The explanations of the default effect attempt to explain why people don't go with the default.
And most of those could easily explain some of the frustration at lore changes.
I'd think this would be pretty dang obvious to anyone who even read the wikipedia article?
Are you meaning to imply that I didn't read the article? You could just ask.
That to one side, the article discusses why the default is chosen more than randomness or rationality would predict. It posits some reasons for this - a pull to conformity ("When in Rome, . . .") arising from the fact that human are social creatures; a possibly related tendency to equate the default with the "best" choice; effort required to depart from the default; etc.
I don't think most of these easily explain frustration at lore changes at all. For instance, ignoring lore changes doesn't require not doing what the Romans do while in Rome - because, as far as I can tell, the salient "Rome" is a player's own table, not WotC or TSR HQ. Likewise with effort - if you already own 100 FR books, there is no effort required not to read and incorporate the 101st. And someone who dislikes the new lore clearly isn't manifesting any tendency to equate "default" with "best".
It seems to me pretty obvious - eg from reading 100s of posts on the topic - that the main reason people don't like lore changes is because they regard the new/changed stuff as a violation, in some sense, of what is to them the essence or core of the canon. It's a normative response grounded in a sense of "propriety" or "appropriateness" or "respect" (that last word comes up a lot, eg in this thread). This is what [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is getting at when he talks about people feeling "ownership" of the lore.
And what I am saying is that I personally don't really understand that normative response. Here is about as close as I can come to getting it: I
do understand the idea of butchering a work (eg in a remake of a film); and the response to (say) the 4e changes to FR seems similar, that it is a type of butchering of the FR. But the reason I don't really understand that response is this: I don't get what
the work is suppposed to be that is being butchered.
Darkwalker over Moonshae is a work.
The Draglonace Chronicles is a work. But FR per se, or Krynn/DL per se, is not a work. It's an imagined setting. A new work that draws upon elements of that setting might be a crappy work, but I don't see how it can itself be a butchering of anything.
And all the above considerations for me are only reinforced by the RPG context, where the whole point of play seems to me to be to
create one's own work. Which is what setting elements are for - they're stuff to be used to make up one's own work, not a work that one is trying to emulate or reproduce via play.
If you don't care about canon, how useful can canon possibly be to running your game?
This has already been answered multiple times upthread.
Having someone else draw maps for me is a useful thing. Having someone else write some history or backstory for my setting is a useful thing.
In my Burning Wheel game I wanted elves, a "Tower of the Elephant Style" city with a bazaar, and a desert. Greyhawk gives me a name for a kingdom of the elves ("Celene"), an appropriate nearby city ("Hardby") that even has the nice touch of being ruled by a magic-using Gynarch, and it also gives me a handy desert ("The Bright Desert", quite nearby on the map) which even has the handy bonus of being full of Suel tribesmen protecting ancient magical secrets - excellent for a S&S-flavoured game - and also having nearby hills (the Abor-Alz) which are a perfect place for locating the ruined tower that the PC mage once lived in.
That's a lot easier than making all that stuff up myself: names, geography, a loose narrative logic tying together all the trope-expressing elements. But none of it is normative.
you want MOST people to care at least a LITTLE about the intent of your world design!
I've never written a RPG setting for commercial publication, so can't comment from personal experience.
But presumably the main reason for publishing a RPG setting is to provide RPGers with useful elements for their gameplay. The KotB is pretty explicit about this; likewise the Grand Duchy of Karameikos mini-setting in the back of the Cook/Marsh Expert book. And this is what I assumed GH was for when I got my copy of the folio in 1984 or thereabouts.
It never occurred to me that I was being expected to (i) intuit the designers' own aesthetic/artistic purpose, and (ii) emulate/replicate/express that in my own game. Or to put it another way: it never occurred to me that the setting was to be treated as something like the text of a play, or the score for a piece of music, which my RPG play would then be a performance of. (I mean, thought about in these terms, what
is the artistic intent of KotB, or GDoK, or the GH folio? They're not really rich literary works. So even if I did want to "perform" them via play, what would that look like? What would it mean to "butcher" my presentation of the Black Eagle Barony, or the Scarlet Brotherhood, or the evil priest in the Keep who pretends to be a good guy?)
I mean, you let the rules of your game be set by someone who isn't even a participant at your table. Is it really that much different in your mind? Everyone needs to be on the same page about attack rolls, and everyone needs to be on the same page about tieflings, too.
I don't think everyone does have to be on the same page about tieflings -
who are tieflings, really? can be a question that is addressed via play, where as (at least in my experience)
how do we resolve basic action declarations in this game? has to be answered before play can seriously get underway.
If by "being on the same page about tieflings" we just mean "everyone has to agree what they look like" - OK, if there's a tiefling in the party it might be useful to know what s/he looks like (though [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] upthread made the point that in many cases a fair bit of play can progress without worrying about issues of apperance - I've been running my main 4e campaign for nearly 8 years now, and I couldn't tell you what colour the elf's hair is or eyes are). But this can be pretty easily settled by direct stipulation, or by pointing to some source on tieflings - and it's no harder to point to Planescape than it is to point to the 4e PHB.
