D&D Realities: a meta-cosmology to unite all editions

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Get ready for the red skies and walls of anti-matter!

My thought as well.

 

[M.L. Martin]

V
[*]Chaos War (1e Krynn to SAGA Krynn)
[*]War of Souls (SAGA Krynn to 3e Krynn)

Not so. The Chaos War came from the pens of Weis & Hickman, who were simply envisioning it as a big event and the Krynnish version of Ragnarok, not a system changeover. After presales of DoSF were good (and the book was in galleys), the DL fans on TSR staff got the go-ahead to relaunch the game line. They originally wanted to do it as a lighter variant of AD&D, a la the 1995 Lankhmar boxed set, but Management told them "We want a non-AD&D, diceless, card-based game--and it has to be set after DoSF", so they came up with SAGA. They also started dual-statting the products as soon as the stuff designed under WotC management started coming out.

I don't have the same knowledge of the genesis of the War of Souls, but if it had been designed primarily as a rules change explanation, I imagine they would have gone forward with the idea of eliminating sorcery and mysticism instead of letting it co-exist.

 

[Dungeonosophy]

Not so.

Thanks for these insights Matthew.

I'm not saying that the Chaos War was originally planned to serve as a rules changeover, but from what you say, it sounds like that's what ended up happening.

I'm not sure if or how the War of Souls matched up with the changeover to 3e either, and would be glad to hear if anyone has better info about that.

 

[Dungeonosophy]

Wrath of the Immortals

I added Wrath of the Immortals to the original post, since it served as the in-story manifestation of the switch from BECMI D&D to Rules Cyclopedia/WotI D&D with its heavily revised Immortals-level rules.

 

[prosfilaes]

That's the thing though... Rules don't exist within the game world. Rules are not the "physics" of the game world.

I think you have that backwards; the game world doesn't exist, whereas the rules do. The rules are more real then the world. You can label the rules an abstraction, but distancing them too much from the world makes the world less real; say a red dragon is the most fearsome thing in the game world all you want, but it won't be in the player's game world if they kill a few at low levels.

The designers don't need any justification to make rule changes that don't impact the game. In fact, I'd say that rule changes not impacting the game setting is the natural default. The idea that you need incidents like the Time of Troubles or the Spellplague to justify rule changes is, in fact, the aberration that requires awkward logic and justification.

The Forgotten Realms just isn't the same place under 3E and 4E. You can't take a world that has a long history of innovative spell casting--frequent articles in the Dragon showcasing new spellbooks and spells--and suddenly get rid of Vancian spellcasting, and expect people to feel that nothing has changed. You can say "ignore the man behind the curtain" or "everything went boom", and I don't see that one is more natural than the other.

 

[Lwaxy]

In which case they should just have made a new campaign setting - or just the rules - and not "destroyed" the Realm. That's what annoyed quite a few people more than just the new edition.

 

[Li Shenron]

Changing settings to reflect edition rules updates has always been one of the very few things of D&D that have really offended me and insulted my intellect. It's quite as if those who think this needs to be done every time have a problem understanding what a game is.

 

[Alzrius]

TSR and WotC has used in-story events to justify shifts from one rules system to another. Examples include:

• Time of Troubles (1e Abeir-Toril to 2e Abeir-Toril)
• Fate of Istus (1e Oerth to 2e Oerth)
• Wrath of the Immortals (BECMI Mystara to Rules Cyclopedia/WotI Mystara, with changed Immortals-level rules)
• Die, Vecna, Die! (2e Great Wheel Multiverse to world-specific 3e Cosmologies)
• Chaos War (1e Krynn to SAGA Krynn)
• War of Souls (SAGA Krynn to 3e Krynn)
• Spellplague (3e Toril to 4e Toril and Abeir)
• Dragon #327 "Winning Races: Diaboli--Bringing Diaboli into 3.5E" (describes changes in the Far Realm and Plane of Dreams)

(If the readers know of any other in-story justifications for rules-changes, please post or contact me.)

Okay, a few things here.

While Die, Vecna, Die! did turn the 2E unified cosmology into its 3E counterpart (which, in addition to altering the Great Wheel somewhat, split various campaigns into having their own cosmologies), there was also The Apocalypse Stone, which was a 2E->3E adventure for home-brew campaign worlds.

The whole "Chaos War" changed Dragonlance from 2E to the SAGA system, not 1E.

 

[Alzrius]

I personally believe that the rules are far more real than the game world; hence why I do think it's an accurate statement to say that they are the "physics" of the game world.

The game rules specify how various aspects of the world, e.g. magic, function. If what happens in a novel or an edition-change alters the effect of something, then there are natural questions that would arise among the people living in the game world as to why basic facts are now different. Hence the need to justify the changes in-game (or just have it be a retcon, which I find to be the more unpleasant option, though it can still be made to work).

This is why I soured on a lot of D&D novels back during the heyday of 2E. If you can't write novels that accurately reflect how things work in a D&D world, then why are you writing a D&D novel in the first plae?! I've heard a lot of people justify that by saying that breaking with the rules is sometimes necessary to write a good story; I say that's just another version of the Stormwind Fallacy.

 

[the Jester]

I recognize that my OP makes for dense reading, but awareness of the distinction between Reality (rules system) and World (setting) will free the designers from the need to make such drastic in-story changes to justify rules changes.

Hold on here.

There is NO SUCH NEED.

I disagree with the premise and hate the idea behind it. I hate hate hate rules changes that toss continuity over their shoulder, thank you, and disagree that they have ever been truly "necessary".