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

[I'm A Banana]

I don't think you fully understand the implications of your argument; you aren't arguing the position that a person should go and make the world a better place. You are arguing for the small-c, conservative and Burkean positions, and wish to stand athwart lore yelling STOP! at those who would change it.

Of course, that's not my argument. I wish to stand awthart lore and yell "THIS IS IMPORTANT TO PEOPLE!" at those who would change it. This is a very different agenda, and is about making change more thoughtful.

There's nothing wrong with that. But progress occurs in the tension inherent between those who cling to what has come before, and those who wish to expand, change, modify, and even subvert it.

Sure, I'm all against "destructive" change, and I'm all for "positive" change. Now, if we can only get everyone to agree on which is which ...

One way to make change more positive is to be more thoughtful about it - to remember that existing lore is important to people, and that changing it destroys some value.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Maybe this point is where I'm having trouble meeting you. What effort? "Hey guys, we're not going to use chaotic evil orcs, most of the orcs in our game are still lawful evil."

It first takes a lot of knowledge and system mastery to even have the knowledge that you need to do that in the first place. I imagine a lot of DM's first revelation that orcs were Chaotic Evil in 3e was when they first appeared in the game and, I dunno, some Law cleric used detect law on them.

Even if you know it needs to happen, you need to change the player's perceptions, and that's not a simple process - we've been playing a Dragonlance game with a gnome wild mage for months, now, and it's still not really Dragonlance to at least one player because of it! "Oh, your orcs are Lawful Evil, well, that's an interesting house rule, I guess this version of D&D we're playing is OK even if it's not really D&D!"

And the more things that change, the more things you have to do that on! "Tieflings are using the 2e tiefling story. Also no dragonborn. Also high elves are not eladrin. Also eladrin are CG outsiders. Also archons are LG outsiders. Also giants are not elementals. Also..."

It's a relatively big psychological lift, and it's not always worth doing!

Well, I've read multiple versions of gnolls over the years. The 4e gnolls that took over Nerath were a pretty cool take. The Volo version is way more interesting, though. I mean, to me, but I would hope it's obvious that some people would disagree.

Sure. Some people think the same thing about 2e gnolls. It'd be nice if we could use them all at once, to have a game that supported ALL of these cool stories!

And honestly, once a story exists, how can it ever be invalidated? If you don't like Volo's gnolls (Volgnolls?), just use some other version.

I hope I've shown that "just use some other version" can be Kind Of An Inconvenience. And since D&D games are fragile little things, sometimes all it takes to check out of the hobby completely is for something to be Kind Of An Inconvenience.

 

[lowkey13]

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[I'm A Banana]

Ummm.... that's why I specifically cited Burkean, small-c, conservatism.

The concept that when there something already there, you have to overcome a very high presumption to change it. That change, by its very nature, is bad because THIS IS IMPORTANT TO PEOPLE or it wouldn't be there.

That's why I wrote that you may not fully understand the implications of your argument- your response is a perfect encapsulation of (small-c, Burkean) conservatism.

Gotcha - got hung up on the "STOP".

I'm not sure we really disagree, then, in as much as the best way to help put the odds in favor of new lore being positive is to make sure it is well-considered, and this consideration can also take into account the disruption it is likely to cause (and examine ways to minimize that disruption). My argument has always acknowledged that change will come and that it will be valuable, and that this is a fine thing to happen, but that throughout recent D&D history (starting in 3e, continuing in 4e, and persisting in smaller ways through 5e), these changes were often not done thoughtfully enough (or at least not with the right appreciations in place). I think that consideration could be - and should be - better. That would seem to address both the need for new lore to be pretty good and the need for new lore to take into account the old lore that it's thinking about chucking.

 

[lowkey13]

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[I'm A Banana]

I completely agree with this; of course, a person can also note that changes we now accept (the kung-fu fighter monk, the cleric) were just added willy-nilly ... so it's more that some stuff gets hallowed with time.

Which leads back to the formulation that good change is good, bad change is bad, and that D&D has a certain gestalt that everyone wants preserved (but that gestalt varies from person to person ... such that people might disagree about whether a hot dog is a sandwich, but we all know that a burrito is not one ... right?).

