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

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Imaro]

It's not an assumption, it's an infernence - you can't make a billion dollars from a film unless your attendances go beyond those who care obsessively about contintuity in the way that some comics, Star Trek etc fans do.

First please stop with the hyperbole you're defining continuity and canon only as things most wouldn't notice while purposefully ignoring the type of continuity and canon even casual moviegoers with interest enough to keep coming back would take note of. In other words instead of engaging with me honestly you are in fact trying to define my argument (something you've done earlier in the thread and then present your own reasons as to why the argument you are constructing isn't valid.

Now to address your point... what evidence or data do you have for this "inference"... in what way is it any more than a baseless assumption on your part?

 

[Imaro]

Yep!

I wanted to watch Dr. Strange because he's my favorite Marvel character, pretty much.
My wife wanted to watch it because of the Cumberbatch (no judging!).
My son wanted to watch it because, um, you know- SUPER HERO MOVIE!
Co-worker A watched it because 3D awesomeness.
Co-worker B watched it because, eh, it's not like they are going to watch an art movie.
Co-worker C watched it because all of those "Iron Man" movies are pretty good.

...and so on. Of the people I listed (and of all the ones I can think of other than people I talk to on the internet) I am the only one that cares about "Dr. Strange" qua Dr. Strange.

...and I am fairly certain that the international market, where the movie dominated, doesn't care about the original Ditko comics.

I see we've moved firmly into the realm of personal anecdotes now... LOL!!

 

[Shasarak]

I see we've moved firmly into the realm of personal anecdotes now... LOL!!

Anecdotally I have not seen Dr Strange because I dont know the character and the trailer did not look very interesting.

 

[Manbearcat]

But you've yet to show a property that benefited by excessive changing of lore and canon.

"Excessive" as a descriptor is going to inevitably create a subjective litmus test, but how about Deadpool?

- The primary antagonists that Deadpool "grew upon" were Black Tom, Juggernaut, and X-Force/Cable. Nowhere to be found.

- The primary supporting character in Deadpool's history is Weasel. He is a tech guru and arms dealer who is responsible for Deadpool's teleportation device (again, nowhere to be found) and his ACME-esque endless bag of goodies (which wasn't played up in the movie). In the movie, they basically co-opted a peripheral character named Patch and named him Weasel while eschewing all of Weasel's characterization save for his "buddy status."

- Vanessa was neither a shapeshifting mutant-turned-mercenary, nor a shapeshifting mutant, nor a mutant at all. Thematically, they sort of mashed together the "Siren love story" with the Vanessa/Wade Wilson origin story and turned Vanessa into a "damsel in distress" (to expedite charming love story interests).

- The story of how his name came to be was certainly more homage than canon (canonically it happened in the Weapon X program).

There is a lot more canonical minutia deviation than that, but those are a few key components.

They basically distilled it into a simple formula:

1) Joe Kelly's origin story with stuff mixed around/omitted
2) Tightly focused the thematically relevant components of a charming, irreverent love story (like The Princess Bride or Love Actually)
3) and zoomed in on Deadpool/Wade Wilson's combination of Wile E Coyote's unfortunate hijinx/indestructibility meets Bugs Bunny's fourth wall breaking meets ninja to nth power meets South Park irreverence and potty mouth.


Boom. The mother load of all convention-defying $$$ jackpots. And certainly not canonically faithful in a way that would please the most strident adherents in this thread (were they analogously faithful to Deadpool canon as they are to FR, Planescape, et al).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Oh, and @doctorbadwolf - a point about kender.

This is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. What's something everyone knows about Kender? They steal. That's a part of what kender are. That's how they are presented and that's been an element of kender lore all the way along. Now, is it the only part? Nope. You're right. There are lots of other things too. But, you don't get to pick and choose which lore is important. You don't get to say, "Well, it's okay to ignore this part of the lore, but not that part of the lore". Either it's all canon or none of it is.

Which means, if you're trying to play an authentic kender, obeying the lore of Dragonlance, then your character should be stealing stuff. He should have pouches with random crap in them. Because that's PART of being a kender.

But, when you can simply ignore canon, then canon is no longer important. It shouldn't matter that gnolls are now demonic. Just ignore that lore. After all, if you can ignore this canon, then why not that canon?

