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

[Remathilis]

But, you've also kinda missed the point. If 4e elves are making elves into not elves, why are 5e elves suddenly all elf again? The only difference between 4e Eladrin and 5e High Elves is a proper noun. That's it.

Which pretty much serves as very good evidence for my point. Canon only matters when it can be used to tell other people they are playing wrong. 4e Eladrin make "elves into not elves" because they rewrite how elves were portrayed, apparently. But, 5e High Elves are pretty much word for word exactly the same as Eladrin, save the proper noun, and suddenly nothing is being rewritten, this is how elves have always been.

Canon is only important when it can bludgeon people.

Canon establishes a baseline set of assumptions. A lingua franca.

If we're playing D&D and I say, "You enter a room and there is a gnome and troll, roll for initiative" you will naturally default to the PHB gnome and MM troll. Now, if you decide to shoot the troll with a fire bolt spell (ya know, regeneration) and then I tell you "sorry, but in my world, gnomes are 20 foot tall monsters of pure evil and trolls are two-foot tall fey with gems in their stomachs, you just murdered a LG captive." You'd rightfully be pissed. I mucked up the canon. More importantly, I didn't inform you of that before you encountered that situation (something that the character would be aware of, if he lives in that world). Now sometimes its useful to turn PC assumptions on their heads, but to me players should be allowed to "learn" the game as much as anyone.

Now, lets bring this back to how 4e mucked up canon. As part of their "grand revision" of 4e, they basically chucked any mythos they though didn't make the game "cool". Cool be the subjective term Collin's et all used whenever the established idea didn't meet their idea of a darker, edgier D&D. So through the cows of D&D, the slaughter did reign. Angels are too good-two shoes; lets make them dark and edgy beings who can be fought. Metallic dragons are Good? Lets make them unaligned and antagonistic. So many monsters got radical redesigns, it often times felt insulting. Check out this post in the firbolg threat for a great example; they went from peaceful minor giants to bloodthirsty members of the Wild Hunt. That's cool if you don't want your game to have any established connection with the lore before it, but when you bill it as "ze game iz ze same" and then you force monsters into whole new roles, your giving anyone who used those monsters before a middle finger.

When I converted from 2e to 3e, I could absorb the core assumption changes fairly well. Dwarves could be wizards, but rarely were due to tradition. Some previous PCs who were nominally described as wizards became sorcerers if it fit better, ditto fighter and barbarian. I had half-orcs in my game since the Humanoid's Handbook, and tieflings since the Planeswalker's Handbook. The changes were minimal. But 4e forced massive areas of re-write. All tieflings looked alike. Elven PCs who previously had no magical ability could suddenly teleport every 5 minutes. Blue dragons hung out in the coastal areas, not the desert. The list went on. In order to convert my world from 3e's assumptions to 4e's I had to have a spell-plague like cataclysm and a massive amount of hand-waving to align with the new canon. It changed my world so radically, I ended up scrapping it and using PF with 3e assumptions until 5e, where I could pretty much use my world as I did in 3e with a few minor changes (basically, accounting for dragonborn).

In 4e, they tossed out the old Lingua franca and made us use a new one. They swapped our gnomes and trolls. They broke iron-bound rules (like Eberron's race-based dragonmarks) just to give PCs another "power-up" toy. They liberally stole the unique ideas from other setting (warforged, vistani, draconians) and threw them into POLsilvania just because they could. Most important, they ignored the tradition set by Gygax, Anderson, Cook, Marsh, and countless others because it wasn't "cool" enough.

And yeah, Eladrin were part of it. A huge part. My namesake character could now teleport. Through iron bars. Every 5 minutes. You know how that ability would have changed his history? Far more than casting Fire Bolt or True Strike could.

Canon is only a bludgeon when people insist tradition, and lingua franca, doesn't matter. Play the game you want, but don't get mad when you end up murdering LG treasure trolls...

 

[Redthistle]

Changes in canon involving how a race is perceived, it seems to me, is akin to changes in propaganda when nations go to war with each other. When America entered WW I, for example, Germans all-of-a-sudden went from just being another group of people to being monstrous.

I suspect that this thread may be a debate that never ends.

 

[Elderbrain]

Sigil is detailed quite well in the DMG2, with the exception of changing the races of a couple NPCs. The Great Wheel gets a one-page writeup in MOTP - hardly what I'd call enough to use it in a 4e game, unless you already own the 2e Planescape material (and of course, many 2e/3e planar monsters and races are missing or radically altered in 4e.)

Rats, meant for this to be a reply to Permeton's earlier post.