(If only the GM knows about Planescape, and the other participants are only familiar with the 4e PHB, that makes it more complex - but that's the price of being a GM who wants to run a game in a setting to which the other participants don't have access.)
There's value in the designers defining "gnome" or "tiefling" as much as there is in defining "attack roll" or "saving throw." And the point of defining those things is so that everyone has similar assumptions and a solid baseline for coming together in play.
<snip>
And the more you change lore, the harder it is to set a baseline.
Here's where we run into some of the (unnecessary) hassle that is involved in lore changes: the GM is expected to be the external order, but a GM might not be any better at any other player at "knowing the lore," might be worse than some, and if they're expected to set the order, it needs to be something that all the players agree is "authentic" to the setting.
<snip>
it's different and confusing and adds barriers to satisfying play and generally, is a frickin' hassle. If the game's lore is consistent, that burden is alleviated. If it's not, that burden is exacerbated.
That tipping point and those expectations are different for different people. Part of why they are different is because there's been so many contradictory and divergent changes in the canon.
<snip>
The more one word is used to describe different stories, the more confusion reigns and the less easy it is to establish those norms as a DM.
All of that is friction, barrier to entry, hassle, overcoming norms, rejecting recommendations, putting in extra work
You are (literally, honestly) the first person whom I've ever seen argue that lore shouldn't change because, if it does, we'll get coordination problems.
As in, the GM will say (thinking of the 3E FRCG sitting on his/her shelf) "Let's play an FR game", and the player (thinking of the 4e FRCG sitting on his/her shelf) turns up with a dragonborn who is a refugee from Returned Abeir.
How often does that happen? And if it does, is it an issue? I've seen one example mentioned ever - your DL gnome being discussed in this thread - and it doesn't seem to be an issue, because you're happy with it and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is happy with it.
My own experience, plus my impression from reading other RPGers' accounts of their games, is that when a GM says "Let's play a FR game" s/he will indicate what it is, at least in rough terms, that s/he has in mind (eg "Let's ignore all that post-Times of Troubles nonsensw.") And when I read people complaining about 4e tieflings and dragonborn, it's not because they or their players are confused about what sorts of PCs they should be rolling up. It's because they object, on aethetic grounds, to the inclusion of these elements in a fiction to which they have some sort of attachment/connection (what [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has called "ownership"). They're not complaining about barriers to entry; they're complaining about
butchering.
if I was hoping to play a gnome, it would be important to know if House Sivis was still around or not. So if you invite me to play and just say "We're playing an Eberron game" and I make a dragonmarked House Sivis gnome, and then I show up and House Sivis is fallen, that changes the story I was going to tell with that character.
<snip>
I'd agree that individual campaigns shouldn't feel any special commitment to canon - they just need to be explicit about what's going on with their game (just as they would if they were changing the way saving throws worked).
I think the designers, however, should feel that commitment, and that it causes some issues when they don't.
If the burden is really on individual groups to collectively establish the fiction for their games, then I'm not sure why the designers need to be especially committed.
If the reason designers are meant to be committed is because continuity in canon facilitates coordination (in the manner that you seem to be arguing for), then that is only going to be so because individual groups
aren't solely responsible for establishing their own baseline, and are entilted to expect the designers to do that for them.
Personally, I think individual groups are the ones who should do this - apart from anything else, they're the only ones who actually
can do it, because they're the ones who create their shared fiction - and hence I don't see that designers need feel any special commitment at all.
Note that this doesn't mean "don't change lore," it just means "don't change lore just because you want to change stuff up."
And who does that?
The 4e design team, for instance, wrote a whole book (Worlds and Monsters) explaing why they developed, extrapolated, and in some cases changed the lore that they did. None of the reasons given were "because we want to change stuff up".
And as far as I can tell, the reason they then changed the FR was not because they "wanted to change stuff up", but because they wanted their flagship setting to easily accommodate the story elements they had included in their newly-published game. You mightn't like that reason, but nevertheless it is a
reason that isn't just "we wanted to change stuff up".
If I show up for a game of 5e D&D set in the Forgotten Realms and everyone's creating characters using FATAL, rolling THAC0, and riding around on motorcycles wearing outfits out of MadMax, I'm going to say this isn't really what I signed up for. It might be awesome or awful or somewhere in between, but regardless it's not what I was trying to do with a 5e D&D game set in the Forgotten Realms.
<snip>
There's no slippery slope, here, though.
Talk about
slippery slopes!
If someone is invited to play a 5e D&D FR game, and then turns up and everyone is using a different system to play Mad Max, the problem isn't a lack of adherence to, or consistency in, canon. The problem is that whoever convened the game is lying to you! So I don't really see what that has to do with this thread.
