I use published settings all the time. I frequently see people post all the time about how they hate such settings, especially if they have a LOT of "canon" to them, like Faerun does.
Interesting. If these people all hate canon, then I wonder what they think of homebrew milieues, where they'll have to sit and memorize, or otherwise run into, the GM's personal canon? Will they hate that canon too?
Are they looking for no canon at all? Do they want to game in Wonderland, where anything and everything can appear and the local terrain can change completely from moment to moment? Perhaps a tea party with Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat shall be the order of all game sessions.
I somehow think it is less about hating canon, than hating other people's interpretation of it.
The GM thinks A, B, and C about The Forgotten Realms, and a player thinks X, Y, and Z about it. Then the player hates what the GM thinks about the setting, and suddenly the player goes on a hate-on for what he or she thinks of as canon, when it is really about interpretation.
Basically, player I'm-Right thinks that Elminster would be able to defeat Manshoon without question and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot. He or she may have even fantasized the duel a hundred times. When the GM has the player stumble upon the two in the last seconds of a duel, and Manshoon kills Elminister inside an Anti-Magic Shell so his Elminster's Evasion spell fails, and then burns the body to ashes and dumps the ashes into a Sphere of Annihilation waiting just outside the shell. Player I'm-Right then gets upset because he is certain the the GM is wrong.
I have a real world example of this.
Two friends of mine were in a 2nd Ed oWoD Vampire game in an invented USA East Coast city. One was the GM and one was a player. The low-level basics of the Camarilla, as far as cities and such go, were standard. However the GM flatly warned the entire group ahead of time that the ultimate background of oWoD was utterly different. He had made a study of Babylonian and Sumerian myth and built a new version of the oWoD background based on it. The players were all told not to use their existing knowledge of the canon oWoD material as a basis for making decisions or judgments.
I talked to both of them, separately, about the game on a consistent basis.
The player, when he talked about the game, kept going on and on about how the GM kept screwing him over in the game and how weird inexplicable things kept happening that shouldn't have happened.
The GM, meanwhile, was telling me about all the times he saw the player doing things that would make sense in a standard oWoD setting, but that didn't work because it wasn't, and were causing frustration for the player. (He was also ignoring the clues left by the GM about the correct background, while the other players were picking them up and acting on them.)
These types of situations, and variations, I think cause much of the so-called "canon" upset and frustration.
