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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Echohawk" data-source="post: 9108812" data-attributes="member: 9849">I'm going to merrily disagree with both of you! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Yes, 5e has some examples of major changes to canon (Ravenloft, Spelljammer cosmology). However, in most products, 5e has tended to stay consistent to D&D lore at a high-level. When it comes to the details, 5e has revised quite a lot. I notice this particularly with monster lore, where many 5e critters have a different spin on their 1e/2e/3e/4e ancestors. I think my stance would be: "5e has revised a fair amount of D&D lore. Most (but not all) of the changes have been minor".That said, I struggle to understand Micah's position. It's not that I don't understand someone being averse to changes to canon. It's more that I'm surprised it has taken until 5e to get upset about it. I don't think 5e's approach to canon is less respectful than previous editions' approaches. Obviously, 4e made substantially more changes to D&D multiverse than 5e. But even 3e and 2e were not as great about respecting past lore as many people seem to remember. The more closely you examine how anything has changed over D&D's history, the more you notice how often there are difference between all of the editions.What has definitely changed is WotC's honesty about their approach. For 1e/2e/3e there was a largely unspoken commitment (or at least an expectation from fans) that some sort of overall continuity would be maintained and contradictions would be avoided. There are, of course, plenty of examples where continuity was not respected: novels declared retroactively to be non-canonical; video games with different versions of cities from printed products; game products flatly contradicting earlier articles in Dragon. But when this happened, it was generally considered to have been a mistake and not because TSR/WotC wasn't trying to maintain continuity.Then we reached 4e. WotC's approach to 4e was to put out a lot of completely new lore and try to convince fans to accept it as a replacement by implying that previous editions weren't as good as this new one. This was not an approach respectful of D&D lore, and it cost 4e a lot of fans. In response, a lot of early 5e (rather, D&D Next) marketing pushed how much more respectful 5e was going to be of the past. There were even early (unrealized) promises that 5e would be a modular system where different components could be slotted in to give a range of play styles matching past editions of the game. Read carefully, the Monster Manual is a master class in presenting versions of monsters that someone who played 1e, 2e, 3e or even 4e would find comfortingly familiar even if not quite the same.For a few years now, WotC's stated position has been that they don't oblige their game designers to worry about anything outside of a few core books as being canonical. I appreciate this honestly about the approach. For me this means that changes to D&D lore have moved into a third phase. Phase one was "changes to lore/canon are mistakes" (1e/2e/3e). Phase two was "changes to lore/canon are deliberate" (4e). The current phase three is "changes to lore/canon happen if it gets in the way".</blockquote>

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