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

[jayoungr]

Hmmm. That's an interesting theory. Do you have a citing or reference?

Abrams' Star Trek movies explicitly take place in an alternate universe different from the original TV series. This is reinforced by Spock from the original universe appearing in the alternate universe alongside his counterpart.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm not even going to comment on this. I'll just leave it there, so you can read what you wrote, and think about it for a while, and then ask yourself if you're really trying to engage ... or have reached the point of diminishing returns where you are simply arguing for the sake of arguing.

I'm pretty serious about the point that "Batman" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people depending on that person's context, and so getting a shared meaning of "What Batman Is" (or "What Batman Means") can be a challenge.

Thus demonstrating how lore changes create ambiguity.

Why? I mean, take the example of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The difference between a "hero" (hero's journey, Campbell) and a protagonist, or just a point of view from the characters, can be vast.

Why can't you just have random characters in a different part of Krynn in an underexplored part of the timeline? Why are you injecting your DL baggage on all campaigns?

I don't think it's a controversial point to say that people who are playing in a D&D campaign should be on basically the same page regarding what that campaign is going to be "about". The ambiguity caused by lore changes makes that more difficult than it has to be.

The phrase "Let's play a Dragonlance game!" is apparently insufficient to do reduce the ambiguity enough to avoid Aruging About It On The Internet. I think it would be better if this was clearer.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Elderbrain]

No, but the changes and additions does make it inauthentic. When making a movie, things have to be cut from books in order to keep the movie running in an acceptable time frame. I get that. Writing in stuff that never existed stops the movie from being authentic, though. The "LotR" and "Hobbit" movies were good fantasy films, but they weren't the Hobbit or LotR.

- What Peter Jackson did with the character of Faramir, in particular, was unforgivable. Changing him from a paragon of virtue into a rat b*stard for absolutely no justifiable reason... I wish Faramir was a real person, so he could sue Jackson for defamation of character!

 

[Corwin]

Abrams' Star Trek movies explicitly take place in an alternate universe different from the original TV series. This is reinforced by Spock from the original universe appearing in the alternate universe alongside his counterpart.

Alternate universe? As in a completely independent unique universe? Or would "altered timeline" be a better description? I'm guessing the latter. They are connected. As you even admit.

 

[Elderbrain]

I have run OA in Rolemaster using a mixture of my 1st ed rulebook, OA3 (a 1st ed AD&D module), OA5 and OA7 (both 2nd ed AD&D), Bushido, plus some other dribs and drabs including 3E/d20 material.

I don't see conversion as that big a deal. If it's hard to write up monsters in the system, it's a bad system. And when it comes to player-side stuff, you just work with what you've got. It's not as if there are a heap of FR PC concepts that are hard to do using 4e (including the 4e players' guide, which gives us Drow and Swordmages).

I guess I'm not sure what mechanics you really felt needed updating.

- The reason people buy a new edition Monster Manual, or whatever, is because they don't want to do all those conversions for themselves to make their monsters compatible with the new edition. And MOST people expect and want those monsters to be the same (or at least pretty close) as they were in the previous edition, only updated to use the new game mechanics. Some people, such as yourself, apparently have no problem with doing conversions. For a lot of other people, it's a huge pain in the backside, which is why they want WOTC to publish books like the MM that do the work for you. Your experience is not my experience.

 

[Shasarak]

J.J. Abrams' Star Trek (2009) significantly changed "canon". Is it therefor not Star Trek?

Now imagine if they gave him a crack at Star Wars - that would be crazy!

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think you are failing to understand what I wrote in my first post. There have been various incarnations of Batman, just like there are various stories set in the "Star Trek" canon. Yet, they tend to have a common theme throughout them; a gestalt, a "Batmanness," or "Star Trekiness," if you will. To paraphrase the late, great, Justice Potter, you know Batman when you see him, just like you identify a Star Fleet Captain.

I don't believe that this Potterism has any truth to it. "I know it when I see it" is just a folksy way of saying "I say what it is based on my own implicit biases," (typically with a dose of "and you all have to agree with my opinion on this") and since everyone has different implicit biases, everybody sees it in different places. That's part of what creates the problem of changing canon - people have very different implicit biases, from each other, from the creators. What you think is obviously Batman isn't what someone else is going to recognize as Batman, and vice-versa. There's no "Batmanness" aside from what any individual thinks of as Batman, and any individual's take is as good as anyone else's, really. Well, they'll only make movies out of particular individuals' takes, but those movies aren't authoritative, though they may be influential.

Similarly, there's no "Dragonlanceness" that can be pointed to as What Dragonlance Is. But clearly, not everyone's Dragonlance is the same, since maltheistic gnome wild mages are Not Dragonlance to some, but perfectly fine for others.

If you're relying on people's "gut" to tell them how to Play Dragonlance, you're relying on a flawed and imprecise implement, and you will create scenarios pretty much exactly like this one.

And that's the rub, and what I said at the beginning (which you didn't engage with). It's not so much a question of whether or not there is some essential "Dragonlance" and all "Dragonlance campaigns" are just the shadows on the wall of the "essential Platonic (Canonic?) Dragonlance that could be run. It's not that there isn't some gestalt to Dragonlance that you can get too far away from.*

Rather, it's the internet nerd empowerment theory. The idea that people (such as you, or me) feel empowered to tell the creators of the works what is, and isn't, canon, because we think we know better than the people doing the writing. There is a difference between fans loving creations, and fans demanding that the things that they love be frozen in amber, unchanging, because they fear any change could hurt this so-called "canon." In the end, and it always works this way, good stuff crowds out the bad.** Morales is accepted as Spider Man not because it's canon, but Morales as (a) Spider Man was accepted because the product was good. Meaning change over time; the Dark Knight Batman wouldn't have been a pop culture sensation in the 1960s, and the Adam West camp wouldn't be a sensation today, and yet both inform and influence each other in surprising ways, feeding back into the comics. Same with James Bond- the books (which are rarely read) influenced the earlier works more, and then came the campier takes (Moore), the wilderness years, and then a return to basics (the darker approach) which some view as a Sean Connery throwback, but is really more in tune with the books and a re-imagining for our current times.

I didn't engage with this point because I don't see it's relevance - I don't feel any particular need or empowerment to determine What Is True Canon and What Is Untrue Canon. I've no desire to judge anything worthy or unworthy. I just want some source to tell me How To Play Dragonlance (or whatever) in a way that is reasonably consistent and authoritative. I want to go somewhere and understand what it means to Play Dragonlance, the same way that I can pick up and play Chess or read The Fellowship of the Ring or watch the Star Wars Saga or read The Killing Joke.

Lore changes make that more difficult.

Change is inevitable, and change can be good. If you don't like the change to a campaign setting, just run it the old way. And while there is nothing wrong with wanting canon to mean something (Star Trek:TOS- Klingons are the enemy!) there is nothing wrong with change, either (later canon- Klingons are sorta allies). And some change, well, we'll see (Vulcan).

Liking or not liking is the wrong frame of reference. It doesn't matter. It's not even sensible to talk about until we can agree on what the thing I'm supposed to be liking or not liking even is. I cant' just say "I like Batman" and expect to be understood by a diverse audience. What matters to me is that regardless of it's quality, the change in lore creates confusion about what the thing even is.

 

[lowkey13]

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[lowkey13]

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