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

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I think hobbits would find that hard to do, as the sheep would just get up and walk away, and the hobbits wouldn't be able to stop them.

Why would they want to get up and walk away? Sheep are pretty docile if you treat them right - look here is a sheep dog controlling a herd of sheep using just his eyes:


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Theoretically those Sheep can just charge the dog and there is nothing he can do to stop them but somehow in reality that does not happen.
 

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It would make sense for the Shire to trade with both the dwarves and the the hobbits of Bree.
And yet it doesn't - at least, not in foodsuffs like milk, butter and cheese. If it did, the journey to Bree wouldn't have required the hobbits to do anything but hitch a ride with one of the returning produce carriers.

Also, elves were known in the shire, so there would likely be trade with the elves as well.
Yet Sam had never met one. Nor, I think, had Bilbo prior to the events of the Hobbit.

And what would the elves trade. What does Rivendell produce? It is not exactly presented as a hive of production!

There are no canonical explanations of the economy of LotR, anymore than Arthurian tales explain the economy of castles that loom up out of deserted forests or moorlands.
 

Why would they want to get up and walk away? Sheep are pretty docile if you treat them right - look here is a sheep dog controlling a herd of sheep using just his eyes
I'm familiar with sheep dogs. I'm getting the impression from this particular exchange that, although my personal experience with farming and herding is modest, it may nevertheless be greater than yours.

The notion that handling sheep for shearing doens't require physical strength is to my mind ludicrous, and refuted not only by my own experience (which you might doubt) but by the visual evidence of both the late 19th and early 21st centuries. No amount of sheep dog are going to hold sheep still while they are shorn. The shearer has to do that. Using size and strength, as we can see in the images. Which, through no fault of their own, hobbits lack.
 

And yet it doesn't - at least, not in foodsuffs like milk, butter and cheese. If it did, the journey to Bree wouldn't have required the hobbits to do anything but hitch a ride with one of the returning produce carriers.

Other than the secrecy with which they left and the fact that maybe no one was going right then.

Yet Sam had never met one. Nor, I think, had Bilbo prior to the events of the Hobbit.

Frodo and others had, though. For several years elves traveled through the shire on the way over the sea. Probably not a lot of trade there.

The dwarves, though, passed through the shire very often and the hobbits had dealings with them.

There are no canonical explanations of the economy of LotR, anymore than Arthurian tales explain the economy of castles that loom up out of deserted forests or moorlands.

He didn't need to flesh it out for the story, but the dwarf trade road near the Shire and Bree would be a part of whatever economy the shire had.
 
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Dancey does not comment on the presentation, or the boxed sets. He comments on the content, calling it "confusing" and "jargon-filled". Those aren't quite my reasons for disliking it - the "jargon" is mostly just silly to someone whose native variant of English is closer to English than American, and I don't find it especially confusing.

My reason for quoting Dancey is that this is yet another bit of evidence that there is no special correlation between preserving "canon" and commercial success. (Or critical success, for that matter, although what counts as critical success in RPGing is admittedly somewhat up for grabs.)
Wha...??
Dancey says the jargon was confusing and off-putting.
Therefore canon has no correlation with commercial success.

That doesn't even make sense. The two statements are unrelated. Jargon isn't canon.

The thread isn't "advocating" anything. And even if it were, it would have no causal significance. The chance of this thread being of zero interest or relevance to WotC is 100%.
Whaaa...
Oh come on. You literally just claimed "evidence" that canon doesn't lead to a critical or commercial success.
That's the definition of advocating.

But if someone says that it is selfish of me to want stuff that might deviate from canon, I am going to respond.

And if someone tells me that preserving canon is a necessary condition of quality fiction, well I'm going to respond to that too.
Um, yeah, you asked people how they used canon and then argued/debated with them when they dared to use canon differently than you.

The question I have repeatedly asked, but haven't really got much of an answer to, is why some RPGers value aligning their aesthetic endeavours to a commercial publisher's output. The closest I've received to an answer is "brand psychology", but that's an answer that makes sense from WotC's point of view, not from the RPGer's.
Because we LIKE it. It's a personal preference. There's really not much more to it than that.


My preferences don't require you to do more work than yours of me.

If stuff is published that I like but you don't because it deviates from canon, you can ignore it and use what you already have. That might be emotionally demanding, but in terms of hours required seems to me like little work.

Conversely, if I have to make up all my stuff myself that is a fair bit of work. It's to save that time - and also because others are better at doing that stuff than me - that I buy material for use in RPGing.

But in any event, neither preference has any moral significance, let alone any sort of moral priority. They're aesthetic preference which have no impact on one another except that the contemporary commerical nature of RPG publishing makes them competing consumption preferences. And consumption preferences among leisure goods are not, as a general matter, a moral issue. (It's not as if, eg, satisfying my preferences will cause any more environmental degradation than satisfying yours.)
There's a big difference because it's exchanging a certainty for an uncertainty.

You've stated you don't want to buy products with lore you don't like.
But established lore does have it's fans.
If a product is released that uses an established part of the setting, WotC can either focus on the fans of that element by keeping the existing lore (a certainty) or change lore, very likely upsetting those fans for the chance someone like you might like the new lore. Or you still might not.
So rather than keep one group happy, they made that group unhappy while trying to court a group that didn't really want the product in the first place.

