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

[Greg K]

See, this is where personal experience really plays a part.

My first experiences with 3e were set in Scarred Lands. I really bought into the setting and loved it. Thing is, SL shares virtually no lore with core D&D. Every flavor element is rewritten. To the point where there are three SL specific monster manuals, a complete SL dieties guide and various other books. Outside of a PHB and a DMG, you can play SL without any WotC books.

I started with Holmes, quickly moved to AD&D, ran 2e, and 3e. Nearly every group with whom I have played ignored the D&D lore. Planescape, Spelljammer, the Blood War, the Great Wheel and the multverse were all ignored except for one DM that offered to run Spelljammer as to give me a break from DMing- his offer was promptly by the other players (myself included). Even many of the classic monsters have never appeared in any campaign in which I have run or been a player. A small sample of the creatures never used include Aaracoka, Aboleths, Blink Dogs, Beholders, Devas/Angels, Displacer Beasts, Flumphs, Githyanki, Githzerai, Mind Flayers, and Modrons. Even Drow have been pretty much non-existant in our games outside of the modules D1-3, and brief campaigns in both Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms (all during 1e)

Recently, I had a chance to play OD&D with a DM from one of the big West Coast groups of the 70's. There was no use of the Greyhawk or Blackmoor supplements. His player races were Human, Elf, Dwarf, and fairy as PC races and the monsters the opponents we encountered were humans or of his own creation or variations of existing monsters. It is possible he might have used some official monsters, but not during the session in which I was a player or observe

I've been rejecting standard D&D lore for a very, very long time.

I have as well- especially, most of the lore generated from 2e onward despite preferring to more modern D&D mechanics to pre WOTC mechanics.

 

[Shasarak]

I started with Holmes, quickly moved to AD&D, ran 2e, and 3e. Nearly every group with whom I have played ignored the D&D lore. Planescape, Spelljammer, the Blood War, the Great Wheel and the multverse were all ignored except for one DM that offered to run Spelljammer as to give me a break from DMing- his offer was promptly by the other players (myself included).

His offer was promptly what? Inquiring minds want to know!

 

[Greg K]

His offer was promptly what? Inquiring minds want to know!

lol. That is it. I am done posting until this fever thing passes. Anyway, we rejected the offer. None of the players wanted to do Spelljammer. He ended up running a boardgame like D&D (Heroquest?) instead.

 

[pemerton]

after six years of doing they're own thing and going in their own direction, they're not really even that similar.

I went to the PF SRD site and looked for some stuff with a 2016 date on it.

Here's the creature template I found:

Cursed Lord

Challenge Rating: Base creature’s CR + 2.
Defensive Abilities: Cursed lords gain the following.

Immortal Curse (Su)

Even death can’t free a cursed lord from its domain, and cursed lords that are killed return to life 24 hours later.

When a cursed lord is created, a specific condition is determined by the source of the cursed lord’s curse, which must be performed in order for the cursed lord to be permanently slain. The exact means vary with each cursed lord, are difficult but never impossible, and should be created specifically for each cursed lord by the GM.​

Weaknesses: A cursed lord gains the following weakness.

Trapped (Ex)

A cursed lord is unable to leave its domain by any means, and effects such as plane shift, shadow walk, teleport, and even wish fail. If its domain is bordered by dread fog, the mists inevitably guide the cursed lord back to its domain after 1 hour.​

Ability Scores: Wisdom –4.​

That could be straight from a 3E D&D product - it's technical framing and nomenclature is indistinguishable.

I won't post the whole of the Vigilante class, but here is enough to make the same point in relation to it:

A vigilante's class skills are Acrobatics (Dex), Appraise (Int), Bluff (Cha), Climb (Str), Craft (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), Disable Device (Dex), Disguise (Cha), Escape Artist (Dex), Intimidate (Cha), Knowledge (dungeoneering) (Int), Knowledge (engineering) (Int), Knowledge (local) (Int), Perception (Wis), Perform (Cha), Profession (Wis), Ride (Dex), Sense Motive (Wis), Sleight of Hand (Dex), Stealth (Dex), Survival (Wis), Swim (Str), and Use Magic Device (Cha).

Skill Ranks per Level: 6 + Int modifier.​

That is then followed by a table with headings and entries indistinguishable from those in my 3E PHB: base attack (including multiple attacks at +6 and +11), three save categories, and a list of special abilities, all by level, and with the special abilities set out in what follows. Here's one of the first level ones, which makes the point:

Seamless Guise (Ex)
A vigilante knows how to behave in a way that appears perfectly proper and normal for his current identity. Should anyone suspect him of being anything other than what he appears to be while either in his social or vigilante identity, he can attempt a Disguise check with a +20 circumstance bonus to appear as his current identity, and not as his other identity.​

The notion that this no more closely resembles 3E D&D than RQ does D&D of any stripe is simply laughable!

