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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6397980" data-attributes="member: 42582">The alignment system: 4e, like classic pre-9-alignments D&D, emphasises a struggle between Law and Chaos. The nuances aren't identical - 4e is not really Morcockian, whereas there are approaches to classic D&D that are - but I think it does a better job than 9-point alignment, which for marks part of the bigger tendency towards setting-exploration as a focus of play in and of itself.The planes are a different matter. I don't think they're more like the AD&D conception, nor less like - I think they fit with AD&D as well as Planescape, probably better (I think certainy better for daemons).I don't think "lore" implies "canon". This was part of my reply to  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], disagreeing with him that canon defines a setting (or is all that can define a setting).Part of the lore of 1st ed AD&D is that orcs and elves hate one another. And that dwarves are at odds with orcs, goblins, hobgoblins and giants. But, unless "canon" simply means "any story element", I don't think this implies canon. There is no canonical reason for these enmities, for instance. (Contrast, say, LotR, where there is.) The GM is expected to do with it what s/he thinks makes sense and is fun.In AD&D, these story elements are resources, not setting (to deploy Hussar's distinction from upthread).This is part of what I was trying to get at in my comments upthread about Peter Parker living two decades over the course of five.There are plenty of Spider-Man comics in which Peer Parker, as a teenager, wears very conventional post-war suits and, when he catches a cab, gets into what is now quite an old-fashioned car. Does this mean that is canon that, today, Peter Parker in a 2014 comic has memories from his teenage years of wearing those suits and catching those cars? Or do we treat that stuff as peripheral detail, a consequence of Spider Man being illustrated serial fiction?The GH gods being located in the Great Wheel is simply because that's what 1st ed AD&D god stats did. It has no significance, though, for their story role. It's like reading Gygax's wand of polymorphing rhyme in his DMG ("Xot's the word, be a bird!") and worrying about an apparent implication that fantasy mages speak English. The rhyming in English isn't part of the story; it's just a side-effect of the book being written in English. Peter Parker looking like he stepped right out of the 60s isn't part of the story; it's just a side-effect of the comic being illustrated in that period. The GH gods living on the Great Wheel isn't part of the story; it's just a side-effect of being formatted for publication in the template of the time. (Like in 3E they all had to have clerical domains; that doesn't change the story about them, it's just a templating thing.)A contrasting point about Spider Man - it's harder to take out those college-year memories of Flash coming home from Vietnam and still say you're talkin about the same Peter Parker. That is part of the story; and it's a recurring problem for these decades-long serials. (What war did Xavier fight in again? Korea is getting further and further away in time.)A contrasting point about Grehyawk - the Suel Pantheon being the gods of the viking barbarians is a part of canon. I don't like it, and as I posted upthread I change it for my game. But as the setting is written, that is a genuine part of the fiction.</blockquote>

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