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

[DeltaEcho]

If I read a setting and think "I could come up with something better than that," then I probably won't be interested enough to run a game in that setting; I'll just borrow what I like and put it into a homebrew. I can't think off the top of my head of any setting that I'd actually want to play in except for these one or two things that I could do better.

Thats extremes of black and white, all or nothing, and rather unrealistic,
So if you like 99% of a setting but not that 1% you would rather not play it instead of fixing that 1%?

Try not to throw the baby out with the bath water....


btw, are you one of those guys that has trouble believing that all rules are from house rules?

 

[Remathilis]

btw, not so subjective if everyone exposed to the change thought it was better than the original,

And if one person dislikes the change? What about if half of them don't?

 

[jayoungr]

Thats extremes of black and white, all or nothing, and rather unrealistic,

Sheesh. Did you miss the point in my original post where I said ...

Exceptions could apply, but that's my rule of thumb and preferred approach.

?

So if you like 99% of a setting but not that 1% you would rather not play it instead of fixing that 1%?

I didn't say that either. It would depend on what the 1% was, how easy it was to avoid, and how much it bothered me.

 

[DeltaEcho]

And if one person dislikes the change? What about if half of them don't?

Even if one person disliked it I would fix it, unless the majority felt different,
But ive never had that problem I MUST BE THAT GOOOOOD !!!!11!!!

 

[DeltaEcho]

Sheesh. Did you miss the point in my original post where I said ...

I was of course talking to your 'rule of thumb'

 

[pemerton]

Again, you're claiming that somehow the default effect doesn't apply.

<snip>

I don't think you've conclusively argued that position, so the authority with which you state it seems entirely unwarranted.

Here's the conclusive demonstration:

The "default effect" (as per the Wikipedia page that you linked to) is an explanation for why certain options get chosen more than rationality would suggest they warrant. The answer: they are presented as the default, and for various psychological reasons, people err in favour of choosing the default.

But what you are currently trying to explain is the hostility to 4e tieflings. Which has nothing to do with explaining a tendency to choose a default, but rather is all about explaining the vociferous rejection of a default.

QED.

Was brown skin the default, though?

The first time dwarves were depicted in color in a PHB, the text says they have "ruddy cheeks, dark eyes, and dark hair." That's certainly their depiction in the art.

<snip>

You could go a long way with the idea that the iconic dwarf in the PHB was white-skinned because game audiences in 2000 were predominantly white and marketing trumped representation there.

In 1st ed AD&D brown skin was the default. The colour art you are referring to is, I assume, from the 2nd ed PHB - which thereby changes the canon, without much uproar.

And the tendency of certain people to default to "human being = white" has nothing to do with the "default effect" described on the Wikipedia page that you linked to. But it is closely related to the hostility to halflings with cornrows.

You'd probably have to ask each individual player, since what matters and what doesn't is subjective, individual, and arbitrary.

If I'd have to offer a hypothesis, I might say that sandstone red dwarves were just an option, so they weren't "default," and that a mid-80's 1e supplement probably doesn't effectively set a "default" for a monster who first appeared in a book 10 years before it.

But you could go with some of the below hypotheses, too.

• Dwarf skin color wasn't very important to very many stories about dwarves
• Other, bigger changes demanded more attention (you don't complain about the rain when you're in the pool)

This is all just elaboration of my point that tieflings were a particular flashpoing. And has nothing to do with any "default effect".

 

[I'm A Banana]

Here's the conclusive demonstration:

The "default effect" (as per the Wikipedia page that you linked to) is an explanation for why certain options get chosen more than rationality would suggest they warrant. The answer: they are presented as the default, and for various psychological reasons, people err in favour of choosing the default.

But what you are currently trying to explain is the hostility to 4e tieflings. Which has nothing to do with explaining a tendency to choose a default, but rather is all about explaining the vociferous rejection of a default.

QED.

I think I see your misapprehension.

I raised the default effect specifically to counter the claims that you can simply change the lore at your table and thus the default lore shouldn't matter. That perspective was causing you some confusion, and the default effect helps explain that perspective.

The default lore does matter. The default effect is part of why the default lore matters.

So if we're in agreement that what the default lore is does matter (because changing it incurs those various psychological costs and difficulties), it should be pretty easy to see how that creates some vociferous rejection - in this instance, some people weren't very interested in putting forth the effort required to change the default lore back to whatever they liked.

If we agree that the default lore matters to most players, then my raising of the default effect has done it's job: it's shown that canon matters, and so it should be easily comprehensible that change in the canon isn't an insignificant thing that can easily be written off as "change it if you don't like it."

In 1st ed AD&D brown skin was the default. The colour art you are referring to is, I assume, from the 2nd ed PHB - which thereby changes the canon, without much uproar.

And the tendency of certain people to default to "human being = white" has nothing to do with the "default effect" described on the Wikipedia page that you linked to. But it is closely related to the hostility to halflings with cornrows.

I mean, I can link to articles all day long that show how white people are the default for media representation, but I think that'd be a bit of a distraction here. The thrust of my point is that there are potentially a lot of different reasons why the change form 1e brown skin to 2e ruddy cheeks might not be as big a deal as the change from variable tieflings to One True Tiefling, or the change in mind flayer lore from the DSG might not be as big a deal as the change in Strahd's backstory for Curse of Strahd. One can't simply point to the times that an outcry doesn't result from a lore change as evidence that lore changes in general shouldn't cause an outcry, because the circumstances are different for each change and each individual asked to accept the change. And this would be something that if I were WotC, I'd be very interested in analyzing.

This is all just elaboration of my point that tieflings were a particular flashpoing. And has nothing to do with any "default effect".

The default effect is what's causing the "flashpoint."

People asked to change from the default assumptions of the game to tell the stories they want to tell incurs in them a new psychological cost that they may reject having to pay (if not over one change, than over another, or just over the course of many).

If you want to understand the anger over new canon, understanding why people choose the default is an important element of that.

 

[Maxperson]

Even if one person disliked it I would fix it, unless the majority felt different,
But ive never had that problem I MUST BE THAT GOOOOOD !!!!11!!!

Can the PCs change things that are canon though their actions?

 

[Hussar]

/snip


It doesn't surprise me at all. D&D is a game of having fun by telling stories with your friends. Of course people have ownership over the stories they have fun creating with their friends! If they didn't have any ownership over that experience, I'd be worried!

But, nothing stops you from having those stories. Nothing about a new canon erases what you were doing before. You can simply ignore the new stuff.

Look, I get being a fan. That's groovy. What baffles me is the extreme of it where any and all changes are automatically rejected, not because the change is worse than what came before, but, simply because it is change. I refuse to believe, for example, that Eladrin played a major (or even much of a minor) role in the vast majority of D&D campaigns out there. But, suddenly, changing the names causes a major upheaval.

We KNOW that gnomes were the least popular race played in D&D. We know that for pretty much a fact. Every single poll on what race you play, by anyone, anywhere, puts gnomes dead last. But, removing gnomes from the game is the same as eating puppies. It's mind blowing.

Again, I really, REALLY doubt that eladrin or gnomes played much of a role in the stories people were telling. The reaction to the changes was far beyond what the actual effect on the majority of tables was.

And the really funny thing is, 5e comes along, changes just as much lore as 4e ever did, and that's all groovy. Again, "Don't change my canon" is just a justification for people telling other people how to play the game.

 

[Hussar]

And who gives a toss about them post 4e?

Bingo. We change Eladrin back to angel elves (are they even in the Monster Manual? I can't remember) and suddenly they vanish into thin air. No appearances in any published material. Completely invisible, just like pre-4e. No one cares.