Forgotten Realms: Do players care about canon?

[Nightfall]

Welcome to another "WTF" by Diaglo.

 

[NiTessine]

My players? Not as a rule, not really, no. Most of them have never really concerned themselves with the in-depth workings of the Realms.

But I care.

To me, one of the great joys in crafting a Forgotten Realms campaign is in carefully fitting a campaign seamlessly within the published canon.

There does exist a concept of "my Realms", mostly in that changes wrought by adventures in previous campaigns can be spotted by characters who cross their predecessors' paths. For the most part, though, these changes have been very minor, such as the burning of the inn in Deadsnows and the mayor's manor in Nashkel, and, well, littering the width and breadth of the known world with their rotting corpses and rusting weapons.

The biggest deviation from the current Realms is that I kept the old 2E cosmology. The current version is what most sages believe the Planes to be like. I happen to be very fond of my Planescape books.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I guess I'm in the minority then, cause the experiences I've had, many players keep asking "Why is Orcus still alive?! Why is Damara a hellhole? What?! Why did you put Santucary in this dive?!"

It's this kind of stuff that made me switch over to Scarred Lands.

And as you switched over to the Scarred Lands, were any of the players interested enough to buy all the books and fiction and question you on those things and if so, did you quit the Scarred Lands and move onto another campaign?

 

[Mystery Man]

And as you switched over to the Scarred Lands, were any of the players interested enough to buy all the books and fiction and question you on those things and if so, did you quit the Scarred Lands and move onto another campaign?

I was kind of thinking the very same thing...

 

[JoeGKushner]

I was kind of thinking the very same thing...

That's one of the reasons why switching to another published campaign is a straw man arguement for me.

If you have a powergamer or some other type of poor role player whose out to get a foot up on you as a GM and can't say no or don't want to argue about it, the only thing to do is home brew. Anything else, even the vaguely described Wilderlands, leaves you open to confrontation if no immediatly as the product comes out, some point down the line as gamers get more interested in the setting and buy their own products.

 

[diaglo]

I run a FR game, but only loosely adhere to canon. The locations and histories are mostly the same, but some of the magic is different, the gods are less directly invovled, the famous names are mostly just old legends and so on. While the Time of Troubles happened, no one really knows what it was. Tilverton still exists, the City of Shade doesn't, there's no such thing as Spellfire, etc.

I feel I've removed those things that bug me most about the Realms (uber-NPC celebrities, world-shattering events once per year) and have allowed the players to have a greater impact on the setting as a whole. My players don't seem to mind the changes.

DMRyan: (prattling on in the background to a n00bie gamer): yadda, yadda, yadda
playerGlenn: So I think we need to find another DM. Anyone interested?
diaglo: Not me. Unless you want to play some Olde Skool D&D.
playerShayne: I could run a journeyman level campaign in my homebrew. Diaglo played in it. He can fill you in on the details
diaglo: (look of terror, oh no not again) Glenn, why don't you run something. Anything for us.
playerGlenn: Okay, give me some time to dig out some of my notes and I'll email everyone a schematic.



a couple weeks later...


DMOlgar: So I sent everyone the basics of the campaign. Tell me what you want to play and we will work on building party unity. Only stipulation is that everyone come from Mistledale in the Forgotten Realms.
diaglo: Are we using canon?
DMOlgar: I made some notes on what won't be included.
playerShayne: Where's Ryan?
DMOlgar: I... er... didn't invite him to the campaign.

Read the Story hour in my sig for the rest of the details..

 

[NiTessine]

And as you switched over to the Scarred Lands, were any of the players interested enough to buy all the books and fiction and question you on those things and if so, did you quit the Scarred Lands and move onto another campaign?

Dude, he was in the books. We respect his authority.

A couple of us did actually buy a substantial pile of SL stuff. I think one of the other players got the entire game line, and my Scarred Lands purchases number seventeen, all because of Nightfall's campaigns.

And in any case, questioning the DM's decisions about the setting material is bad form, and should not really be done with any setting, be it Realms, Lands or Kingdoms. Obviously, I didn't play in his FR campaign.

 

[Imruphel]

We use canon except we've fallen behind on some of the more recent series of novels.

We've agreed not to use the Driz'zt and the orcs storyline at all because such a major plot point from the Silver Marches accessory is for the PCs to resolve.

The next campaign will be set in the Great Dale of the Unapproachable East safe from any novels that have been either published or announced.

As a group, we really appreciate the sense of verisimilitude that FR canon provides. The trick is making sure that the novels don't wreck this (fortunately only one of the players reads the novels).

 

[JoeGKushner]

Dude, he was in the books. We respect his authority.

A couple of us did actually buy a substantial pile of SL stuff. I think one of the other players got the entire game line, and my Scarred Lands purchases number seventeen, all because of Nightfall's campaigns.

And in any case, questioning the DM's decisions about the setting material is bad form, and should not really be done with any setting, be it Realms, Lands or Kingdoms. Obviously, I didn't play in his FR campaign.

So you have to be a published author to change canon?

I think it's great that Nightfall was able to help sell the SL setting so well to his players. It doesn't invalidate the question of would he quit it if confrontated about the "canon" aspect of it though.

I agree that it's bad form to question the DM in any setting but since many peopel claim that instead of X being a fantastic setting, that they went to it because it didn't have a lot of published work or an extnesive history, I'd like to know what happens when X does have more details or players know X better than the GM. Do they then switch to campaign Y?

People should switch campaign settings because a new campaign has something that interests them, not because players know more than they do.

 

[wedgeski]

As usual, it's all about player expectations. It's one thing to say "Here's my homebrew" and slyly drop bits and pieces in from an established world which the players may find wryly familiar, it's another thing entirely to say "We're going to play int he Forgotten Realms" and then turn FR canon upside-down because that's your 'vision'. If you're going to do that, you'd better have a good in-game reason for, say, the Harpers to be homicidal psychopaths bent on global domination, or else you're going to most likely have a bunch of peed-off players.

IME players don't tend to care about canon as much as they care about their DM being straight with them (there have been other threads on that point lately).