job of the monsters and the cosmology is to express those tropes and themes in ways that players can use to play their own games. When you think of the game in that way, changing the details of the lore in the pursuit of better expressions of those tropes and themes is good design. And prioritising details over tropes and themes is getting things backwards. Obviously I don't think my opinion is a universal one. But I think it's a tenable one. And I think it's that the 4e designers seem to have shared, or at least adopted as a working hypothesis. Which was the basis of my point, stated upthread, that they were not "disrespecting" what had gone before, or (as is often said) changing it for change's sake. They were trying to make it the best version of what it already was. [/QUOTE]
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