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

[Mouseferatu]

Sometimes you do just have to declare something non-canon. But that should be a group decision involving multiple people and not just one person trying to fix a pet peeve.

And this is almost always how it's done.

The process for writing a chunk of lore in a WotC book, or writing a Star Trek novel, or whatever, includes multiple layers of approval. No single writer gets to toss out FR canon; it goes from the writer to the lead designer, and from there to other levels in WotC. (Or at least that's how it was done when I worked with them in 3E and 4E.) Tie-in and licensed novels have to go through multiple levels of approval.

None of it is unilateral to any single person, most of the time.

 

[Shasarak]

The framing in both these posts is different from how it looks to me.

No one is being given anything. They are being offered it, invited to buy and read it. If people don't like it, they (presumably) won't buy and read it. And hence don't have to "suck it up". No GH fan has to suck up FtA. They can just ignore it.

My point is that if you don't like what is being published then (if you interest is mainly story) don't read it, or (if you interest is mostly RPGing) don't use it in your game. And this is no harder to do if you like sticking to canon - you stick to the canon you like, and thus get a by-the-book FR (or GH, or whatever) experience - of if you don't care about it - in which case you pick and choose whatever you want from the book.

Maybe you can explain to me how I am supposed to decide if I like something that has been written or not without actually reading it? I am curious at the exact process.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The canon stick so often is just an excuse for "I don't like this and I need to justify my dislike".

I think there's also a dose of "I just don't like this."

When I look at how the Time of Troubles treated FR, for instance, I can see a lot of people disliking it just because it's not necessarily improving anything. A lot of the 4e changes can fall into that same bucket: okay, it's different, but that doesn't make it any better, and in a lot of ways it can make it worse just by being different.

This isn't necessarily a gain or a loss when you didn't have any particular feelings about the old lore. But when you liked the old lore, or it somehow mattered to you, it ends up making the thing worse.

Take tiefling horns. One of the things that was fun about the tiefling in 2e was that their appearance was varied - horns, lizard tails, goat legs, a smell of brimstone, odd colored skin, whatever. But now I'm supposed to abandon that fun because some dice-jockeys in Renton tells me it's gonna be more fun to have every single tiefling share a distinct appearance? And if I happen to think that appearance is kind of goofy-lookin'?

People can disagree about whether they like the new or the old better, but if your opinion was that the old one was fine, fun, even, changing it is a clear message from the designers that the fun you were having wasn't, apparently, worth preserving in the new world.

The Spellplague isn't a whole lot different. There's a lot of gems in the 4e Realms, but if you were a fan of the 2e/3e Realms, changing it is just telling you the fun you were having wasn't all that important to D&D, or to the future of the game.

Setting lore's primary purpose is to inspire fun times - if it does that and then they discard it, it feels like the managers of this game that you've come to have fun with don't understand at all why you're having fun with their game.

That's how canon becomes crystallized - it gives people fun experiences that they value and want to continue to have. No one's saying that illithids should stop eating brains, because it's fun to have illithids eat brains. If 6e illithids don't eat brains, I think you'd be pretty justified in a "What the heck?" reaction, even if 6e illithids are the coolest thing since Poochy.

5e's done a pretty good job of respecting the tradition without being beholden to it, I think. Some of the monster lore makes me facepalm a bit, but that's been the worst of it, which means it ain't been too bad.

 

[Hussar]

Fair enough. But "I don't like it" doesn't make it bad. Any more than I like it makes it good. Changes should be judged based on other criteria than, well "I" liked this so it should never change and if they do change it, I'm going to repeatedly scream at the top of my lungs until they change it back.

 

[Shasarak]

Like many here I've been gaming through multiple editions. Monsters and whatnot have had many interpretations and incarnations.

But start futzing about with some race of elves no one has ever heard of much less care about and people lose their minds. Change the length of tiefling horns and you might as well be eating puppies without ketchup.

The canon stick so often is just an excuse for "I don't like this and I need to justify my dislike".

Race of elves that "no one much has heard of"? You are talking about "Elves" the second most popular race in the whole game, right? Man, that earned a hearty laugh from me.

 

[Jacob Marley]

Race of elves that "no one much has heard of"? You are talking about "Elves" the second most popular race in the whole game, right? Man, that earned a hearty laugh from me.

I think Hussar was referring to the 4e change of High Elves into Eladrin that people lost their minds about. Not elves in general.

 

[hawkeyefan]

People can disagree about whether they like the new or the old better, but if your opinion was that the old one was fine, fun, even, changing it is a clear message from the designers that the fun you were having wasn't, apparently, worth preserving in the new world.

The Spellplague isn't a whole lot different. There's a lot of gems in the 4e Realms, but if you were a fan of the 2e/3e Realms, changing it is just telling you the fun you were having wasn't all that important to D&D, or to the future of the game.

Setting lore's primary purpose is to inspire fun times - if it does that and then they discard it, it feels like the managers of this game that you've come to have fun with don't understand at all why you're having fun with their game.

