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

[pemerton]

for someone who self-identifies as "not caring about lore," every change is a Level 3 since Sir Generic of Anywhere doesn't relate to the fiction in any significant way at character creation anyway.

This doesn't describe anyone in this thread, does it?

Posters in this thread who have said they don't care about canon, or about published lore, aren't saying that they don't care about the fiction of their games. They're just saying they don't rely on someone else to write it for them.

And any lore change produces an active question about which lore is in use for any particular game, creating ambiguity and confusion that leads to unsatisfying character play in practice.

When you say "leads to", you mean (I assume) in some cases. Certainly not in general, because I've never suffered from unsatisfying play as a result of published material that differs from earlier published material. And there are other posters in this thread who say much the same thing.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm not talking about an in-game change. I'm talking about a retcon which changes the thematic significance/meaning of the setting.

For a change like Tan'nari into demons to change the thematic significance/meaning of a setting, that setting has to be heavily about demons. The core of 2e was not about demons, so we are not talking about any change of thematic significance. Now, your personal homebrew campaign might have been heavily about Tan'nari, but that's not really what we are talking about here.

If I rewrite my devils so that, instead of being a certain sort of exemplar of moral failing (which is what devils are, by default) they become other-dimensional alients whose main raison d'etre is the Blood War, I've changed their meaning as part of the shared fiction.

To some players that doesn't matter, because "meaning" of the shared fiction isn't that important to their game. Likewise, rewriting demons from outsiders to elementals doesn't matter to me, because that sort of "metaphysical" stuff isn't a very big deal to me.

As I mentioned, it's not even necessarily a change. The prime plane is ignorant of a lot of what goes on. Nothing may have changed and they may have just been wrong the entire time.

Edit: Or even a retcon at all. Nothing is said prior to Planescape what the motivations of demons and devils out in the planes is. The addition of the Blood War is just that, an addition. It really changes nothing. On the prime plane demons are demons and devils are devils, just like the primes believe.

 

[Shasarak]

Well, I can't say I fully grasp all the reasons that motivate canon enthusiasts. But some seem to think it matters that a succubus is a devil rather than a demon, which is primarily a change of goal.

And many also seem to care about changes in origin or backstory, and that seems no more important than goal.

So you dont mind if Mindflayers are time traveling space creatures or spawn of the Far Realm or simply mutated humans as long as they all want to destroy the Sun? That is fair enough to me, everyone has their breaking point.

Take your example of the Succubus. Obviously there was a designer in charge of the Demon/Devil section of the game who was just going crazy over this creature that was just blatantly filed under the wrong section and they were in the position to indulge their particular OCD. And good on them at least they were giving it a go, eh. And on the other hand it is just another good example of going too far and if you make enough of those small changes then by the end you end up with a God Asmodeus ruling Planet Hell while Demons are some kind of corrupted Elementals.

 

[pemerton]

For a change like Tan'nari into demons to change the thematic significance/meaning of a setting, that setting has to be heavily about demons. The core of 2e was not about demons, so we are not talking about any change of thematic significance. Now, your personal homebrew campaign might have been heavily about Tan'nari, but that's not really what we are talking about here.

It seems to be what at least some posters (eg [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION]) are talking about.

Suppose that my game (which might be a 1st ed game, or an OD&D game - given that this thread has focused heavily, though not exclusively, on cross-edition changes of "canon") makes demons central, drawing upon their presentation in the MM and PHB as exemplars of chaos and evil who live in the Abyss and trade in the souls of mortals (per the Night Hag entry), and are liable to be "turned" by clerics whose presentation is essentially along the lines of the mediaeval orders of knighthood.

Were I to then adopt the new Planescape canon, which presents demons as, in effect, "aliens" from another dimension - and which to that extent therefore strips them of the religious/moral/thematic significance that they had in their prior incarnation and which I have made a key part of my game - that would be a major change to my game.

The contention of some posters is that the disruption posed by such changes is a good reason not to change canon. I disagree. If the Planescape stuff will be bad for my game, then I just ignore it - thereby leaving my game unchanged.

As I mentioned, it's not even necessarily a change. The prime plane is ignorant of a lot of what goes on. Nothing may have changed and they may have just been wrong the entire time.

Edit: Or even a retcon at all. Nothing is said prior to Planescape what the motivations of demons and devils out in the planes is. The addition of the Blood War is just that, an addition. It really changes nothing. On the prime plane demons are demons and devils are devils, just like the primes believe.

It's only not a change if you treat all the stuff that is implied but unsaid about demons - implied by their name, their symbology, their relationship to clerics, the name of their home plane, the archetypes that they draw upon, etc - as irrelevant.

