Speaking of different assumptions at tables, Dark Sun.
<snip>
for me, my genuine good person in a broken world character is the reason I want to play Dark Sun. I'm not just uninterested in playing a jackwagon in a world of other jackwagons, struggling to "get mine" even if I gotta kill and maybe eat everyone in my path to do so. I despise the idea of playing that.
The DM, OTOH, is all about that. The whole point of using DS, for him, was to play a "shades of rather dark grey", "points of slightly less abysmal darkness" type campaign.
This sort of thing can happen pretty easily in any campaign set-up, I think.
It doesn't sound like a problem that would be solved by sticking resolutely to canon, nor by having the "canon" never change. (Not that read your post as saying otherwise - I'm just connecting your post to the other discussions going on in the thread.)
The general principle when one plays a game is that one plays it according to the assumptions of that game. Changing those assumptions is something for "advanced players,"
But this is manifestly not true for people who change editions of D&D. (At least, not true in general. Maybe there is a table somewhere that I've never heard of nor seen any evidence of that had this issue.)
If 4e is the first version of D&D I pick up, then the fact that tieflings have horns won't bother me, because I have no expectations grounded in previous canon.
If 4e is not the first version of D&D I pick up, then the fact that tiefling are now drawn and described differently makes no difference to me. I remain free to run tieflings however I like.
When I "upgraded" from B/X to AD&D in 1985 (? or thereabouts), I didn't rewrite my campaign world just because I now had a gnome PC in the game, or because not all elves were guaranteed to be magic-users. I just kept running my game. And everything I've ever experienced directly or heard of second-hand suggests that others approach things the same way: they do not feel any obligation to reconcpetualise all the story elements they are familiar with just because a new edition or a new sourcebook uses different illustrations or descriptions.
If one finds that they can't play the game according to the game's own assumptions...well, there's a lot of other ways to spend your time.
But 4e
can be played using horned tieflings. It equally can be played using Planescape tieflings with the random chart.
It makes no difference either way.
I mean, someone who played Planescape is
already used to ignoring big chunks of PHBs (eg very few of the assumptions about the situation of starting PCs set out in the 2nd ed PHB is true for a 1st level PC in Sigil) - why does this suddenly become impossible to do in the case of the 4e PHB?
Your distinction here feels arbitrary. Why is "an imagined setting" not also "a work"?
The LotR is a work. The Silmarillion is a work. Middle Earth is not a work, though - it is something imagined and constructed on the basis of JRRT's works.
Similarly, while Fantastic Four #1 is a work, and the Phoenix Saga is a work, the Marvel Universe is not a work. It's a similarly constructed imagined place.
Gygax's D-series modules are a work; and when you play one of those modules part of the work of creation is already done for you. But the underdark in which the events of those modules occur is not a work - it is an imagined place, and if I end up imaging it differently from how Gygax did; or from how some later author deploys the same idea in his/her work; well, that's what happens when an audience for a work has more than one member.
If the FR is a work, then what is Darkwalker on Moonshae? An adaptation? A related work?
If the FR is a work, then what is the relationship between that work, and a RPG session that takes place set in the FR? Is the session an adapation? A performance of the work? Something else?
Note: Darkwalker on Moonshae, Descent to the Depths of the Earth, LotR, The Silmarillion, FF1, Phoenix Saga - these are all real things. They actually exist - I can read them, for instance. FR and Middle Earth and the underdark are not real things. They are purely imaginary things, constructed on the basis of reading works.
And the drawing of this distinction is not arbitrary. It's about trying to establish what is the artefact that an artist creates, and what is something else that audience members might construct as part of the process of engaging with the work the artist created.
pemerton said:
It never occurred to me that I was being expected to (i) intuit the designers' own aesthetic/artistic purpose, and (ii) emulate/replicate/express that in my own game. Or to put it another way: it never occurred to me that the setting was to be treated as something like the text of a play, or the score for a piece of music, which my RPG play would then be a performance of.
(I mean, thought about in these terms, what is the artistic intent of KotB, or GDoK, or the GH folio? They're not really rich literary works. So even if I did want to "perform" them via play, what would that look like? What would it mean to "butcher" my presentation of the Black Eagle Barony, or the Scarlet Brotherhood, or the evil priest in the Keep who pretends to be a good guy?)
It never really struck me that this was something that big RPG fans would not clearly see, but I suppose that's my own biases setting my expectations.
To more clearly show it: it's even embedded in the language we use in RPG's. You
Play the
Role of a
Character. You do this in a narrative context.
I learned RPGing playing Moldvay Basic and AD&D. And in those game you don't perform a role in the way that an actor does; you perform a role in the way that a plumber or a librarian does. The roles are defined functionally, in terms of capacities and responsibilities, and to play one of the roles is - within the imagined context of the game - to take on the relevant functions.
The first time I encountered the idea that playing a character is in any way like performing a part in a play was at tournaments, where the PCs are pregenerated and come with notes on backstory, personality, etc, and then points and prizes are awarded for how well one does that. That can be fun, and I'm not too bad at it, but for me that is not the paradigm of RPGing. It's a special case for special occasions.