So, which is it? Is lore important, in which case changing it should be a non-starter, or is lore simply a convenient bit of shorthand that can be changed when the mood strikes?

You know I'm not on the side of lore being immutable/super important, right?

But also, it actually isn't either/or.

"Lore is important, but not immutable" is an entirely valid, and quite common, stance.

The idea being that as long as the essence of the lore is kept intact, small changes aren't an issue. WIth the Kender example, downplaying the "stealing" aspect doesn't change the essence of who Kender are, so it's not a big deal. Kender are much more defined by being naïve, curious, incapable of fear, nearly impossible to keep locked down, almost supernaturally good at taunting people (and even dragons and such), and fairly childlike in demeanor, than they are by picking up lots of random stuff and filling their pockets with stuff from every room and person they encounter.

Hell, that whole thing is just one aspect of their lack of an idea of personal property, which is a function of viewing all people as part of a community, rather than really as individuals. It is trivally easy to show that without making the Kender player have their character constantly annoy and inconvenience other characters by randomly pocketing their stuff.

And it is Dragonlance novel cannon that Kender can be traumatized into knowing fear and losing a lot of their childlike exuberance and naiveté and still very much remain Kender. Because I just described a main character from a Dragonlance set of novels.

Even Tass tones down a lot of that stuff after years of adventures that would have emotionally and psychologically crushed just about anyone else. That's a huge part of the real point of Kender. They are irrepressible, and can bounce back from things that would destroy the strongest human or elf, without completely losing themselves.

Same with gnome magic users, wild mages, warlocks, minotaurs whose sole quest in life is to become the first non human Solamnic Knight, noble Draconians, etc.

And they are authentic DL characters because they are directl informed by the normal place of those characters in DL. SOme could exist in other worlds just as well, like the minotaur (just replace Solamnic Knight with Purple Dragon Knight), but they have the resonance that they do for the player because they are that thing in Dragonlance. A gnome wildmage could be in most any setting, but the specific backstory in this thread only makes sense in Dragonlance, and the character both exists and is interesting to the player because of the nature of Dragonlance, gnomes in Dragonlance, and Wild Magic in Dragonlance.

If you don't think that is an authentic Dragonlance character, the problem is entirely, exclusively, with you.

Heck, take warlocks in Dragonlance. Ok, Raistlin made some sort of pact. Fair enough. But, that's NOT what Warlocks say. Warlocks make pacts with "mysterious beings... ancient knowledge such as fey nobles, demons, devils, hags and alien entities of the Far Realms". ((PHB p 105)) Simply making a pact with another wizard isn't what a warlock does. Warlocks are "defined by a pact with an otherworldly being". Number one, most of those things don't even exist in Dragonlance. There is no Far Realms, nor devils nor fey nobles. Granted, some of that stuff was added later, that's true. But, since canon is important, why do people accept those later changes?

Adding warlocks to the setting changes Dragonlance. Depending on the pact, it changes the setting considerably.

QUOTE]

Bolding mine. Feylock doesn't require fey noble just powerful beings that in a cosmological model that uses the term "fey", would be classified as Fey.

So, the Chronicles have Fey with which one could make a pact. No problem. Also in later books, the Dragon Overlords are definitely powerful enough for pact making. Heck, even before then I could see it with only the most mild of reflavoring of the warlock. (note that even people who view setting canon as super important don't all view class fluff as important)

I've seen a few infernal warlocks with the infernal patron described as one of the more outwardly destructive evil gods. And played a fey warlock (the term fey wasn't a thing, nor were patrons, back then, but if I were convert her to 4e or 5e, she would be a feylock) who learned magic from a unicorn in an enchanted wood, which I'm sure will sound familiar to many DL fans. She didn't do the same kind of magic as wizards, and the wizard in the group was unsure whether he should report her to the Tower or not, because she was doing ancient faerie magic, not the same magic wizards do. Some of the effects were the same, ie the invocations that gave warlocks spell like abilities and such, but even they worked a differently, and we described them as being obviously not wizard spells, even if they had the same final effect.

Absolutely no reflavouring of canon required. And she was directly inspired by events in the books.

