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

[billd91]

He did it with Aragorn as well. In the books he was a man who knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was to be king. In the movies he was wishy washy and unsure of himself.

Aragorn had his moments of indecision in the books too. From the fall of Gandalf to his return, Aragorn second guesses himself a lot. He knows his destiny is coming, but remember his lament that all his decisions go ill for a while. I don't think I'd call him wish-washy, but he is struggling to feel on top of things.

 

[Hussar]

For a TTRPG setting, it's "done" when it's first published as a TTRPG setting.

This doesn't mean you can't make more settings or add onto the existing setting or make variant settings in alternate timelines or make sequel-settings, or whatever. You can even make new editions of the setting that clean up details.

I think Mearls made a similar point in the run-up to 5e about dramatic edition changes - yes, games have editions, and yes, editions change things, but the scope of changes that D&D goes through is several orders of magnitude larger than the scope of changes that other games go through, and that creates issues when one wants to "Play D&D" (because what does that even mean?).


Again, I don't care about whether or not I personally "agree with" or "like" the canon.

What matters most is just that everyone understands the meaning of "Let's play a Dragonlance game." You could like it or not like it, I don't care. But you can't even talk about liking it or not liking it if we can't even basically agree on what that is. It would be like saying I "like Batman." That's a statement almost devoid of meaning, since Batman could mean a whole host of things.

Yes, but, that's how communication always works. You say, "I like Batman" so, my first question is, "Which Batman". How is that a problem? Why does "I like Batman" have to have one, and only one, concrete interpretation understood by everyone?

Even in a campaign, the conversation continues. Things come up and are dealt with.

But, the idea that I can say, "My Dragonlance doesn't include wild mage gnomes" and TELL you that you can't play your character is complete bollocks. Who am I to tell you that your creativity just isn't good enough for me?


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And, as far as wanting a single source to tell you how to play in Dragonlance (or any setting), well, why wouldn't you go to the original books? I mean, it would be pretty easy to see the core of the setting from those, wouldn't it? Pulling out canon from thirty years later and completely different writers and then complaining that it's the lore changes that are making things more difficult is a bit of a stretch. Never minding pulling lore from wikipedia articles.

I mean, if your understanding of a setting is all third party sources, I'm not sure you can really complain that others might not share your views of what is canon.

 

[Shasarak]

Why do people - who KNOW ST - have any problems grasping what they see when they watch the JJA stuff?
(Oh, I know, you don't LIKE it. So you all play dumb.)
It's a parallel version of the Trek universe. The same idea as the mirror universe. Familiar stuff, just altered....
Did Nimoy Spock & the Romulans travel back in time? Yes, but they also went sideways.
And conveniently the story serves as a franchise reboot.

The thing I did not like about the Reboot Star Trek movie was that it seemed to be missing about 30 minutes of back story that essentially explained all the "plot holes". I know that watching it a second time after researching what was going on made it make a whole lot more sense to me.

An extended Directors Cut would be great.

 

[Maxperson]

Thing is, you're telling me I can't have round steak because you don't like it and round steak isn't really steak because it's different from what you like.

I'm having a hard time with seeing how you get from "No matter which way we like it, it still has the value of being steak." to "you're telling me I can't have round steak because you don't like it.". You have a disconnect going on somewhere.

 

[Shasarak]

And, as far as wanting a single source to tell you how to play in Dragonlance (or any setting), well, why wouldn't you go to the original books? I mean, it would be pretty easy to see the core of the setting from those, wouldn't it? Pulling out canon from thirty years later and completely different writers and then complaining that it's the lore changes that are making things more difficult is a bit of a stretch. Never minding pulling lore from wikipedia articles.

I mean, if your understanding of a setting is all third party sources, I'm not sure you can really complain that others might not share your views of what is canon.

I dont really understand. I pointed to Raistlin trading his soul for power in the original books and yet I was told that there are no such thing as Warlocks in Dragonlance only White/Red/Black Wizards.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

From what I can gather about pre-3e DL, (ii) is coming from new gnome lore. Also, the very concept of wild sorcery comes from new DL lore. And it's wild sorcery + gnome that turns into "gnome wild mage." Without those elements, you don't have a gnome wild mage who obsesses about Chaos and wants to dream big about free will - these emerge from his identity both as a DL wild sorcerer and a DL gnome. That leads to a different class or race and perhaps a different background and origin. A gnome who took an Artificer class, for instance, wouldn't have much cause to differ from his Lawful kin and wouldn't be concerned much with the fabric of reality, and so might have the Guild Artisan background instead and feel no differently about the gods than most gnomes. Or maybe in looking for unique DL archetypes I'd pass over gnomes who were just tinkers (I mean, that may have been unique at the time, but it's hardly unique now), and I'd ping on moon mages and now we've got very devout wizards. That all changes how a character might feel about (i).