Yeah, I don't think it's a controversial statement that making good lore is hard. Arguably, this is one of the biggest values that WotC's paid devs can bring to the table! And yes, some lore that was offhand or easy got lucky - much like everything else in life, success is something that depends on chance to work. Sometimes you're going to pour a lot of work into something that lands with a thud. Sometimes an offhand idea really takes off. You've gotta be ready to absorb both of these kinds of failure (and learn from them when possible).

But, you know, there are ways to help this. WotC has access to the same books that I do, presumably more, and they presumably have people whose entire job is to do some internal research (more than one, if they're smart - you don't want the entire 40 years of D&D history represented by just one dude's perspective). They have in place a system already for playtesting mechanics that is pretty successful - why not playtest lore like that, too? (I mean, that's what "focus grouping" is, no?) Not to mention dorks like those of us for whom cannon matters, who would gladly tell them if their story ideas are off script or not. And development-process things like democratizing decision-making and ensuring that no one person's voice is privileged.

So I'm reasonably confident there are tools at their disposal that they're not using to their fullest.

No one that I know of asked RL fans if CoS revealing the True Nature of the Dark Powers was a good idea or not.

But we've got a lot of asking about if the new ranger's mechanics are a good idea or not.

 

[TwoSix]

It first takes a lot of knowledge and system mastery to even have the knowledge that you need to do that in the first place. I imagine a lot of DM's first revelation that orcs were Chaotic Evil in 3e was when they first appeared in the game and, I dunno, some Law cleric used detect law on them.

If the issue never arose for months, how was it possibly a burden or a challenge?

Even if you know it needs to happen, you need to change the player's perceptions, and that's not a simple process - we've been playing a Dragonlance game with a gnome wild mage for months, now, and it's still not really Dragonlance to at least one player because of it! "Oh, your orcs are Lawful Evil, well, that's an interesting house rule, I guess this version of D&D we're playing is OK even if it's not really D&D!"

I'll be honest, if there's an interesting back story for the gnome, that player needs to get over themselves. "But it's not REALLLLY X" players are the worst.

And the more things that change, the more things you have to do that on! "Tieflings are using the 2e tiefling story. Also no dragonborn. Also high elves are not eladrin. Also eladrin are CG outsiders. Also archons are LG outsiders. Also giants are not elementals. Also..."

Why? You know as a DM what you want. If it comes up, communicate it to your players. When are archons and giants going to come up at the beginning of the game?

It's a relatively big psychological lift, and it's not always worth doing!

Yea, still not seeing it, sorry. I've seen one example of one player who's a little uppity because his mental picture doesn't match the DM's mental picture. It happens.

Sure. Some people think the same thing about 2e gnolls. It'd be nice if we could use them all at once, to have a game that supported ALL of these cool stories!

There's absolutely nothing stopping you from running 5e with 2e gnolls or 3e gnolls or 4e gnolls or 5e pre-Volo gnolls. I mean, I guess you could have a book that has every version of gnolls ever published together, but why? If you want to use 2e gnolls, you already know about them. You don't need to be told again.

I hope I've shown that "just use some other version" can be Kind Of An Inconvenience. And since D&D games are fragile little things, sometimes all it takes to check out of the hobby completely is for something to be Kind Of An Inconvenience.

Maybe I've just been lucky, but I've never been in a game where lore has ever cropped up as an issue. The DM has always had final say over setting issues. When people have pointed out a contradiction between the DM and the rules, the DM either retcons (rarely) or overrules. Game goes on.

 

[lowkey13]

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[TwoSix]

Or, put another way, people often don't know what they want until they get it. To put a more 5e spin on this, my favorite section of VGtM was the lore section (Part 1); the Hags and Gnolls, alone, were worth the price of admission for me because of the possibilities.

Agreed. To be succinct (is it possible?), I'd rather see 5 editions tell 5 different stories of a monster, than the same story rewritten 5 times. Seeing all those different takes are what let me get to the real heart of the idea of the monster. (Much like how all the different games that are "like" D&D help inform me what the core of "D&D" is.)

 

[lowkey13]

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