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

[Mouseferatu]

hahhahahahahhaha You have missed some the books I have read. Multiple layers of approval.

I did say there were exceptions. And what I described is the way things tend to be now; things may have been looser some time ago, with some of the properties. Tie-in, like everything else, has developed and matured over time.

 

[Shasarak]

Eladrin is what I was referring to. How many people gave the slightest toss about Eladrin pre 4e?

And who gives a toss about them post 4e?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Anyone can do what they want in their home game, so that's not generally the source of ire from lore changes.

But the default assumptions matter a great deal.

And when you replace old lore with new lore, you're saying, "this should be your new default assumption, if you want to play the game. I mean, you can change it, but this is the new standard."

Someone who liked the old one is going to resist that. If history is any indication, they are going to resist that vocally on the internet.

This is part of why you heard the "It's not really D&D!" complaint in 4e. For a lot of folks, the fun they had with the old lore defined D&D for them. Without that old lore, they didn't feel like 4e supported the kind of game they were looking for or the kind of fun they were interested in having.

I don't really disagree with anything you're saying....except that I feel like the solution to these problems is simply to let it go. I think criticism is fine, and I think people should share their feedback. I think a lot of the "back to basics" approach with both the rules and with the FR setting are due to people providing feedback.

But, when it comes to these kinds of topics...about caring about setting canon....I think that a good ol healthy dose of "oh well" to any unwanted changes goes a long way. I personally didn't like a lot of the changes made in the 4E era, both rules wise AND setting wise. So I stopped playing 4E after a while and switched to Pathfinder. Now that I am back to D&D (after eventually hitting the wall with Pathfinder), I simply ignore any setting lore from 4E that I didn't like.

I've always been a huge fan of comics, and continuity used to be a huge part of that enjoyment. As years went on, continuity became harder to maintain, and I started to feel frustrated. So I definitely understand where people are coming from. However, the way I got past that was to let it go....to stop worrying so much about continuity and to just enjoy what I enjoy. It was a conscious effort on my part to not worry about that stuff as much.

I think it is a choice to be angry or to accept and adapt.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I don't really disagree with anything you're saying....except that I feel like the solution to these problems is simply to let it go. I think criticism is fine, and I think people should share their feedback. I think a lot of the "back to basics" approach with both the rules and with the FR setting are due to people providing feedback.

But, when it comes to these kinds of topics...about caring about setting canon....I think that a good ol healthy dose of "oh well" to any unwanted changes goes a long way. I personally didn't like a lot of the changes made in the 4E era, both rules wise AND setting wise. So I stopped playing 4E after a while and switched to Pathfinder. Now that I am back to D&D (after eventually hitting the wall with Pathfinder), I simply ignore any setting lore from 4E that I didn't like.

I've always been a huge fan of comics, and continuity used to be a huge part of that enjoyment. As years went on, continuity became harder to maintain, and I started to feel frustrated. So I definitely understand where people are coming from. However, the way I got past that was to let it go....to stop worrying so much about continuity and to just enjoy what I enjoy. It was a conscious effort on my part to not worry about that stuff as much.

I think it is a choice to be angry or to accept and adapt.

I don't think this is unreasonable, but it has consequences.

"Let it go" might've been a lot of people's approach, and if they followed a similar path to you, they stopped buying 4e products, because the changes were just too much. From WotC's perspective, that's letting it go entirely, and it's a lost customer.

What's more, because of the ownership and creativity that go into this game, a lot of people (including most people who post about it on the internet) are passionate about D&D. They want to see it succeed, they want to be excited about it. When they don't really want to play the new version because it over-wrote some stuff they loved, that's...well, certainly not helping the game grow, at any rate.

From a production standpoint, you want engaged, passionate consumers - they're the folks who get your word of mouth buzzing, the folks who introduce newcomers to your weird little hobby, the folks who go on to make TV shows and cartoons and movies and books that reference your brand (even if in "off-brand" ways). "Let it go" isn't a position you want folks enjoying your product to have to take.

Your response is reasonable, but I think a more passionate response is also reasonable. I also know that telling someone that they should "let it go" is damn near pointless (thanks, Customer Service positions!) - if it's A Thing for them, it doesn't matter if that's illogical or pointless or even counter-productive that it is A Thing for them. It is. It's emotional. Minimizing it doesn't make it go away, it just makes it boil over. The only way past that is through - to listen, to hear the complaints, and to address them.

It seems like, by and large, 5e did that, which I think is part of why it's a product of at least moderate success!

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I think it is a choice to be angry or to accept and adapt.