I think you have a stricter view of how "immutable" canon must be to be important than most of the people who are arguing that canon is important.

Also, Wizarding magic in DL is pretty damn close to warlock pacts to begin with. You get magic from the god of the moon corresponding to the robes you've chosen. Sure, it also involves careful study and all that, but it's pretty pact-like in nature. The only thing about a warlock that is counter to DL canon is if that warlock is at least suspicious to Tower Wizards.

 

[Imaro]

"Excessive" as a descriptor is going to inevitably create a subjective litmus test, but how about Deadpool?

- The primary antagonists that Deadpool "grew upon" were Black Tom, Juggernaut, and X-Force/Cable. Nowhere to be found.

- The primary supporting character in Deadpool's history is Weasel. He is a tech guru and arms dealer who is responsible for Deadpool's teleportation device (again, nowhere to be found) and his ACME-esque endless bag of goodies (which wasn't played up in the movie). In the movie, they basically co-opted a peripheral character named Patch and named him Weasel while eschewing all of Weasel's characterization save for his "buddy status."

- Vanessa was neither a shapeshifting mutant-turned-mercenary, nor a shapeshifting mutant, nor a mutant at all. Thematically, they sort of mashed together the "Siren love story" with the Vanessa/Wade Wilson origin story and turned Vanessa into a "damsel in distress" (to expedite charming love story interests).

- The story of how his name came to be was certainly more homage than canon (canonically it happened in the Weapon X program).

There is a lot more canonical minutia deviation than that, but those are a few key components.

They basically distilled it into a simple formula:

1) Joe Kelly's origin story with stuff mixed around/omitted
2) Tightly focused the thematically relevant components of a charming, irreverent love story (like The Princess Bride or Love Actually)
3) and zoomed in on Deadpool/Wade Wilson's combination of Wile E Coyote's unfortunate hijinx/indestructibility meets Bugs Bunny's fourth wall breaking meets ninja to nth power meets South Park irreverence and potty mouth.


Boom. The mother load of all convention-defying $$$ jackpots. And certainly not canonically faithful in a way that would please the most strident adherents in this thread (were they analogously faithful to Deadpool canon as they are to FR, Planescape, et al).

I think you're missing my point here. I don't think the MCU has to be canonical with the comic books... because the comic books themselves don't have consistent canon. Instead I'm arguing they should stick to the canon and lore they create. The X-Men movies didn't do this... the movies by Marvel Studios did.

EDIT: Deadpool only has one movie so far so it really hasn't had the chance to keep or break from it's lore and canon yet.

 

[Shasarak]

"Excessive" as a descriptor is going to inevitably create a subjective litmus test, but how about Deadpool?

What about the other Deadpool from one of the Wolverine movies? You know the guy whose mouth they stitched shut with the laser beams for eyes?

 

[pemerton]

In the run up to 5e, Mearls mentioned that the rapid pace and dramatic changes of D&D between editions was something that disrupted play and made it harder for people to get back into the hobby.

But as best I recall he wasn't talking about the backstory for gnolls or eladrin. He was talking about basic tropes and mechanical fundamentals - the "feel" of the game.

Any D&D player who even knows the backstory to 2nd ed AD&D eladrin is already a pretty hardcore fan - they're part of a setting (Planescape) that is a meta-heavy play on ordinary D&D, and that (to the best of my knwoledge) had only modest commercial success. These players aren't being confused by the changes to eladrin in 4e. They're being put off because they don't like it!

 

[pemerton]

you're defining continuity and canon only as things most wouldn't notice while purposefully ignoring the type of continuity and canon even casual moviegoers with interest enough to keep coming back would take note of.

Those who engage with a fictional setting only casually don't care about things like eladrin changing from "outsiders" to "fey"; or about orcs changing from LE to CE; or about gnolls having their backstory altered to be more expresssly demonic.

My reason for asserting this? That the people I play with, who have been playing D&D more-or-less continually since childhood in most caes, don't care. And they are hardly apt to be described as casual RPGers.

The only people whom I encounter in my life who care about canon to that degree of detail are hardcore fans of the sort who are not enough, on their own, to keep this multi-million dollar enterprises afloat.