That's how canon becomes crystallized - it gives people fun experiences that they value and want to continue to have. No one's saying that illithids should stop eating brains, because it's fun to have illithids eat brains. If 6e illithids don't eat brains, I think you'd be pretty justified in a "What the heck?" reaction, even if 6e illithids are the coolest thing since Poochy.

You make a lot of good points, and I agree with a lot of it. However, I think most of it applies more to the fiction of the setting rather than the game setting. If the designers change something that I think was fun, it doesn't make me feel like I was having wrong fun...it makes me ignore their change. What is preserved is largely up to me and my group of players.

For me, if Illithids are changed to not eat brains, I absolutely will say "What the heck?" Then I'll look at what they decided to do with them, and then decide if I want to use the new version, or the old. Or both...depending on the new take. Or maybe I'd twist the idea of a new kind of mind flayer into something more to my needs and tastes.

Maybe a new strain of Illithid is discovered that doesn't eat brains....maybe there's a conflict between these neollithids and the classics. Maybe they've been bred by one of the gith races to help nullify Illithid psionics so the gith can safely hunt the Illithids down. Maybe, much like the gith did with the Illithids, these neollithids are attempting to toss of the shackles of those that have enslaved them. Seems pretty cool....plays with the themes already established with the Illithids and the Gith, and doesn't contradict anything that came before.

All I see is opportunity. The more ideas they give me, the more I can mash them up and mix and match into something that my gaming group and I will enjoy. The lore is what I decide to make of it. I can make the lore work....we all can.

For the novels and short stories, I know that the more they muck with canon, the more it can impact the fiction. And that does stink. I don't know how much of an issue this actually is...I haven't ready any FR novels in a few years, so I can't be sure. My guess is that for the most part, things were fine with the exception of the Spellplague and, to a lesser extent, The Sundering. Most of the individual book series are pretty self contained and don't rely on other work. Those Realms-Shaking Events though definitely seem to impact things.

For me, this is far less of a concern because I don't care that much about the novels. I know others do, and I acknowledge that it stinks for them, but my primary concern will always be the game.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Fair enough. But "I don't like it" doesn't make it bad. Any more than I like it makes it good. Changes should be judged based on other criteria than, well "I" liked this so it should never change and if they do change it, I'm going to repeatedly scream at the top of my lungs until they change it back.

I think it's entirely fair to advocate for the kinds of fun you enjoy to be present in the game.

If that means changeable tieflings and grey-box 1e FR, say how much you love them and how much you want them in the game.

If that means Turathi tieflings and post-Spellplague FR, say how much you love them and you want them in the game.

All with the grain of salt that at any one point in time, you're more likely to hear from those who are unhappy than those who are happy.

I believe that in a company like WotC, changes are based on criteria other than what a given author wants, and these criteria include what fans like and expect (which is why mind flayers still ate brains in 4e). What the author wants must fit into the brand and strategy of what the company wants. Like, with some of the 5e monster lore that I'm not exactly over-the-moon about, the intent seems pretty clear to me: link monsters together so that reading one entry makes you want to use related monsters; use legends and backstory to inspire new adventures; give newbies a quick sense of what a monster is "about," etc. All good criteria to have, even if some of the results are...eh....

Many of the criteria for the 4e changes are a bit more opaque to me. My main hypothesis credits them with a branding/IP imperative ("change it so nobody else can copy D&D!"), and I'm sure there was a healthy dose of "this has always annoyed me..." and "explore new territory" in there. Like, for Turathi tieflings, as best I can figure, they wanted a kind of tiefling that wasn't a generic "touched by evil" narrative, so the invented some proper nouns, gave them a shared history, and developed a shared appearance, while exploring the Sword & Sorcery trope of the fallen, decadent empire of old. Now when someone who had no RPG experience compared a D&D tiefling with a Pathfinder tiefling, you could easily tell them apart!

Of course, the resemblance they bore to the tieflings that came before was...well...their name was the same? And they both have this "touched by evil" thing going on. But you're ignoring a lot of the fun of old tieflings by abandoning them in favor of this new model. And the new model might not even be very good.

And that's why people complain about handlebar tiefling horns. In their subjective taste, it is worse than what came before.

 

[Shasarak]

I think Hussar was referring to the 4e change of High Elves into Eladrin that people lost their minds about. Not elves in general.

I would expect the decision to suddenly turn the most popular sub-race of Elves into the least popular sub-race of Elves in a spectacular retcon deserves its own special category rather then being lumped into the giving Tieflings horns section.

 

[pemerton]

Take tiefling horns. One of the things that was fun about the tiefling in 2e was that their appearance was varied - horns, lizard tails, goat legs, a smell of brimstone, odd colored skin, whatever. But now I'm supposed to abandon that fun because some dice-jockeys in Renton tells me it's gonna be more fun to have every single tiefling share a distinct appearance? And if I happen to think that appearance is kind of goofy-lookin'?

