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

[FormerlyHemlock]

Lore should also sometimes be exciting or even confronting. It should make you think about some element of the fiction in a way that you otherwise woudln't have - to shed some new light on what it means to have a certain hook or role. It shouldn't just be a lullaby, or the written equivalent of comfort food.

I agree. It would be a huge improvement if the MM even just had three or four rumors (alleged factoids, possibly contradictory) about each monster. But no, they spend half their space on listing combat stats and the other half on cliched vagaries:

Orcs gather in tribes that exert their dominance and satisfy their bloodlust by plundering villages, devouring or driving off roaming herds, and slaying any humanoids that stand against them. After savaging a settlement, orcs pick it clean of wealth and items usable in their own lands. They set the remains of villages and camps ablaze, then retreat whence they came, their bloodlust satisfied.

I mean, really? What did that tell me that I wouldn't have assumed anyway from watching Lord of the Rings? Compare that with these juicy rumors:

Orcs are what happens when teen mothers drink during pregnancy in a fantasy world

Orcs are not a separate race, but instead all elves wearing masks!

Orcs are the reflection of man from a once distant dimension merged with ours. Neither can achieve their potential while the other exists, and this is knowledge only the orcs have. Killing humans is a deeply spiritual duty for an Orc, even if it's not something they [speak of] often.

They are simply angry over centuries of bigotry

Try and tell me that those four lies(?) don't spark more fun adventure ideas than the MM entry. What about a rural village filled with people who actually believe lie #2 about elves in masks, and consequently hate elves for atrocities committed by orcs? Who do you think might have been planting those rumors and why? (Maybe a demon?) Or what if in this campaign, it's actually true, in whole or in part? What if elves sometimes do dress up like orcs in order to commit atrocities? What if the players are attacked by orcs who try to steal their treasure, but when they examine the corpses very closely, they turn out to be elves in masks--a sort of elvish Klu Klux Klan? What then? The story doesn't quite write itself but it's going somewhere that the MM isn't.

The MM is not evocative, and not inspiring.

 

[Maxperson]

Chuck Norris squares off against someone wielding a katanna....

Chuck Norris easily crushes the interloper wielding a fake katana.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] - thanks for dropping by the thread!

Your comment about anondyne/banal orc descriptions vs what might-have-been is one I agree with.

From my perspective, it is a similar point to my comments about doppelganger "lore". My view is that some of this banal lore is not only not useful, but can be a deadweight on dynamic or imaginative gameplay. Do you have any thoughts about that?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] - thanks for dropping by the thread!

Your comment about anondyne/banal orc descriptions vs what might-have-been is one I agree with.

From my perspective, it is a similar point to my comments about doppelganger "lore". My view is that some of this banal lore is not only not useful, but can be a deadweight on dynamic or imaginative gameplay. Do you have any thoughts about that?

[embarrassed look] Haha, well, there's a lot of thread to digest and I haven't finished it yet. I read some of your posts on doppelganger lore but I didn't quite get the point you seem to be making here about deadweight. Perhaps I need to go further back in time and read earlier posts to understand your context.

(How far do I need to go back to catch the point where this thread turns from talking about setting cannon to talking about the MM?)

 

[Maxperson]

[embarrassed look] Haha, well, there's a lot of thread to digest and I haven't finished it yet. I read some of your posts on doppelganger lore but I didn't quite get the point you seem to be making here about deadweight. Perhaps I need to go further back in time and read earlier posts to understand your context.

(How far do I need to go back to catch the point where this thread turns from talking about setting cannon to talking about the MM?)

Page 77/Post 1533 is where I would start it.

 

[Shasarak]

Here's my take on continuity: it is a double edged sword.

I think that is something that everyone can agree with.

 

[pemerton]

(How far do I need to go back to catch the point where this thread turns from talking about setting cannon to talking about the MM?)

Maybe 50-100 posts?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I dispute the claim that "there was a lot of content there". There are a lot of words there - I counted them as 700-odd.

But there is not a lot of content there.

Being told that a monster is grey, hairless and with a thick hide (when I already knew, from its stats, that it is AC 5) is not significant content. How often has the issue of doppelganger body hair ever come up on a game? Or the thickness of its hide?

And how does it improve anyone's game to be told that the AC 5 is due to thick hide rather than (say) agility, or luck, or magic, or some combination thereof?

