D&D 5E 5th edition Forgotten Realms: Why can't you just ignore the lore?

[Laeknir]

Has nothing to do with lawyering.

You should head on over to Candlekeep and educate yourself a bit.

I don't know if you've been lately, but Candlekeep is full of angry ghosts and cobwebs.

 

[HobbitFan]

I don't know if you've been lately, but Candlekeep is fully of angry ghosts and cobwebs.

That's not a very nice way to talk about the Candlekeep community.

 

[Laeknir]

That's not a very nice way to talk about the Candlekeep community.

Ed's most recent novel involved a lot of damage to Candlekeep. The wards are shattered, and most of the monks, well, you'll have to read it.

 

[HobbitFan]

Ed's most recent novel involved a lot of damage to Candlekeep. The wards are shattered, and most of the monks, well, you'll have to read it.

I'm sorry I haven't read the Herald yet but I have it on order from Amazon.
Are you talking about the Candlekeep forums or the actual place within the Realms? I may have misunderstood what you meant just now.

 

[Laeknir]

I'm sorry I haven't read the Herald yet but I have it on order from Amazon.
Are you talking about the Candlekeep forums or the actual place within the Realms? I may have misunderstood what you meant just now.

It was a joke, and I was referring to the place in the Realms. If I say more about what happens to it, it'll spoil the novel ending for you. Suffice it to say that it gets pretty damaged.

 

[Parmandur]

Has nothing to do with lawyering.



You should head on over to Candlekeep and educate yourself a bit.

Oh, I have; and it can be fun. But the changes post-4E still are novel-centric.

 

[pemerton]

Players need a boat? Ok, this town spontaneously became a trading town with lots of ships in it.

The GM had a map with a locale on the coast. As s/he indicated in the post I quoted, that's all s/he knew about that locale. So s/he decided that it was a trading port with a ship available - "sure, that sounds fine."

I will repeat myself for a third time: I reject your claim that the game would have been better if the GM had not made this decision, and instead had decided not to give the PCs easy access to the ship that the players wanted for their plan. (Your use of "spontaneous" is another red herring - any description of the town was going to be "spontaneous", given that the GM had to make something up about a locale concerning which s/he had no information except its location on the map.)

A game in which the players have to spend valuable time at the table faffing around for a boat, when the real action is with the delivery in Waterdeep, doesn't sound like a "spicy" game to me. It sounds like a boring one.

I think the two of you are talking past each other.

I don't think so. Derren asserted that the GM's decision to have the coastal town marked on the map be a trading town in which a vessel was easily available was bad GMing, making for a boring and spiceless campaign. I disagree - I think it was good GMing and seems to have kept the game focused on the action the players care about - making their delivery to Waterdeep, whatever that was - rather than forcing the action onto something the players apparently didn't care about, namely, spending play time acquiring the necessary means of travel.

If he's not using the setting canonically, there's nothing wrong with that either.

At this point, unless I've badly misunderstood you, you are disagreeing with Derren, and hence (it seems) agreeing with me that the GM did not make a bad decision. No one is talking past anyone, as best I can tell.

I don't think portraying Candlekeep as a library town with no shipping wouldn't have been railroady or roadblocky at all had the DM done so. It wouldn't have directly contributed to the PCs getting to Waterdeep, but it still could lead to interesting play in the campaign.

I think that forcing the action onto something the players have no prior interest in, and thereby stopping them from pursing the action that they actually are interested in, are pretty much the paradigm of railroading and roadblocking respectively.

If it was already established for the campaign that Candlekeep was a library rather than a port town, that is a different matter - consistency of backstory is a fairly important part of mainstream RPGing - but the poster whose GMing Derren criticised already made clear that there was no prior backstory. All s/he and his/her players knew was that it was a coastal locale marked on a map.

I should add - even if, for whatever reason, the GM did decide that Candlekeep was a library rather than a trading port, the idea that no boats were available there would still make no sense. If the economy of Candlekeep bears any resemblance whatsoever to real world examples, then the librarians acquire their food either from local producers - who, living by the coast, would have boats and/or ships - or from distant producers, who would use ships to deliver their produce to a coastal location.