Anyway, I second what Remathilis said above. If you buy a new edition of a Star Wars rpg, you expect that the Wookie or Jedi or whatever you were playing before can be ported over without too much difficulty. Sure, the game mechanics will be different, but Wookies will still be big hairy tough guys and Jedis will have Force powers and use lightsabres. Change that, and you may have a sci-fi game, but it won't be Star Wars anymore. If you opened up the book and found that Wookies are now defined as hairless short dudes and Jedi use kung-fu and nunchucks instead of the Force and lightsabres, you'd throw the book down in disgust. Cloud City? Oh, that's boring, let's get rid of that? Tantooie? Oh, "Debrakur" is a MUCH better name... don't worry, you'll get used to it!

 

[pemerton]

Sigil is detailed quite well in the DMG2, with the exception of changing the races of a couple NPCs. The Great Wheel gets a one-page writeup in MOTP - hardly what I'd call enough to use it in a 4e game, unless you already own the 2e Planescape material

But anyone who is wanting to run a Planescape game, and who notices the comsology changes in 4e, already owns that matieral (or is in some other way familiar with it). And that one-page writeup tells you how to represent the GW in 4e mechanical terms. So I don't see the problem.

If you buy a new edition of a Star Wars rpg, you expect that the Wookie or Jedi or whatever you were playing before can be ported over without too much difficulty. Sure, the game mechanics will be different, but Wookies will still be big hairy tough guys and Jedis will have Force powers and use lightsabres. Change that, and you may have a sci-fi game, but it won't be Star Wars anymore. If you opened up the book and found that Wookies are now defined as hairless short dudes and Jedi use kung-fu and nunchucks instead of the Force and lightsabres, you'd throw the book down in disgust. Cloud City? Oh, that's boring, let's get rid of that? Tantooie? Oh, "Debrakur" is a MUCH better name... don't worry, you'll get used to it!

Obviously that's not going to happen in a Star Wars game - but if it did, and you didn't like it, why wouldn't you just ignore it?

Canon establishes a baseline set of assumptions. A lingua franca.

If we're playing D&D and I say, "You enter a room and there is a gnome and troll, roll for initiative" you will naturally default to the PHB gnome and MM troll.

<snip>

lets bring this back to how 4e mucked up canon. As part of their "grand revision" of 4e, they basically chucked any mythos they though didn't make the game "cool".

<snip>

In 4e, they tossed out the old Lingua franca and made us use a new one.

A MM troll is rubbery, green, regenerates and is vulnerable to fire.

Which MM am I talking about? Well, guess what, it could be the 4e one or the 1977 AD&D one.

In my game the other day, when I described a snake-bodied, human-headed creature a player straight away recognised it as a hydra. They have also recognised hydras, goblins, gnolls, drow, giant spiders, balors (balrogs at our table), mariliths, various sorts of giants and ogres, and sundry other creaturews that I'm not recalling now.

In other words, at my table of players most of who first played D&D with Moldvay Basic, there was no issue with the "lingua franca".

Angels are too good-two shoes; lets make them dark and edgy beings who can be fought. Metallic dragons are Good? Lets make them unaligned and antagonistic. So many monsters got radical redesigns, it often times felt insulting. Check out this post in the firbolg threat for a great example; they went from peaceful minor giants to bloodthirsty members of the Wild Hunt. That's cool if you don't want your game to have any established connection with the lore before it

<snip>

When I converted from 2e to 3e, I could absorb the core assumption changes fairly well. Dwarves could be wizards, but rarely were due to tradition. Some previous PCs who were nominally described as wizards became sorcerers if it fit better, ditto fighter and barbarian. I had half-orcs in my game since the Humanoid's Handbook, and tieflings since the Planeswalker's Handbook. The changes were minimal. But 4e forced massive areas of re-write. All tieflings looked alike. Elven PCs who previously had no magical ability could suddenly teleport every 5 minutes. Blue dragons hung out in the coastal areas, not the desert.

In my B/X game, all elves had magical ability. Then in AD&D they didn't. Then in 4e some do (eladrin) and some don't (elves).

In my B/X and AD&D games, no dwarves can use wizardry. Then in 4e they can. (And 3E inaugurated this change.)

In my AD&D game, gold dragons didn't have wings - they looked like Chinese dragons (and this was expressed in their "Latin" name). In 3E, they did have wings.

In my AD&D game, orcs were LE - ie organised and hierarchical. 3E makes orcs CE.

And as far as firbolgs are concerned, here are firbolgs as I understand them (from the original MM2) - they are N(CG), and

are cautious, crafty, and have considerable magical power. They have learned to distrust (and fear) humans, and will be found only in remote and wild places. . . .

