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

[pemerton]

D&D is not written to be that sort of game. You can use your playstyle with it, but D&D is designed with the fictional elements being hard coded to a greater degree than your playstyle wants. Most people play the game the way it was designed to be played, and to them, the depth that "locking down" information on dopplegangers provides is an excellent improvement over having schrodinger's doppleganger that might have thin skin and be lithe one day, and thick skinned the next when it faces Grog the barbarian.

Two things.

First, if you're going to lecture me about "my style" you might at least do me the courtesy of getting it right. If you think that I don't hold lore and backstory consistent once it's been revealed in the game - as if I was palying Toon - then you obviously ha have no idea.

Second, who says that D&D is not written to be my sort of game? Where is that written in the rulebooks? I mean, 4e is D&D, and I spent years being told it sucked precisely because it was my sort of game. I've had posters tell me that Gygax didn't know what RPGing really was because, in his discussion of saving throws and hit points in his DMG he presents them as suiting my sort of game - ie the mechanics don't lock down any particular narration until the actual moment of play.

There is nothing special about D&D that makes ultra-heavy "lore" - pinning everything down to the Nth degree before play actually happens - better suited than my preferred approach.

By your logic nothing should be described

Seriously?

I didn't say that no description is helpful. I even pointed, with approval, to the Dungeon World quote that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] provided.

From the fact that I think some descriptoin is excessive, it doesn't mean that I hate all description.

No doubt some readers prefer Wilkie Collins to Hemingway, but it woud be absurd for a fan of Collins to say that Hemingway readers would be even happier with blank books! (That's not to compare the 2nd ed Monstrous Compendium/Manual to Wilkie Collins, which would be vastly unfair to the latter. Although he spells stuff out in detail that I personally could live without, it's not generally redundant and repetitive in the way the doppelganger entry is.)

Descriptives add depth, even if YOU don't find them necessary or good. Not adding depth to your game doesn't keep them from adding depth in general.

This is just assertion. It's not generally true of film. It's not generally true of narrative fiction. It's not generally true of visual art. Why would it be generally true of RPGing?

A new DM would have the doppleganger trail a PC until that PC is alone, rather than set the doppleganger up hidding in a room until the PC walks in to go to sleep.

Why? If the GM can think of having a doppelganger trail a PC - which doesn't seem that much of a breakthrough - why would s/he not think of having the doppelganger lurk in the PC's home? The first time I ran a doppelganger scenario, about 25 years ago, I thought of that without having the 2nd ed entry to help me. And I wouldn't hold that up as one of my great creative moments as a GM! - it seemed pretty obvious to me that that might be one way to kill someone and take their place.

 

[Maxperson]

Two things.

First, if you're going to lecture me about "my style" you might at least do me the courtesy of getting it right. If you think that I don't hold lore and backstory consistent once it's been revealed in the game - as if I was palying Toon - then you obviously ha have no idea.

Let me ask you this. Once dopplegangers are revealed to have thin skin and be agile in your game, does that remain the way they are in future games in the same world with different PCs and/or players?

Second, who says that D&D is not written to be my sort of game? Where is that written in the rulebooks? I mean, 4e is D&D, and I spent years being told it sucked precisely because it was my sort of game. I've had posters tell me that Gygax didn't know what RPGing really was because, in his discussion of saving throws and hit points in his DMG he presents them as suiting my sort of game - ie the mechanics don't lock down any particular narration until the actual moment of play.

It's clear from the way it's written. D&D is written with pre-established lore, stats, etc. 1e-5e all say "This is the way things are." Dopplegangers are a great example. They ARE thick skinned and hairless, not thin and agile. If you are going to try and play D&D with your playstyle, you have to override a whole lot of what D&D establishes and assumes. In short, you have to force your playstyle upon it. A game written for your playstyle would embrace it, not have to have it forced upon it. Now, it's not all that hard to force your playstyle on D&D, but it's not written for that sort of game.

This is just assertion. It's not generally true of film. It's not generally true of narrative fiction. It's not generally true of visual art. Why would it be generally true of RPGing?

That's like saying that "legs are not true of snakes, not true about sharks, and not true about snails, why would it be true of humans?" RPG gaming is very different from film, narrative fiction and visual art. There are similarities, but the differences are pronounced.

Why? If the GM can think of having a doppelganger trail a PC - which doesn't seem that much of a breakthrough - why would s/he not think of having the doppelganger lurk in the PC's home? The first time I ran a doppelganger scenario, about 25 years ago, I thought of that without having the 2nd ed entry to help me. And I wouldn't hold that up as one of my great creative moments as a GM! - it seemed pretty obvious to me that that might be one way to kill someone and take their place.