You would rather WotC throw me under the bus for the *chance* you might like the replacement lore.
It's forcing someone else to adapt and change. Someone else to do work they otherwise wouldn't so you have more choices. Hence selfish.


Are you joking? I can't tell.

Washington DC is a real city. Latveria is a made-up country. That's my point. You said that the verisimilitude of Casbalanca depends upon adhering to the truth about the war. But you're wrong. They made up the urban geography of Morocco, just as Marvel Comics made up the political geography of Central and Eastern Europe.

EDIT: Maybe you were intending the phrase "established world" to carry weight. But I don't see how it can. There was a first appearance in the FF of Dr Doom, and that first appearance invovled the first reference to a fictional nation of Latveria.

That was not drawing on established canon. It was making something up - a fake country, that fights fake wars and has a fake internal political system - and it doesn't seem to have done the FF or Marvel more generally any harm.
The point is you're not making things up all yourself. You're not creating the villain or the country or city the embassy is in. All that is drawing from continuity. You're choosing to use the continuity, going so far as to even have Latvaria be from the same continent as it is in the Marvel comics.

If you dislike continuity so much, why are you not making up all of your own characters and places? Answer: because it's easier to draw from the work other people has done. There's no need to reinvent the wheel continually.
That applies equally for real world lore (WW2, Washington DC) or for comic lore (Latvaria, Doctor Doom) or tabletop games (Sigil, the planes). You shouldn't needlessly change the nature of D&D lore for a story anymore than you'd make sweeping changes to WW2 to fit your narrative.
You're just choosing not to take the extra step of looking up where Marvel established Latvaria to be located, or where embassies are located in DC. But that's your choice. That doesn't mean every single Marvel comic writer should do the same and move Latvaria around the globe to wherever is convenient for their story.
 

You've stated you don't want to buy products with lore you don't like.
But established lore does have it's fans.
If a product is released that uses an established part of the setting, WotC can either focus on the fans of that element by keeping the existing lore (a certainty) or change lore, very likely upsetting those fans for the chance someone like you might like the new lore. Or you still might not.
So rather than keep one group happy, they made that group unhappy while trying to court a group that didn't really want the product in the first place.

You would rather WotC throw me under the bus for the *chance* you might like the replacement lore.
Not making stuff that you want to buy is not "throwing you under a bus".

Taking chances on popularity of fictional material is what commercial publishers of stories do!

I'm not under any sort of duty to buy stuff I don't like so as to keep your preferences commercially viable.
 

I'm not under any sort of duty to buy stuff I don't like so as to keep your preferences commercially viable.
Okay then, let's get specific.

What lore is keeping you from buying products?
If they changed that, would your purchase be guaranteed?
What changes to the lore would get you to buy the products?
 

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I think hobbits would find that hard to do, as the sheep would just get up and walk away, and the hobbits wouldn't be able to stop them.
For a single hobbit, probably. But why not one (or even two) hobbits to hold the sheep and another one to shear it? I don't see why that wouldn't work.

The question I have repeatedly asked, but haven't really got much of an answer to, is why some RPGers value aligning their aesthetic endeavours to a commercial publisher's output.
I gave you my answer: if I like a fictional world, then I want to have the virtual experience of living in it for a while. But the way you phrase the question is putting the cart before the horse from my point of view. Your question assumes that I commit myself ahead of time to following the published material, before I know what it is. My approach is to look at the fictional world and decide whether I like it enough to stick to it.
 

I'm familiar with sheep dogs. I'm getting the impression from this particular exchange that, although my personal experience with farming and herding is modest, it may nevertheless be greater than yours.

The notion that handling sheep for shearing doens't require physical strength is to my mind ludicrous, and refuted not only by my own experience (which you might doubt) but by the visual evidence of both the late 19th and early 21st centuries. No amount of sheep dog are going to hold sheep still while they are shorn. The shearer has to do that. Using size and strength, as we can see in the images. Which, through no fault of their own, hobbits lack.

Do you know the best way to develop strength? Work as a Farmer. But then you would know that because of your extensive personal experience with farming.

You know the other good way to deal with your size? Have smaller sheep or, you know as I already suggested, farm Goats. But honestly what are the chances of a random internet commentator actually really knowing anything about farming anyway? Giant floating eye balls of fire? Thats cool. Hobbits farming? WTF!
 

But you don't have to poke LotR very hard for it to break. For instance, hobbits have cheese, and hence presumably milk. Where do they get their milk from?

They wear woolen clothes. Where do they get their wool from?

Hobbits are about the size of children, and I can tell you from experience children aren't big or strong enough to work with sheep. Hobbits herding cows would be a sight to see! (And, very sensibly, JRRT sidesteps the whole thing. In that respect he's more interested in writing a good story than in building a world.)

I bought my copies around 10 years ago. I don't know if those editions are still in print. The stories themselves are all on Project Gutenberg as far as I know.

This whole line of discussion is, ultimately, pointless. Tolkien offers us just a few snapshots of the Shire here and there and you're trying to infer a whole system of agriculture out of it. Yes, they have cheese and no cows are mentioned. So? We don't have enough information to assume they don't have them and they aren't relevant to the story. So why even bring up the subject?

You're also assuming that being the size of children also suggests they have the underdeveloped musculature of prepubescent children. There's no reason to believe that.
 

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