Pemerton, I'm still reading through this thread and I was intending to save my comments until the end, but I have to speak up now on a couple of scores:

(1) You're basically right that "impressive" is probably not the right word to describe 2nd edition Doppelganger lore. It's nothing like as good as OSR lore. It's impressive to me compared to the 5E MM's Doppelganger entry but it's not uncontrversially a masterpiece of impressiveness. If MaxPerson had used a milder word we might not be having a semantic argument right now over what impresses who.

(2) There's nothing contradictory about being "basically lazy" and yet also careful planners and diligent about things that have a high payoff. Actually that's an excellent description of me. The classical description of a computer programmer: someone who is so fundamentally lazy he will spend three days writing a program to save himself five minutes, just so he never has to do that five-minute task ever again. Some people say you have to be lazy to be a good programmer, though that's probably overstating things. It's easy to imagine a Doppelganger with the exact same mindset: work like crazy for three weeks to get yourself into a position where you'll have luxury for decades.

(3) Having a defined appearance for a doppelganger does enable certain stories. The first thing that comes to my mind is, "The King's best general has gone missing, and a hairless rubbery gray humanoid was found dead in the general's locked apartment. We think the Greys, whoever they are, must have kidnapped him, but he fought and managed to kill one of them, giving us our best clue! You're being paid to track them down and get him back!" Of course savvy players will jump right to the next phase of the adventure, "There was no kidnapping. It was a doppelganger all along--don't look for the general, try to figure out how long the doppelganger has been here and how much damage he's done, and who was paying him."

(It will turn out if players investigate that the Greys also "must" have poisoned the general, because his food has traces of poison, which provides yet more confirmation for the doppelganger theory and also raises troubling questions of its own.)

Of course we also know from doppelganger lore that the doppelganger was almost certainly being paid because being a top general is a high-stress position, and doppelgangers are basically lazy so wouldn't assume that kind of position merely for fun. It's not surprising that a powerful wizard might be involved, because hey, it's D&D, but at least we have explicit confirmation that doppelgangers are often associated with wizards for historical reasons, as opposed to, say, the drow. Hey, there's a powerful wizard on the border of the kingdom--he's supposed to be neutral in the Unhuman Wars but this doppelganger thing makes me think maybe he's not neutral, or maybe he might know someone in wizard circles who isn't. "Let's go check him out." Etc.

(3) It was not unheard-of in AD&D times for one PC to play under multiple DMs. I don't do that much nowadays but I understand that this still happens in 5E at Adventurers' League events, etc. To players in these campaigns it's genuinely useful to have explicit lore on the fact that doppelgangers have an appearance, and this is what it is, because otherwise different DMs would all make up different things and everyone would get confused.

(4) From a DMing angle, it warms my heart to be reminded that the 2nd edition MM includes information on Doppelganger psychology and motivations. All one tribe (so, high degree of social connectivity, probably a good grapevine, check--can make doppelgangers the rumormongers of the fantasy world); basically lazy but careful planners; not loners, operate in small bands; resolve conflicts by flight. Regardless of AC and combat abilities, it sounds like these guys aren't even supposed to be a combat challenge--they will rabbit early and often and fight only if cornered. All of these things tell me whether and in what manner the PCs are likely to come into conflict with the Doppelgangers in their midst, and how the Doppelgangers are likely to react. Contrast this with the 5E MM which gives about 25% as much information on doppelganger psychology ("work alone or in small groups, size unspecified"--well, I guess at least now I know there aren't any doppelganger nations out there, so it's at least half as useful as knowing that they operate in bands of 3-12; "might have daddy issues if you read between the lines", which is actually a cool bit of lore if you pick up on it) and perhaps a comparable amount of information on habits and tactics ("might has an imprisoned original around somewhere"; "seduces women and produces changelings").

When I grab a monster out of a book, its combat stats are a part of what I'm interested in, just in case it comes to a fight, but even more I want to know, "If there's a fight, what is the fight about?" An MM entry which says, "Slaads will fight to the death for a pickle because they love the taste so much" tells me an easy way to inject a Slaad into my story, and a dramatic question for the players to engage with: "Can you stand to let a Slaad lick all the pickle juice off you after you fell into that vat? If not, can you stop him?" 5E tends to assume that things will fight your PCs because the PCs are there, which is even sillier because 5E is set up so that fighting PCs is suicide, so why are all these things committing suicide-by-PC constantly? In this context it is even more important to have motivations for your monsters, and it's very helpful to have a motivation right there in the MM so that I've got a plot seed even if I have already used up all my good ideas for tonight and I literally just rolled this monster up on a random encounter table.

