Evidence?
As I said, I know of no evidence that whatever deviations Tyranny of Dragons involves from past canon is hurting its commercial success. Do you?
D&D 5E 5th edition Forgotten Realms: Why can't you just ignore the lore?
- Thread starter Sailor Moon
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As I said, I know of no evidence that whatever deviations Tyranny of Dragons involves from past canon is hurting its commercial success. Do you?
Having read the unfolding drama on the Realms-L mailing list around the time of Dancey's email, I begin to see where some of the ideas Sean Reynolds communicated in the Realms mailing list came from.
I like the idea of taking a critical look at prior material and figuring out which of it is crap and disregarding it, especially for the Realms.
Just what a "critical look" entails...heh, that's the kicker. Go in one direction and you have the 3E Realms. Go in the other and you have the 4E Realms.
Me, I prefer how WotC went about building the 3E Realms.
Sure, but there is a limit to how far you can deviate from the canon.
Let's say a hack writer came onto the X-men and decided to re-write Magneto's history. He places Magneto at the concentration camp, but makes him a Nazi guard. Maybe because the writer thinks this is more in line with Magneto's later personality. (Writer thinks, "Dude's pretty fascist, so clearly he'd be a Nazi.") There would an enormous fan outcry, and rightfully so.
So while you can deviate from Realms canon, at some point the Realms stop being the Realms. Where is that point? I don't know. However, my personal opinion is that the proliferation of powerful NPCs is actually an important part of the setting, and what attracts a lot of Realms fans.
In this regard, I believe that the Forgotten Realms may be different than the other D&D settings. In FR, perhaps the people and organizations are more important than the setting mechanics and "background". Most other settings, it's the other way around.
I am simply saying that with DM's out there trying to stay true to the continuity, it is appaulling to me that the designers officially working on the Realms wouldn't do so. There are people with far more difficult jobs who manage to do all of their work on time.
As for evidence, the sales of the module, Tyranny of Dragons, are unknown to me. I was thinking of the complaints made in this thread, with DM's unable to use the Realms even if their players ask to play there.
Those complaints - eg from [MENTION=67338]GMforPowergamers[/MENTION] - aren't caused by authors deviating from canon. They're the result of an excessive amount of canon which makes running the campaign world too much work!
It seems to me that the job of a commercial RPG writer is to write commercially successful RPG material. In the absence of any evidence that slavish adherence to canon matters to commercial success, I don't see that that is part of what their job demands.
I think that would be covered by Dancey's reference to "most important features".
A better example for Magneto would be the question of whether he is Jewish or Roma. This was a big debate among online fandom around the time I stopped following the X-Men comics (1996-ish): it seemed that Magneto was being retconned from Jewish to Roma, although in the films at least he remains Jewish.
Whether such retcons/changes (be they deliberate or accidental) are good or bad is a matter of literary judgment (personally I think Claremont's recreation of Magneto's personality and backstory was one of the best comic retcons of all time) or commercial vindication - depending on the perspecive one takes.
My claim is that neither perspecive dictates slavish adherence to canon.
That may well be so. I don't have the sales figures and market research to tell me one way or another.
I've never played or GMed in the Realms.
I have used maps of Waterdeep as a Dyvers city map in an old Greyhawk campaign. And I have used Kara-Tur, but I just ignored all the Realms references (eg OA7 refers to a cult of Chauntea - I put in some other god/religion that made sense in the context of my game).
In the material I've used, adherence to canon is not perfect. Eg in PoL, there is conflicting backstory on Asmodeus (compare The Plane Above to THe Demonomicon). I combined it and reconciled it as best I could by introducing new material that fitted with my own game.
In GH, there is conlicting canon on the fall of the Shield Lands, and the role of the Horned Society in that (compare City of GH boxed set to From the Ashes and associated material). In this case, I've just gone with the earlier boxed set, and disregard the conflicting stuff in later material. When I dusted off my GH stuff for the first time in many years for a session a few months ago, I didn't fuss over which maps I used - after all, mediaeval cartography was not all that accurate and political boundaries were rather fluid.
TL;DR of a rambling post: use what you like; follow the canon that makes sense to you; if you have unreasonable expectations about adherence to canon you might be disappointed; if you don't like the work the writers are doing, just ignore it.
