You're writing off the different existing psionics stories too easily. Having psionics originate from the far realm does change every setting's narrative of psionics and is likely to be the focus of play in a game with a psionic character. It is likely to link to that character's origins, motivations, and goals.
This is an empirical claim. It strikes me as implausible. I've played lots of D&D games with wizards who had spellbooks. The "scholarly" origins of wizardry had no impact that I recall on the characters' origins, motivations or goals - except in the purely instrumental sense of hoping to find scrolls with spells that they could write into their spellbooks.
If psionic characters had human sacrifice as their recharge requirement, that would be a different thing - and much closer to your example about warforged (a more extreme version of it, obviously). That psionics entered the world when the Far Realm did, though? Easily ignorable. If you ignore those words literally nothing else about your game has to change. Whereas if you ignore the recharge requirement, you have to come up with a new one (and worry if it is balanced, etc); and if you ignore the lore about House such-and-such, which is an active part of the gameworld, you have to write in new lore to explain how they spend their days and make their money.
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Presume you're going to wreck someone's game with a change you make. That is the baseline.
Then the only winning move is not to change anything.
<snip list of changes over the years>
None of those changes were made to screw over players or DMs. However, each one of these changes effectively meant someone's game got ruined.
In the recent exchange I'm generally sympathetic to Remathilis, but here I can't easily agree with either of these posts.
Why should WotC, as a designer/publisher, presume they are going to wreck someone's game with a change they make? Buying their products is purely voluntary. Using a purchased book in a game, whether in part or in whole, is purely voluntary. So if someone is going to buy WotC's stuff and then use it to wreck his/her game, that looks like the other person's problem, not WotC's!
Now obviously, given WotC is a commercial publisher, they want people to buy their stuff. But the threshold for that shouldn't be that it doesn't wreck a customer's game - it should be that the customer likes it for what it will add to their game!
Only if people are somehow compelled to use WotC's stuff can it wreck their game. And that compulsion would have to come from within them, because WotC can't force them to use. Which brings us back to the idea of "brand" - that is the source of the compulsion! But hasn't something gone wrong with RPGing, when a medium that began with the premise that
players would come up with their own fiction and stories has turned into one in which the premise has become that
players will identify with a commercial publishers fiction and stories, and will do so to such an extent that they get
angry when the publisher publishes something else that is not the same as, or canonically consistent with, the earlier published works?
You've still got a ways to go to understand the root cause if you stop there. Why did they regard it as "an aesthetic affront"? What did it ask them to do that they were hostile to doing?
If we are going to use the metaphor of "asking", then it did what any new RPG book does - it invited those who encountered it to buy it and use it in their games.
But that is not why it was regarded as an affront. No one gets offended by the publication of a book of stuff they don't like under a brand they don't care about. It was regarded as an affront because, for some people, it outraged their "sense", their "conception", of what a [high elf/ giant/ tiefling/ angel/ archon/ eladrin/etc] is. People were affronted that the story elements that were being sold under the D&D brand did not match their preferred conception of those story elements.
That's why I describe the issue as one to do with brand management and marketing.
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A lore specialist might be a valuable hire. A collection of the text of all D&D books evar might give you something to search and find obscure references with.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I assume that WotC has fewer resources for this sort of thing than Marvel Comics, which I take (again, perhaps erroneously) to be a bigger commercial operation.
Marvel couldn't do it. That's why they invented the no prize - to nod the head to fans who picked up on and then ret-conned away continuity errors.
And that's even assuming this sort of ultra-conservatism is the right approach to selling books. Why do I need to buy new books if all they tell me is everything I already have? And, if I've hitherto not been interested in the default fiction of D&D, why would I be interested in it this time around?
If in some meeting someone's afraid to speak up about the problems with Chris Perkins's Brilliant New Idea, or if their perspectives are just dismissed by a management or marketing team eager to make changes, they might as well not be there
Do you have any evidence that this is how WotC works? Have you actually read Worlds & Monsters - it's a hymn of affection to D&D lore, not (as I have seen some assert) the product of those who don't know it or don't care about it.
it asked them to change their default assumptions about the lore of their games too dramatically
<snip>
It asked them to abandon stories that they wanted to tell in favor of these new stories that the designers wanted to tell.
Every single publication of a new RPG book does this. Burning Wheel invites you to play a sword-and-sorcery tone game with Tolkienesque elves, dwarves and orcs. Tunnels and Trolls asks you to play a dungeoneering FRPG in a tone about 100 times more light-hearted than anything I can think of published for D&D.
So this is not a sufficient explanation for outrage. You don't get to that until you start talking about "brand" (or some other concept in the neighbourhood that deals with a sense of consumer identity and even ownership based around purchase and use of a particular producer's product).
every time that person signs up to a new D&D game, they still need to figure out which version of "playing D&D" the group is using.
This is not a meaningful cost. It is already ubiquitous among D&D players: which edition? which supplements? which house rules? hack-and-slash, or "story driven"? etc etc.
4e did not change anything significant in this respect. I have not seen a single report that I recall of anyone suffering, in terms of time or emotional energy, because of a lack of clarity over which version of the game was being played.
Although there is a widespread view that 3E
didn't change the play experience from AD&D, you only have to look at threads where the impact of (say) wand of CLW crafting, or changes to fighter saving throws, are discussed to see that this was not the case for many D&D players.
I will also make a more bold conjecture: one sort of way of playing D&D - namely, the highly GM-curated "story driven" game in which the role of mechanics is secondary - was probably fairly easily migrated from 2nd ed AD&D to 3E. Whereas 4e is overtly hostile to that sort of approach (this is one way in which the indie influence on its design is evident). I think one thing we learn from the strength of reaction to 4e is how central that sort of playstyle is to the D&D fan-base.
Again, if you ask someone who "hated" 4e lore if they would hate it quite as much if the game explicitly said that this was some "Nentir Vale Adventures" campaign setting, you will often get a much, much different response to the lore.
The rejection of 4e lore by some folks is, in part, an attempt to avoid confusion over what "playing D&D" means to them. "Playing D&D" didn't mean teleporting extraplanar PC's before, and, to them, it still doesn't, and it never will.
The word "confusion" is misused here - or, at best, is a metaphor.
No one is literally puzzled. No one literally fails to understand what is going on. Rather, some people who identify as
D&D players do not want to identify with
this. They see it as an affront. I have seen the word "insult" used.
The response is the same, in its basic nature, as those who object to changes in other sorts of serial fiction (soap operas, movie series, comics, etc). No one who (say) objects to Wolverine's claws being stripped of adamantium to become bone, or who thinks that the clone saga turns Spider Man into a travesty, is expressing
epistemic difficulties. They are not confused by anything. Rather, they don't like it.
At which point at least two responses are available. One is to ignore it, on the general principle that one should not spend leisure time or money on stuff one doesn't care for. The other is to reaffirm one's identification with the fiction at issue (D&D, Marvel Comics, whatever) and to condemn the stuff one doesn't like as a travesty/betrayal/insult. Someone who takes the second path is someone I would say cares about canon in a very different way from how I do.