These human-looking giants will not always greet strangers with open arms, but usually firbolgs will not try to kill them (unless given provocation, of course). They do, however, enjoy appearing as little people and duping humans out of their treasure.​

These are not peaceful beings. Changing them to Wild Hunters is, to me, giving them a logic and rationale within the gameworld rather than leaving them hard to distinguish from spriggans (who, in the MM2, are said to be "In small form . . . basically thieves, while in large form . . . giant bandits").

But in any event, I don't know who is forcing you to change anything in your gameworld. In my GH game I ignore the 3E nonsense change to orcs. If you don't like coastal blue dragons, I don't see what is stopping you from ignoring that.

if you decide to shoot the troll with a fire bolt spell (ya know, regeneration) and then I tell you "sorry, but in my world, gnomes are 20 foot tall monsters of pure evil and trolls are two-foot tall fey with gems in their stomachs, you just murdered a LG captive." You'd rightfully be pissed. I mucked up the canon. More importantly, I didn't inform you of that before you encountered that situation (something that the character would be aware of, if he lives in that world).

But people change up this stuff all the time. In fact, original D&D play was based on this sort of thing - eg the GM says "You see something that looks like a beholder" but really it's a gas spore. Or whatever.

Another issue with your example is that it is not an example of problematic changes to canon, but rather of bad GMing. Eg the GM hasn't described the two antagonists - so the players thought the "troll" was 8' tall, green and rubbery, not 2' tall and fey-like.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Let's just hit some of the high notes:

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.

You're still ignoring the costs of changing the default. You can do it, but you pay a price to do it, and there is resistance to doing it embedded in the game's assumptions.

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?

Say it with me now, everybody!

Everybody's.
Breaking Point.
Is Different.

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.

....and if you wanted to change elves into Prachettesque horrors because that's a more useful bit of material to you, you don't think that some players would be like, "Wait....what?" Especially if they were looking forward to playing an elf?

That's kind of the reaction when someone shows up to a Dragonlance game with a gnome wild mage, apparently. One of the two of us weren't told the facts about that character's place in the world. We don't know what stories we're expected to tell, because the words "It's a Dragonlance game" mean different things to different players with different concepts of what that world includes.

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.

That is a little more difficult, isn't it? (Not to mention a violation of copyright law in most cases) Now imagine how many aspects of possible story that changes! Okay, you copy a bit about the history of the Dawn War. But now Giants are elemental beings with a stake in the Dawn War and it matters that if the god of fire was a primordial or a deity and hey what about devas, are they the same or different now?

Those thing matter a LOT when you want to draw lore into your play experience, and being wrong on any of them could be catastrophic to the story you want to tell. If my first character at this table is a dwarf who worked with the stone giants near his homeland, he's now taken a side in the Dawn War, aiding and abetting elemental creatures that have no love of mortals. Now the party cleric is icy to me when I recommend talking with the giants rather than slaying them.

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.

It does when people have a different idea of what that identity is.

Are the gnomes in this Dragonlance game able to be spellcasters? I was told "It's a Dragonlance game," did some research, and figured, yeah, gnomes in Dragonlance can be spellcasters. Someone else told the same thing figured the opposite. Now, we don't have a shared expectation, because the DM didn't scour the race and class descriptions in granular enough detail to tell me if my character was exceptional in that way or not. And now the experience sucks more - more for me because my gnome is inauthentic in Hussar's eyes, and more for him because a Dragonlance game with a gnome wild mage in it isn't the Dragonlance he was expecting to play.

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.

There's an answer in that chart: no. The answer is no.

There's a contrary answer in the 3e book: sure.

Which answer is intended when someone says "Let's play a Dragonlance campaign!"

I didn't even know there were other possible answers, let alone where to find them.

Clearly someone treating the chart as canon and someone treating the 3e book as canon have different ideas of the setting, just as someone who only ever read that wizards in Middle Earth were trained at Hogwarts would have a very different idea of the setting than you or I would. They might just have no idea that wizards in Middle Earth could've ever not been trained at Hogwarts.

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.

In both cases, you can break the story the setting is telling, and in both cases, you first need explicit permission.

 

[pemerton]

You're still ignoring the costs of changing the default. You can do it, but you pay a price to do it, and there is resistance to doing it embedded in the game's assumptions.

<snip>

That is a little more difficult, isn't it?

<snip>

In both cases, you can break the story the setting is telling, and in both cases, you first need explicit permission.

Whose permission? Whose permission do I need to play a PS tieflng in a 4e game?