Pathfinder is also Golarion and it's world as much as its rules.

A Google of "PF FR game" turned up this as the first item (from March 2016):

There is an opening for 1 or 2 pcs in a 13th level FR Game using PF rules, set in 1252 D.R.​

I don't think that advertisement is misleading or confusing - and certainly not contradictory! I would certainly expect it to be much easier to run a 3E FR module using PF rules than (say) 4e or even 5e ones. The potential little inconsistencies wouldn't be any greater than 3E/3.5 ones - ie basically ignorable on the GM's side unless you're a stickler for PC/NPC mechanical equivalency.

New races and classes.

This doesn't make something not D&D! D&D has always had new races and classes. New monsters, new spells, new magic items, etc. The whole point of a list-based system is to add to the lists!

Marvel Comics is just the DC Universe published by a different company.

Marvel comic's superheroes owe as much to DC and Superman as PF owes to D&D. Superman and then Batman established the tropes as much as D&D established the rule framework. Many characters are interchangeable.
They use the same structures for storytelling as all comic books. They used identical looking text bubbles and simmilar font. Their art style was very simmilar in the past. If you took an unlettered page of the characters in civilian clothes, you'd be unable to tell a Marvel comic from a DC comic.
They're far more simmilar than D&D and Pathfinder.

Marvel was founded on being not DC - hence "the Marvel way", the FF not having secret identities and having interfamily squabbles, etc.

The relationship between Marvel and DC is more like that between D&D and T&T, as described here by Ken St Andre:

My objective was to make the game easy to understand, quick to play, and as humorous as I could. Multi-sided dice were the first to go. My game would use six-sided dice that anyone could get from games they already had like Monopoly. Next to go was character alignments. Why should characters be Good, Evil, or Chaotic? Nobody I knew fit into such a neat scheme.

Then I threw out attributes that didn’t make any sense. What the heck did Wisdom have to do with anything? Who needs Hit Points when the character already has Constitution? What did Charisma mean, anyway–I started out thinking of it as personal beauty and pretty quickly translated it first into leadership and then into impressiveness. I’d remember something from the D & D rules, and then I’d change and simplify it so that it made sense to me.​

C&S, RQ and RM are also reactions to D&D, though heading in a different direction from T&T.

 

[pemerton]

fireball is not unique to D&D. I know that Rolemaster had those spells back in the day.

Fireball doing 6d6 damage is a D&D idiom - which is why I used it. Rolemaster doesn't even use damage dice - it uses charts that rate damage and crit type based on the net attack roll result.

 

[pemerton]

The story and significance are not one and the same. The significance, which rests in the head of the viewer, did change. The story did not. Everything that happened in the first movie still happened, exactly the same.

This is a contentious theory of fiction.

Here are some sentences from REH's "The Scarlet Citadel":

The roar of battle had died away; the shout of victory mingled with the cries of the dying. . . .

Conan's dark scarred face was darker yet with passion; his black armor was hacked to tatters and splashed with blood; his great sword red to the cross- piece.​

Here is a possible retelling:

It was quiet now. The victims no longer screamed; they had died. The "victors'" cheers of bravado, too, had ceased. . . .

Conan's face and body were the battlefield writ small: the blood in his cheeks a testament to fury; his scarred visage a testament to agony; his tattered, bloodied armour a testament to struggle; his sword a testament to the futility of the struggle's end.​

I'm not much of a writer, and so won't try any more. But I don't think I'm writing the same story as REH. Tone and theme are pretty central elements of a fictional work.

 

[pemerton]

Funny. I read the same words in Deities & Demigods as you did. But when I started, I placed my campaign setting in the multiverse, as did the other person who took turns running. It wasn't much of a leap that if both games took place in the multiverse there could be crossovers.

What, like this?:

That is not to deny that there may have been some players who, prior to MotP, imagined all the gods in DDG as co-existing; or who imagined that every D&D setting, from the published ones like GH and Boot Hill (a setting to which Murlynd had notoriously travelled) to the setting that they once made up for a one-shot on a lazy Sunday afternoon, all co-existed as parallel prime material planes. But that view was just one possibility, and enjoyed no canonical status.

Everyone knows that some players took some PCs from one campaign to another. Gygax gives advice on how to handle that in his DMG - I even quoted bits of that in the post you're replying to.

But that doesn't show there was a canonical "multiverse". That, by default, every D&D gameworld was to be taken to be part of the one big fictional realm. Gygax is giving practical advice on how to run a game, not setting out an account of a fictional world in which every setting is deemed to coexist. As I said, that idea has its first published expression in the MotP.

