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.
Yeah, sounds like D&D has never been the game for you, I would recommend you move onto a more generic RPG.
The D&D that I have played the most is 1st ed AD&D and 4e. The "canon" for the latter is in no great tension with the "canon" for the former, provided you're happy to ignore appendix 4 of the AD&D PHB.
I have little interest in playing a game that adheres with great faith to 2nd ed AD&D lore, as I'm not a big fan of 2nd ed AD&D. How WotC should respond to my lack of interest is a commercial decision for them, of course. But I don't see how it implies anything like "D&D was never the game for me". Unless somehow 1st ed AD&D and 4e don't count as D&D?
Actually, the D&D Cosmology has been firmly in place since AD&D 1E, in the appendices of the DMG. It really is "The D&D Cosmology" (which initially appears in the AD&D 1E PH, on page 121)... it got expanded in 2E, and in 3E, mostly ignored for 4E.
See, I don't get this claim that 4e "mostly ignore" the D&D cosmology.
4e has Mount Celestia, where Bahamut and Moradin stand watch against evil. It has the 9 hells, with the layers and rulers as set out by Ed Greenwood in Dragon and the AD&D MM2, subject to subsequent Planescape permutations. It has an Abyss ruled by Demogorgon who fights with Orcus and Graz'zt. It has Lolth, the Demon Queen of Spiders. It has spirits of the orcish dead warring eternally with spirits of the goblin dead. It has Sigil.
This is all classic D&D cosmology.
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.
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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
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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.
I can't really agree with what you say, for two reasons.
First, you are assuming that any difference of artistic preference entails that one party is disrespecting the views of the other. This seems to me obviously wrong. Wagner's reworking of Nordic legend is different from Tolkien's. Both are different from Beowul or the Eddas. Does this mean that these works are "disrespectful" of each other? The suggestions seems to me to be ridiculous.
Left to my own devices, I meld all the D&D fiends into one big pool, but treat Charon as not a fiend at all but a lord of the ethereal plane. 4e follows D&D tradition and keeps demons and devils seperate, but merges daemons into demons, fairly consistently with the way that Gygax treated them in D3. The 4e authors aren't disrespecting me by treating demons and devils as different, despite my own inclination to run them together; and when I GM 4e I follow their lead. Both my approach, and the 4e approach, might be different from how you might want to use fiends, or how the Planescape authors used them, but where is the disrespect?
Second, any new lore - what you describe as non-disrespectful "building" - is going to contradict someone's game. For instance, all the Planescape stuff about "yugoloths" and what-have-you contradicts the use to which I have put daemons in my games in the past. The 4e take on the Blood War, which links it to the central theme of "the shard of evil" that has corrupted an otherwise perfect world, is much more interesting to me and more consistent with how I have run my games in the past.
"Building" rather than "reconcepting" is only "more respectful" under the assumption that everyone is just following along with the published lore and metaplot, updating as they go. Which is completely at odds with your own comments about the game being something that people play. And seems much more in line with [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION]'s remarks about "fossilisation in amber", and treating the
output of someone else's play as the input and straitjacket for your own.
The truth is that the core of this "disrespect" is WotC (and TSR before them) telling people that the way they like to play the game is not the way WotC wants them to play the game.
Your years of dwarves not being slaves to giants or demons and devils cooperating for The Greater Evil or fat halflings or magic not being part of the Weave is something WotC has rejected because they have this better idea that everyone should do and so they're going to act like everyone is doing it for the next decade.
Any new lore will have this effect. Because thri-keens are in the MM2, or in the 5e MM, does that mean they have to be part of my gameworld?
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.
I dont agree with this at all. Canon is passively consumed, too. If it's not, then it's not "canon", and the fact that the designers say A rather than B is irrelevant.
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.
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D&D has always been a game that needs a group to tell a story
Either people are telling their own stories, using bits and pieces of the material provided by the designers as props for those stories, or they are singing along to someone else's songsheet.
If the former, then new lore, old lore, lore that emphasises contintuity of theme over continuity of detail, is all just grist to the mill.
Only if the latter is the case does it matter if what the designers say now about the natural or mythical history of some creature is different from what they said ten years ago. If people are making up their own stories, but prefer what was said ten years ago, then they can just keep on using those old props. Like when I recently ran a (Burning Wheel) game set in Greyhawk I pulled out my original folio maps rather than my From the Ashes or LG maps.
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.
My response to this is the same as in my earlier post: I think that my experiences of loving the meaning of some story element is better honoured by making it the best it can be.
[MENTION=3887]Mallus[/MENTION] once described a lot of D&D commentary as "literary criticism by and for engineers". That's what I feel I'm seeing here: an insistence that "really loving some little detail about the salamander as it was used in the past" is more important, and more worthy of honour, than "really loving some thematic feature of the salamander as it was presented in the past". I don't accept that valuation. And I think attempting to capture and better present theme, even if it means sacrificing detail, is not disrespectful. It's just valuing theme over detail. That is a completely reasonable artistic judgement.
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
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That might just be because you agree with the designers when they chose thematic elements to make central.
Two things.
First, I can differ from judgements the designers make yet not judge them to be disrespecting past material. For instance, I personally think hill giants have more in common with ogres than with elemental giants, and in part for that reason probably won't use 4e hill giants and earth titans. That doesn't mean I think the 4e designers were disrespectful in trying to fit hill giants into the elemental framework. I believe that they were sincerely trying to do something worthwhile for the game.
Second, any design is by your lights "more than a little egotistical". Deciding what bits of the salamander to amplify, and therefore what parts of existing players' campaigns you might "invalidate", is no different from deciding what you think is best about a creature. A designer has to decide what to do with what has come before, what is worth preserving, and what is worth changing. (For instance, the intellect devourer has been changed from a name-level threat to a low-level one. The 5e rust monster cannot affect magic weapons. By your lights, how do you avoid concluding that these are "more than a little egotistical" as design choices?)
Nobody is talking about a sacrosanct lore set in stone that is beyond being touched, I am merely humbly suggesting that game designers give me a fun D&D play experience, which means supporting the experience I want to have, not insisting that I have this experience that they want me to have.
I don't understand this language of "insistence". Nor any implication that the designers are trying to do something other than support a fun play experience.
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.
But it's OK to completely ignore the classic AD&D lore about demons, devils and daemons - which, as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] points out, leaves it open for evil to cooperate in conflict against the world and/or the heavens - and replace it with nonsense about yugoloths and the Blood War and the like? I mean, maybe I'm not interested in that story.
Or maybe I've never seen D&D as merely "escapist fun" in the way you seem to describe it - is it disprespecting me to introduce more babies to be killed (to allude to another current thread on flame snakes)?
As far as I can see all you're pointing out is that not everyone wants to use every story element. That's not any sort of argument (i) for never changing story elements, nor (ii) that any such change is disprespectful and hubristic.
