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

[Remathilis]

But what if your ideas are better than what's written?
surely you owe it to your players,

Considering that is subjective to the max, it's an impossible standard to achieve. Who decides if it's better? The DM? The players? Random poll oh people on the internet?

 

[DeltaEcho]

Considering that is subjective to the max, it's an impossible standard to achieve. Who decides if it's better? The DM? The players? Random poll oh people on the internet?

subjective like someone thought F.A.T.A.L was a good idea, no,

most people think Star Wars is better than battlefield earth....subjective? Maybe, see where I'm going here....

but the reverse if you like, what makes what someone wrote better than I wrote? Subjective, so equally valid right?

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

 

[Maxperson]

Just a technical point: 3e tieflings didn't have a monolithic appearance, either - it was in 4e, with the One True Origin that we got "every tiefling looks a little something like THIS".

That's true. The chart was gone, though, which disappointed me. I have to dig through my old Planescape stuff and see if I have that chart somewhere.

For the overall point: It's not my personal line to draw - it's each player's (or, each table's, anyway). My personal line is definitely inclusive of 4e's lore changes, and the work occasionally necessary to reverse them when I want to (4e remains my second-favorite D&D edition, after 5th, in part for its flexibility). But regardless of how I personally feel, if enough people reach enough breaking points with enough bits of lore, you end up giving your audience to a retroclone or to oblivion, and unless you're hugely growing without them, you're shrinking your hobby.

One person falls on the tiefling horns. Another falls on riverboat halflings. A third really thinks 2e Eladrin are important to their game. A fourth thinks this World Axis cosmology is for crap. A fifth hates Sword & Sorcery with a passion. A sixth feels like powers are samey. Or one person feels like all of those things are each minor in and of themselves but in aggregate make overcoming the defaults a hassle.

Do enough people think your changes are improvements to off-set all of that?

I don't know. I imagine WotC is the only one to have that sort of information. I do know that you will have falloff that is at least as big, perhaps greater if you never change anything. You can only play the same old thing for so long until you become bored with it.

It sounds like over 4e's lifespan, it alienated more than it brought in. And it sounds like 5e's more inclusive approach is bringing in more than it's alienating (even if Strahd's history is better in 2e than it is in Curse of Strahd).

I agree. I staunchly played 1e-3e. 4e came out and I played a game or two and was done with it. I skipped it entirely because of all the drastic changes it brought. Now I'm playing 3e and 5e and enjoying both.

But, I am certainly on an extreme end of the bell curve. There's probably more people out there like @hawkeyefan who can put up with some stuff for a while but might eventually transition to another game. And probably even MORE people out there who just stop playing D&D altogether when it doesn't work for them anymore. I don't have solid numbers or anything, but I'd imagine that to be the case, and I'd imagine that would be the scenario that spooks WotC the most.

I don't think so. D&D has a huge following still, so I think more people are closer to our end of the spectrum and just modify the current edition to suit their needs, or else play it as is. 4e is the edition that I heard the most people tell me that they wouldn't play, and they kept with 3e or went to Pathfinder. I don't know of any who actually quit D&D.

 

[Corpsetaker]

Canon is important with regards to novels and if I am running the setting in line with the canon. If I didn't want to use the canon then I wouldn't use the setting in the first place.

I think the whole "canon" argument is actually unfounded and a bit over exaggerated to the point where it's not really a problem but people like to self inflict themselves with some kind of disability that doesn't allow them to change things or add to the existing. That people can't physically keep Elminster from their games.

A setting like the Realms is based on it's canon. It's a living world that flows with or without the PC's and that's the way I like it. It is completely possible to stick with the canon and still make the setting your own.

 

[pemerton]

4e's PHB establishes the default assumptions for playing 4e D&D. It sets the norms. If you want to play 4e D&D, that's the book that tells you how to do it and what is expected when you do it.

<snip>

One feels an obligation to play the game as the game asks to be played (ie, with its own lore). That is, after all, what the book that gives instructions for the game asks you to do. That's the default

<snip>

The people who wrote the game didn't really want them to serve that function anymore. Doesn't stop you from restoring it, but it does make it a question of reward for the effort.

They're the ones telling people what to do to play the game. They're setting the defaults, and thus setting the norms. It takes effort to resist those norms - effort that the player didn't have to go through until that (pointless for them) lore change.

I don't think I agree with any of this.

