D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....

[Alzrius]

A core rule book that came out five years after the release of the other two?

Four years. And no, there's nothing strange about that. The Monstrous Manual effectively replaced the original two Monstrous Compendium volumes, becoming the Core monster book in the process.

And don't you think that there's a reason that the Monstrous Compendium included all that Planescape stuff? Wasn't it because TSR was trying to default all planar material to Planescape? That Planescape (and to some extent Spelljammer) was to become the over setting that ties all D&D settings together?

It would make sense to include that material in a compilation book would it not?

You seem to be missing the point: it wasn't Planescape stuff if it pre-dated the creation of Planescape. How were they defaulting material to a campaign setting that didn't exist yet?

 

[Hussar]

Sigh, you folks are stuck on the idea that this is all about me disliking Planescape. That's never been the issue. To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of any published setting, but, that's not the problem.

The problem is that the default setting material, whether you want to say it's from 2e or Planescape, I don't really care, that's a pedantic semantic wank for another day, is being forced into every single setting, every single supplement and the default setting material is far from generic.

Like I said way, way back, if I want an adventure that features allied demons and devils, I have to write it myself because there is no way that you're going to get a published one that does that. Personally, I like Formorian far more than Modrons because they are much easier to use in an adventure, mostly because formorians aren't saddled with a couple of decades worth of baggage.

I simply prefer a much, much lighter touch when it comes to canon elements. I don't want to play in WOTC's game world. I want to play in my own and in order for WOTC to support what I want, they can't attach too much baggage onto various elements.

But, again, I see I'm whistling in the dark here. I'm very very much in the minority of what people want, quite obviously.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Hopefully 5e will include a robust license for 3rd-party publishers. If that happens, I can all but guarantee products that don't match up with--or even actively reject--official WotC lore.

I like the D&D lore, and I still want to see and/or work on this. The more options for inspiration, the better.

 

[Savage Wombat]

You are missing my point. Call it whatever you want, I lump it all in as Planescape, although, that's probably not correct. The point is, all the lore became graven in stone and could never be changed. Despite the fact that 2e rewrites a large amount of planar lore from 1e and then takes it several steps further by forcing all settings to conform to that lore as well.

Yes, I have been calling it all Planescape. Call it 2e then if it makes you happy. But, please, stop missing the point.

I don't dislike it because it comes from Planescape (or doesn't as the case may be). I dislike it because it becomes canon and must never be changed, altered or fixed and all subsequent material has to follow what comes beforehand.

The distinction is in how you argue.

You have previously compared Planescape Lore to elements like Dragonlance or Ravenloft - implying that the version of these creatures we describe is a niche interpretation, an offshoot from the main game. And that including PS in core materials is equivalent to having halflings be kender or minotaurs be pirates.

Instead, we are describing what was the main, core rules description of these monsters for a long period of D&D, and a period that was fairly definitive in setting the "official" lore for the D&D cosmos. And to large degrees, 3rd edition did not directly contradict most of these interpretations.

So yes, several of us would like to have 2nd edition canon, which was an elaboration, of 1st edition canon, continue into 5th edition instead of being altered into something new. And that's pretty much always the case when you're talking about canon - people like it to be official, and not randomly changed.

Or in other words - we understand that you disagree. We don't understand why you continue to assert that we're being so unreasonable.

 

[Hussar]

Hopefully 5e will include a robust license for 3rd-party publishers. If that happens, I can all but guarantee products that don't match up with--or even actively reject--official WotC lore.

I like the D&D lore, and I still want to see and/or work on this. The more options for inspiration, the better.

See, I'm not so sure. Even my Scarred Lands materials wound up referencing the core planar lore. Which made absolutely no sense for the setting.

 

[Chest Rockwell]

But, again, I see I'm whistling in the dark here. I'm very very much in the minority of what people want, quite obviously.

Yeah, sounds like D&D has never been the game for you, I would recommend you move onto a more generic RPG.

 

[Mr Fixit]

Or in other words - we understand that you disagree. We don't understand why you continue to assert that we're being so unreasonable.

To be honest, Hussar has a point. When talking about Prime Material plane, the place most adventures take place in, core books don't assume much at all, except that it's your standard medieval fantasy world, and even that isn't cast in stone as various "bolder" settings show. They don't tell you if the world is composed primarily of kingdoms, city-states, or merchant republics, how many continents there are, what races are in there (except the main ones, of course, and even those have been narrowed down in 5E), etc... Once you get to the planes, however, suddenly there's an official default cosmology with exactly these planes, flavour, and cities which are in exactly such and such relationship to one another.