If you took all that stuff seriously - which, ingame, is the "clueless prime" lore concerning demons - then the Planescape changes are massive. The mere fact that the moral and religious beliefs of "clueless primer" is all retconned as false (or, at best, massively limited and misunderstood), is a massive change. It completely reconceives the moral and thematic "hub" around which everything revolves.

So you dont mind if Mindflayers are time traveling space creatures or spawn of the Far Realm or simply mutated humans as long as they all want to destroy the Sun? That is fair enough to me, everyone has their breaking point.

I don't understand. As far as what WotC (or TSR before them) publishes, I don't have a breaking point. I just use what I like and ignore the rest. As well as the mind flayers' goal being to extinguish the sun - which I think is pretty cool - the DSG also had the "Alignment Wars" as an explanation for how drow, duergar etc got driven below ground. I think that idea is much weaker, and have never used it.

I also like the idea of mind flayers being from the future. And from the Far Realm. Ideally they'd be from both! (Though I've never had the need to think through how that would work and why it would matter - but in my current 4e game I have Ygorl being from the future and travelling backwards in time, as per The Plane Below, and that worked pretty well.)

Take your example of the Succubus. Obviously there was a designer in charge of the Demon/Devil section of the game who was just going crazy over this creature that was just blatantly filed under the wrong section and they were in the position to indulge their particular OCD. And good on them at least they were giving it a go, eh. And on the other hand it is just another good example of going too far and if you make enough of those small changes then by the end you end up with a God Asmodeus ruling Planet Hell while Demons are some kind of corrupted Elementals.

Again, if you don't like it don't use it. Who has a gun to your head forcing you to use all this "canon" you don't like?

 

[billd91]

Again, if you don't like it don't use it. Who has a gun to your head forcing you to use all this "canon" you don't like?

Perhaps not, but willy nilly changes from edition to edition do mess with the cultural literacy of the game. Players who know about storm giants being a significant contrast to their more thuggish relatives are going to have a different reaction to the imprisoned storm giant in G2 than players whose D&D literacy is based on 4e where the storm giants are as evil as the other giant types.

And as I'm a Banana points out in the comment I quoted below, when the group comes to the table with that dissonance, it can create headaches for the DM. For some styles of game, particularly heavy on kicking in doors and not caring about the lore, this may not be much of an issue. But for those of us not running games like that, recruiting and retaining players with similar knowledge bases is preferable. You get better backstory/campaign/player expectation agreement.

And any lore change produces an active question about which lore is in use for any particular game, creating ambiguity and confusion that leads to unsatisfying character play in practice. If I created a character who believed in peace at any cost who wanted to make peace between the devils and the demons but there was no Blood War, this would not be as resonant a story in a game that didn't use 2e lore, for instance. It creates an additional burden on the DM to know of and explicitly state which version of demon/devil lore we're using for the game during character creation, when even the DM might not be aware that the Blood War was ever a thing if he only started DMing in 4e (and a character might not feel empowered to make a PC that uses that story if it's not clear which version of the lore they're using). Or it requires a player to create a character independent of any particular stakes in either bit of lore, which makes creating a character that uses lore to tell an interesting story more difficult.

 

[pemerton]

Perhaps not, but willy nilly changes from edition to edition do mess with the cultural literacy of the game.

<snip>

For some styles of game, particularly heavy on kicking in doors and not caring about the lore, this may not be much of an issue. But for those of us not running games like that, recruiting and retaining players with similar knowledge bases is preferable. You get better backstory/campaign/player expectation agreement.

Because of course I run a "kick in the doors, don't care about the lore" style of game! And that's why I don't worry about "canon".

 

[Maxperson]

Suppose that my game (which might be a 1st ed game, or an OD&D game - given that this thread has focused heavily, though not exclusively, on cross-edition changes of "canon") makes demons central, drawing upon their presentation in the MM and PHB as exemplars of chaos and evil who live in the Abyss and trade in the souls of mortals (per the Night Hag entry), and are liable to be "turned" by clerics whose presentation is essentially along the lines of the mediaeval orders of knighthood.

In 1ed demons came from the Abyss. In 2e demons came from the Abyss. 2e gave them another name Tan'nari, but they were still demons. Two names, not a change into an alien. It's like the Walking Dead. Call them Walkers, Biters, whatever, they are still zombies. They didn't stop being zombies and become something else due to other names being used. Planescape also didn't stop them from trading in the souls of mortals and being exemplars of evil. It just ADDED the Blood War as something that they also do in the outer planes.

Were I to then adopt the new Planescape canon, which presents demons as, in effect, "aliens" from another dimension - and which to that extent therefore strips them of the religious/moral/thematic significance that they had in their prior incarnation and which I have made a key part of my game - that would be a major change to my game.

Nothing was stripped, though. They're still everything that they were on the prime plane........on the prime plane. They just added the Blood War as something else that they and the devils engage in.