If you are using the DnD rules then obviously there is common thread that runs through each separate campaign. If you use DnD Trolls and I use DnD Trolls, and you can summon Fire Elementals and I can summon Fire Elementals, and your Clerics can cast healing spells and my Clerics can cast healing spells.

So you can say that these games are happening in completely different Universes but at the same time they could very well be happening together as per the Spelljammer and/or Planescape suggestions.

Two RQ games will have the same commonality. So will two Monopolopy games! That's what happens when two groups of people play the same game with the same flavour text.

It doesn't follow, though, that the stories happen in the same fictional world.

Catch-22 is a fiction set during WWII. Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos likewise. That doesn't mean we have to take them as happening in the same world. To suppose that Yossarian and Dum Dum Dugan might have crossed paths if only one had zigged instead of zagging.

And if someone were to write a Catch-22/Sgt Fury mash-up, well, good luck to them, but that would be a third fictional world, not part of a single "multiverse".

I would argue that D&D isn't a ruleset but *includes* a ruleset. It is both rules and the baseline assumptions of it's main campaign setting (which is either or Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms).

But people were playing D&D before GH was published. And many kept playing it ignoring GH. Not to mention Blackmoor, which is clearly more primordial than FR, which wasn't anything but an allusion of some Ed Greenwood Dragon articles (hence non-canonical at that time) until the first Grey Box which came out ten years after the AD&D Monster Manual.

Trying to cabin D&D into these terms; or deny D&D status to DL and OA, both of which predate FR as published settings; is just untenable. Forget "canon" and "continuity" - that requires ignoring or rewriting the actual history of the game for it's first 15 or so years!

I've started making notes in anticipation of perhaps getting a chance to run it again - and in the course of doing that am taking out all the reference to Glantri, which seem like a distraction to me and dilute the Amber family's connection to Averoigne. Castle Amber I find rather compelling, despite its evident absurdities; Glantri, on the other hand, not at all, and especially not as a component of Castle Amber.

That's not canon or continuity. That's setting.
It doesn't sound like didn't dislike the history of Mystara or adherence to Mystara lore, you objected to the inclusion of Castle Amber in a fixed setting rather than being setting neutral.

That Stephen Amber is a prince of Glantri is canonical. (It's in X2, and I'm also pretty sure it's in the Glantri gazetteer.) I am disregarding that canon, because I find it dilutes what is compelling about Castle Amber as a module.

(I also note that, by your criteria, it seems that none of X2, Averoigne or Glantri is D&D, being neither GH nor FR!)

4e didn't really change the rules outside of the classes. The actual rules of the game were mostly the same, albeit slightly tweaked.

4e was a revolutionary step in rules *and* a repudiation of continuity. It did both at the same time, which probably made it that much harder to accept. It didn't keep all of the lore and just revise the rules, or just tweak the rules and rewrite the cosmology. It did both. So there was that much less familiar about the game.

Sorry, which claim are you making about 4e?

 

[pemerton]

Things can be of importance and value without being art.

The main categories of value I'm familiar with, and that get discussed in works on value, are morals, ethics, family/social life, and art/aesthetic value. (And maybe self-interest.) I'm not saying those categories are exhaustive or watertight, but I'm trying to establish what realm of value canon is intended to belong to. The most obvious comparison is to works of literature or film (ie other story-telling works) - which are works of art. Hence my taking art/aesthetic value as a starting point.

How on Earth can you expect someone to articulate the value that is moving them to care about canon?

I didn't think it was that outrageous a question! Criticism, critical discourse, discussion of what is valuable and why, are all pretty commonplace activities in relation to cultural activities. People explai why they like some books and not others; why they think some authors are superior to others (not necessarily the same thing); why they enjoy fly-fishing; etc.

RPGing doesn't seem significantly different in its amenability to being discussed in this way, and a RPG message board seems like an appropriate place to do that.

"WotC" is a corporate entity. It doesn't write the books. People write the books. Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford and Matt Sernet and Chris Perkins and Chris Lindsey. They don't own D&D. It's not theirs to do with as they please. They're just borrowing it.

Who owns it? From whom is it being borrowed? What duties are owed to the lenders? And what is the source of those duties?

These are the sorts of questions I am interested in hearing answer to.

 

[TwoSix]

TwoSix, my apologies. I didn't see the earlier Golorian quote and misattributed someone's response to an earlier one of your posts to you. Trying to follow the thread while running a fever is probably not a good idea.

Apology accepted and appreciated.

 

[Maxperson]

Fireball doing 6d6 damage is a D&D idiom - which is why I used it. Rolemaster doesn't even use damage dice - it uses charts that rate damage and crit type based on the net attack roll result.

Guy walking by hears..

Player:I hit him with a fireball doing 6d6

Guy walking bylaying D&D?

Player:No. Champions. My superhero can throw balls of fire. It's kinda weak, but it's fun!