I also think the requirement for characters to want the return of the gods is not clear at all from the setting information, and some of the folks who know DL better than me are pointing out that it's not necessarily the case. So at the very least, the setting information is awful at producing that outcome. It's possible that you and Hussar are just dead wrong about what the intent of game play should be in DL - that it is more open and flexible than you suggest. I don't know what's right because I'm new to the setting, and the sources used to create my PC didn't really mention it. They did mention that most people weren't faithful, and that the original reason for this was that people turned from the gods because the gods slaughtered millions of innocent people in the Cataclysm, but it didn't indicate in the slightest that this was a bit of the setting that the PC's should want to change, or that the PC's should believe that the gods were right. If the intended result was PC's who wanted to restore the gods, we have a pretty catastrophic design failure.

I agree. I read DL for the first time when I was 12 or so, and have read most of the DL books at least once, and...nope. The "point" of the setting is not necessarily or objectively that the gods are right and the heroes want their return. Some ppl read that into the setting, some don't.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Aragorn had his moments of indecision in the books too. From the fall of Gandalf to his return, Aragorn second guesses himself a lot. He knows his destiny is coming, but remember his lament that all his decisions go ill for a while. I don't think I'd call him wish-washy, but he is struggling to feel on top of things.

Yeah, Aragorn isn't the least bit indecisive in the movie or books, but in both he has to come to accept his destiny as King of Gondor. And he is definately plagued by doubts in the books. I'd say the movie Aragorn is less prone to self doubt.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not confusing it. I'm just not assuming the authors motivation was anything other than what was written. Do you have any hard evidence for the motivation?

Let's start with the low-hanging fruit: I assume that you accept that George Orwell's Animal Farm is a critique of Stalinist Communism, and not just a fairy-tale about some talking animals. And that Snowball = Trotsky, Boxer = the working folk of Russia, etc.

Then let's move to something slightly less literal: I assume that you accept that JRRT's treatment of Feanor (including his temptation by Melkor) and of Numenor (including the temptation of the Numenoreans by Sauron) is his reworking of the Fall.

More generally, I assume that you accept that authors sometimes write works to convey ideas and to reflect on themes and concerns that they don't expressly put into the mouth of any character, or the ominsicient narrator. DL is not as transparent as Animal Farm, but it's not the most subtle set of novels ever written!

In any event, in understanding why Raistlin can't create, and why evil is not a creative force, in the DL novels, we are not confined to asking that question from an in-fiction perspective. We can ask it as readers - and we ask it of the work itself, and/or of the author (depending, in part, on our broader conception of where artistic meaning is located). There is a whole set of disciplines devoted to this - literary criticism, musical criticism, etc.

It is largely from those disciplines - especially critisim of literature and film - that we get our critical vocabulary for RPG settings, given that there is no independent discipline of RPG criticism. (The Forge tried to establish such a thing, but remains a bit fringe.)

When I say "My character's morality is like Batman's," that's a meaningless statement at this point in time. It tells you nothing about that character's morality.

When my DM says "Let's play Dragonlance!", how meaningless should that statement be? How much should it tell you about the heroes and conflicts and villains?

<snip>

At a certain point, one needs to stop putting paint to the canvas and call it "done," warts and all (typically for written works, this comes in publication).

I still feel that you are assuming that even a single campaign book, or The Dragonlance Chronicles, bears a self-evident meaning that the actual experience of human encounters with works of art suggests it probably doesn't.

Eg I read the original DL books quite differently from Maxperson, apparently. I'm guessing the same is true of the two of us in respect of REH's Conan stories, and LotR and JRRT's other Middle Earth works.

 

[pemerton]

when Hussar and Banana disagree on what "Dragonlance" means, they're going to come together and play a Dragonlance campaign, and their interpretations at least need to share some baseline commonality like "What is the purpose of the heroes in this setting?"

This isn't actually true, as a general proposition. It depends on other goals of play.

There is a whole school of RPGing which is built on the idea that "we play to find out".

And the existence of that school is not tangential to the discussion in this thread - the existence of that school, as a self-conscious approach to RPGing, arises in response to dissatisfaction with play that subordinates player authorship to the referee's or third-party canon.

 

[pemerton]

- The reason people buy a new edition Monster Manual, or whatever, is because they don't want to do all those conversions for themselves to make their monsters compatible with the new edition. And MOST people expect and want those monsters to be the same (or at least pretty close) as they were in the previous edition, only updated to use the new game mechanics.

But 4e gave you this! Are you really asserting that is it too much work for you to rewrite the alignment of a 4e MM storm giant, or a 4e MM2 grey render? Is rewriting the alignment of those creatures too much mechanical work for you to do?

Personally, I think you've already done the heavy lifting when you've noticed the alignment change. At that point, the conversion back to the old alignment is complete! (Unless you're worried that, unless you write it down, you'll forget. But then, if you forget the old version, you won't care that the new version is different!)

EDIT: the last post of yours that I replied to was complaining about Forgotten Realms conversions. What bit of FR mechanics that you would have needed converted was not converted, as a result of the additions to canon and changes to canon in the 4e FRCG?