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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 7902660" data-attributes="member: 1210">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.That I can buy as a reboot.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.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.</blockquote>

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