The contention of some posters is that the disruption posed by such changes is a good reason not to change canon. I disagree. If the Planescape stuff will be bad for my game, then I just ignore it - thereby leaving my game unchanged.

This I agree with.

It's only not a change if you treat all the stuff that is implied but unsaid about demons - implied by their name, their symbology, their relationship to clerics, the name of their home plane, the archetypes that they draw upon, etc - as irrelevant.

This I don't agree with. That stuff is unchanged by the addition of the Blood War and the additional motivations that the Blood War adds on the outer planes.

If you took all that stuff seriously - which, ingame, is the "clueless prime" lore concerning demons - then the Planescape changes are massive. The mere fact that the moral and religious beliefs of "clueless primer" is all retconned as false (or, at best, massively limited and misunderstood), is a massive change. It completely reconceives the moral and thematic "hub" around which everything revolves.

This is overstated. The "clueless" are clueless about what happens on the outer planes. Demons and devils still trade in souls, are exemplars of evil, yada yada yada on the Prime Plane. The additions of Planescape don't necessarily alter what the clueless know about interactions at home. They just make it so that there is a lot more about the outer planes that the clueless don't know.

 

[I'm A Banana]

If the Planescape stuff will be bad for my game, then I just ignore it - thereby leaving my game unchanged.

So, here's a description of the problem as it has been experienced by me at least:

In some hypothetical world 6e uses the "fiends are just aliens" stuff, and a new player stoked to play D&D comes to your table all excited about playing her character who is a bard whose heroic origin includes a story wherein she made peace between a faction of demons and her hometown, leading to a mutual prospering where the demons even defend her hometown from attack by other creatures. It's part of her identity as a persuasive, diplomatic character - she managed to make peace with demons. Truly, an exceptional and heroic feat! It's why she's taken a "peaceful diplomat" bard build in 6e and why her character has ranks in Religion - to let her know what the demons want. Maybe she's tiefling, too - with the pre-4e "varied children of the planes" story, and that plays into her character's success there.

Of course, in your campaign, this is impossible - demons are not creatures you can make peace with.

The price you then pay is in telling your excited newbie that she can't play the character she's really excited about playing. Sorry, I use old lore, demons aren't like that in my games. You can be a heroic peaceful diplomat, but maybe you made peace with some orcs instead? Maybe instead of a tiefling...you're a half-orc?

Or, maybe she doesn't even tell you the backstory. You know, she has no reason to expect that any other backstory is necessary, 6e presents this narrative as THE narrative. And so when she tries to make peace with the rampaging demons, suddenly everyone else at the table is like "what are you doing you fool?" and she's like "oh, this is a situation wherein everyone tells the hero that she can't do it, but I'm going to be the hero and go forth and do it!" and then she gets clawed to death instantly (or, you have that same conversation above and nuke her character concept, but now it's a few sessions in because the DM and the player weren't on the same page about the lore).

Or maybe your game is ambivalent about demons and you don't think your campaign will really use them, so you say, "sure, that character's fine," and then some other player who's been by your side since 4e sees this bard bragging about making peace with demons and now in his cleric's mind this bard is a liar and a fool, dangerously naive and possibly inventing memories when she talks about the demons who defend her hometown.

All of these situations are part of the cost of changing lore. That cost might be felt differently by different players using and caring about different lore. That cost can be worth it or not, and can be mitigated or intensified in various ways. It's not smart to pretend that this cost is non-existent or only comes from some ulterior motive related to the lore you favor, though.

 

[CHEMISTSDP]

I agree with several Posters such as Jester David that I care about canon when it comes to the publisher maintaining canon continuity. I personally do not like a lot of crossover between gaming worlds (no Elminster in Greyhawk or Mordenkainen in FR). When I read source books and come across canon issues it really bothers me. History and lore maintains a certain tone to a gaming world. It matters to me that certain elements that Gary Gygax placed in Greyhawk. It matters to me about Ed Greenwood having specific lore about an item or a place. That is why Christopher Tolkien maintains such a draconian grip on his father's world - to maintain the soul of the universe he created.

A particular canon issue that always bothered me involved the first Forgotten Realms boxed set that had stated Sembia would always remain an unpublished area of the Realms for DM's to put their Homebrew. How long did that last before there were source books and novels that ran counter to that initial canon? Those are the kinds of discrepancies that drive me crazy!

My answer for what you use in gaming is much simpler - the magnificence of this game is that you bend it to what makes it fun for your group. Whatever makes it a good table-top experience is what matters for your home games.

 

[Shasarak]

Again, if you don't like it don't use it. Who has a gun to your head forcing you to use all this "canon" you don't like?

If you dont particularly care about canon, then why do you care if other people particularly care about canon?

Where is your skin in the canon game?