People can disagree about whether they like the new or the old better, but if your opinion was that the old one was fine, fun, even, changing it is a clear message from the designers that the fun you were having wasn't, apparently, worth preserving in the new world.

<snip>

Setting lore's primary purpose is to inspire fun times - if it does that and then they discard it, it feels like the managers of this game that you've come to have fun with don't understand at all why you're having fun with their game.

Turathi tieflings, as best I can figure, they wanted a kind of tiefling that wasn't a generic "touched by evil" narrative, so the invented some proper nouns, gave them a shared history, and developed a shared appearance, while exploring the Sword & Sorcery trope of the fallen, decadent empire of old. Now when someone who had no RPG experience compared a D&D tiefling with a Pathfinder tiefling, you could easily tell them apart!

Of course, the resemblance they bore to the tieflings that came before was...well...their name was the same? And they both have this "touched by evil" thing going on. But you're ignoring a lot of the fun of old tieflings by abandoning them in favor of this new model. And the new model might not even be very good.

And that's why people complain about handlebar tiefling horns. In their subjective taste, it is worse than what came before.

There are a few things here.

The specific issue of the tiefling change - I have a player in my 4e group who liked the 4e tieflings, and played one, and the "my ancestors were corrupted by devils" thing has been an important part of the character. I don't believe this player - who has played plenty of 2nd ed and 3E - ever had any interest in the prior version of tieflings.

The more general topic of the 4e approach to lore - by giving tieflings (and dragonborn, and dwarves, and elves, and goblins, and warlocks, etc) a morally and thematically laden backstory, the lore establishes a setting which is (by default) dynamic rather than static, and which (again, by default) gives PCs a context for and reasons for action arising out of nothing but choice of race and class. This is a desirable thing in a RPG. Other contemporary RPGs have noticed this and taken steps to operationalise it (Fate's aspects; MHRP's distinctions and milestones; Burning Wheel's beliefs; 5e's bonds, ideals and flaws) - in 4e the operationalisation took place via default backstory.

In some cases this required overwriting existing backstory for established entities that fit the bill in general terms (eg tieflings are descended from fiends) but not in specific terms (that descent doesn't per se inform their narrative arc).

Whether or not one likes this way of designing a RPG, the logic of it is pretty evident. (And for those who missed it on their own reading, WotC spelled it out in the Worlds and Monsters "preview".)

And finally, the suggestion that "I'm supposed to abandon that fun because some dice-jockeys in Renton tells me" and that "it feels like the managers of this game that you've come to have fun with don't understand at all why you're having fun with their game" - this I don't get at all. It's like the other moralising/normative language that has been used upthread. You're not supposed to abandon anything. If you don't like the new tieflings keep using the old ones. It's not going to do your game any harm to roll your tiefling's appearance on the old random chart.

To me this seems such a non-issue I can't get across the concern at all. I mean, 3E - after 20+ years - changed the default alignment of orcs from LE to CE. So what? If I want LE orcs I just use them as such. (As it happens I don't think I've used an orc in any game since 1998, so it's been a non-issue for me.)

Someone writing something that (i) they think is interesting or would be fun or useful in play, that (ii) you don't like, isn't an insult to you. It's just something you can ignore with no consequences or cost whatsoever.

Maybe you can explain to me how I am supposed to decide if I like something that has been written or not without actually reading it? I am curious at the exact process.

You can ask the opinion of those who know it and whose opinion you trust. You can read reviews. You can skim through it in a book shop. If it's one chapter or section in a larger work that you are otherwise keen to buy regardless of whether or not you like that bit, you can subsequently read it and decide to ignore it (eg I really like the Plane Above, but just ignore the stuff about the "outworlds" or whatever they're called for each Divine Domain, because they strike me as very Planescape-y and not really my thing).

People have been engaging in these processes for much longer than RPG publishing has been taking place. And in the case of 4e FR, there was no shortage of public commentary on its changes immediately upon release.

If the designers change something that I think was fun, it doesn't make me feel like I was having wrong fun...it makes me ignore their change.

This. So much this.

Burning Wheel Gold uses a different positioning system for combat from BW revised. I like the revised system better, so I use that in my BW game. (I also use the revised rather than the Gold sorcery rules. But I use the Gold version of the summoning rules, because I think it does a better job of balancing the difficulties for different sorts of summoned entities.)

Or to focus on setting rather than rules: in my early-90s GH game I came up with the idea of the Scarlet Brotherhood taking over the Lordship of the Isles independently of FtA. (It's a natural extrapolation from the situation presented in the original folio.) That means that, when I've encounter post-FtA stuff that assumes the Scarlet Brotherhood controls the Lordship also, I use it. But when I encounter other stuff that doesn't fit my game (eg certain assumptions about the role of the Archleric of Veluna that contradict my own, established, version of that role) I ignore it.

The authors of FtA weren't being disrespectful, let along malicious or dismissive. They just wrote some stuff that they thought was good, and I like some of it but not all of it. And so I use some of it but not all of it.