So the 2nd edition MM lore is, if not "impressive", at least "quite helpful".

(5) But I certainly wouldn't object to a MM with a few brilliantly-creative rumors per monster, like these:

They stole the source of true names and fled where only the damned go. They have returned, paying another price; their own visage. They imprinted the book on each of their souls, allowing them to take any form. You may have them do a task for you, but you must give your name to the book, allowing them the right to use your own face

When unconscious they revert back to their natural form

They are the liquid sea-formed soldiers of chaos, walking among the stone of the land to destroy law and all its stable forms. That war never ended

Doppelgangers are able to alter their voice to reproduce any sound

They evolved in a dungeon environment to take advantage of large groups of unorganized men. A party with more hirelings then it can keep its eye on at once is particularly prone to a doppelganger infestation

Some of these rumors (like the "unconscious reversion" one) become even more fun for the DM if they are false.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

From my perspective, it is a similar point to my comments about doppelganger "lore". My view is that some of this banal lore is not only not useful, but can be a deadweight on dynamic or imaginative gameplay. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Okay, I've now caught up on the thread and am ready to answer your question.

(1) The 2nd edition Monster Manual contains some advice on doppelgangers' habits that might be obvious to an experienced DM.

(2) I don't mind having that information there. I wish the 5E MM was better at calling out certain tactics and behaviors instead of forcing DMs to infer it from the combat stats. In some cases I question whether the 5E authors even invented the tactical patterns I see implicit in the combat stats, or if they just invented whatever they felt like and I'm the one putting it together into a sensible whole. E.g. did they realize that 5E wolves' proning attack enables hit-and-run pack tactics? If so, they sure didn't do a good job of ensuring that most 5E DMs would be aware of and actually run wolves using hit-and-run tactics a la goblin conga line but with the opportunity attack at disadvantage to boot.

So I don't mind at all that the 2nd edition MM is telling you, "Don't use these guys in a straight-up fight."

(3) The 2nd edition MM allocated at least a page for (almost) every monster, so having that information doesn't necessarily steal space from more evocative information--it might just reduce the amount of whitespace on that page of the MM.

(4) Despite all of the above, clearly the Doppelganger entry could have used some attention from Strunk & White and a good copy editor. It's not tightly-written.

(5) In terms of evocative and inspiring lore, it's possible to do much, much better.

Ultimately, we all get better at stuff as we gain life XP. Er, I mean, life experience. Therefore, I'm not particularly upset that 2nd edition's MM from way back when has some holes that I might like to patch three decades later in 2017. I am a little bit miffed that 5E's MM is in fact worse, not better, but either way I can fix it with the help of the Internet.

 

[Remathilis]

I agree. It would be a huge improvement if the MM even just had three or four rumors (alleged factoids, possibly contradictory) about each monster. But no, they spend half their space on listing combat stats and the other half on cliched vagaries:



I mean, really? What did that tell me that I wouldn't have assumed anyway from watching Lord of the Rings? Compare that with these juicy rumors:



Try and tell me that those four lies(?) don't spark more fun adventure ideas than the MM entry. What about a rural village filled with people who actually believe lie #2 about elves in masks, and consequently hate elves for atrocities committed by orcs? Who do you think might have been planting those rumors and why? (Maybe a demon?) Or what if in this campaign, it's actually true, in whole or in part? What if elves sometimes do dress up like orcs in order to commit atrocities? What if the players are attacked by orcs who try to steal their treasure, but when they examine the corpses very closely, they turn out to be elves in masks--a sort of elvish Klu Klux Klan? What then? The story doesn't quite write itself but it's going somewhere that the MM isn't.

The MM is not evocative, and not inspiring.

And the first module that uses orcs as more than pie-guardians proves which of these are true.

Which is going to be a problem with any module: the story of the drow wasn't written in the MM (which was written as rumors and legend) but in D1-3 and Q1, when the PCs faced them and visited thier cities. No matter what you do then, the drow were linked to spiders, Lolth, and the underdark. It took Eberron to try something new and even that was cut/paste replacement of scorpions for spiders.

For the kind of D&D that doesn't tie anything down, you have to get rid of modules, supplements (beyond pure crunch) and novels. That makes for a very limiting publishing schedule for any game designer. Alternatively, you have to publish support for every option, and hope there is enough players using the "elves with masks" option to warrant the design and development of a module with them.

In short, unless the game never develops beyond the core rules, a Canon will develop.

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