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

[pemerton]

Sign me up as someone who has been thinking the same thing [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION] is arguing; so maybe no one else has stated it in exactly those terms, but there are others (probably many) who feel that is an important consideration. It has always been an assumed part of the argument for me on any thread that has touched on this sort of thing.

I have read your posts on this and your now-lost thread, and so if I missed this aspect to your argument I apologise.

 

[Shasarak]

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".

I think it would be inaccurate to suggest that it would be no effort to add a 101st book onto the previous 100. Especially so if that 101st book is based in some kind of alternate universe based in name only on the original.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6780330]Parmandur[/MENTION], I think your two recent posts are getting to the heart of this issue - really trying to make sense of what [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] called "ownership" upthread.

there is a certain pleasure from a shared creative process, that people enjoy; this can be seen in many collaborative artforms. RPG world building has emerged as this sort of weird form, where the users (DMs) also contribute somewhat, even if they make up many details (you wizards cloak might be a different color), but it has been an oddly consistant phenomenon in the past 40 years for people to get all tied in a knot when a company decides to take setting ina new direction (Travller New Era, World of Darkness 2E, D&D 4E). It does seem that "breaking" that creator-consumer creative floe can be commercially deadly, more so than any gain from new stories.

I would suggest that world-building can be a work of art, and I'm the context of a RPG a work that the tables participate in, or at least feel that they are somehow participating in; if somebody has been running their game, incorporating their changes along with new material for Ed Greenwood for twenty years...to have it all blown up by fiat? Very jarring, the feeling of creative interaction is destroyed.

This, to me, seems to be the crux: "canon", and the use of canon being experienced as a type of collective/shared/cooperative artistic process.

I am going to quote a very critical discussion of this approach to RPGing - you won't be surprised that I tend to feel an affinity with. But I'd be very interested to see what the sympathetic, affirming alternative perspective looks like.

Karaoke. This is a serious problem that arises from the need to sell thick books rather than to teach and develop powerful role-playing. Let's say you have a game that consists of some Premise-heavy characters and a few notes about Situation, and through play, the group generates a hellacious cool Setting as well as theme(s) regarding those characters. Then, publishing your great game, you present that very setting and theme in the text, in detail. . . .

Metaplot. The solution most offered by role-playing games is a supplement-driven metaplot: a sequence of events in the game-world which are published chronologically, revealing "the story" to all GMs and expecting everyone to apply these events in their individual sessions. These published events include the outcomes of world-shaking conflicts as well as individual relationships among the company-provided NPCs involved in these conflicts. . . .

Almost inevitably, it creates a series of game products that pretend to be supplements for play but are really a series of short stories and novels starring the authors' beloved and central NPCs. The role of the individual play group in those stories is much like that of karaoke singers, rather than creative musicians.

Metaplot is central to the design of several White Wolf games, especially Mage; all AEG games; post-first-edition Traveller; AD&D'2, beginning with the Forgotten Realms series; as well as others. Nearly all of them are perceived as setting-focused games, and to many role-players, they 'define role-playing with strong Setting'.

However, neither Setting-based Premise nor a complex Setting history necessarily entails metaplot, as I'm using the term anyway. The best example is afforded by Glorantha: an extremely rich setting with history in place not only for the past, but for the future of play. The magical world of Glorantha will be destroyed and reborn into a relatively mundane new existence, because of the Hero Wars. Many key events during the process are fixed, such as the Dragonrise of 1625. Why isn't this metaplot?

Because none of the above represent decisions made by player-characters; they only provide context for them. The players know all about the upcoming events prior to play. The key issue is this: in playing in (say) a Werewolf game following the published metaplot, the players are intended to be ignorant of the changes in the setting, and to encounter them only through play. The more they participate in these changes (e.g. ferrying a crucial message from one NPC to another), the less they provide theme-based resolution to Premise, not more. Whereas in playing HeroQuest, there's no secret: the Hero Wars are here, and the more everyone enjoys and knows the canonical future events, the more they can provide theme through their characters' decisions during those events.​

I would add - if setting and "canon" are transparent in the way suggested in the last paragraph of the quote, then the coordination issue raised by [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION] won't arise, because everyone will know what it is that the game is coordinating around (and it will quickly come out in play, and hence be resolvable, if there's any confusion).