And you still haven't told me what the cost is. Photocopying a couple of pages - a PS random tiefling chart, a 4e Dawn War precise, whatever - isn't a salient cost in the context of a game that generates reams of notes over the course of long-term play. (As far as the copyright violation - non-commercial copying of two pages I would suggest is de minimis.)

I don't really think most people care about change per se, either. Look at all this new lore in the forthcoming Volo book - changes to gnolls, flinds, niblogs, barghests, leucrotta, etc, quite a bit of which contradicts my understanding of those creatures (eg where are the flindbars?). No one is complaining on those threads. If I was running 5e and wanted barghests that are goblin allies rather than goblin enemies (which is what they were in their original incarnation - they eat humans and goblins help them with this - as well as in 4e), there would be no cost to doing so.

As far as "breaking the story" - I can promise you that nothing will break in the "story" of the 4e setting if tieflings are randomly fiendish rather than uniformly diabolic.

Which answer is intended when someone says "Let's play a Dragonlance campaign!"

There is no answer to this question except by talking to said person, and finding out what they think is at the heart of the setting.

If I ask you to join me in a MHRP X-Men game, what version of Jean Grey are you allowed to play? Is Magneto a through-and-through villain or a misunderstood friend?

You can't shortcut these questions by freezing a chart in amber. No game setting is going to both have longevity and have only a single viable reading. So you're going to have to talk anyway. At which point there is no cost in noting, during the course of that conversation, (say) what edition or what sourcebook is providing the default.

 

[Maxperson]

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?

You're going to have to explain that one better. Are the 2e PHB races in Planescape? Yes. The classes? Yes. Equipment? Yes. Skills? Yes. Spells? Yes. Combat rules? Yes. I can't remember if money is used the same or not, but I think it was, so that didn't change either. That's all the 2e PHB was. No big chunks were ignored by 2e Planescape that I can tell.

 

[pemerton]

You're going to have to explain that one better. Are the 2e PHB races in Planescape? Yes. The classes? Yes. Equipment? Yes. Skills? Yes. Spells? Yes. Combat rules? Yes. I can't remember if money is used the same or not, but I think it was, so that didn't change either. That's all the 2e PHB was. No big chunks were ignored by 2e Planescape that I can tell.

The 2e PHB assumes that PCs being their adventures in the ordinary world (ie Prime Material Plane), not that they are engaging with planar beings from the get-go.

There are also assumptions about alignment that are different, and there is also the issue of faction membership as an element of character building.

And probably other stuff too, but those're the main ones that come to mind at the moment.

 

[Maxperson]

The 2e PHB assumes that PCs being their adventures in the ordinary world (ie Prime Material Plane), not that they are engaging with planar beings from the get-go.

That's really not much of an assumption. The PHB is just about combat and making/using PCs. The assumption of prime plane is little more than a blurb, if it's even there at all. I could and did have planar adventures prior to Planescape. The cosmology is the same.

There are also assumptions about alignment that are different, and there is also the issue of faction membership as an element of character building.

Those are additions to the PHB. They don't replace it.

 

[Remathilis]

The 2e PHB assumes that PCs being their adventures in the ordinary world (ie Prime Material Plane), not that they are engaging with planar beings from the get-go.

There are also assumptions about alignment that are different, and there is also the issue of faction membership as an element of character building.

And probably other stuff too, but those're the main ones that come to mind at the moment.

To be fair, the original Planescape boxset assumed only five planar races; bariaur, tiefling, githzerai, human, and planar-half-elf (a mixture of a planar human and prime elf). All other races (dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, etc) were assumed to be prime; as were most PC humans and half-elves. The assumption was some clueless berks would stumble upon a portal and end up in Sigil, and find out things aren't as simple as the Prime makes it. Factions were usually something you joined afterwards. Thus, it completely possible (and indeed, was recommended) to start PS games with JUST the PHB assumptions and then reveal the curtain when they get there.

Ravenloft worked on the same assumptions, btw. At least, until Domains of Dread.

Of course, this is a very different tack than say, Dragonlance (which removes races and recasts many of them in new roles) or Dark Sun (which practically re-writes every class and race in the PHB). Even 2e Forgotten Realms took to "augmenting" the core assumptions heavily. Really, the only 2e settings that stuck to "PHB is canon" is Greyhawk and to a lesser-extent Mystara (and even then, they took liberties).


Then again, the 2e PHB is a bad example to hang "canon" are, since the book is very incomplete when it comes to setting. It assumes little, and has plenty of "ask your DM" moments (specialty priests being the biggest example). Its practically BEGGING for a group to add a fourth book (in the form of a campaign box set) into the mix. When 1e needed an example, it defaulted to Greyhawk. When 2e needed an example, it tried to pull historical or literary examples, then made stuff up when that failed.