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

[Hussar]

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.

Eladrin is what I was referring to. How many people gave the slightest toss about Eladrin pre 4e?

 

[Hussar]

See @Imabanana what I don't get is how personal people take the changes are possibly telling anyone they are having fun wrong. How? Someone isn't making this change to spite you. They are making the change presumably because they like this thing better.

That in no way reflects anything on you.

I think this is what baffles me most whenever this comes up. The degree of ownership that people presume over the game is astounding. It constantly surprises me.

Edit to add.

And furthermore if I'm guilty of baderongfun by changing something, how is someone not equally guilty for blocking the change? If changing tieflings is telling people they're doing it wrong, why is it acceptable to tell me that I can't have what I want?

Why can't we have both? Since you've already got what you want, how is it bad that I get what I want too? You want variable tieflings? Well, you've got your books right there. But in order for you to have what you want I must not have what I want?

It's the unbelievable arrogance of canon fetishists that just blows me away. You want FR with no spellplague? You've got thousands of pages of material. Why can't I get a refreshed Realms that I much prefer? Why must the canon police tastes always be satisfied first?

 

[rollingForInit]

I enjoy both worlds that are canon and worlds that aren't. Just is very important to set the right expectations. If I was told I'd be a player in a campaign set in Forgotten Realms (with nothing else specified) I'd expect it to be more or less canon. I mean, personally I'd definitely ask the DM how canon it's going to be, but either way I'd really appreciate being told if the setting was just used as inspiration, and that any meta-knowledge I have will be completely irrelevant.

Just to walk into it with the right expectations.

 

[JeffB]

On my word as a sage nothing within these pages is false, but not all of it may prove to be true. All stories presented are as I have heard them and had them recorded, all information is checked as best as possible given the limited resources of an old man in a small town (even if that old man has the power to flatten mountains, mind you). As you adventure in this fantasy world, be warned that not all things are as they appear, and trust to your wits, your weapons, and your common sense in surviving and profiting from the Forgotten Realms.

From FR0, pg 4.

Even the fictitious people in the fictitious world in question Rule Zeroed you Canon Lawyers years ago. Pftttt....

 

[jasper]

Eladrin is what I was referring to. How many people gave the slightest toss about Eladrin pre 4e?

Who are the Eladrin? Eladrin sounds like you trying to sell me Elvin Advil. I thought you were talking about drow.

 

[jasper]

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 ..canon; it goes from the writer to....
None of it is unilateral to any single person, most of the time.

hahhahahahahhaha You have missed some the books I have read. Multiple layers of approval.
Level 1 Hey at least he spell Sprock right!
Level 2. Hey it in the script but not in the movie.
Level 3. Who cares our publishing date is next Friday. ApPROVEDING the booked.

I have never let published fiction tell me what canon is.

 

[jasper]

No one's saying that illithids should stop eating brains, because it's fun to have illithids eat brains…
Hi I am Iain! I am Illithids and I eat brains.
Crowd, “Welcome Iain.”
But I don’t want to eat brains.
Crowd, “amen”
“Does a love one have a brain eating problem? Here a Jasper’s Anonymous Brains. We can help!”

 

[SkidAce]

Eladrin is what I was referring to. How many people gave the slightest toss about Eladrin pre 4e?

My homebrew.

 

[I'm A Banana]

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.

Anyone can do what they want in their home game, so that's not generally the source of ire from lore changes.

But the default assumptions matter a great deal.

And when you replace old lore with new lore, you're saying, "this should be your new default assumption, if you want to play the game. I mean, you can change it, but this is the new standard."

Someone who liked the old one is going to resist that. If history is any indication, they are going to resist that vocally on the internet.

This is part of why you heard the "It's not really D&D!" complaint in 4e. For a lot of folks, the fun they had with the old lore defined D&D for them. Without that old lore, they didn't feel like 4e supported the kind of game they were looking for or the kind of fun they were interested in having.

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.

4e had a lot of this: by changing the lore, they hoped to interest people that hadn't been interested.

I think they wound up losing more in that deal overall, since the people who had been interested weren't anymore, and the new folks didn't fill that gap (since, you know, dwarves and elves and fighters and wizards are still what most people play).

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

You say this like this was new to 4e, but it's been true all the time in D&D, forever, even with the homebody halflings.

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.

The default matters. Expectations matter. Design intent matters. These things tell me how I am meant to play the game. If the default/expectation/intent of 4e is that I'm going to tell the story of a Turathi tiefling, but I don't want to tell that story, why should I bother to play 4e at all? It's not offering me the fun that I want. I'll just stick with a game that IS offering me that fun.

I think this is what baffles me most whenever this comes up. The degree of ownership that people presume over the game is astounding. It constantly surprises me.

It doesn't surprise me at all. D&D is a game of having fun by telling stories with your friends. Of course people have ownership over the stories they have fun creating with their friends! If they didn't have any ownership over that experience, I'd be worried!

 

[I'm A Banana]

Eladrin is what I was referring to. How many people gave the slightest toss about Eladrin pre 4e?

My homebrew.

I mean, this is kind of a microcosm of the whole scenario.

WotC: "No one cares about the changable appearance of tieflings, as long as they are kind of evil, we'll keep the old fans!"

Old Fans: "Uh...actually...we don't care about your new story at all, and kind of preferred the old one?"

Repeat for hundreds of thousands of lore changes big and small across 8 years.

5e's not provoking that as much, and it's worth looking at why. As an example of where this does happen in 5e, you can see the reaction to Strahd's new backstory in Curse of Strahd for a shade of that - another example of fans of the old stuff saying "this new stuff is worse than what came before." I wonder what that shares about 4e's changes that, say, some of the changed monster lore doesn't.