In my own 4e campaign, everyone at the table knows that the Dusk War is coming, that the Rod of 7 Parts being rebuilt will be the final trigger, that the Lattice of Heaven will then be reconstructed, etc. So the canon for the game (drawn from a mash-up of The Demonomicon and The Plane Above) is clear, but equally clear is the space for and significance of player decisions about their characters.

 

[pemerton]

I think it would be inaccurate to suggest that it would be no effort to add a 101st book onto the previous 100. Especially so if that 101st book is based in some kind of alternate universe based in name only on the original.

I think you've misread me - if you own 100, it's no effort to not read and incorporate the 101st.

 

[Shasarak]

I think you've misread me - if you own 100, it's no effort to not read and incorporate the 101st.

Oh, I see. Just like it is no effort not to write a double negative I guess.

Besides who is more likely to read that 101st book? Someone who has read the other 100 or someone that never liked the other 100?

 

[pemerton]

who is more likely to read that 101st book? Someone who has read the other 100 or someone that never liked the other 100?

That depends on how the book is packaged, doesn't it?

If it's presented as a novel in a series, the suggests one answer. If it's published as a supplement with a game line logo on it, that suggests a different answer. I remember buying a few FR sourcebooks 2nd-hand in the early 90s (Dreams of the Red Wizards; Ravens Bluff); since then, the only one I bought was the 4e FR Player's Guide.

 

[jasper]

Ok I confused. So here how I see canon being discussed.
1. No Canon. The dm has the phb, mm, dmg and maybe read or download a map of FR but then make various changes. Modules/adventures are stuck in willy nilly.
2. Box Canon. Dm has the books, and bought box supplement/book which fleshed out part of FR. This would be Sword coast, the hardback adventure etc.
3. Canon All around. This all the printed supplements, GAME books, modules from all edition. Trouble here is if FR history was changed between editions or supplements.
4. APC APC ALL Published is Canon. This includes all fiction published about FR, all supplements printed since 1900, all official net articles etc. the dm is must know this backward and forward.
As Dm I have floated between 1 and 2. 3 is silly because why should buy a 3E supplement of New York City when I already have the 2e box edition and the players have murdered Boss Hogg. I don't get people APC people as I have read the books and said "NO bad story" and drank a beer to kill those brain cells.

 

[Parmandur]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] I would say I agree with a lot of what you are saying there; another example would be the Grand Pendragon Campaign where Greg Stafford mapped out the entire Arthurian Mythos for multigenerational storytelling!

As opposed to the evolving metaplot, there is also the "baseline" approach, seen in the original Greyhawk boxed set or in Eberron: TSR/WotC sets out the world as of a certain time, and any further books would just add details to the side, or for adventures just offer possible events: Eberron has had no timeline advancement in 11 years of publishing, and it seems that WotC has been trying to kill the metaplot to Forgotten Realms and make it a similar slate for DM development and choice.

Bit that is specific setting canon: there is also the question of "core" expectations, such as the cosmology changes seen in 4E.

My college group played a PoL game in 3.x before that was identified by WotC as a thing: I played a paladin of St. Cuthbert, and the other Greyhawk elements were there, but it was not Oerth: the FM and us were making it up as we went along. So, stylistically, the set-up for the PoL in 4E very much makes sense to me: however, we would not have been supported by WotC in continuing the game and internal table continuity we had if we had switched to 4E, because so much was changed in the core story assumptions (just PHB level stuff, mind). Doubly so for players who had gone all-in for full Plane hopping, I am sure; while the 4E FR changes are analogous to the shift from MegaTravellers setting to New Era, the core assumption changes were as if they had replaced the method of FTL travel, or what kinds of weapons might be expected to exist.