Who said anything about can't think of dopplegangers lurking for victims? I said the lore helps them come to a decision, especially if the DM is new or not as creative as you are.

You seem to having trouble understanding that many DMs are new and don't know these things, aren't nearly as creative as you are and really need these things, and/or don't have time to create all of these things themselves.

I fall into that last category. I don't have time to create all that lore for all the creatures I use, so it's a blessing that they have provided lore for me to use. It allows me to focus my creative time into other areas.

 

[pemerton]

Again, you're doing this in a game, not a movie or a novel.

I realise this. I'm talking about running a game, not writing a novel.

Your players are going to interact with it in a different way - through their characters (which are, among other things, a set of mechanical representations that will interact with the game system) - rather than as passive viewers/readers. There are games in which issues of inventory, for example, only come up as dramatic effects - like complications in Mutants and Masterminds, where it's voluntary at the outset. But a lot of players prefer to try to control the problems Legolas has with inventory at the outset... an approach, yes, D&D generally takes and a lot of players favor because they're the ones in more control of it compared to a GM fiat.

How do you know what my players are going to do? Have you asked them? I think I'll rely on my own knowledge and experience of what makes for a good game.

And what does GM fiat have to do with anything? Are you assuming that the only way to manage (say) running out of arrows is via GM fiat? Even Rolemaster, over 30 years ago, worked out that charges for a wand could be managed by rolling a % chance of depletion after each use rather than keeping track of them charge by charge. Or you can do it as a consequence of a failed check.

There are any number of ways to manage things like inventory, commerce etc as elements of an unfolding drama which (i) don't require detailing all of the gameworld, modelling its economy or modelling character encumbrance, etc, and (ii) don't require GM fiat.

But you have to know your audience for that to work. For a lot of players, such things imposed for them to react to and beyond their ability to proactively avert are adversarial moves.

That's not been my experience. I've never found players object to bringing on weather, nor introducing other complications into the situation in accordance with whatever procedures (formal or informal) govern such things.

And why woudn't one have to know one's audience before introducing (say) encumbrance rules or Traveller-style commerce mechanics? I did once RPG with an accountant, but only for a few sessions.

it's totally quick and dirty. There's no simulated economy of significance - just a weekly upkeep or maybe money abstractly generated via a profession check. Prices based on some weird estimate of power rather than scarcity or set by some abstract metagame factor. There's no supply and demand, there's no inflation and deflation.

If your conception of "quick and dirty" is counting every pound and every coin, but not having an inflation/deflation model for prices nor a "lever" factor for turning weight into effective encumbrance, we are drawing that line on the spectrum in quite different places.

My conception of quick and dirty for encumbrance is - does it look plausible, given genre, PC build etc. And for buying stuff is "Yep, you'e got that, now let's get on to the action" - unless the action is buying the stuff, in which case doing it with some sort of check is quick and dramatic.

Then maybe you're hung up too much on the XP mechanic and not the other ways Conan is an inspiration for the game. Not all campaigns are based on great quests and wars for the fate of the campaign world and that high level of drama. Sometimes they're based more on trying to make a few coins, survive, make a score (whether successful or not).

No Conan stories that I can remeber are about trying to make a few coins, survive, make a score. The only one that has Conan begin with that motivation is certainly not about that - from the point of view of the reader, it's never about that, and from the point of view of the protagonist it's not about that by the end. It's about the dynamic between Yara, Conand and Yag-Kosha.

Saying that you want to play a non-Conanesque game doesn't show that a game focused on 10' pole, logistically-focused dungeon looting tends to support Conanesque play.

 

[pemerton]

Let me ask you this. Once dopplegangers are revealed to have thin skin and be agile in your game, does that remain the way they are in future games in the same world with different PCs and/or players?

Maybe, maybe not. As I said in the OP, I regard each campaign as a distinct thing.

I have run GH games using AD&D, Rolemaster and (currently) Burning Wheel. The game elments aren't the same across each campaign: elves in RM, for instance, take a long time to heal, whereas elves in BW have a bonus to healing. And in AD&D they heal at the same rate as everyone else.

These campaigns obviously feature overlapping elements - names, places, even some personalities. But not all the minutiae. If I ever run a doppelganger in my BW game, I won't care whether or not it is similar in any respect other than shapechanging to the RM doppelganger I ran for different players 25 years ago.

D&D is written with pre-established lore, stats, etc. 1e-5e all say "This is the way things are."

But, as you yourself pointed out, Gygax's MM didn't tell us why a doppelganger has AC 5. That was left up to the table.

