D&D 5E (2014) The Debate of "Canon" in D&D 5E

[jgsugden]

Whoever holds the keys, determines canon. We saw it in Star Wars when the 'canon' changed so that they could make a new trilogy unfettered by the novels that had been deemed canon.

However, In RPGs, Canon serves a different purpose than in movies. It is a fixed starting point from which aparticualr campaign world will diverge.

Some of those divergences will be "out of game", such as a DM deciding that a notable NPC in a published setting is actually a fiend in disguise before the players take one step in his world, and others occur during play as events unfold that change the world of the players.

However, if I join a new group and they tell me the campaign is set in the Forgotten Realms, I know generally what the baseline for the game is and can ask for the things that separate that world from the canon elements of the setting.

To that end - we have a bunch of different canon settings in the FR. We have the snapshot from the first Grey Boxed set, the 3E version following the Time ofTroubles, the 4E version following the Spellplague, and the 5E reboot. When I run the FR, I always run it from the same starting point - Eveningstar - 1357 DR. The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar take on different forms every time I run it, but the world around it is essentially the same.

Just adjust the way you think of canon based upon how we use it in the game, not how it is used in movies.

 

[cmad1977]

Canon is for fodder.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

What people do at their tables is totally seperate from Canon, only official products matter for what is canon and what has to remain consistent with Canon.

I do find it interesting how you seem to defend the existence of Canon, when the Acq. Inc. book seems to be canonical and yet is something I know you find personally distasteful.

 

[Fenris-77]

That's what happens when you misapply definitions.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The streaming and the videogames, but to create a true classic or smashing-hit is a true challenge, nor even the best studios have found the right key, at least without a lot of time and work but without crunch. They tried a Dragonlance animated movie and they failed. Even with transformers, its best cinema blockbuster, in the last movie were too burnt and they had to reset with a reboot.

Sometimes I have joked about a D&D version of most popular Hasbro franchises (transformers and my little pony) but also it was half seriously half joking. "Endless Quest" gamebooks were a good hook, but not it is a different age. Children are used now to internet and videoconsoles. Today Marvel makes more money with the toys than the own comics and teleseries could help DC to start a new gold age for lesser famous superheroes. It is a good age for franchises from comic industry, but not so good for comics for children.

I have also suggested in the past a new Dungeon-Crawling board game, "Endless Quest", with simple rules easy to be learn by +7, or +10y, children, and maybe with a app for tablets to be the AI as DM in solo games.

The media titles for little and big screen are maybe the best advertising, but they need a lot of time and money. The adventage is the best authors you can hire are working there, but also this means these will have the keys to alter the lore.

 

[the Jester]

Reboots are when a world is essentially "restarted." A good example is DC Comics' New 52, when the comic company only released 52 comic lines from it's main superhero world. These 52 were all replacing not just the previous comic lines, but also the very fiction that preceded it; no piece of fact printed before could be treated as an event that the current "versions" of characters had experienced. This Batman, though still Bruce Wayne, had been restarted.

Each edition of D&D, the entire multiverse has been in effect "rebooted," though I don't think that word has ever been used. The very cosmology and order to the universe has been reshaped from edition to edition, and large changes implemented among various worlds, like Forgotten Realms in its Sunderings.

Those aren't reboots. Those are world-shaking events, but they don't change the past, which I'd argue is a key (and awful) element of a reboot- you don't know if past stories still happened or not. With D&D, all the past stories are still in canon, but the lens we see things through- the game rules- has been revised. To use your comics analogy, rather than being like a comic book reboot, each new edition is more like a new creative team has taken over the writing, editing, and art on the book. You might say that, to use the X-Men as an analogy, 1e was the classic Kirby/Lee early X-Men, 2e was the Neil Adams era, 3e was Chris Claremont's run, etc.

The difference is that, in the Claremont run, you knew that the events of the first X-Men story involving Unus the Untouchable happened, but after the New 52 reboot, you don't even know whether a given character (say, Pulsar Stargrave) ever existed at all.

Other worlds like Dark Sun get an even more traditional reboot, where events are reset into an earlier timeline, as 4E did.

That I can buy as a reboot.

The second piece of D&D canon, which throws the whole concept of canon for D&D into doubt, is that of the home-table. As many WotC writers and developers have said, although there are several "official" or "canonical" explanation for ever world and the multiverses cosmology, none of them actually impact people's hometable. Meaning, when you play a game of D&D at home, you do not impact official canon in any way; even if you're playing in Forgotten Realms, you are in effect playing in a "fan fiction" FR, one that has no impact on actual canon. For this reason, you can kill the entire Council of Waterdeep, and you're not "playing the game wrong." It is your table.

A couple of things here.

First, I agree with the overall conclusion. However, every home game has its own canon. My version of the World of Greyhawk had an in-canon invasion by Dragonarmies inspired by Tiamat/Takhisis' success in Krynn. That was never canon for anyone else's table (probably), but it was for mine.

Also, keep in mind that things like cosmology are never more than the best guesses of mortal sages. Want to explain a change in cosmology? It's a new perspective or theory on how things fit together, which may or may not be any more accurate than the last version. It's like when we discover that classical Newtonian physics actually only looks right to a certain point, and then we need to add elements of relativity- it doesn't actually change anything in the world by itself, it just opens up new possibilities for us over time. In other words, relativity doesn't make cell phones, but understanding it allows us to do so.

Why must we use canon as a weapon, when it is simply but a handy tool provided to quickstart a game?

May we all take a deep breath, and accept there is no D&D canon that needs to matter.

I agree with the basic sentiment- though, again, each table's canon matters a great deal to that table. But we should all be able to agree that my table's canon need not affect any other table's canon, and vice-versa.

 

[dave2008]

What people do at their tables is totally seperate from Canon, only official products matter for what is canon and what has to remain consistent with Canon.

However, can't those just be stories and not be canonical? Heck, there are storiee in my family that have been repeated as if they are fact (aka canon), that I am pretty sure now are mostly fabrications, and that is just in the last 100+ years!

 

[Fenris-77]

The idea of canon is very much influenced by the godlike perspective allowed by fiction and amplified in the case of TTRPGs by very nature of the information in the supplements. There's no half or remembered truths, there's no history written by the victor, there's no interpretation of fact to determine cause and effect. In this way it bears very little resemblance to actual history, but is very much informed by issues of control and definition. If you want to posit the existence of a 'canon' then you can say with absolute certainty that X is the case and Y is not.

I don't think this is actually important for D&D, at least not when the information extant is already mostly rationalized, and when the use of any part of that information is entirely at the discretion of the DM. The existence of small discrepancies isn't going to seriously impact any notion of shared world, or at least it shouldn't when any given table isn't using the whole set of lore available all at one time anyway.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I don't mind too much the canon as player or collector, but more as novels reader.

Sometimes the stories are good, but there is a strange feeling. The History doesn't change too much until the main characters appear and the most important happenings are always linked with them.

 

[Eltab]

A "living world" is a fundemtally terrible idea in an RPG because it completely nullifies player agency. It's impossible for their choices to have any effect on the world, and any official adventures have to be a hard railroad (see: Dragonlance).

Living Forgotten Realms says Hi. Each new adventure included a feedback form so groups could describe " what happened " in their play. After a certain length of time, new adventures presumed the most frequent result from those report forms was "the way it worked out".