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

[pemerton]

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".

Sure, that's one factor. (In theoretical linguistics there's a big literature on it.)

But there's a broader issues too.

Some descriptions present themselves as implicitly complete, at least in certain respect - eg if the GM says "You see a mouse and a treasure chest" that is consistent with the PCs also seeing a huge red dragon, but the description implicitly precludes that, because the visible presence of the dragon would be so overwhelmingly salient in contrast to the mouse, and in the context of the chest, that for the GM to omit to mention it generates an implicatioin that it is absent.

On the other hand, "You see a mouse and a treasure chest" also leaves it open that the PCs see some dust on the floor and some damp patches on the walls. (This is what many of the "gotcha" monsters trade on.)

To me, the idea that the description of the Celestial Bureaucracy in OA leaves it open that's it's just a minor municipal operation in the context of the grand Faerunian pantheon and cosmology - such that placing OA into the FR is addition, not change - yet an explicitly in-fiction account of the visible heavens precludes a third moon that is invisible to the naked eye, is ridiculous. And my inability to reconcile them is not based on concerns about parsing sentence of English. It's about communication and salience, about what is implicitly precluded or left open by one account but not by the other.

 

[pemerton]

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).

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a module set in GH (the Barrier Peaks, to be precise).

If a GM runs that module, and as part of that, or following up on it, adds an orbiting satellite with a weapons system into his/her GH game, that is not "breaking" GH or altering canon. That's just playing the game.

As for why the authors never mentioned a 3rd moon - in the fiction, because they couldn't see it (the passage on heavenly bodies is written in the voice of a sage of GH); in the real world, because they didn't think of it/make it up. But running a RPG inevitably involves adding material into the setting that its authors didn't think of or make up. Otherwise the ficiton is frozen and no gaming can take place!

(The map has some ruins marked in the Sea of Dust. A GM who adds ruins into the Sea of Dust that aren't marked on the map isn't breaking the canon either. The seas and oceans have their depth colour-coded on the map. A GM who adds a super-deep trench into one area of water marked as shallow on the map is likewise not a canon-breaker. GMs add material to the setting. That's their job!)

 

[Imaro]

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.

Who in this thread has been arguing this? I feel like you're having a totally separate discussion than the rest of us at this point...

 

[Imaro]

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a module set in GH (the Barrier Peaks, to be precise).

If a GM runs that module, and as part of that, or following up on it, adds an orbiting satellite with a weapons system into his/her GH game, that is not "breaking" GH or altering canon. That's just playing the game.

As for why the authors never mentioned a 3rd moon - in the fiction, because they couldn't see it (the passage on heavenly bodies is written in the voice of a sage of GH); in the real world, because they didn't think of it/make it up. But running a RPG inevitably involves adding material into the setting that its authors didn't think of or make up. Otherwise the ficiton is frozen and no gaming can take place!

(The map has some ruins marked in the Sea of Dust. A GM who adds ruins into the Sea of Dust that aren't marked on the map isn't breaking the canon either. The seas and oceans have their depth colour-coded on the map. A GM who adds a super-deep trench into one area of water marked as shallow on the map is likewise not a canon-breaker. GMs add material to the setting. That's their job!)

What exactly is your definition of "canon" again? It can't possibly mean anything and everything because then it becomes meaningless... so how exactly are you using the word canon?

 

[Shasarak]

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a module set in GH (the Barrier Peaks, to be precise).

If a GM runs that module, and as part of that, or following up on it, adds an orbiting satellite with a weapons system into his/her GH game, that is not "breaking" GH or altering canon. That's just playing the game.

I dont think that it is guaranteed for a DM to accept that Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is actually official Greyhawk canon since it departs from the tropes that they may be using in their game.

At best it could be considered a meta adventure if you were to include it at all.

As for why the authors never mentioned a 3rd moon - in the fiction, because they couldn't see it (the passage on heavenly bodies is written in the voice of a sage of GH); in the real world, because they didn't think of it/make it up. But running a RPG inevitably involves adding material into the setting that its authors didn't think of or make up. Otherwise the ficiton is frozen and no gaming can take place!

I think that is a great point - the DM has to make something up to play the game and of course the more that gets made up then the more the campaign world diverges from canon until perhaps the only similarities are the maps - and maybe not even then!

 

[Shasarak]

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

Just as long as it is not an Eladrin glasses and mustache set - all True Fans know that they are not real costumes.

 

[ProgBard]

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:

Ahem. [blushes, coughs awkwardly] I don't normally disclose this kind of thing, but I'm typing this in a batik button-up, a Steven Universe t-shirt, and plaid pajamas. So only one of these things can possibly be true, and I have my doubts about the other one.

... But I take the compliment in the spirit it was intended, with my humble, and slightly embarassed, thanks.

 

[Hriston]

I do find it hard to believe that in no Greyhawk campaign setting material across all editions is the sentence... "Oerth has two moons...".

Why would it matter if there was such a sentence? Are you saying that a Greyhawk game that uses only the folio edition is non-canonical if some detail of the game is contradicted by some later-published material?

 

[ProgBard]

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?

I think the way you lay this out is pretty much exactly how I'd thread the needle. I also recognize the value that lore has in establishing expectations; heck, I do that all the time myself, so I hope I'm not giving the impression of being all "lore is stupid and you should ignore it." At its best, it's rewarding or at least cool to interact with, and it's every player's hope that they've drilled into lore that's going to give them some kind of positive feedback in play. (One of my characters for public games at my FLGS is from Little Calimshan in Baldur's Gate, the descendant of former pashas who fled genie slavery during the Spellplague. That bit of history has a huge impact on the way he sees and interacts with the world, and I'm always just a little disappointed when a DM doesn't pick that up and bat it back.)

If DMs use lore as a cudgel to keep players off-balance - either by pulling out superior knowledge of it to short-circuit player actions, or secretly changing it just for the sake of pulling the rug out - that is really, really sucky DMing, and I get why that would make you fall back on the lore as a kind of rulebook. My point from the start of this thread was that 1) there are better ways of solving that kind of problem, and 2) it's still a needless leap to therefore treat "blue dragons are found in deserts" as something as fixed and inviolable as, say, the way hit points work.

In a necessarily social hobby, Wheaton's Law is, if anything, even more vital than Rule Zero.

 

[Imaro]

Why would it matter if there was such a sentence? Are you saying that a Greyhawk game that uses only the folio edition is non-canonical if some detail of the game is contradicted by some later-published material?

We aren't speaking to "published" material...