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.
