D&D 5E Do you care about setting "canon"?

[MechaPilot]

Canon = story. . .

Canon = the "official" story. Canon =/= story.

. . . so if one does not care about established canon, then one does not care about the story the books present.

Not caring about the "official" story does not equate to not caring about story, or to caring more about mechanics than story.

 

[ArchfiendBobbie]

If you set up a strawman, you're not exactly proving anything by knocking it down, are ya?

The "straw man" in this case is a representation of the flaws in your analogy in this post. If it is a straw man, then that means your own argument is invalid for using that straw man to try to prove your own point.

Consider that at some tables, rewriting the mechanics doesn't require any of those things. They're all superfluous. Hey, I just plugged two new ability scores and a half-dozen DMs Guild class options into my new game, who cares how balanced they are? I'm the DM, I make the judgement calls, as long as we're all having fun who gives a toss whether you kill the necromancer in five hits or in seven? Hell, maybe I don't even track HP, I just declare something dead when it seems like people are getting bored of fighting it. Attack rolls? Never figured they were necessary, my group just rolls damage. Game works like a dream.

And those tables are playing with their own homebrew systems and likely never use any further products, thus would not be subject to issues of errata making a character design suddenly useless. Making your entire stance pointless.

At this point, you are arguing against yourself.

Consider that at other tables, "Drow are actually jungle elves who are nocturnal" is met with, oh I don't, now, someone saying, "Well, they're not really Drow then, are they? I mean, maybe they're fun and all, but they're not what anyone would call Drow. That's just not what Drow are. Never have been."

People tried the same argument with how Eberron presented Drow. End of the day, setting is setting; if you don't like it, you don't have to play that setting.

What you're illustrating here is that you personally care more about mechanics than about story. That's fair enough. Even expected on a site like ENWorld. But that's also not the way everyone plays the game.

You think I don't care about story? I said I wasn't concerned about canon in my first post on this thread. And I also made it clear that any changes made for story purposes don't affect canon.

My comment about players wanting to know more about nocturnal jungle drow was to illustrate that you've hooked them into the story at that point with your entirely new lore. Because at that point, you have their interest, and you can tell a lot more drow-oriented stories that serve to feed their hunger for this new lore. It's not simply an adventure or roleplaying hook, but a way to draw them further into the world and open the door for more campaigns in the future. Maybe your next campaign is entirely drow-centered, so they learn massively more about the setting. Maybe it's exploring a culture that is an enemy of the drow and getting a more nuanced viewpoint of how they interact with the world. Maybe players even incorporate that new version of the drow into their characters and have it be somewhat central to the individual stories of those characters.

Changing lore/canon is very much related to caring about stories. It's related to "how can I tell a good story, and what do I need to change to make the players interested?" Most players I have are not interested in Drizz't, so it doesn't hurt the FR stories I tell to simply replace him with someone else. Someone written more to their liking.

And it makes it my story and not me simply retelling someone else's work.

I'm sorry that you do not see how it is that people can manage to not care about changing canon and care about story. You don't need to be a parrot to care about story.

 

[Shasarak]

Brand doesn't matter. Meijer brand acetaminophen works just as well as Tylenol's does.

Depends on who you ask. For me, yeah the stats say most likely what ever the cheapest Paracetamol will do the trick but for everyone else the most expensive one is going to be the most effective.

 

[pemerton]

What if the people are not mistaken, what if the Celestial Emperor is just lying to the people?

That's a different sort of change, but it's still a change from the core idea of the setting.

 

[pemerton]

even without any merging at all, the OA included "western" lands with PHB classes and gods that were outside of the Celestial Court. That was a part of the OA even without any other settings being involved.

But I don't think it was part of the setting that those gods governed the cosmos independent of the Celestial Bureaucracy.

 

[pemerton]

he cares more about the mechanics that are published in the books than about the story that is published in those books.

Canon = story, so if one does not care about established canon, then one does not care about the story the books present.

Canon = the "official" story. Canon =/= story.

Not caring about the "official" story does not equate to not caring about story, or to caring more about mechanics than story.

Not only is MechaPilot right, but there is a further point: not caring about canon doesn't mean not caring about the story the books present. I don'g care about canon, but I care about the story the books present, in the following sense: if those story elements are more interesting than what I have, or am likely to, come up with, then I'll use them!