True, or you can just drop D&D, which apparently enough did over 4e, to make WOTC take another look at where they are taking the game and figure if it is worth it. Apparently a lot of 4e lead to 5e moving things back in the old direction. Which was great for me, not so great for others, but I'm mostly interested in my table.

Edit: I see IAB hit this point before me.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't think this is unreasonable, but it has consequences.

"Let it go" might've been a lot of people's approach, and if they followed a similar path to you, they stopped buying 4e products, because the changes were just too much. From WotC's perspective, that's letting it go entirely, and it's a lost customer.

What's more, because of the ownership and creativity that go into this game, a lot of people (including most people who post about it on the internet) are passionate about D&D. They want to see it succeed, they want to be excited about it. When they don't really want to play the new version because it over-wrote some stuff they loved, that's...well, certainly not helping the game grow, at any rate.

From a production standpoint, you want engaged, passionate consumers - they're the folks who get your word of mouth buzzing, the folks who introduce newcomers to your weird little hobby, the folks who go on to make TV shows and cartoons and movies and books that reference your brand (even if in "off-brand" ways). "Let it go" isn't a position you want folks enjoying your product to have to take.

Your response is reasonable, but I think a more passionate response is also reasonable. I also know that telling someone that they should "let it go" is damn near pointless (thanks, Customer Service positions!) - if it's A Thing for them, it doesn't matter if that's illogical or pointless or even counter-productive that it is A Thing for them. It is. It's emotional. Minimizing it doesn't make it go away, it just makes it boil over. The only way past that is through - to listen, to hear the complaints, and to address them.

It seems like, by and large, 5e did that, which I think is part of why it's a product of at least moderate success!

To be clear, I'm not trying to belittle anyone's view. I do hear where people are coming from, and I do agree that feedback has certainly impacted future design decisions. People should voice their opinions about what they like and don't like. I can certainly list a ton of things that were done to the Realms that I don't like. I'm sure anyone who is into the setting could do so.

To clarify, though, when I jumped over to Pathfinder from 4E, I kept right on playing in the Realms. We also used Golarion as a setting, but we in no way abandoned the Realms simply because we didn't dig the 4E mechanics for long, and generally didn't like the Spellplague and the changes it brought. I didn't need the 4E campaign book.

I simply took the matter into my own hands and created a Faerun that I thought my players would enjoy. From a purely gaming perspective, it seemed the best way to handle it. But I never felt slighted or let down by WotC. That part I don't quite understand. They put out a product, I tried a bit and decided not to continue. I had plenty of past products to continue using, or alternate products from competitors.

True, or you can just drop D&D, which apparently enough did over 4e, to make WOTC take another look at where they are taking the game and figure if it is worth it. Apparently a lot of 4e lead to 5e moving things back in the old direction. Which was great for me, not so great for others, but I'm mostly interested in my table.

Edit: I see IAB hit this point before me.

I think the success of Pathfinder made WotC realize their error. I really enjoy their approach to 5E, so I'm glad things all played out this way. I also think they seem to be approaching a looser view of canon themselves, which I think is a good idea.

 

[pemerton]

Anyone can do what they want in their home game, so that's not generally the source of ire from lore changes.

But the default assumptions matter a great deal.

And when you replace old lore with new lore, you're saying, "this should be your new default assumption, if you want to play the game. I mean, you can change it, but this is the new standard."

<snip>

The default matters. Expectations matter. Design intent matters. These things tell me how I am meant to play the game.

this is kind of a microcosm of the whole scenario.

WotC: "No one cares about the changable appearance of tieflings, as long as they are kind of evil, we'll keep the old fans!"

Old Fans: "Uh...actually...we don't care about your new story at all, and kind of preferred the old one?"

The thing is, these aren't reasons why [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and I are wrong; it is just a restatement of what we are denying.

The default assumptions don't matter very much at all. They don't tell you anything about how you are meant to play the game. They're not normative in any shape or form. If you don't like them, you just ignore them.

This is why D&D is not like Star Trek. If you want to keep watching new Star Trek shows or movies, you have to engage with the fiction the producers are offering. But you don't have to use the most recently published fiction to play D&D. That's not the case, and never has been the case.

If the default/expectation/intent of 4e is that I'm going to tell the story of a Turathi tiefling, but I don't want to tell that story, why should I bother to play 4e at all?

This is just staggering to me. It implies that no one could ever have played Moldvay Basic at all, because it offer no default story for any of the PC races.

What happened to the idea that D&D is about the players imaginations? About creating one's own fiction, borrowing from the fiction of others where one finds it useful or inspiring? Where did the idea come from that the point of D&D is to slavishly mimic or reproduce the fiction that the game publishers are offering?