What is your basis for saying that it is true to D&D's design for a later book - the 2nd ed Monsrous Compendium/Manual - to fill in that detail? I can just as easily say - as I do - that that subsequent filling in provided nothing of value. Why am I wrong?
There is nothing special about D&D that makes ultra-heavy "lore" - pinning everything down to the Nth degree before play actually happens - better suited than my preferred approach.

If you are going to try and play D&D with your playstyle, you have to override a whole lot of what D&D establishes and assumes. In short, you have to force your playstyle upon it.

What the hell are you talking about? You're just making this up!

I first began to develop my style playing Oriental Adventures - an AD&D game. I used the rules and lore in that book, and I didn't have to "force" anything onto anything. I currently use my style to run - among other systems - 4e. I don't have to "force" anything onto anything there either. And when I ran a few 3E session back when it had not long come out I didn't have any trouble either. I didn't have to "override" anything that D&D "assumes". In all these cases, I just ran my games.

For instance, when I was running Castle Amber in 3E the PCs went into the garden, and I needed stats for a living tree. So I flipped through my MM and used a Tendriculos. You might think that's some weird thing that only those "other" guys do - but to me, that is just playing D&D. Adapting monsters, changing things either in advance or on the fly, has been part of the game for the whole 40 years its existed. It's never been aberrant for GMs to do this sort of thing.

Descriptives add depth, even if YOU don't find them necessary or good. Not adding depth to your game doesn't keep them from adding depth in general.

This is just assertion. It's not generally true of film. It's not generally true of narrative fiction. It's not generally true of visual art. Why would it be generally true of RPGing?

RPG gaming is very different from film, narrative fiction and visual art. There are similarities, but the differences are pronounced.

This doesn't answer my question. So I'll repeat it: Given that it is not, in general, true of any art form that depth is proportionate to desriptive minutiae, why would this be true of RPGing?

Who said anything about can't think of dopplegangers lurking for victims? I said the lore helps them come to a decision, especially if the DM is new or not as creative as you are.

You seem to having trouble understanding that many DMs are new and don't know these things, aren't nearly as creative as you are and really need these things, and/or don't have time to create all of these things themselves.

I fall into that last category. I don't have time to create all that lore for all the creatures I use

As I posted some way upthread, saying that doppelgangers follow their victims to inns isn't lore. It's GMing advice - which you seem to acknowledge when you say that it is helpful to new GMs who can't think of what to do with doppelgangers.

As I also said, it's very banal GMing advice. Someone who wants to use a doppelganger will almost certainly have some idea what they want to do with it, without being told that it might follow a victim to an inn. (Does that mean it won't follow them to a tavern?) As GMing advice for doppelganger scenarios, it is lacking in imagination. And it doesn't give the GM actually important advice, like how does one handle an assination and infiltration scenario against the PCs. Which is a tricky thing even for a very experienced GM to handle.

 

[pemerton]

There are issues of familiarity at work. Let's envision levels of familiarity as circles. Interest is generally going to fade as those circles get bigger. People are generally more interested in what's going on with the groups and people they know and the games they're playing.

<snip>

continuity of canon is one of those things that promotes the shrinking of those circles, breaks in that continuity grow the circles.

<snip>

For those of us who prefer continuity, even upgrading our campaigns through the editions, 4e was already gearing up to fail to gain our support with the WotC Presents books and it was months away. Add in the difference in mechanics and, as people here claim, the very different way the game plays, and what do I have in common with 4e players? A lot less than every other D&D edition. The lingua franca of the gaming industry, D&D and its various -isms, was sundered. The changes in mechanics may always of taken their toll, but add in massive changes, sorry, "reconceptings" in the canonical identities and roles of things and you've got a one-two punch that caused some problems.

Relatively light lore (and the yardstick on that varies) is fine because that too can provide a basis for familiarity, but when even that get changed/"reconcepted" it just makes the change that much more vexing because there wasn't all that much there to begin with to provide that common understanding.

This is all armchair sociology.

When I posted this thread about the Eye of Vecna, even the non-4e players seemed to be able to follow along and chime in. Gygax's "light lore" seems to have worked pretty well in this case.

I don't think the reason that 4e was not the commercial success that WotC was hoping for was because players who got into the game in the 80s - the players whom 5e has recruited in large numbers - didn't know what an archon or eladrin was. (Those players weren't familiar with PS either.)

You say you had little in common with 4e - but in your many posts over the years explaining why you don't like 4e, you never seem to have any trouble that I recall in understanding what was going on in people's 4e games. (I mean, you seem to have a pretty good catalogue of the lore changes you didn't like.)

