D&D 5E 5e isn't a Golden Age of D&D Lorewise, it's Silver at best.

[Parmandur]

As someone has read the Silmirillion several times for fun since Middle School, and who actually does enjoy reading the 3E FRCS in spite of the information being all online...as a game prep resource, SCAG has proven a good resource for use in play.

Lore is easy now, with the Internet. Concise game-centered prep tools are more valuable.

 

[GreyLord]

S'truth. I just think of 2e when I think of AD&D for the same reason I think of 3.5 when I think of 3e. It's a specific revision, but it's also just "That Edition" for me.

And it's the reason I put "AD&D and AD&D 2e" in the previous line. Just didn't carry it forward.

So there's 1e D&D which is the basic game, BEMCI and stuff. Then 2e which is AD&D and AD&D 2e and AD&D 2e Revised. And then 3e is also 3.5. 4e is 4e -and- the Powers Revamp. And now 5e is 5e and soon to be 5.5e. Unless they swerve and drop 6e. S'just how my brainmeats work and I don't ask anyone else to understand it without hefty explanation!

2e could be like the Silver Age as well.

That's when we get a LOT of new comics as well such as Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, the Avengers, X-men, Hal Jordan as Green Lantern, Barry Allen as the Flash, etc.

Then 3e would be like the Bronze Age (though not in as much quantity) during the 70s and 80s.

Not sure what 4e would fall under this heading...maybe the 2000s when DC kept rebooting it's universe over and over, and Marvel started doing something similar but short of rebooting it all?

 

[Blue Orange]

2e could be like the Silver Age as well.

That's when we get a LOT of new comics as well such as Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, the Avengers, X-men, Hal Jordan as Green Lantern, Barry Allen as the Flash, etc.

Then 3e would be like the Bronze Age (though not in as much quantity) during the 70s and 80s.

Not sure what 4e would fall under this heading...maybe the 2000s when DC kept rebooting it's universe over and over, and Marvel started doing something similar but short of rebooting it all?

Plastic Age?

The 8 Ages of Comics!

2020 has proven to be the ultimate disruptor in life and the comic book biz. It's even given birth to the first new Age of Comics in almost 20 years! For your entertainment and edification, Sitcomics breaks down the 8 ages of comic books! The Platinum Age - pre-1935 Publishers sell reprinted...

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[Parmandur]

What made the Golden Ahe of comics "Golden" wasnqualoty, it was breadth and variety: every genre conceivable was being pumped out in comics at the time, in the total possible range of quality, constantly. The closest equivalents in the TTRPG space in my mind are the D20 boom and the current age of Kickstarter and DMsGuild. There was no corporate master of the Golden Age: it was a huge mess of competitors scrambling for a huge and diverse audience.

 

[JEB]

Rather than produce tome after tome of material for 5e they provide one or two books which provide tone and identity and let you pick and choose what to put in it from a vast back catalogue of materials that were once Canonical in their entirety.

5E has an official stance on canon, and it's definitely not "pick and choose." It's "every edition of the roleplaying game has its own canon" and "beyond [the] core rulebooks, we don’t have a public-facing account of what is canonical." 5E canon does not include older-edition canon unless they specifically include it in 5E material, and even then it's only a maybe if it's not in a core rulebook. (This latter point was recently underscored by them moving VGTM and MTOF into a non-canon "Legacy Content" status, replaced by MOTM.)

Now, you can certainly pick and choose anyway - I do - but 5E isn't providing explicit support for this. It's something you just have to do on your own. Same as if you wanted to run a Greyhawk game under 4E rules, or an Eberron game using BECMI.

The funny thing is, tapping into the "vast back catalogue" seemed very much to be the plan for 5E at the beginning, which had references galore to specific older settings in the core rules (mainly in the DMG). They even included novels and video games in the lore. This continued into early adventure modules, with their guidance for adapting them to out-of-print settings. But something changed by 2021, as the new policy discourages that in favor of only 5E's material being canon for 5E.

Ravenloft is perhaps the best example of this sort of update in that it basically has a Multiverse of Dread Realms slowly sliding into oblivion and each one is just as "Real" as any other so you can combine the modern ones with the 2e ones with the 3e 3rd party ones and they all work just fine. You can even ignore Lord Soth's appearance-absence-dual existence nonsense.

I assume this is a reference to Klorr? That's more of an Easter egg, a sop to veteran fans, than encouragement to use older material. And even then you'd be expected to use it within Klorr, in the context of them all being "lost and failed domains" slowly sinking into the void. The "real" Ravenloft for 5E is the versions of the domains outside Klorr; the old versions are intended to be out of the picture.

 

[Parmandur]

5E has an official stance on canon, and it's definitely not "pick and choose." It's "every edition of the roleplaying game has its own canon" and "beyond [the] core rulebooks, we don’t have a public-facing account of what is canonical." 5E canon does not include older-edition canon unless they specifically include it in 5E material, and even then it's only a maybe if it's not in a core rulebook.