If I hadn't known something specific about Candlekeep (that it sits on bluffs overlooking the sea but with no direct access), I wouldn't have seen a problem with using it as a generic coastal town either.

I learned everything I know about the canonical Candlekeep by Googling it, and then skimming the entry on Forgotten Realms wiki, before writing this post.

If there were details on Candlekeep's economy I missed them in my skim, but absent some pretty exceptional circumstances, a library on a coastal bluff is going to have some boats or ships available pretty close by. So even following canon, the GM has no reason not to make some sort of vessel available to the PCs. (If it's a fishing boat rather than a sea-going ship, that can add to the colour but needn't be crucial to the play of the game.)

 

[Barantor]

After all the shifts in the lore and it's state being in flux at the moment with the new edition I just packed up shop and started over with Greyhawk.

I gotta say, those older edition adventures work out just fine with 5E.

 

[pemerton]

it's important for the cohesion and continued success of setting IP that those people working on it professionally and being paid for that to be aware of the material at a high level, to retain continuity and cohesion as much as possible (unless you're excising something that was itself a retcon or gaff in a prior product), and to act as a responsible caretaker for the property in question. It's just part of being professional

My view on this is similar, though perhaps not identical, to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s.

Key words in the passage I've quoted are "success", "responsible" and "professional".

I can think of two basic ways of approaching those terms.

One is from the literary/artistic perspective. But from this perspective, canon is not always going to be a number one priority. Hussar gives some reasons why not. So did Ryan Dancey in the early days of WotC's takeover of TSR:

From: "Ryan S. Dancey" <ryand@frpg.com>
Newsgroups: RPG.DnD.Greyhawk
Subject: What is and is not Cannon
Date: Sun, 26 Dec 1999 17:45:00
Message-ID: <96229@cipher.wizards.com>
Lines: 167

. . .

For a long time, there was an effort to have "one cannon". That is, to assume that all facts published by TSR were to be considered parts of a larger whole. When those facts contravened themselves, a convoluted logic tree was built to explain the discrepencies. . . .

Starting with 3e, we are changing our definiton of cannon. We are going to be moving to an idea called "core continuity". . . .

No deviation from that material will be acceptable - all facts must check with the core continuitity. . . .

Over time, we will advance the core continuity. . . .

The core continuity material is not encyclopedic. We are not going to go through every published product, extract every fact, try to create logical explanations for all the discrepencies, then ask designers to adhere to that mass of data. The "core continuity" will be much smaller - an abstract of the total data, hitting just the most important features. . . .

First, the amount of knowledge that will be considered "cannon" has to be of a reasonably minimal size. It is simply impossible to keep every piece of fact accurate and checked when the volume of such material expands to the size of something like one of our popular campaign worlds. . . .

Second, there is a lot of data that contradicts itself. . . .

Third, some of the material produced for our worlds is crap. Pulling no punches, not every word written under the banner of a D&D world logo is suitable for print or should ever have been published. Rather than hold our noses and pretend that such material is signficant, we're going to simply pretend that it does not exist and stop trying to patch it up or fix it.​

The other relevant perspective is a commercial one. I don't know of any evidence that pettifogging over canon is an important factor in commercial success for a professional publisher of fantasy stories or fantasy RPG material.

A comparable medium is superhero comics, and these don't slavishly adhere to canon. Sometimes this is because it is irrelevant from the internal, artisitic point of view and rather is a factor of what, in gaming, would be called a metagame consideration - for instance, changes of season, of fashion, or technology, etc that correspond to the real world circumstances in which the comics are published. This can even extend to aspects of character biography, such as which war Prof X fought in (originally Korea, but that would no longer make sense for a character who is middle-aged in 2015 - such a character would not have been born when the Korean War was fought).

Even the X-Men movies don't maintain perfect continuity between themselves, but I don't know of any evidence that this hurts their commercial success.

Is there any reason for thinking that less-than-100% canon compliance is a factor in the commercial success of Tyranny of Dragons? I haven't seen anyone post any, but I haven't read every post in every thread.

 

[SirAntoine]

Conveniently, though, they would be the only ones in the know about what is in that core continuity.

They need to face up to the fact that the fans want real continuity, and provide it. If the designers can't be bothered to research everything, maybe they need to be fired.