This is part of why you heard the "It's not really D&D!" complaint in 4e. For a lot of folks, the fun they had with the old lore defined D&D for them. Without that old lore, they didn't feel like 4e supported the kind of game they were looking for or the kind of fun they were interested in having.

Again, this is just reiterating the point that others are denying.

If you want to use tiefling with random appearance, and you have a table in a Planescape book for rolling up random tiefling appearances, then you already have the support you need. The fact that something different has been published in a more recent book doesn't change anything about the support you already have. (This is [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s point about there being 1000s of pages of pre-4e Realms.)

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!

But this doesn't answer [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s point at all.

Because he is not talking about D&D players' ownership over their fiction and their stories. He is asking why people feel ownership over the fiction that TSR/WotC publishes. Your answer to that is because the players feel obliged to use that fiction, and hence get upset if they don't like it.

But where does that sense of obligation come frome? It was clearly not part of the game in the 70s or early 80s. It seems to have come into being some time in the late 80s and consolidated its hold in the 90s - that the point of RPGing is to emulate or engage with someone else's fiction. And not just any old fiction, but the most recently published iteration of it. Such that it is a problem for a person's RPGing if that most recently published fiction is not to their taste.

I think this is a very strange state of affairs.

 

[pemerton]

by giving tieflings (and dragonborn, and dwarves, and elves, and goblins, and warlocks, etc) a morally and thematically laden backstory, the lore establishes a setting which is (by default) dynamic rather than static and which (again, by default) gives PCs a context for and reasons for action arising out of nothing but choice of race and class

You say this like this was new to 4e, but it's been true all the time in D&D, forever, even with the homebody halflings.

I don't think this has been true all the time in D&D.

In Moldvay Basic and Gygaxian AD&D, for instance, there is generally no morally or thematically-laden contex and reason for action that arises out of nothing but the choice of race and class. The motivation is independent of race and class, and is not particularly moral or thematic at all. The movitation is to loot dungeons.

One classic class that does carry thematic baggage is the thief class, and this is precisely why it is notoriously difficult to integrate into typical dungeon-crawling: because the only way the thief PC can carry out his/her thematic trajectory of stealing is by stealing from party members. (An exception is the all-thief party: and that's why there is a distinct tradition of all-thief games in classic D&D where there is no comparable tradition of all-cleric or all-fighter games.)

At about the time the focus of published D&D material began to change from dungeon-raiding to more dramtic and thematically-driven story arcs we see the emergence of advice to ignore the mechanics and fudge results. This is not a coincidence either - its an indication of the tension between the classic D&D mechanics and thematic-style RPGing.

 

[Shasarak]

You can ask the opinion of those who know it and whose opinion you trust. You can read reviews. You can skim through it in a book shop. If it's one chapter or section in a larger work that you are otherwise keen to buy regardless of whether or not you like that bit, you can subsequently read it and decide to ignore it (eg I really like the Plane Above, but just ignore the stuff about the "outworlds" or whatever they're called for each Divine Domain, because they strike me as very Planescape-y and not really my thing).

People have been engaging in these processes for much longer than RPG publishing has been taking place. And in the case of 4e FR, there was no shortage of public commentary on its changes immediately upon release.

The problem with reviews is that there is no guarantee that they are actually correct. I have seen lots of reviewers pan a product that turns out to be golden or the reverse. I could ask someone else but that requires them to buy and read the product first. So to get a balanced review I would need to wait about 3 to 6 months for the dust to settle.

So I have taken an opposite tack myself, of buying from writers with a proven track record. If they jump the shark then they can at least catch me out once.

 

[Manbearcat]

Brief chime-in. Anyone who has read something I've written on this knows where I stand so I'll post my analysis of the broader issue (as someone who has run groups with players heavily invested on either side of it).

The below two priorities are at odds enough that pleasing both is nigh impossible (or at least cost prohibitive for designers):

1) RPG material needs to either (a) be a direct piece of serial fiction or (b) carry the expectation of having high (complete?) fidelity to a serial fiction.

2) RPG material needs to be immediately accessible (not requiring the investment of time, further $, and effort to parse the nature and context of the material) and discreteized/malleable/mutable enough to allow for individual groups to use/ignore varying portions of the content at their table with the expectation of (i) minimal cognitive workload to deploy the material in-situ and (ii) it is versatile enough to give rise to deeply varying stories with an emergent quality.

Very different cultures and micro-behaviors at the table (which oftentimes coincide with play procedure or outright system preference) spin out of those two priorities. When an RPG material support paradigm caters to one while eschewing the other there is either a perception of slight or the sense that the material doesn't carry the kind of utility (that could be thematic heft or simple deftness) that can be functionally deployed at the table.