[Rant] Screw Canon!

[TheAuldGrump]

There's the best response to most any argument on these boards.

Is not!

The Auld Grump, joking...

 

[Feathercircle]

I view canon the way I view the alignment system- it should be a tool rather than a straightjacket, and it exists to help establish baseline assumptions. To people familiar with it, it's a great shorthand and a good starting point. It's much easier to say "Oh, we're playing a Planescape:Torment based campaign and using the Psionics is Different option" or "It's basically standard "generic" D&D except that dwarves are the most magely of the races and kobolds are playable and a part of respectable society" than to throw someone in the deep end and describing every minute assumption of the setting.... though some people will occasionally want you to provide that level of detail.

Canon is good so that you don't go in expecting one thing and getting another. I don't want to create a cleric of Lathander for a Realms campaign and then find out that we're playing without deities. I don't want to go in with a sorcerer and plans to become a Dragon Disciple and find out halfway into the game that the DM thinks that all dragons, even metallics, should be always evil. I ESPECIALLY don't want to have a repeat of the campaign with the DM who arbitrarily changed spell descriptions on us and didn't tell us about it until after we'd selected and cast them and couldn't trade them out.

Want necromentals? Sure, go ahead. Want a monotheistic campaign with one true god? Fine by me. Want Maanzecorian to still be alive in your campaign? Cool. Want to use a completely different magic system of your own devising? Great, just let me know beforehand. I'm completely fine with deviations from canon or several completely incompatable canons coexisting side by side. I'm an anime fan- some series have upwards of half a dozen different versions to work from. Great Wheel vs 3E Faerun's Tree vs Eberron cosmology is small potatos by comparison. I'd just appreciate knowing when I should be expecting something different.

 

[Pants]

I've never had a problem with 'canon'. Somewhow, I doubt that most people here on EN World have. It's also a d20 board after all, and this should stand for 'open to new ideas'.

It's mostly the WotC boards IME, but I'd rather post a discussion here than over there...

Was that in EN World? A search for 'lichfiend' didn't turn up anything. Nor did a Google search. So can you tell me what they don't like about these creatures?

There weren't any topics devoted to the subjects per say, just posts sprinkled throughout random vaguely related topics.
A fiend can't be a lich because:
1) An outsider's soul and body form one unit, preventing it from being an undead (however, visages are undead outsiders... hmmm...)
2) This prevents an outsider from having a phylactery (it can't very well store its soul in there if it makes up part of its body...)

The same pretty much applies to the Necromental, its body and soul form one unit, preventing it from being an undead (and there's the whole Negative Quasielementals too...).

I'm not quite sure in which direction your rant targets.

It's just a general rant that, I admit, isn't very well organized nor stated. It is a rant after all.
I'm not really targeting the people who don't like when something changes, but just the people who make a habit of making needless, offtopic posts about how X and X sucks because it doesn't agree with Y pre-established information.
Yeah, I can ignore it, but when it happens ALL the time, it gets irritating...

Pants,

Uhm just curious...but how can you screw a cannon anyway...?

It involves lots of butter, 3 yards of rope, 14 monkeys, and 2 midgets. You musn't forget the midgets.

It's quite unpleasant without the butter, believe me...
Egads, I believe I've said too much.

And don't anyone believe that I'm singling out Planar Fans, because, while I sorta am, it's only because I encounter them more because I like discussing the planes usually.

 

[Testament]

Or how they revise the map of Faerun for Forgotten Realms?

What the spork? How and when did they ever do that?

 

[Staffan]

When they released FR for 3rd ed, they decided to mess a little with the map, basically pulling southern Faerûn somewhat westward. The reason given was that they didn't want to waste a quarter of the map with ocean.

 

[Sammael]

When they released FR for 3rd ed, they decided to mess a little with the map, basically pulling southern Faerûn somewhat westward. The reason given was that they didn't want to waste a quarter of the map with ocean.

A little? They moved pretty much everything around, to the point where cities in the Heartlands aren't on the same side of rivers they used to be on anymore.

I use mostly 2nd edition maps. I keep the 3e FRCS map framed and on a wall. It's not detailed enough anyhow.

 

[Faraer]

Maybe this has to do with the fact that most people understand that the 'Core' setting of Greyhawk exists as a sort of amorphous blob that is supposed to be shaped in whichever way the DM sees fit.

I dare say most Greyhawk fans who buy these books do understand that. Technically, the core setting of D&D is not the World of Greyhawk per se, but a derivative called Greyhawk Light.

Yet the planar fans DO whenever some small, stupid rule about how the Great Wheel works is broken.

I ask myself, why?

Because they want material for their campaign setting, I imagine, and it's not clear that the default D&D planes are intended as an alternate version of the traditional planar structure.

Maybe my brain is wired differently, but I see everything as a building block in order to make my game be unique.

This 'toolset' approach is the default assumption of current D&D -- whose designers realize, I'm sure, that they have to balance catering to a wide spread of people with different preferences and campaigns with presenting setting material and imagery with enough coherence to be recognizably D&D because it's that material and imagery which they're selling, as much as the broad play style and mechanics.

Kudos to every company that does something different. They may not always succeed, but at least they try.

Which argues for WotC maintaining some kind of baseline that the other d20 publishers can diverge from, no?

 

[Desdichado]

I hadn't really noticed the "echelons of fanboyism" whining about what's canon.

Check out the current threads about Forgotten Realms and cosmology...

 

[Henry]

And the really weird thing is are the fans. So, WotC releases a new book that has some new Gods, a few PrC's with organizations attached, some new monsters, and a little flavor text. Now, Greyhawk being the 'Core' D&D setting, you'd assume that this might make some GH fans angry. 'This organization doesn't belong in GH!', 'These Gods don't exist in GH!', 'These monsters shouldn't exist in Greyhawk!' should be the normal outcry whenever a new book is released, yet, there really isn't much outcry at all (usually).

...But, what I don't get is if the GH fans assume that most stuff printed in the books isn't really GH or doesn't mesh well with preexisting canon, they generally don't raise a fuss. Yet the planar fans DO whenever some small, stupid rule about how the Great Wheel works is broken.

I ask myself, why?

If I'm misunderstanding your rant, I apologize.

However, if you're saying that GH fans don't raise much fuss about canon vs. non-canon, I beg to differ. Heartily. Repeatedly. Emphatically, even. There's a quite active website called Canonfire for goodness sakes, whose main purpose is collecting info that's true to the Gygax and crew pre-1990 or so vision for Greyhawk in one place. The main reason you don't hear much any more is that a LOT of Greyhawk fans have "given up on the mess," so to speak. Not to say there's still good material now (kudoes to Erik Mona for his works with Rob Kuntz and others to get Castle Maure and the Greyhawk Map Revivified!!!) but the "kitchen sink" approach to Greyhawk since roughly 2001 through the supplement books has disappointed many fans who had lots of hope when Ryan Dancey said "Gary we'd like to work with you" in the 1999 Gencon D&D 3 intoductions.

To these fans, it's like giving aspirin to someone with debilitating back pain and saying that they've been taken care of. I personally have no opinion one or the other, but fandom is fandom, no matter where you look; you'll find just as much and as loud dissent with GH fans as you will Planescape fans, or Dark Sun Fans, or Spelljammer fans.

 

[Arnwyn]

There's a "lichfiend" template in Libris Mortis? How'd I miss that?