WotC had eschewed much of the TSR metaplotiness (outside the FR), when transitioning to 3E. However, the core assumptions were similar enough that people could port their games over to the new edition without intensive home brewing. Granted it is totally doable yo play old school assumptions in 4E, but for a lot of folks it seemed easier to just not do that legwork and work with some other game that fit their table.

 

[I'm A Banana]

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

I don't think there's a lot of support for that hypothesis. The general principle when one plays a game is that one plays it according to the assumptions of that game. Changing those assumptions is something for "advanced players," and isn't generally required to play or enjoy the game.

D&D is only different in that it tries to lower the bar for and encourage that "advanced play." (In the case of 5e, it even requires a bit of that in the realm of DM adjudication). That doesn't change the general principle about intended play, though.

If one finds that they can't play the game according to the game's own assumptions...well, there's a lot of other ways to spend your time.

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.

I think it's a mistake to be reductive, here. There's no reason this needs to be the exclusive or even most significant cause of not liking lore changes. There's a lot to hate about lore changes!

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.

Your distinction here feels arbitrary. Why is "an imagined setting" not also "a work"?

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 that case, you care about the lore! You care that the lore is useful, at least! If it changes and is less useful, wouldn't that cause some (perhaps small) amount of friction? If you love the Dawn War and use it in your games, and 5e doesn't have the Dawn War, doesn't that make your job as a 5e DM of introducing and explaining the concept a little bit more difficult?

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?)

It never really struck me that this was something that big RPG fans would not clearly see, but I suppose that's my own biases setting my expectations.

To more clearly show it: it's even embedded in the language we use in RPG's. You Play the Role of a Character. You do this in a narrative context. Hell, even outside of RPGs, gameplay can be described as as an improvisational performance - change the rules, and the performance dramatically changes as well.

I'm not sure I follow your acronyms, but if that evil priest was actually a good guy and not just pretending to be a good guy, wouldn't that change the experience of the players meeting that priest, and perhaps create a less tense experience for, I dunno, needing healing from him? And if the Scarlet Brotherhood was actually very accepting of other races (because, you know, we want them to be a PC organization now in 6e or something), wouldn't that change how they were used in the game?

And in that sense, how could they be said to be the same fictional entities that Gygax described?

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.

Defining fiction is important because it helps set the possibility space for character goals and performance. If my tiefling has sharp teeth and little black horns and maybe could pretend to be a human sometimes, this is a much different story than if my tiefling has giant horns and a tail and bright red skin and a spikey jaw line and sticks out like a sore thumb. If everyone at the table isn't on the same page about my tiefling, it creates a very relevant divergence in our imagined fictional worlds.

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 @Hussar is happy with it.

It's one of the big motives for avoiding metaplot-heavy settings in general, I think - the inability to reliably get people on the same page with the rules of the setting and its stories. And it is an issue, because another player in the game sees this character as less authentic, so I'm failing at my goal of creating a DL character that is part and parcel of the setting. That's quite deflating! "Oh, it's a fun character, but really it's got nothing to do with the setting" is not what I wanted!

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.

They set the default, they proscribe the norms, they declare designer intent...

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.

How many boards can you change on the Ship of Theseus before someone's lying to you by pointing at it and saying "That's the Ship of Theseus?"

Because right now in a Dragonlance game, I'm pointing at my gnome wild mage and saying, "this is Dragonlance!" and someone else is pointing at the same thing and saying "That is NOT Dragonlance! Gnome wild mages aren't compatible with Dragonlance, where gnomes are forbidden to use magic!"

And by the same token, you have people pointing at their 4e games and saying "this is D&D!" and someone else pointing at the same thing, seeing all the lore changes, and saying, "That is NOT D&D! The Dawn War isn't compatible with D&D, where there's no ancient primordial threat!"

The absurd scenario I articulated differs in degree, but not in kind.

And it's less absurd than you might expect!

 

[ccs]

I'm not sure I follow your acronyms,

I'll translate:
KotB = Keep on the Borderlands
GDoK = Grand Duchy of Karimekos (sp?)
GH = GreyHawk