Now, I'm not overly bothered by this because I'm a fluff/lore whore, and I always like an abundance of detail even if I'm going to change it. Though, I think WotC would do well to adopt a lighter touch with plane-building. Perhaps treat the Great Wheel as an example cosmology, but then provide a bunch of cool guidelines for building your own stuff, incorporating planar creatures in a custom game, etc.

 

[Nivenus]

To be honest, Hussar has a point... Once you get to the planes, however, suddenly there's an official default cosmology with exactly these planes, flavour, and cities which are in exactly such and such relationship to one another... Now, I'm not overly bothered by this because I'm a fluff/lore whore, and I always like an abundance of detail even if I'm going to change it. Though, I think WotC would do well to adopt a lighter touch with plane-building. Perhaps treat the Great Wheel as an example cosmology, but then provide a bunch of cool guidelines for building your own stuff, incorporating planar creatures in a custom game, etc.

That's not necessarily a bad idea actually and IIRC that's pretty much what the 3rd edition Manual of the Planes did: it presented the core cosmology, which represented about 80% of the book, but it also had an appendix devoted to presenting some alternative cosmological models. I wouldn't mind if WotC's inevitable planar sourcebook for 5e (whether it's a 5th edition Manual of the Planes or a new iteration of Planescape) did the exact same thing. It would even make sense from a Planescape-centered POV, given the emphasis on how little Primes really know about the multiverse and how strongly belief shapes everything.

In other words, keep the core cosmology, because it's clear a lot of people really do like it, but make it clear it's just a model and that there are other ways of looking at the same material.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The repurposing of archons as elemental warriors rather than celstial servants is clearly not, and not intended to be, an evolution of the prior canon. It is taking a cool name and attaching it to a new monster that the designers - rightly or wrongly - think is more worthy of the name.

But as for the notion of "change" vs "building", I think it is very much in the eye of the beholder. I am pretty familiar with a wide range of D&D lore - especially but not ony 1st ed AD&D - and didn't find 4e's changes "drastic". For me, they were about integration and enhancement, changing plot details to bring out thematic elements more strongly. (Which is also how WotC presented them in Worlds & Monsters.)

Sure, that might've been the intent. But I think it's important to note that what WotC thought were relevant "thematic elements" and what the PLAYERS thought were relevant thematic elements were often wildly divergent. A pretty meaty example of that is the 4e tiefling -- it grabs the "born of fiends" theme, but leaves on the table the "orphans of the planes" theme and the "unlucky birth" theme and the "many different kinds" themes in exchange for one true and unique origin for all tieflings that is common knowledge in the world and making them a race that breeds true.

The 4e tiefling is a drastic change from existing lore if those OTHER things were at all important thematic elements of the tiefling for you.

The idea that this is "disprecting" tradition is puzzling to me. It suggests a fixation on petty details of canon at the expense of thematic coherence.

An attempt to describe what people valued about a lot of monsters' stories as a "fixation on petty details of canon" is not only wildly inaccurate, it's kind of insulting. And it's the same kind of disrespect that the designers manifest in presenting One True Way.

D&D has always been a game that needs a group to tell a story. Where the book's lore intersects with what a group might find interesting in the moment is not consistent or predictable. Millions of vastly different stories spin out of blurbs of lore, and they use different elements of that lore in different ways. Bits of lore become the building blocks for different and divergent kinds of adventures, and thus become really important to those adventures, and to the experience of playing through them. Tieflings being orphans who don't know their true origins might just be a poetic flourish you ignore, or it might serve as the basis for an entire character's motivation as they seek to understand the forces that produced them, and why they are outcasts in a diverse multiverse.

In fact, at the core of this "disrespect" is the hubris a designer must manifest when they deign to tell people what is "really" important about a given creature, what is "worthy" of being the Official Theme, what is "petty" and what is somehow higher in authority, by deciding that whatever pet theme they enjoy the most is the "true core" of the fictional game element and that thus of course no one will really miss those other unimportant bits of lore. The truth is that the diverse players of this game have used almost any random element as an important building block in their stories.