It requires literally no additional effort to imagine tieflings in Planescape terms than in 4e terms. It takes no effort to disregard all those pictures and recall the ones that I like.

My concrete example: the original AD&D books told us that dwarves are brown-skinned, yet I have never seen a picture of a brown-skinned dwarf nor encountered any D&D player other than me who defaults to thinking of dwarves as brown-skinned. No effort was required to disregard that so-called "norm".

It's a game of imagination. People will imagine what they want. Did you know that the 4e PHB tells us that, while dwarves "have the same variety of skin, eye, and hair colors as humans, . . . dwarf skin is sometimes gray or sandstone red"? I didn't, until just now when I looked it up. Was there an uproar that this departed from the canon of Gygax's MM and PHB?

No, everyone who wasn't interested in it just ignored it.

The outcry around 4e tieflings is not connected to the "default effect"; it's a distinct response to something which is a flashpoint issue.

(Likewise the response to halflings with cornrows, though the flashpoint issue in that case is different.)

Also, you still haven't explained why there is no outrage that everything about illithids since 1986 has disregarded the canon established in the DSG.

 

[SkidAce]

That's true. The chart was gone, though, which disappointed me. I have to dig through my old Planescape stuff and see if I have that chart somewhere.

Yeah let me know where you find it, I can't remember either.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah let me know where you find it, I can't remember either.

I thought it was in the main Planescape players guide, but I have to see if I still have it. My Plansescape stuff has become mixed up.

Edit: Found it. The Planeswalker's Handbook page 80.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It requires literally no additional effort to imagine tieflings in Planescape terms than in 4e terms. It takes no effort to disregard all those pictures and recall the ones that I like.

Again, you're claiming that somehow the default effect doesn't apply. That's going to be tough to argue, if you hope to get me to agree with that. It's possible that your insistence that it doesn't apply is at the root of your lack of understanding here.

My concrete example: the original AD&D books told us that dwarves are brown-skinned, yet I have never seen a picture of a brown-skinned dwarf nor encountered any D&D player other than me who defaults to thinking of dwarves as brown-skinned. No effort was required to disregard that so-called "norm".

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.

3e you have a divergence between text and depiction in the PHB (of Tordek), but then you have a consistency between text and description in the MM, which also explicitly calls out mountain dwarves as lighter skinned, so "ah, okay, Tordek's a mountain dwarf," and now you have a better understanding of how dwarves are expected to be played by 3e's designers!

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. The implied default of "white" for skin color certainly has a long and tumultuous history. In fact, white dwarves can actually show how hard it is to change the default.

It's a game of imagination. People will imagine what they want. Did you know that the 4e PHB tells us that, while dwarves "have the same variety of skin, eye, and hair colors as humans, . . . dwarf skin is sometimes gray or sandstone red"? I didn't, until just now when I looked it up. Was there an uproar that this departed from the canon of Gygax's MM and PHB?
...
Also, you still haven't explained why there is no outrage that everything about illithids since 1986 has disregarded the canon established in the DSG.

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)
• Monster changes have fewer ramifications in actual play than PC class/race changes, and so aren't felt as often or as strongly (one character has 24 months to tell us who they are; a monster has about 3 rounds or maybe a night -- comparing Curse of Strahd, again, where the outcry over the changes is greater than it is for, say, the change for lamias).
• More people read and care about what's in each PHB than what's in an old 1e supplement.
• The internet has made codifying and following lore easier, so 2e/3e lore has more norm-setting power in the minds of the fans than previous lore or later lore
• The plot about mind flayers putting out the sun doesn't resonate with the audience as much as the plot about mind flayers being alien overlord for one reason or another. ("I mean, it's got NOTHING to do with eating brains!")
• probably others?

But all this is just brainstorming on why it could possibly be. Maybe all of these have some effect, maybe none of 'em do. Only the affected individuals can tell you why they were affected, and even then they'll probably only tell you AFTER you annoy them. Though if I were WotC, it'd be a question I'd be super-invested in answering.

The outcry around 4e tieflings is not connected to the "default effect"; it's a distinct response to something which is a flashpoint issue.

(Likewise the response to halflings with cornrows, though the flashpoint issue in that case is different.)

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

 

[jayoungr]

Yes, I care about setting canon. For the most part, my attitude is "If I'm going to run an existing setting, I'm going to run it right" ... Otherwise, I'll just borrow some elements ...

But what if your ideas are better than what's written?

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.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

Do you allow PC actions to affect and change the setting?