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

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[TwoSix]

View attachment 80672

Don't even get me started on the dwarf planets.

"Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to the Kuiper Belt we go!"

 

[ccs]

I just want to make sure I'm understanding things here.

I can add several new races, an entire civilization and a complete pantheon of gods with a unique cosmology to Forgotten Realms (Kara Tur) and that's not changing the setting.

But, if I add a moon that isn't actually visible to the naked eye, that's not only a change, but such a drastic change as to make the setting no longer canon?

Is that seriously the argument that's being put forward here?

The difference is simple:

Were you paid by TSR/WoTC to add that 3rd moon?
Company changes/adds/subtracts/further details = cannon.
Anything done by the rest of us? Not cannon.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Shasarak]

Having a 3rd moon doesn't contradict anything in the earlier material - the other two moons are still there, just as desdribed. And the canon never asserts that they're the only two moons. (I think this is much the same point as [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION]'s not far upthread.)

That is true I guess. Canon also never asserts if there is a Death Star orbiting the planet or not so that can easily be added in as a third "moon" (which obviously it is not explaining why it is never mentioned).

 

[Shasarak]

I think that's just a basic problem with English. If I say "I have a dollar in my pocket", there's no way to parse whether I have "exactly" one dollar or "at least" one dollar. Same thing for "Oerth has two moons".

I am not sure you could make that mistake with the number of moons that you have in your pocket. Unless your English was really bad.

 

[innerdude]

So like an idiot, I dipped into the last few pages of the Setting Canon thread, which seems to have long since gone off the rails, slipped the tracks, careened into the wilderness, and barrel-rolled two or three times before catching on fire and exploding. That said, though, something startling came up in recent posts that was so alien to my experience that I had to make sure I was reading it right: The idea that if gameworld "lore" (specifically of monsters in the discussion in question, but presumably exapndable to all other aspects) isn't utterly consistent, it's useless, and that if you allow exceptions for some aspect of it you might as well throw the whole rulebook out, cats and dogs living together, &c., &c.

In short, I was flabbergasted to find a subset of my fellow hobbyists who want setting lore to be another kind of rule.

I myself find this mindset disturbing, but there's one good reason I can think of for this being the case, which is that as a player, knowing the lore means knowing how to interact with things in the world properly, which is to say, to my advantage. If I understand a setting's "lore," it allows me more leeway in acting "in character," because my knowledge of the lore intersects with the character's knowledge of the lore.

However, any GM worth his/her salt can simply say at appropriate times, "Hmmm, it looks like you're basing your decision making on some assumed bit of lore, or assumed knowledge that may not be correct for this setting. Let me explain some things that may help you here . . . ."

If people are averse to changing lore, I'm guessing it's because at various points in time they've been screwed over by a GM who did change the lore but didn't tell them, and then beat them over the head with it. In other words, as long as we're all practicing Wheaton's Law, the whole argument over whether lore is a subset of "rules," or whether it can be changed, pretty much dies, doesn't it?

Because otherwise, aren't we all just arguing purely subjectively about whose idea of fictional reality we happen to like better?

 

[Hussar]

The difference is simple:

Were you paid by TSR/WoTC to add that 3rd moon?
Company changes/adds/subtracts/further details = cannon.
Anything done by the rest of us? Not cannon.

But, hang on, that's been rejected here. Adding Isle of Dread, Sasserine and Cauldron to Greyhawk (a la Paizo) breaks the setting according to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]. Even though it's 100% official and Paizo was very much in collaboration with WotC during the Dungeon years.

I hope people can at least understand why I might find this all rather confusing. Changes are only changes sometimes. Filling in details aren't changes (apparently) but, when we actually fill in a detail (adding a third moon does not actually change any existing canon) suddenly that's a change and breaks the setting.

Even when the canon is actually 100% clear and people are changing that, apparently that's not a change, when it's convenient to the argument.

But, again, I just want to be absolutely clear - adding an entire pantheon of gods, hundreds of new monsters, several new races, thousands of years of history and culture to a setting isn't a change but an addition, but, adding a moon that can't be seen with the naked eye and a wizard order that's tied to said moon, breaks the setting.

Is it any wonder that this is a bit confusing?

