I guess where I disagree is that I don't see players who make the assumptions that the writers of the books clearly intended them to make as obnoxious. They're mislead. Under-informed.
Hogwash. How many times does the game have to scream "ANYTHING IN THIS BOOK IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AT YOUR OWN TABLE!!!" before we can finally put the impetus
back onto the player to actually understand that?
They listened to someone who promised to tell them the way things were, but the thing that they listened to wasn't entirely honest. It omitted a lot of how things are. It showed you the color orange and said "rainbows are this color," which is true, but they're also a lot of other colors. It elided the interesting complexity in the world in favor of....well, I don't know, exactly.
No... they read a book that said Monster X had Y backstory... *and* that other games will not necessarily use that backstory. Just because the Y backstory is written here for all those players who don't want to make up their own... DON'T PRESUME that this is how it is in every game.
Basically, all you rules lawyers and book memorizers... STOP METAGAMING!
To throw a bone to a brand team that is terrified of honest complexity? To make the designers' amateur fiction-writing dreams come a little bit true? There's value in the stories that the designers tell, Mearls says. What he doesn't say is why those stories are so valuable that they need to be presumed standard. Why is that worth the (admittedly, small in most cases) hassle of contradicting a player who presumes that rainbows are orange or that jackalweres are Grazz'zt-related?
They are "presumed standard" by you *only* because they appear in the Monster Manual. But your suggestions to combat this have always seemed to be either to remove all narrative function from monster entries (thereby screwing over all the players who do not have the time or wherewithal to make their own)... or else list three to five
different narrative functions in every monster entry all for the purpose of making sure all of our supposedly reading comprehensionally-challenged players out there pick up on the fact that these monsters can be used different ways in different settings. Because just stating that plainly off the top of the book somehow isn't enough. But of course, doing this expands every single monster entry by several paragraphs, thereby reducing the number of monsters that end up in the book.
Quite frankly, KM... I have absolutely no idea why these players in your head somehow are able to memorize the backstory of all these monsters so completely that they will get upset or offended when they aren't used that way in a particular game... but somehow are
incapable of memorizing the simple sentence "Anything in this book can be different in a different setting or at a different table."
THESE are the players that I don't feel WotC needs to cater to. They feel entitled to treat everything in the Monster Manual as the "One True Way" and refuse to accept one simple sentence that things can be changed. No, those players are not "mislead". No, they are not "under-informed". They are
obnoxious.