5e is being more careful about that (though they aren't getting it perfect...because TIEFLING! ). The 5e salamander doesn't pretend that your 2e salamander experience was somehow flawed or invalid by presenting a new story based on what some designer thought was "really" important. It presents more information, additional context, it builds on the lore without contradicting it. That additional context may or may not be welcome or interesting, but at least it honors the experiences of those who really loved some little detail about the salamander as it was used in the past.

Integrating dwarves, giants, Moradin and the elemental planes into a story of slavery and liberation with the possibility of future fall or redemption doesn't strike me as disrepectful at all. It is respectful - displaying sensitive attention to the best in what has come before, and re-presenting it in a way that brings out that best.

See, "the best" is a judgement call, a bit of subjectivity that reasonable people can disagree with. And it's inherently judgmental and more than a little egotistical to MAKE that judgement call: "Oh. I get to say what is The Best, and whatever I DON'T say is The Best is not worth the time to worry about, because it is not what I say is The Best. Whatever these millions of other fans think is The Best is either in accord with my designation, or they're not worth listening to."

This isn't a beauty contest. Mearls has said that the job of a designer of D&D is to support the players of D&D, and that support means letting the groups make that judgment call. No dork in Renton can tell millions of people what they all should find interesting or worthwhile, especially with regards to things that they have already been using for 40+ years.

Arranging all those elements into that One True Story is saying that every group that follows some other story is doing it wrong, is doing it "not the best," is somehow not getting what is "really" important. But that's bass-ackwards: groups determine for themselves what is really important, because the best group experiences are customized to that group and not decided from on high. WotC's job is to support what we say is important, to empower DMs to make that call themselves, not to tell us what should be important.

You may as well say that the X-Men movies are disrepectful to the comic canon because they focus on theme and broad-brush elements rather than every bit of accreted detail of mutiple decades of serial publication.

The IMMENSELY IMPORTANT bit you're missing here is that all X-men stories are passively consumed as told by other people. They can be good or bad, but they are not our stories to tell.

D&D is our story to tell. It isn't Mearls's, or Wyatt's, or Crawford's. Or Gygax's or Cook's or Mentzer's, for that matter. People determined long before this One True Story was written down what they liked and didn't like about a given rules element, and it is disrespectful to those stories that have come before to imagine that you have the authority to determine for others what their stories should be.

5e's more cautious approach doesn't suffer from that disrespect as much as 4e's did, for sure. The 5e cosmology, like the stories of 5e monsters, seems to make a concentrated effort not to invalidate what came before, but to try and build on it. Of course, there's places where they ignore this -- for some reason everyone uses the Weave now which is just *facepalm*.

And for clarity: If someone doesn't like 4e, that's his/her prerogative - I'm not arguing with that. I'm arguing with this notion of "change" vs "building", of "disprespect". I am strongly of the view that 4e built on past D&D in a deeply respectful way.

That might just be because you agree with the designers when they chose thematic elements to make central. My point is that it is not up to the designers to choose those thematic elements for us, it is up to each group to use the elements that they find the most thematically resonant for their own group in the moment, and the designers merely need to help us do that.

A story of slavery and liberation with elementals and dwarves might not be a story I'm really all that interested in telling. I mean, for me personally, introducing the themes of slavery into my games in ANY respect just sucks the fun out of the experience because for me, slavery was first and foremost that trans-Atlantic horror show of the Colonial-to-Civil War period in America whose echoes are still felt very personally by people I consider friends and mentors and I am not going to try and address that level of serious pain and suffering in a game about magical elves that I play as a bit of escapism and fun.

I'm not everyone, of course, and I wouldn't necessarily say it's anything more than objectively worse for me, but the delightful thing D&D can do is adapt to my own personal desires and quirks and insisting that One True Story about slave-dwarves is the best D&D story that people can tell and the only story that's going to get any support doesn't help me play more and better D&D, it just makes me never want to use elementals and dwarves and giants and that whole sordid plotline.

 

[Desdichado]

That's not necessarily a bad idea actually and IIRC that's pretty much what the 3rd edition Manual of the Planes did: it presented the core cosmology, which represented about 80% of the book, but it also had an appendix devoted to presenting some alternative cosmological models.

Of all the books from the 3e/3.5 era, Manual of the Planes and Unearthed Arcana were by far my favorites... precisely because they gave DMs tools with which to do his own thing.