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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ripzerai" data-source="post: 2856335" data-attributes="member: 38324">Right. And in those games where Baphomet is only CR 20, what I said applies - that would be the subgroup that cares more about having wild, ludicrous, yet comparatively low-level fun than creating a self-consistent setting. And that's what the default is now; that's part of the advertising for the book, that what's in this book supercedes everything previous as far as the official version of the game goes.I don't think there is a "canon" in core D&D, as (like you said) the various books and magazines contradict one another all the time. The githyanki in the Planar Handbook are "eons" old and the millennium-old Lich-Queen is 150th in her line; in Lords of Madness they're less than 2000 years old and this can't possibly be true unless the average reign of a Vlaakith is less than 7 years; in Dungeon #100 the lich-queen is killed, while she's still around everywhere else. And it's all "official," but there's no canon in the sense of a consistent storyline.There isn't a "canon," but in many cases there's a default. D&D doesn't have a canonical cosmology, but it has a default one. There's no canonical pantheon for the game, but there's a core pantheon for the sake of an example. The lords of the Abyss may not have a canonical CR, but Baphomet's default CR is 20 and if you want it to be different you're either going to have to buy an issue of Dragon or do some math homework. And I'm saying that when people say the default CRs supplied in this particular book don't make the Abyss a very consistent place, they're not wrong. They're all about the same level as rank-and-file unadvanced balors, two of them equal to balors and one even less, in a plane full of anarchic bullies with anger management problems. Even the most devout anti-epic DMs might well have problems with their players maintaining suspension of disbelief. So I'm not saying it's "canon," but I'm saying that if you accept that Baphomet is CR 20 and you accept that balors are also CR 20, then you have a situation where Baphomet is continually threatened by his own minions, who (as demons) don't really understand the concept of loyalty, only ever-shifting situational ethics (or the utter lack thereof). As a mortal ruler he might be okay, but as a demon he's in bad trouble.He said it was his intention, and what he thought might have been his fellow designer's intention, but that he didn't write that part of the book and wasn't sure. From what JoeGK said, the book states bluntly that the Abyssal rulers are rarely encountered outside of the Abyss. In other words, Erik's not the designer of that part of the book, and he seems to have been mistaken.This discussion has become very narrowly focused on this one issue, when it's a comparatively tiny part of the book, and that's wrong. But it is a real issue, a real inconsistency in the default version of the game.</blockquote>

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