In the paradigm case - of playing one's own character in a scenario that is not pre-scripted - there is nothing analogous to performing a part or to performing a song; to performing or adpating a work written by another.
Which is borne out by the modules that I mentioned (eg KotB, Descent to the Depths of the Earth) - these are works of fiction, but they are not
stories in any sense, and to play one of these modules is not to
perform or
adapt a work written by Gygax, but to produce one's own work - via the process of play - but using Gygax's work (which is something like an imaginary atlas or guidebook combined with a biographical dictionary) to provide some of the elements used in one's own work.
Much as the Phoenix saga includes some characters and motifs (eg Cyclops, Jean Gray, the X-Men) that Claremont and Byrne borrowed from others.
if that evil priest was actually a good guy and not just pretending to be a good guy, wouldn't that change the experience of the players meeting that priest, and perhaps create a less tense experience for, I dunno, needing healing from him? And if the Scarlet Brotherhood was actually very accepting of other races (because, you know, we want them to be a PC organization now in 6e or something), wouldn't that change how they were used in the game?
Changing elements of the shared fiction will change the narrative that results from playing the game, yes. That doesn't mean that playing the game is just adapating or performing someone else's already-written work.
Which takes me back to what I see as the function of RPG setting material . . .
In that case, you care about the lore! You care that the lore is useful, at least! If it changes and is less useful, wouldn't that cause some (perhaps small) amount of friction?
. . . Namely, that the function of setting material is to provide me with elements for my shared fiction that are (i) useful/interesting, and (ii) easier to borrow than to create from whole cloth.
If canon changes, and that later-published material is less useful, then I just don't borrow it. As I've stated repeatedly upthread, when running GH or OA I pick and choose. Eg the stuff that I thought was silly in OA5 Mad Monkey and Dragon Claw I just ignored. But the stuff that I thought was cool (like the Dragon Claw martial arts cult using mind-controlling and lifeforce-sharing swords, ultimate providing lifeforce to a minor godling/demon) I used. In my current BW GM game, I plonk down whichever map happens to be at the top of my folder, or have the best resolution, or will fit into the empty space on the table. Because the game is taking place in the area around Hardby, the Woolly Bay, the Bright Desert and Abor-Alz, et al, that could be my original folio map, or my "Adventure Begins" map, or my "LG Gazetteer" map, or my City of GH boxed set GH city region map, or my FtA GH city region map. The slight differences between these maps, reflecting the notional chronology of the setting over those various iterations, don't matter for my purposes and are ignored. (And the fact that we can so easily ignore them at the table confirms that they don't matter for our purposes!)
If you love the Dawn War and use it in your games, and 5e doesn't have the Dawn War, doesn't that make your job as a 5e DM of introducing and explaining the concept a little bit more difficult?
Why would it? If I was running a game with players who aren't already familiar with 4e - not something that would come up at my table - I just tell them or photocopy a page or two from the 4e Rules Compendium or something similar.
5e doesn't have the City of GH in it either, but I wouldn't think that's any sort of barrier to running a 5e GH game.
how could they be said to be the same fictional entities that Gygax described?
<snip>
How many boards can you change on the Ship of Theseus before someone's lying to you by pointing at it and saying "That's the Ship of Theseus?"
Because right now in a Dragonlance game, I'm pointing at my gnome wild mage and saying, "this is Dragonlance!" and someone else is pointing at the same thing and saying "That is NOT Dragonlance! Gnome wild mages aren't compatible with Dragonlance, where gnomes are forbidden to use magic!"
And by the same token, you have people pointing at their 4e games and saying "this is D&D!" and someone else pointing at the same thing, seeing all the lore changes, and saying, "That is NOT D&D! The Dawn War isn't compatible with D&D, where there's no ancient primordial threat!"
The absurd scenario I articulated differs in degree, but not in kind.
You seem to be raising the issue of the metaphysical identity of fictional creations - Are the NPCs in my game the same as Gygax's or not? Is
my city of Hardby, with its Gynarch but also (as established in a recent episode of play) with its Suel mummies buried in its catacombs after being disinterred from their tombs in the Bright Desert and carried to Hardby, the same as Gygax's? Is my GH in my Burning Wheel game the same as the GH of my Rolemaster game, when the latter game had all sorts of mentalists (psionicists, in D&D terms) who were especially prominent in relation to the Scarlet Brotherhood, whereas BW probably doesn't permit the recreation of many of these characters, and to the extent that it does they won't be any different in power source from "ordinary" wizards?
Frankly, in my view, the answers to such questions - though perhaps interesting in themselves - are irrelevant to the practicalities of playing a RPG. What matters is communication of expectations among a group of players, and metaphysical identity doesn't generally matter to that.
Eg discussions of the Ship of Theseus won't help persuade [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] that your gnome fits into Dragonlance (not that he seems to actually
care one way or another). Explaining to me how your FR game transmogrified
completely organically and without malice or even deliberate effort into Mad Max won't make me any less irritated if you post an ad saying "FR player wanted" and I turn up and you're all playing post-Apocalyptic dirt bike riders.
