D&D 5E Whatever "lore" is, it isn't "rules."

[Corpsetaker]

Where you'll run into problems with filling in the blank spots is when they've already been "officially" filled in by something else.

FR is the obvious example. I've got the grey-box version, which has enough structure and lore to run with and whole great whacks of blank or blank-ish space for me to mess with as I please.

Let's say I mess with the blank space, and add in a bunch of things - dungeon sites, towns and villages, even a few small-scale cultures and what-have-you - then start and maintain a long campaign on this basis. By your definition above I'm still running FR, right?

So, when the 3e FR book comes out and adds a pile of things to the maps/lore/etc. that I didn't (and, reasonably, couldn't) account for in advance, what then? Let's say for example that the new FR now has a great big town in what was formerly blank space which I'd filled with monsters and dungeons, most of which remain unkilled and unexplored. What then? Am I still running FR? And when a new player, steeped in FR lore, comes into my game does she have a legitimate beef or not when she finds that town doesn't exist? Clearly my FR doesn't match her FR...but it's still FR...right?

Lan-"guidelines, all guidelines"-efan

Everything in the grey box is FR so yes it's still FR, even if you fill in some places with your own ideas.

 

[Hussar]

I've answered that at least a half dozen times already. You can look one of those up.



Where is the alternate Greyhawk setting? I'd like to look at it. Also, the incorporation of the Isle of Dread is not canon. Paizo is incapable of creating D&D canon as they don't own the rights to D&D.



Again, I've answered this at least a half dozen time already. It really shouldn't be mysterious.

Now there it gets a bit stickier. Paizo, at the time they were publishing Dungeon and Dragon, actually were licensed to use WotC IP. That's why you have Demogorgon and Orcus and all the other goodies in Savage Tide. So, at that time, Paizo was certainly capable of creating D&D canon. Dungeon and Dragon were (and always were) 100% official material.

 

[darkrose50]

The lore skill(s) should be useful, and should give "something" after a successful check. Having a skill that does nothing is irritating. One of my friends runs games where lore skills just do not give you any more hints on a monster because the monster is not known (they never are). It is frustrating to have lore skills that do not give hints. If one studies the lore of the supernatural, then one should get a hint if one is successful as knowledge is often useful across related and unrelated subjects. For example airplane checklists leading towards doctor checklists.

 

[darkrose50]

Oh an people disagreeing on lore is a "heck yes!" This is how we get so many religions. We even have versions of Christianity that literally disagree with Jesus (Christians who disagree with Christ). Jesus (at least in the lore of the Bible) went on and on and on about how helping the poor is important to him, and we have Christians saying that helping the poor hurts them (and thus do not help them, or limit how they allow the poor to be helped). Are then these followers of Jesus, not followers of Jesus? Half-followers of Jesus? Some portion of a follower of Jesus? Do they just not believe in that portion of the lore presented in the Bible? They then would have a different version of Jesus than other Christians (on what appears to be a central cornerstone of the religion, and not an odd passage here or there). It is fascinating what paradoxes exist within lore and religion.

This would be like the god of the harvest being worshiped by those who think that harvesting crops needs to be limited, and contained as harvesting crops is dangerous. Farmers should not be helped as those who are in favor of the god of harvesting will be successful, and those who are not successful are not worthy. Yet their holy book would go on and on about how helping farmers is a cornerstone of the religion.

 

[Maxperson]

Now there it gets a bit stickier. Paizo, at the time they were publishing Dungeon and Dragon, actually were licensed to use WotC IP. That's why you have Demogorgon and Orcus and all the other goodies in Savage Tide. So, at that time, Paizo was certainly capable of creating D&D canon. Dungeon and Dragon were (and always were) 100% official material.

A few things.

First, do you have a source that says that Dungeon and Dragon were 100% official material? That there were official products is not in doubt, but the material inside was always optional as far as I know. I certainly got a lot of push back when I say that 1e had Paladins of every alignment due to the Plethora of Paladins article in Dragon Magazine. The claim is that it isn't official material.

Second, Savage Tide was not released as part of work directly for WotC like Dragon and Dungeon were. It was released well after the end of 3e, at a time when Paizo absolutely had no ability to create canon. Whether or not they could do so prior to Pathfinder isn't really relevant.

 

[pemerton]

D&D™ incorporates the world as laid out in all the various source-books and supplements.

<snip>

3e and esp 4e had very tight reins on what the DM could do in terms of rules and even lore

Both these claims are strange to me.

