Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Just looked inside of a 3e Dungeon Magazine and it says that the opinions inside are not necessarily that of WotC. That's not official.
D&D 5E Whatever "lore" is, it isn't "rules."
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Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
It's a disruption of the setting. The more you change about a setting, the more likely it is that you will cross that line for any given individual where the setting loses what it means to be that setting and becomes an alternate universe. If I were to play in your game, it would be disruptive to me to call it Greyhawk. You've changed waaaaaaaaay too much for it to be Greyhawk any longer. However, if you called it an alternate Greyhawk loosely based on the original, I wouldn't have a problem with it at all.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
I'll try one more time. I stepped one foot outside of pure canon. You took a full sprint 100 yards outside of pure canon, then boarded a plane and crossed the impure canon ocean. Where I altered one small thing in a full setting, you've axed 95%+ of it and just kept the maps.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
To be clear, by "departure from canon" what is really meant is "it doesn't line up with how I personally see the themes and meanings of the setting."
It doesn't mean "departs from the world presented in the book."
In fact, it's by adhering to the world presented in the book that my character has apparently departed from what Hussar sees as the relevant themes and meanings of the setting.
Which must certainly leave him with a little asterisk next to this game as "not really a Dragonlance game."
If game creators feel that there are particular themes and meanings they'd like their players to get out of their setting through various play mechanics and storylines, a lack of consistency in the lore will make those themes and meanings more inconsistent, and less liable to be actually driven through play. If you write "all gnome wizards are renegades" into a book but expect every PC who plays a gnome wizard to not be a renegade because renegade wizards are inconsistent with your themes and meanings, you've done messed up.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
There's nothing inside the cover that says that Dungeon is official D&D material.
[quote[I certainly noticed the change in 3E Dragon from its classic days. Instead of having the flavour of a fan magazine (ideas for rules variants or new rules, commentary on playing the game, etc) it had the flavour of a house organ: the articles read like supplements to WotC's game. 4e continued this trend.[/QUOTE]I agree that it felt a bit closer to a company product, but I never took anything in Dragon to be official in 3e. Anything in there had to be okayed by me and I scrutinized it like I did a 3rd party product.
While Hussar was wrong about Dragon having always been official content (I and others have pointed this out to him in the past including a nice quote from Gygax by I believe Kobold Stew), he is not wrong about 3e Dragon (at the least 3.5) or Dungeon.
3.5 Dragon content was official. Most 3.5 covers will state 100% official Dungeon and Dragons or "100% official Dungeon and Dragons content". A few just say Official Dungeons and Dragons Magazine. However, the idea was that with 3e mechanics came directly from WOTC's design team. I can't say for certain about 3.0, but the earliest enclosed subscription mailers had an image the bottom left which had the text "official Dungeons and Dragons articles". This was before they switched to the image of the Dragon issue with the Half-Orc Paladin.
Here some examples:
This first link is an ebay lot. Scroll through the covers. The second of the images is Dragon 310 and towards the lower right of the cover it state that the magazine 100% Official Dungeons and Dragons. Several of the other covers state the same or at the word content. Again, there are two or three that simply state Official Dungeons and Dragons Magazine. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dragon-Dung...hash=item2a6260db0e:m:mnkBOLJSFkPcD0CLTvl1QaA
Look at the upper left corner of the cover for 352: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dragon-Maga...997837?hash=item2a786c6bcd:g:6NMAAOSwa~BYa5OB
Edit: As for Dungeon, I was surprised that the adventures were official. However, there is an ad on pg. 24 of Dragon 280 that states Dungeon is the magazine for "official dungeons and dragons adventures"
As for vetting Dragon material, I too vetted everything from Dragon before allowing it n my campaign. I vetted everything from WOTC before allowing it including material was written by people whom I would regularly allow under their own imprint/website or another publisher. This was both done for quality and to ensure the material fit my own campaign and playstyle. WOTC never received and still doesn't receive a free pass for being the official publisher of D&D
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This is either bare tautology - changes are what make people judge that something is different from what it was - or false if taken quite literally, because it may be that one change to a crucial thing makes a bigger difference in this respect than many changes to peripheral things.
I wish you would stop making stuff up and then attributing it to me.
What 95% do you think I have axed? What 5% have I kept? This relates to the question of "tautology or false" - having set out no theory of how to individuate the components of a setting, how are you now counting them, and cataloguing what I do or don't use?
Here are some re-posts from the other thread:
What is the 95% thrown out here?
By your own standards, adding details to the Knights of Holy Shielding by drawing on the DL knights is "adding", not "changing". Likewise adding in WoHS, based primarily in the Gh: GH already has two moons, and adding a third invisible black moon is more "addition", not a canon change.
No one would have trouble recognising the game as a GH game.
What does it mean to call it an "alternate" GH game? Every campaign world is "alternate", in the sense that it is not following someone else's script.
And what does "loosely based" on mean? That's just you saying you don't like how I've used the setting. I don't think of my game as "loosely based" on GH. It's set in GH. It's "loosely based" on a mixture of JRRT and REH.
A final repost will elaborate:
What's the evidence for this?
Some changes to lore might do this. (Eg midichlorians in Star Wars.) Others might not, even if (as individuated facts) there are more of them - eg suppose there is inconsistency across Star Wars stories about the rules of debate of the Galactic Senate, or about the workings of the engines of a TIE fighter. (I have no idea if there are such inconsistencies - but if there were, they wouldn't make it harder to get the lore and themes out of using the setting.)
When 3E changed the alignment of orcs from LE to CE, there was a WotC column that asserted that this change would reinforce theme, because it would bring orcs into line with the chaotic way that we have all, always, been playing them. That claim might be false - it rests on an empirical generalisation - but it's not obviously absurd.
The 4e designers, somewhat similarly, thought that making succubi devils would enhance, rather than detract from, their thematic role.
Or, to put the same point in slightly different words: if previous authors got it wrong - created a mismatch between details and theme - then changing those details can strengthen the connection between material and theme. And if the details are largely tangential to theme (eg TIE fighter engines), then changing those or saying inconsistent things about them won't be any sort of impediment to realising theme with the setting in question.
A pure Phantasm that spawned a 100 page (and on-going) thread that has now determined, as far as I can tell, that Flint, Caramon and Riverwind were not authentic Dragonlance characters.
Whose game did this disrupt? Not mine, and by [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s testimony not his - and presumably not [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION]'s either, given that he didn't learn how Hussar felt until it came out in a 100 page thread.
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