I am not sure it would even be possible to acquire such precise evidence. There are limits to the reach of surveys and feedback, and we already have established that there is negative feedback. Its existence implies that sales are also being affected. Maybe "not significantly as far as you know", but it is feedback and it wouldn't be very surprising if there are other DM's who feel as GMforPowergamers does.
You say GMforPowergamers is experiencing a problem because there is too much canon, not because authors have deviated from canon. I am thinking the authors could solve his problem if they organized and presented all of the information much better. It would be nice if they maintained an online resource that instantly answered a DM's questions, or if they opened a support line. GMforPowergamers should be able to quickly get a list of all of the archenemies of any particular major NPC, and that information should be adjusted for different dates.
When the authors release new canon, they of course should have professional standards for maintaining continuity. A good example from movies comes to mind.
In the Alien vs. Predator films, which are very violent and gorey, the villain from each franchise is forced to fight the other in a different timeline that many argue disrupts canon and most just don't want to be continued in any future alien or predator movies. But those movies exist, and they have fans. The studio can't just ignore them any more than they could just ignore Alien 3 and 4 and make a new sequel to Aliens starring Michael Biehn again. I don't know if you've seen these movies, or if you like them, but they're one example.
The official publications for D&D affect all of us. The level of creative license to adjust canon and ignore it the authors have demonstrated is like what individual DM's enjoy. When they adjust that for their campaign, it's fine because everyone doesn't have to play in their campaign.
The authors need to meet certain artistic and professional standards. You can take any novel series, too, and if it just wrote over what came before it wouldn't meet them. The authors of D&D can't disrespect their audience!
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I am not sure how you envisage this being commercially viable. (Perhaps you are being ironic and I missed the irony?)
From my point of view this all just begs the question. Why is it unprofessional or disrepepctful to depart from canon?
Departing from canon doesn't undermine artistic/literary integrity. So it is not unprofessional or disrespectful in that sense.
Departing from canon doesn't undermine commercial viability, as best I can tell. Indeed, there is an argument that departure from canon is a necessary condition of commercial longevity, because otherwise the barrier to entry for new readers/gamers becomes too high. (This is an ongoing issue for the big superhero comic franchises.) So it is not unprofessional in this sense either.
If the purpose of published RPG products was to maintain a perfectly consistent imaginary world, then departures from canon would be unprofessional, and perhaps disrespectful, but I don't see that that is the purpose of published RPG products, any more than it is the purpose of published novels or other creative work. (The author of a Guide to Middle Earth should strive to be consistent with the material that Tolkien published. But Tolkien is under no such obligation. If he thinks retconning the Hobbit will make LotR a better story, that is his prerogative.)
When I buy RPG products, I am looking for interesting material to use in my game. When I buy RPG products branded with a particular gameworld, I am looking for stuff that fits into that gameworld from the point of view of theme, flavour and general features. Precise consistency with every prior published product - most of which neither I nor the majority of other purchasers will have engaged with - is simply not a big deal for me. If it happens that there is some minor contradiction of some other piece of backstory that has been relevant in my game, I will make the required adjustments.
If I'm a minority - or, to turn it around, if the principal market for purchasers of Forgotten Realms gaming products are people who aren't interested in gaming with it at all, but rather want it to serve as a type of atlas or tour guide to an imaginary world - then I think the D&D community has bigger issues than occasional departures from canon.
(And the same is true for the novel line, too. A viable series of commercially-published novels, like TV shows or movies, has to have a bigger market than the hardcore crowd who will notice and be upset by occasional departures from canon.)
Just a point, the word is spelled "canon", not "cannon".
Sticking to the canon of a world is tremendously important, in my opinion, but there are limits as to how much you can do so. I have a shelf filled with Forgotten Realms products - and I think I'm missing about half of the game products and even more of the novels. Knowing all the Realmslore is something only a very few people can achieve, and not all of them are good writers of game products or novels.
Then there are details which are, quite frankly, unimportant. Having the Open Lord of Waterdeep suddenly be an intelligent pig is a major thing that you can't get away with, but knowing whether Laeral is left- or right-handed isn't so crucial.