Yeah, they have made older Lore a resource they can use, not a restriction on what they can do.

Now, you can certainly pick and choose anyway - I do - but 5E isn't providing explicit support for this. It's something you just have to do on your own. Same as if you wanted to run a Greyhawk game under 4E rules, or an Eberron game using BECMI.

I have seen Chris Perkins recommended the Grey Box and the 3E FRCS on DMsGuild as a resource when people asked about a all-Fawrun book. So providing the old lore for use with new rules is an intentional strategy.

The funny thing is, tapping into the "vast back catalogue" seemed very much to be the plan for 5E at the beginning, which had references galore to specific older settings in the core rules (mainly in the DMG). They even included novels and video games in the lore. This continued into early adventure modules, with their guidance for adapting them to out-of-print settings. But something changed by 2021, as the new policy discourages that in favor of only 5E's material being canon for 5E.

That's not quite accurate: Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel has several suggestions for using Greyhawk, and one for using Mystara, so there hasn't been any change in their willingness to tap into older material.

 

[JEB]

Yeah, they have made older Lore a resource they can use, not a restriction on what they can do.

In the same sense that you can use third-party material or homebrew as resources, sure. If they wanted you to treat older-edition lore with the same weight as current lore, they wouldn't have made a policy statement that implicitly walled it off. They want you to privilege the use of 5E as the only current canon.

I have seen Chris Perkins recommended the Grey Box and the 3E FRCS on DMsGuild as a resource when people asked about a all-Fawrun book.

Did Perkins say that as an official recommendation of Wizards of the Coast, to use older-edition material as canon for the current edition? Or just as an offhand comment about useful resources?

So providing the old lore for use with new rules is an intentional strategy.

Then why did they publish a canon policy out that says older-edition material is only canon for its edition, and only 5E material is canon for 5E? A policy that encouraged use of older-edition lore with current material would look rather different to what we got. Instead, they strongly suggest that's not the way to go.

That's not quite accurate: Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel has several suggestions for using Greyhawk, and one for using Mystara, so there hasn't been any change in their willingness to tap into older material.

Greyhawk has appeared in 5E, in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, so that's no longer an older-edition reference. The Mystara reference is interesting, though... Mystara confirmed?

 

[Steampunkette]

@JEB

The statement linked for Perkins is basically the same statement as Disney on Star Wars and Marvel...

"It's not canonical until we decide it's canon, but it's obviously still there to enjoy for everyone who enjoys it."

They don't want you to "Have" to climb over the entire freaking MOUNTAIN of Forgotten Realms resources to run a modern FR game, but you are free to use them for your games. Which is the same stance they've had the entire time.

They even specify that 5e's core canon isn't core canon to your personal campaign, which will have it's own canon, in the exact same Perkins Piece.

In other words:

WotC has it's own canon for 5e. Every edition also has it's own canon. And you are not bound to the canon of a specific edition.

So pick and choose what you want for your home games.

 

[JEB]

WotC has it's own canon for 5e. Every edition also has it's own canon. And you are not bound to the canon of a specific edition.

So pick and choose what you want.

Yes, that is the choice we can make. It's the choice we could always make, and many have made (including me!).

But Wizards isn't encouraging you to pick and choose with their current policy. They encourage you to imagine the lore of each edition as limited to that edition, and for the 5E lore to only include 5E material (and not even all of it). You can make up your own canon, they say, but they don't encourage mixing. (The implication I get is that they'd rather you use 5E lore, or modifications thereof.)

If they really wanted to encourage players to tap into the lore of every edition, they would have said that instead, rather than creating barriers between different editions' canon. Or just not said anything at all.

 

[Parmandur]

In the same sense that you can use third-party material or homebrew as resources, sure. If they wanted you to treat older-edition lore with the same weight as current lore, they wouldn't have made a policy statement that implicitly walled it off. They want you to privilege the use of 5E as the only current canon.


Did Perkins say that as an official recommendation of Wizards of the Coast, to use older-edition material as canon for the current edition? Or just as an offhand comment about useful resources?


Then why did they publish a canon policy out that says older-edition material is only canon for its edition, and only 5E material is canon for 5E? A policy that encouraged use of older-edition lore with current material would look rather different to what we got. Instead, they strongly suggest that's not the way to go.


Greyhawk has appeared in 5E, in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, so that's no longer an older-edition reference. The Mystara reference is interesting, though... Mystara confirmed?

Mystara has received a pretty streak of references, including suggestions for alternate locations for Saltmarsh (coast of Karamekios, natch). So my point is that they haven't really changed their approach at all.

Perkins put a #WotCStaff tag on the post, which in line with their corporate Social Media policy means he was stating it as a Hasbro employee not just on his own.

It's not a black and white situation: they want people to feel free using Amy older-edition lore or making up their own stuff, bur WotC isn't binding themselves to trivial elements from older books as a binding precedent. It's all just suggestions and ideas.