This is literally what I was talking about.
That's... not what anyone here is trying to claim. For a Multiverse, WotC will be producing one Forgotten Realms. All material they publish will be for that one version of the Realms. But! they aren't going to demand that everyone play in it exactly the way they write it, and they aren't going to claim that any group's version is "fake." They never have and never will, and nobody has claimed that they have or will. WotC is just going to do what they've always done: have one version that they decide is canon and not care if players change it as they want to. If they write an adventure where the goal is to stop X from happening, then they're going to produce later books assuming that X was stopped. At most, they'll have a sidebar that says "if X happened in your game, then this other thing may happen." And that's an if, depending greatly the nature of X.
But again: unless WotC decides to totally follow Keith Baker's lead, they're not going to produce a base Realms, have the starting year always be 1495, and have the PCs be the main characters with no NPC shenanigans going on in the background,.
So we both agree that WoTC is going to continue doing exactly what they have always done. So, can you explain to me why my model which requires no change in what WoTC has done, and only an acknowledgement that table games are equally canon to the books is a bad business decision like was claimed?
Because, that's all my model does. Acknowledges that there are different, sealed, realities that can have different origins and rules but are still part of "the multiverse". And I was told this was a bad decision based on DnD tradition (which I am not addressing) and business, because WoTC doesn't want a Multiverse, they want a shared Universe where everything affects each other because that makes more money... despite them making good money having never done that.
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Which refers to universe or Milky Way size or bigger.
EDIT: Not the least of which the dictionary has not yet caught up various science fiction terms that are used fairly freely nowadays.
The Milky Way is a Galaxy, not a Universe.
Universe, coming from the latin universus means "combined into one, whole". It is everything that is observable. If everything that was observable was found out to be the size of a marble, then out current understanding of the universe would be the size of a marble. At one point the universe WAS the size of a marble, due to the Big Bang, and so clearly size has nothing to do with it.
Then guess what, it isn't a universe.
Not very difficult was it now?
Then what is it?
As entropy and the heat death occur, and the stars fade and the galaxies rip apart and the planets turn to dust, what do you call the space they all inhabited that was once and still is all of observable reality? What is the name you give it, since you claim it can no longer be the universe?
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True, they have already said that, and have been for virtually the entire history of the game. What then exactly do you want them to do differently? I've gnashed my share of teeth over the core lore changes they've made recently, but I can't deny their right to do it, and they're not going to provide more than one option or even say that what they say happened might not have happened. They're going to leave that up to individual groups, like they always have done. To do otherwise is to dilute the brand, which is what they REALLY care about.
My point was to address the gnashing of teeth.
For example, earlier in this thread someone was complaining that Goblins can't all come from the Feywild, because in Dragonlance they were created by the Grey Gem and therefore giving Goblins a universal origin is wrong.
But that seems to me like a modeling problem. Just because Goblins come from the Feywild for even the majority of realities doesn't mean that they came from the Feywild for all realities. It could be true that they were created by the Grey Gem and that they came from the Feywild, and that they were born from Human/orc relations and that they are the First Children of Gaia. All you have to do is accept that the story being told is only one reality, and that there is another reality where a different truth is true.
All I'm trying to do is give people a different way to picture the Multiverse that allows for multiple versions of the same setting to concurrently be true, because that is EXACTLY how a multiverse should work. Which means it is highly likely that is how the people at WoTC are considering it. Fizban's has quite a few examples of this, including the dragon sight and the echoes. And I think this really ameloriates people's need to gnash teeth, because WoTC is just producing one version of events, not THE version of events.