Hence I use a lot of the 4e default cosmology and lore in my main 4e game. And will be using a lot of the Dark Sun defaults in my 4e Dark Sun game. And I use quite a few GH defaults in my Burning Wheel game. And I use a lot of Marvel Universe defaults (based on my knowledge, which is c1970 - c1995) in my MHRP game.

But I don't worry about departures from canon when that is what the game demands or leads to. Eg Nightcrawler in my MHRP game is far more sinister and manipulative than in the comics. And Titanium Man I mostly made up (having no familiarity with the character other than from the scenario's brief outline) without any qualms.

The publishers saying "Drow are elves who have been bit by shadow-infused spiders sent by Lolth" and using that as the basis for what Drow are for a decade, denying all other Drow, makes problems.

This begs the question, though. Because publishing "Drow = X", and then publishing "Drow = non-X" - in circumstances where everyone knows Drow are fictional - isn't denial. So where is the denial coming from? Why does publishing variations matter?

It sounds like you don't have much literacy in consumer/brand psychology.

No. I'm familiar with it.

But brand psychology is a device used by marketers, to sell people stuff. It's a technique of manipulation.

What I'm asking is - from the canon fan's point of view, what is the reason for embracing or subordinating oneself to brand psychology? Why revel in the fact that some commercial entity has persuaded you that your identity depends on buying what they're selling?

 

[Maxperson]

But I don't think it was part of the setting that those gods governed the cosmos independent of the Celestial Bureaucracy.

You have said repeatedly that theme is important. The separation of East and West is one of those themes. It would be silly for the Eastern gods to be in charge of the Western ones. If that were true, there would be no separation and both would live in the same manner. There would be no such thing as gajin with their strange classes and ways. The Celestial Bureaucracy would be running the world.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The "straw man" in this case is a representation of the flaws in your analogy in this post. If it is a straw man, then that means your own argument is invalid for using that straw man to try to prove your own point.

My position in that post is that change in mechanics is comparable to change in fiction for the game overall.

By positing some hypothetical table that LOVES the published rules and playing with them, but then doesn't care about the published setting material or playing with it, you're not showing that my position is wrong, you're just saying that there's some tables that put more emphasis on the published rules than they do on the published fiction. That's true, it's fine, it's great, I'd expect a lot of those folks in this thread, but in as much as tables don't match your hypothetical (and among millions of players, I'm positive that many don't!), your hypothetical doesn't matter.

People tried the same argument with how Eberron presented Drow. End of the day, setting is setting; if you don't like it, you don't have to play that setting.

If we were talking about specific settings, this wouldn't be a major concern. If Eberron wants to have different drow, that's cool. If some DM wants to have different drow, that's between her and her table. If WotC wants to publish a product that says Drow in D&D are now entirely different then they were in previous editions, we run into a disruption of play. Same thing happens if WotC publishes Eberron and now Drow are spider-worshipers there.

You think I don't care about story?

That isn't what I said. I said you care more about mechanics (at least in published products). You use the mechanics from the book. You don't use the story from the book. It doesn't seem controversial to suggest that you care more about the thing you use than the thing you don't.

 

[Elderbrain]

Permeton is assuming that the point of view of a Oriental character in OA (that the Celestial Emperor rules over everything, everywhere) HAS to be factual in order for the setting to work. Question: WHY? Where's the harm if the folks in Kara-Tur are simply mistaken, and the Celestial Emperor is just the chief deity of that PART of the world, with the western gods holding sway in their respective areas (i.e Zeus ruling over Greek-speaking peoples, Odin over the Norse, etc. or fill in the pantheon of your choice)? How does the existence of, say, the Greyhawk deities somehow harm or invalidate the rulership of Ao the Overpower over the gods of Toril? It's ridiculous to claim that they are somehow mutually exclusive! So WHAT if the folks of Faerun think Ao is the top dog? It's like claiming that there can't be a king of England AND also a king of France!

 

[pemerton]

You don't use the story from the book.

This is the contentious part of what you are saying.

From the fact that someone doesn't use canon, it doesn't follow that they don't use story elements from published books.

My own conjecture, based on the WotC surveys that show the prevalence of "homebrew" campaign worlds, is that the most common approach to campaign design is taking bits and pieces from different published books (MM, PHB, DMG, whatever module or modules the group happens to have used, etc).