 

[Hussar]

Was just reading the "Listened to the latest Lore you should know" thread and I wanted to cross quote this gem from [MENTION=6803722]ProgBard[/MENTION] who basically says everything I want to say, but, a a lot better because he's smarter and better dressed than I am:

To expand a bit on my previous:

Many fans who engage immersively with complex, long-running fandoms have a difficult time understanding that the things they find rewarding - complexity, long histories, the connections that can only be made throught deep immersion - are offputting to folks who are coming to the same material for the first time. The comics world has been dealing with this forever, obviously, and continuity fetishists in the funnybook realm can be relied on to make the same complaints we're hearing here every time there's a reboot or a retcon - including the accusation that those money-grubbing so-and-sos at Big Corporate Media HQ are catering to the shallow, lumpen masses who don't know this stuff like we do and don't want to. But the thing is that the lumpen masses have just as legit a claim on the material as anyone, and making them feel welcome is a good and wise thing (and not just for the bottom line).

I say that some fans have a hard time getting this, but at their worst, they get it perfectly, and it's just what they want: the ability to draw tribal boundaries so the Real True Fen get rewarded for their engagement and the hoi polloi are kept outside the gates. I hope I don't need to draw a line under how ugly this is.

Fandom isn't like marriage; you don't get special prizes for multiple decades of commitment. Nor do you get to demand gold stars from content creators because you did work the rabble weren't willing to do by digesting and internalizing years upon years of continuity. You might feel like that's what makes your stuff special and exciting, but the folks who appreciate it for other things aren't wrong. Believe me, as someone who loves a number of things that are long, old, complex, and more interesting the closer you examine them - Thick as a Brick, I'm looking at you - I get how tempting it is to roll your eyes when someone comes along who's only digging on it for the surface aspects. But the truth is that the surface aspects need to be the point. If Thick as a Brick isn't first of all a good album, all the rest of it is just wankery; it has to be listenable to someone with a baseline interest in the style of thing it is but who isn't on the inside about the history of why it's an in-joke about concept albums and who isn't interested in reading the album sleeve.

All the above applies even more strongly to interactive media like RPGs. Which is why I think the D&D team is making a savvy choice in the way they're looking at the Realms and continuity. They're not saying the folks who engage immersively with Realmslore are stupid for doing so - indeed, what I'm hearing is that folks who know it all that well are going to appreciate various Easter eggs and internal connections that are going to pass everyone else right by - they're just saying, in essence, that each book in the 5e line needs to be a good album first. If everything you need to play it isn't in the game, it's not doing its primary job. And, to flail on my point a little more, the players who never look beyond the covers of the 5e books but still fall in love with the setting are not Doin It Rong. They get to call themselves fans too.

Our hobby is a big enough world for all kinds of players. It has to be, if it wants to survive. So maybe wishing for a playground that makes it smaller and more insular isn't such a great thing - no matter how special and unique that playground would be.

And this second quote:

There are two issues with this, though, one practical and one aesthetic.

On the practical end, providing this takes work, and D&D is a skeleton crew. Everyone on staff has quite enough to do without adding "Keeper of the Faerun Timeline" to someone's list of titles.

But further, it's clear that the D&D team wants to avoid setting up one chain of events as the "official" version, artificially elevating its status to The Way Things Really Happened. Because what this does is subtly de-legitimize whatever decisions you made at your table, and they don't want to send that message. The furthest they're going to go is suggest that maybe the things going on in this other campaign had an effect on this one, but not so strongly that it won't work if that doesn't ring your bell. It's not a cop-out; it's a gift of empowerment to everyone's table that their version of Realms history from here on out isn't a poor shadow of the "real"* one.

And it's that second point which is why I get annoyed by these canon arguments. It's the attempt to delegitimize other points of view by claiming the "canon" high ground. Eladrin aren't really D&D because they aren't canon. X isn't really D&D because it's not canon. It's fine that you like X, but, it's not really D&D and us real D&D players will be over here playing the Real D&D. You go off and be happy with your *sniff* home-brew game.

And I've seen this for a lot of years now. 3e wasn't Real D&D (tm) because it changed too much - thus we get OSR games and endless threads about Pokemounts and bad art. 4e wasn't Real D&D (tm) because it changed too much - thus we get Pathfinder and then 5e. Now, funnily enough, 5e is seen as Real D&D (tm) but, when it's pointed out that 5e changes a huge amount of lore and canon from what came previously, it's swept under the carpet. Why? The same reason it was in 3e. Enough people like the lore changes that they can't separate their personal preferences from any sort of objective standard. So, 5e becomes "Real D&D (tm)" and those changes are conveniently forgotten or swept away as "oh, those things? They aren't really changes, they're additions and addition isn't change."

The whole thing is just arguing One True Wayism with a funny set of glasses and a fake moustache.

 

[innerdude]

The whole thing is just arguing One True Wayism with a funny set of glasses and a fake moustache.

Yes, but just how well-groomed IS that fake moustache?


Note: It seems a waste to use my 1,000th post on EnWorld on something so trivial . . . but really, this is an Internet message board, after all.