 

[billd91]

And why woudn't one have to know one's audience before introducing (say) encumbrance rules or Traveller-style commerce mechanics? I did once RPG with an accountant, but only for a few sessions.

If your conception of "quick and dirty" is counting every pound and every coin, but not having an inflation/deflation model for prices nor a "lever" factor for turning weight into effective encumbrance, we are drawing that line on the spectrum in quite different places.

My conception of quick and dirty for encumbrance is - does it look plausible, given genre, PC build etc. And for buying stuff is "Yep, you'e got that, now let's get on to the action" - unless the action is buying the stuff, in which case doing it with some sort of check is quick and dramatic.

What I'm reading about a lot of your posts is you like to gloss over a lot of stuff that the game includes. That's fine... for you. But the game has included a lot of these things you gloss over because other players and gaming groups like them. When faced with that issue, what should the publisher do? What's their optimal move? Looks to me like it's include the canon and rule detail since that is more likely to satisfy the players who like that while the ones who gloss over that stuff anyway will continue to do so.

 

[billd91]

When I posted this thread about the Eye of Vecna, even the non-4e players seemed to be able to follow along and chime in. Gygax's "light lore" seems to have worked pretty well in this case.

Yeah, sure people knew what you meant about the Eye of Vecna. Of course, you didn't exactly reconcept it as the eye of a paragon of good, did you? And I suspect many posters were also assuming there were other nefarious side-effects other than the hallucinations that the GM wasn't telling you... as probably should be the case with a relic of Vecna.

I don't think the reason that 4e was not the commercial success that WotC was hoping for was because players who got into the game in the 80s - the players whom 5e has recruited in large numbers - didn't know what an archon or eladrin was. (Those players weren't familiar with PS either.)

I'm not saying nor have I said that canon changes were the sole reason 4e underperfomed as the D&D flagship. I've always maintained it's a set of factors of which canonical changes was one and I've stated before why I think that it was a barrier to some players of previous editions moving to 4e. Constantly getting hung up on specific examples brought up in this discussion as if they are my sole argument is getting you nowhere.

You say you had little in common with 4e - but in your many posts over the years explaining why you don't like 4e, you never seem to have any trouble that I recall in understanding what was going on in people's 4e games. (I mean, you seem to have a pretty good catalogue of the lore changes you didn't like.)

Yes, I had little in common with 4e when it came out, but we still gave it a 9 month go because a couple of players in the group were excited about it. One of those players actually grew quite disgusted with it and we gave it up in favor of returning to 3.5 which most of us liked better. In fact, we turned to a new 3.5 campaign in which we traded off DMing duties (something I think was made easier with our shared knowledge of canonical materials). But if it seems I largely get the gist what's going on in 4e games, it's because I spent some time reviewing the differences between the editions and their canonical and mechanical changes and, frankly, found having to do so to that degree to be an enormous pain in the ass. Significantly worse than any other changes between D&D editions. The closest equivalent I experienced was probably when Traveller went to New Era, an even bigger pain in the ass and another transition I decided not to make.

 

[Maxperson]

Maybe, maybe not. As I said in the OP, I regard each campaign as a distinct thing.

I have run GH games using AD&D, Rolemaster and (currently) Burning Wheel. The game elments aren't the same across each campaign: elves in RM, for instance, take a long time to heal, whereas elves in BW have a bonus to healing. And in AD&D they heal at the same rate as everyone else.

These campaigns obviously feature overlapping elements - names, places, even some personalities. But not all the minutiae. If I ever run a doppelganger in my BW game, I won't care whether or not it is similar in any respect other than shapechanging to the RM doppelganger I ran for different players 25 years ago.

Let me try again since I was unclear. We have been discussing D&D, so I assumed you'd stay within this system. If you established in 5e that dopplegangers were thin skinned and agile, would you keep the that way for other future campaigns using 5e and set within the same world if you had different PCs and/or players?

What is your basis for saying that it is true to D&D's design for a later book - the 2nd ed Monsrous Compendium/Manual - to fill in that detail? I can just as easily say - as I do - that that subsequent filling in provided nothing of value. Why am I wrong?

I never said you were wrong to add or alter details. I said that adding those details is a boon to people new to D&D, less creative than you are, or who do not have the time to create all those details themselves.

You keep saying that it's worthless to everyone, which is fairly arrogant.

There is nothing special about D&D that makes ultra-heavy "lore" - pinning everything down to the Nth degree before play actually happens - better suited than my preferred approach.

I didn't say it was. I said it's the way D&D has been since its inception. D&D has always provided lore and pinned things down. 2e more than any other edition, but all editions do it.