To a large extent, Continuity (like History) is what you remember having happened. (Ask [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] or any other Doctor Who fan about continuity over the years in that show). And you can have a mistaken view of events as well.
Actually, studios will quite happily ignore movies and remove them from continuity. To give you some examples, "Highlander 2" and "Terminator: Salvation".
Stargate SG-1 ran for 10 seasons, and happily ignored a bunch of continuity established by the Stargate movie.
Continuity isn't quite as important as you might immediately assume. It's not unimportant, but there are a lot of successful products that don't follow it slavishly.
Cheers!
Sticking to the canon of a world is tremendously important, in my opinion, but there are limits as to how much you can do so. I have a shelf filled with Forgotten Realms products - and I think I'm missing about half of the game products and even more of the novels. Knowing all the Realmslore is something only a very few people can achieve, and not all of them are good writers of game products or novels.
Then there are details which are, quite frankly, unimportant. Having the Open Lord of Waterdeep suddenly be an intelligent pig is a major thing that you can't get away with, but knowing whether Laeral is left- or right-handed isn't so crucial.
To a large extent, Continuity (like History) is what you remember having happened. (Ask [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] or any other Doctor Who fan about continuity over the years in that show). And you can have a mistaken view of events as well.
Actually, studios will quite happily ignore movies and remove them from continuity. To give you some examples, "Highlander 2" and "Terminator: Salvation".
Stargate SG-1 ran for 10 seasons, and happily ignored a bunch of continuity established by the Stargate movie.
Continuity isn't quite as important as you might immediately assume. It's not unimportant, but there are a lot of successful products that don't follow it slavishly.
Cheers!
I don't agree that sticking to canon is tremendously important, but I do agree that there are limits (both practical ones, and artistic ones), that it's not unimportant, and that there are a lot of successful products that don't follow it slavishly.
I can think of a few comics examples. In Spider Man, at least in the periods I'm familiar with (more-or-less from the beginning through to the early 90s), there were a series of plots on more-or-less permanent rotation: Aunt May would have a heart attack, or be kidnapped, or marry Dr Octopus or Mephisto or whomever, etc; Peter would flirt with Mary Jane, or even get together with her, but then they would break up (often for Spider Man-related reasons); etc.
There's a reason these plots recycle: they arise naturally from the characters as presented (both theme and backstory), and most of those who are reading this year's Aunt May crisis or MJ on-again/off-again romance weren't reading the version that ran 2 or 5 or 10 years ago.
But if I was running a Marvel Heroic game, would I make all this stuff part of the backstory of Spider Man and co? It would be ludicrous - a bit like the Hardy Boys being perpetually 17 and 18 and fitting dozens of mysteries into their school holidays. Stuff that makes sense in serialised fiction with stable characters and a generally changing readership simply can't hold up when it is supposed to be all held true all at once. You have to pick and choose what to focus on and what to let go. (To my mind this is part of the strength of the X-Men movies - they capture the themes and basic character elements terrifically, but without crowding out the essentials with nonsense crud which is simply the result of the need to publish a new 20-something pages every 4 weeks.)
Another comics example is the Maddy Prior factor in X-Men: Claremont recycled the name Maddy Pryor (taken from the English folk singer) and it ended up being stuck on a major character. The earlier use in Avengers Annual 10 (I think - going from memory here) is best just disregarded.
Besides LotR, it's hard to think of a bigger influence on D&D than REH's Conan (I guess Leiber and Vance are the other candidates). But it's also hard to think of a collection of fantasy stories with a common protagonist to which canon could be less important. The Hyborian Age is a self-conscious amalgam of a range of times and places from Earth's past, but imagined rather than real, and hence freed from the constraints of historical consistency or fact-checking. In REH's stories Conan is wherever and whenever the author wants him to be for literary and imaginative purposes, and the world can be the imagined Near East of Zamora and its spider-haunted towers (the paradigm of sword-and-sorcery in my book), or the feudal lands and cavalry of Poitan, or the idealised frontierfolk of Beyond the Black River.
Of course it's fun to draw up Conan timelines, and to try and fit it all in and make it all make sense, but ultimately it's like trying to work out how Frank and Joe Hardy fit so much adventure into a dozen or two weeks of holidays: pointless, and missing the point.