But, as [MENTION=6704184]doctorbadwolf[/MENTION]'s example shows,
sticking to some notional "canon" won't solve any of these issues either. Because one person might think that the "point" or the thematic heart of Dragonlance (or Dark Sun, or . . . ) is X, and another might think that it is Y. (See also the discussion upthread about whether or not atheist PCs fit into DL.)
Either this gets worked out via play (if in doubt, that's my preferred approach) or a compromise of some sort is reached (even if that compromise is to use a different setting). Sticking to an unchanging canon isn't going to help in either case.
It's one of the big motives for avoiding metaplot-heavy settings in general, I think - the inability to reliably get people on the same page with the rules of the setting and its stories. And it is an issue, because another player in the game sees this character as less authentic, so I'm failing at my goal of creating a DL character that is part and parcel of the setting. That's quite deflating! "Oh, it's a fun character, but really it's got nothing to do with the setting" is not what I wanted!
I think you are asking canon to do something that can't be done.
Either in this thread, or in [MENTION=6677017]Sword of Spirit[/MENTION]'s lost one (or in some other thread I've forgotten or am confused about), the issue of non-natives PCs in Krynn came up. Dragonlance Adventures has rules for such characters (eg how to handle "heathen" clerics from other worlds). Now personally, I think those rules are not really about the fiction of the setting at all - they're guidelines for players and GMs, along the lines of "if you port your existing characters into this setting, you'll get better results if you do so in such a way that respects the setting premises rather than contradicts them" (though maybe a bit more heavy-handed in tone than what I just wrote). But other posters disagreed with me, and took those passages as clear evidence that, even back before the 2nd ed era of Planescape, Spelljammer, etc, that Krynn was part of a D&D "multiverse", and the presence in Krynn of characters from other worlds is completely canonical.
Sticking to "canon" won't resolve that disupte.
Or, to look at your wildmage gnome - as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has pointed out, that character is (in mechanical terms) a function of edition change. The DL Adventures hardback doesn't have to discuss wildmage gnomes at all, because the concept of wild magic doesn't exist in 1st ed AD&D. Even in 2nd ed, gnomes are - to the best of my knowledge - not able to be wild mages without a houserule, and so the issue again doesn't come up. So, when the idea that "any race can be any class" emerges in 3E and is still with us today, how do we apply that to Dragonlance? What is the relationship, to the "canon" of that world, to DL Adventures "classes allowable to various races" chart, which can be read as a description of the fiction of the setting but is also a mechanical artefact of 1st ed AD&D's rules that limit certain classes to certain races? Is the prohibtion on elves being paladins, stated in that table, a statement of "canon", or just a mechanical rule that can be disregarded in a 3E, 4e or 5e DL game?
Appeals to an unchanging "canon" won't help with these questions. They just have to be sorted out at individual tables.
Defining fiction is important because it helps set the possibility space for character goals and performance. If my tiefling has sharp teeth and little black horns and maybe could pretend to be a human sometimes, this is a much different story than if my tiefling has giant horns and a tail and bright red skin and a spikey jaw line and sticks out like a sore thumb.
But if you're aware of both possibilities (which obviously you are), then you can just choose whichever one you think is more interesting. (If in doubt, flip a coin!)
Absolutely
nothing in 4e is going to break because you chose to play a tiefling with sharp teeth and little black horns who can sometimes pretend to be human. And, at least to the best of my knowledge of the setting, nothing in Planescape is going to break if your tiefling is an obviously diabloic descendant of an empire that made a pact with devils.
If everyone at the table isn't on the same page about my tiefling, it creates a very relevant divergence in our imagined fictional worlds.
So just tell them what your tiefling looks like.
Are there tables in which (i) every player has so closely read the PHB that they know exaclty what 4e tieflings are presented as, their Bael Turath-ic backstory, etc, and yet (ii) those selfsame players will be baffled and their expectations for the game thwarted by your playing of a Planescape tiefling?
If you answer is "yes" - eg maybe that's your table - then I'll accept that at least one such table exists. Frankly I think it's an outlier. My group has to count as pretty hardcore FRPGers by any measure - across the 6 of us we have over 150 years of RPGing experience, and for most of us there would not have been more than a handful of month-long periods over the past several decades in which we have not played at least one RPG session. Yet how many of this group could tell me what the default backstory is for a 4e halfling? My guess is none - or maybe the one player who toyed, at the start of the campaign, with playing a halfling warlock named Peter. (But ended up with a half-elf warlock named Wolfren.)
I think players take their cues for the fiction overwhelmingly from their fellow players and the GM. And from the assumptions that they bring to the table that have somehow formed and stuck as a result of their exposure to fantasy tropes (eg for halflings, in my group at least, I think Tolkien - or perhaps JM Barrie - dominates over any descriptive text ever written by a TSR or WotC author of a halfling entry, though I am about to try and break that hobbit habbit in my Dark Sun game).
