No, you choose to make it a detriment of you wish.
Your table, your game, your choice.
As it was before this declaration, and is now.
Only you got to choose if it applied to you. Not me.
Now, it's non canon for everyone, yay progress.
Nobody gained.
A certain segment, no matter how small, lost.
So either spitefulness, leads one to think anything improved, or no, there is no progress.
Just like a few other things that literally every table and DM could solve for themselves, Wizards has to to seemingly take away (spite) some, for the sake of....nobody.
No surprise at this point how people can cheer for a change that subtracts joy from others, I've seen it multiple times here.
You seem to be suggesting that have a game centered around a default setting with a set-in-stone canon of lore comes at no cost to those of us who don't use that lore in our home games. I would contend that this is false, because
game books that are oriented around established lore can be and often are quite opposed to the emergent, sandbox character of
gameplay that I employ. This thread has made me realize that this is part of why I find OSR products so compelling, as they sketch their settings very thinly, with explicit room for players and dms to manuever, subvert, and create. Even better, they provide tools for imaginative world creation hex by hex (e.g. Worlds Without Number). If 5e produced books as helpful, I would consider buying them. If they are going to produce books like Volo's that fill their page count with set in stone lore, less useful for me.
If your response is that I can always just ignore the lore for my table...well then why am I buying the book? That is, if the audience for the game product is you, it's less useful for me. What you are asking is that the products continue to treat you as the default reader, and the rest of us can do the work to adjusting to your preferences.
I will say that adjusting to other people's preferences is not a big deal. I'm an adult, I can take my business elsewhere and have grown up conversations with other people at my table. I don't need to mope in a corner about how hasbro hates me, or something.
The authority is important, because that's a fundamental aspect of the nature of canon: it's a determination that's made entirely external to you (in the general sense of the word "you"). That externalization grounds it, making it more real, because it gives it a quality of immutability - or at least, immutability in terms of personal whim - which is something it then shares with the real world.
I suspect that this is where a lot of our inability to reach a consensus is coming from, because I'm of the opinion that canon is more than simply agreeing on the history/lore/rules; as mentioned above, it requires an authoritative determination of what's part of the imaginary world and what's not, and in so doing removes personal issues of agreement from the equation entirely. Even if you have different universes, storylines, or alternative takes on the same body of work, their canonity ("canonicity"?) is determined by the individual(s) who have authority over that particular work; not by the fans or other people who engage with the material.
Thanks for your posts on this topic. Following from this theory, canon is in rpg gaming (as it is in religion and literature) inherently coercive. Those who enjoy the game through canon need other people, in particular a central authority, to validate lore. If it's just them and their game, then that lore is less meaningful and enjoyable. This means that the official source (wotc in this case) needs to take a stance on whether goblins are evil, they need to print this stance in the MM and in adventures (along with a little alignment tag), and that's the baseline. This baseline is
required in order for canonophiles to have fun. Implicitly, everyone else needs to also accept that baseline, even if we are "free" to ignore it in our games (thus making a large part of our purchased book irrelevant). (Contra to this, OSE has a one-sentence physical description and a statblock, the rest is up to the dm). So where 'canonoclasts' can say live and let live, canonophiles require others to at least acknowledge the baseline lore before they adjust anything. (that's phrasing is intentionally harsh so as to make the contradicting styles clear, obviously there's lots of middle ground (and with stakes much lower than in religious discussions)).
I've come to see tabletop RPGs as an inherently transformative medium. Transformative from the jump, with little room for the curative approach. TTRPGs are tools to create your own stories. We can argue over the specific processes and methods of play until the cows come home (who knows how many times the "system matters" discourse has been dragged out of its grave back into the world of the living), but at the end of the day, no matter if the story has been prepared beforehand or if it is spontaneously generated at the table, if it's the GM or the players who are the primary drivers of the story beats, each table creates their own stories, limited by the rules of the game, but after that only by their own imaginations. This applies just as much if they're playing in an already established IP's setting as it would to them playing in a world of their own creation. Basically, tabletop roleplaying is collaborative fanfiction, and since when have fanfic authors given the slightest hoot about canon?
I totally agree. IMO, if wotc should extend the 'rulings not rules' ethos from mechanics to lore as well. I'd return to 5e if they were more focused on tools to help dms and players creature transformative, emergent stories (like just about every major indie rpg does). I'd be similarly more willing to buy an adventure book if it wasn't so strictly tied to a setting.