D&D (TM) can't incorporate the world as laid out in all the sourcebooks - it can't be true, for instance, that the events of some module are happening in both FR and in GH, but the modules contain advice on adapting to other campaign settings.

In other words, there is no single world laid out in all the sourcebooks. They're books of rules and advice for playing RPGs - and they present setting material as an aid to that. They are not catalogues of a Platonic multiverse. For instance, the statement "If a GM wants to run this adventure in Eberron, change ABC to XYZ" isn't a statement about the content of the multiverse. It's real-world advice to a prospective game referee.

The statement about "reins" is also odd. First, it seems contradcited at least in the 4e case by the inclusion, in the DMG, of a page of advice on houseruling. (I seem to recall something similar in the 3E DMG.) There are also the comments about the GM's power to author settings that I've already posted once or twice upthread.

Second, many people changed rules and lore in 4e and the world didn't end.In my own case, I strated my cam[paign using Night Dark Terror, a B/X module, and for 30 levels the campgin has not moved to any part of the mortal world beyond that campaing map. I ran G2 as a mid-epic adventure (with levelled-up frost giants) located in the Feywild. Nothing bad happened as a result.

Chris Perkins posted a regular column on the WotC website where he talked about events in his own campaign, which included a non-default hisgtory, goeography and cosmology, including a nondefaault treatment of mind flayers.

The same was true for 3E - the only (brief) 3E campaign I ran started in The Bright Desert, using an old White Dwarf mini-module (so statted for eithe rOD&D or AD&D) then shifted to Castle Amber, and if it had kept going presumably would have ended up in Averoigne.

These "reins" that you speak of are pure phantasms!

True, but 3.0 did usher in the "there's a rule for that" era of D&D which intended to create a "unified experience" via consistent rule application. Its also the beginning of the "everything's core" mantra 4e wholly embraced and it slowly shifted to "player empowerment" as time wore on.

And this creates "reins" on lore how? Prevents changes to the rules how?

The only 4e class that has significant setting detail built into it is the warlock. Much like the 5e warlock, in fact! But even there it's trivially easy to reconceive the nature of the warlock's patron if a table wants to do that.

playing Scarred Lands using the 3.0 PHB and DMG is as much "D&D" as using Pathfinder to play Eberron, but neither of them come as close to playing D&D™ as running Forgotten Realms with the v3.5 core books would.

But how is this meant to be reconciled with the default gods in 3E being from GH? Or with the default planar structure being different from the 3E-era "world tree"?

Canon should be the starting point of any discussion on lore.

Why on earth should this be so? If someone posts a thread saying, "I want to run a vampire mystery - any suggestions for ideas, published modules, etc?" why would anyone think the starting point should be canon? Maybe someone just published a cool module on DM's Guild, or under the OGL, and that should be the starting poin

The ideal would be to keep things as internally consistent as possible while improving on things that haven't worked (creating a continuity of experience across editions) but obviously, conflict will arise.
(Tangent: I think a lot of the rejection of 4e comes from the fact it intentionally and willfully broke this "continuity of experience" in terms of both rules and lore. It may have created a game that was interesting or even superior, but the intention breaking of both traditions to the amount it did is the heart of the cry of "Not D&D anymore").

My issue with this is that it implies - as was often asserted - that those who liked 4e hated D&D and hated its traditions. It's an attempt to stake out one particular approach to D&D (one that I, personally, associate with the highpoint of the 2nd ed era) as D&D per se.

Wagner set out to perfect the symphonic tradition of Beethoven. Some critics think he succeeded. Others think he didn't. But a bald assertion that "the problem with Wagner is that he rejected the tradition" would be ludicrous.

Mutatis mutandis for 4e and D&D. There are different views on what it's tradition is, and hence on what counts as developing, perfecting or (whether deliberately or inadvertantly) breaking from that. Simplistic caricatures of those who happen to read the tradition differenlty from you don't contribute anything useful to reflections on and discussions about the nature of D&D.

My point remains the same; it has to be the starting point for a discussion on the game, but you are always free to do what you want in your own game. Just don't tell me since you find it worthless, its worthless to everyone.

You don't find this a touch ironic - that you are asserting that, because you care about D&D(TM) and it's canon - as you conceive of it - everyone should, and should use it as the starting point for all discussion?