This doesn't answer my question. So I'll repeat it: Given that it is not, in general, true of any art form that depth is proportionate to desriptive minutiae, why would this be true of RPGing?

It is an answer. It's just not one that you like. RPGing is not like the others, so attempts to compare it to other art forms are flawed from the get go. Besides, I've already answered this several times in other ways in other posts by showing you how it helps new DMs, less creative DMs, and DMs with not enough time.

As I posted some way upthread, saying that doppelgangers follow their victims to inns isn't lore. It's GMing advice - which you seem to acknowledge when you say that it is helpful to new GMs who can't think of what to do with doppelgangers.

No, it's not advice. Advice to a DM is, "If you want, you the DM can have dopplegangers follow PCs and try to catch them alone.". Lore is what they provided for dopplegangers. Lore can be very useful to DMs in planning encounters, but that doesn't make it advice.

As I also said, it's very banal GMing advice. Someone who wants to use a doppelganger will almost certainly have some idea what they want to do with it, without being told that it might follow a victim to an inn.

Again, that's just banal to you though. To others it is not. Also, you are again letting your own way of doing things cloud how you see things done by others. Something I do, and I know that fellow DMs that are friends do, is go through a monster book and look through monsters and their lore to get ideas on what to use and how. It's a pretty common way of doing things, so the idea that a DM will "almost certainly" have a pre-conceived idea on how to use a monster isn't accurate.

 

[Shasarak]

You don't think "chucking 30 years of lore" is slightly hyperbolic? The Nine Hells didn't change from their PS status-quo. Goblins worshipped Maglubiyet, bugbears Hruggek, drow Lolth. Bahamut was the god of metallic dragons, Tiamat of chromatics. Etc, etc.

That was probably the worse change for me. There were other Drow Gods before the Sundering and yet I am supposed to believe that nothing changed when suddenly Lloth became the only Drow God. I mean sure if the only Drow you know come from the Salvatore novels then most likely you did not even notice the change but it is not "exactly the same".

It's not a change, it's an addition. Because both bits of lore are obviously consistent. They live in coastal deserts.

Great, now I have the image of hippy surfer Blue Dragons living on the Beach.

Well, not everyone thinks it was a bad mistake, do they.

If someone writes something that (i) you don't like, and (ii) is inspired by or derived form something you like, it's of course your prerogative not to like it. But it doesn't follow that they misunderstood, or hated, or set out to destroy or "chuck", the stuff that you liked. Worlds & Monsters explains their reasoning - combining aesthetic considerations with considerations of gameplay - in detail. You might not like the reasons. You might not like what the reason led to. But the reasons were there.

Some people like Monet but don't like Cezanne; that doesn't mean that Cezanne's work is not a legitimate response to, and development from, impressionism. And the point becomes even more obvious if one then continues the development/response through to Picasso and cubism.

Of course not everyone thinks the same way, I am sure that you could dredge up enough Flat Earthers to have a decent Christmas party if you really wanted to. And I am sure if you asked them that they could go through all of their reasons that support their belief as well. I would not be surprised if there was not even a book or two that explains it.

I think it is fair to judge them on the result of their "reasoning" rather then the logical process that led them over the edge of the cliff.

 

[pemerton]

What I'm reading about a lot of your posts is you like to gloss over a lot of stuff that the game includes. That's fine... for you. But the game has included a lot of these things you gloss over because other players and gaming groups like them. When faced with that issue, what should the publisher do? What's their optimal move? Looks to me like it's include the canon and rule detail since that is more likely to satisfy the players who like that while the ones who gloss over that stuff anyway will continue to do so.

Are you running an aesthetic argument or a commercial one?

When the essay about Star Wars says "there were huge holes in the canon that Slavicsek and his co-writer Curtis Smith would have to fill in themselves. Movies simply don’t require the level of exhaustive detail that a game would," I take that to be a claim about the aesthetic and practical logic of RPGing, not about their commercial viability.

And that is what I reject. A RPG doesn't need "exhaustive detail" that differentiates it from the world of Star Wars as presented in the film, or the world of Lothlorien as presented by Tolkien. The fact that many people like that sort of stuff doesn't change that.

Of course not everyone thinks the same way, I am sure that you could dredge up enough Flat Earthers to have a decent Christmas party if you really wanted to. And I am sure if you asked them that they could go through all of their reasons that support their belief as well. I would not be surprised if there was not even a book or two that explains it.

I think it is fair to judge them on the result of their "reasoning" rather then the logical process that led them over the edge of the cliff.

In most fields of aesthetic endeavour we don't use commercial success as the measure of merit.

Is there a reason why RPGs are different in this respect?