D&D began as a game about making stuff up: worlds, characters, monsters, the events that occur to them, the places where those events happen, the tools (spells, magic items) that are used in undertaking those events. Those of us who think that lore and canon remain in the service of that creative purpose, and not ends in themselves, aren't some deviant RPGers who don't really understand the hobby and whose views don't count!

 

[Hussar]

A few things.

First, do you have a source that says that Dungeon and Dragon were 100% official material? That there were official products is not in doubt, but the material inside was always optional as far as I know. I certainly got a lot of push back when I say that 1e had Paladins of every alignment due to the Plethora of Paladins article in Dragon Magazine. The claim is that it isn't official material.

Second, Savage Tide was not released as part of work directly for WotC like Dragon and Dungeon were. It was released well after the end of 3e, at a time when Paizo absolutely had no ability to create canon. Whether or not they could do so prior to Pathfinder isn't really relevant.

Says so right inside the cover of every single Dungeon and Dragon magazine. The magazines were, at least in 3e, 100% official.

And, nope. Savage Tide was not released after the end of 3e. It was released before 4e even hit the shelves. Paizo's license was even extended so that it could be released. It was released under the 3.5 rules and was 100% official.

Funny thing is, I've seen people quote Dragon magazine all sorts of times to establish lore for the game. That we can't change this or that because it was established in Dragon magazine. But, like all lore/canon discussions, apparently what's actually lore or canon is only lore or canon when it's convenient.

 

[pemerton]

Now there it gets a bit stickier. Paizo, at the time they were publishing Dungeon and Dragon, actually were licensed to use WotC IP. That's why you have Demogorgon and Orcus and all the other goodies in Savage Tide. So, at that time, Paizo was certainly capable of creating D&D canon. Dungeon and Dragon were (and always were) 100% official material.

Dragon was not always 100% official. Back when I use to read it fairly regularly (80s and early 90s) it was unofficial unless it was column from Gygax asserting the contrary. (And those stopped in the mid-80s, for the well-known reasons.)

Dungeon I don't know about.

But as far as Paizo's use of the IP, I agree with you. They were publishing stuff under licence using D&D IP, including GH.

This is one reason why the notion of "pure canon" is ridiculous. Paizo publishes stuff under licence. WotC goes on to publish stuff that contradicts it, because they don't really care what a licensee who is now a major competitor did with the IP a decade or so ago. There's no canonical reconcilation of this stuff - trying to construct a "Platonic" ideal of GH (or whatever) is like solving crosswords - it might be a fun activity for the puzzle solver, but it's not actually adding to the sum total of human knowledge!

Savage Tide was not released as part of work directly for WotC like Dragon and Dungeon were. It was released well after the end of 3e, at a time when Paizo absolutely had no ability to create canon. Whether or not they could do so prior to Pathfinder isn't really relevant.

According to wikipedia,

The Savage Tide Adventure Path (or simply Savage Tide) is the third Adventure Path for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, published over twelve installments from October 2006 through September 2007 in Dungeon magazine.​

That is not "well after the end of 3E". It seems pretty clearly to be a case of writing and/or publishing under license from WotC.

Just looked inside of a 3e Dungeon Magazine and it says that the opinions inside are not necessarily that of WotC. That's not official.

That seems like defensive text in relation to reputation and defamation suits. I don't think it affects the status of content vis a vis game rules or canon.

I certainly noticed the change in 3E Dragon from its classic days. Instead of having the flavour of a fan magazine (ideas for rules variants or new rules, commentary on playing the game, etc) it had the flavour of a house organ: the articles read like supplements to WotC's game. 4e continued this trend.

 

[pemerton]

He can also play around with canon, it's just more likely to disrupt things

What things? I've never had disruption issues.

You are not everyone.

OK - I'll try a more literal take. Who is reporting "disruption of things" resulting from departing from canon in using a setting?

No one in this thread. No one in the other thread, where [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has been quite clear that [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION]'s departure from canon (as Hussar sees it) is not a disruption to the game.

These "issues" are, in my view, purely phantasms.

 

[pemerton]

I've answered that at least a half dozen times already. You can look one of those up.

I've answered this at least a half dozen time already. It really shouldn't be mysterious.

It's utterly mysterious to me, as it was to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION].

You depart from canon but it's OK. I depart from canon and you accuse me of playing GI Joe with my McDonald's toys. You might at least do me the courtesy of explaining, rather than posting snide dismissals - particularly as youd din't even acknowledge my post not far upthread poiting out that your description of my game is, at the best, very loose paraphrase.