In that context, your assertions seem a little weird. If I make a D&D setting about Arthurian Knights (which ones? Christian? Transitional? Mists of Avalon? Excalibur?), I don’t have to include vikings to be flexible, because vikings aren’t necessarily part of the D&D game. I should include stuff about druids, because plenty of Arthurian stories include druid themes if not actual druids. Further, D&D includes druids. It’s not a stretch.

In the context of 4e D&D, your assumptions about gnomes are also off the mark. 4e gnomes are neither humorous, necessarily, nor gadgeteers. They’re definitely not steampunk. The implied 4e D&D setting isn’t Dragonlance, Lantan, or Azeroth. It isn’t even Eberron, where gnomes are deadly serious. In reality, grim or at least serious gnomes and gnome derivatives are a norm in the 4e game’s implied setting because of their persecution and slavery at the hands of the fomorians. Saying one could play a similar Athasian gnome whose sense of persecution came from the historic Cleansing Wars and at the hands of modern defilers is also far from a stretch.

I also don’t advocate “watered statements”–I advocate giving people tools to play what they want. I also advocate using absolutes and exclusions only if they are defining to a setting. Excluding gnomes and trolls because of some historic pogrom is trivial, because the coolness of the pogrom, the Cleansing Wars in this case, isn’t diminished because it failed in its utter eradication of its targets. Most historic pogroms on Earth failed exactly so, but succeeded in creating a historical context for interesting stories. The defining element of those wars in Dark Sun is that they happened and create a similar narrative context.

I’ve also said it over and over again: Some people treat canon like law or rules. They don’t change even what they don’t like. Others even use their knowledge of canon to diminish fun or the flexibility of others. I’m glad you’re more flexible in your outlook, but you’re not everyone.

What I’m really advocating is telling people that someone just made this stuff up. It isn’t law or rule. You can make up something that defies canon (that is, something someone else made up), and you’re still playing the game right. I’m advocating helping people understand flexibility and giving them tools to be flexible if they choose to.

It might not apply to every canon-based game. Original games have the luxury of excluding certain content from the beginning. When a supplement to an existing game makes exclusions, those exclusions should be very important. Further, such exclusions are no reason to leave out tools for people to ignore those exclusions. In every instance I’ve seen, such tools take little space and are worth the space they take.

I think one of your core assumptions, which seems ot be that flexible is always better, is…well I don’t think its true. I think when you are designing a setting and you want it to be distinctive, you have some right to say “My game is about Arthurian knights.” rather than “My game is about Arthurian knights, but I’ll put in a few pages on playing druids, and some bits on playing viking, in case you want them, even though neither adds to the sortso f stories I’m designing rules to simulate.” Games are tools to tell partcukar sorts of stories, and details like Dark Sun’s “No gnomes!” seem perfectly fair to me as a way of creating a storytelling tool in which the usual gnomish mix of comedy and gadgetry are forbidden. I can see characters trudging through necropoli of dead gnomes, dealing with the fact that they aren’t in a cutesy gadgetter steampunk setting this time.

What does it add to the game if you let players who really love playing gnomes add gnomes to this setting? Even in your own post, they can play gnomes so long as the gnomes…well, don’t act like gnomes, really. Isn’t it even more flexibile to allow them to play gnomes straight? Yes, but it diminishes the game if players do, because this game’s not the tool for that story.

So, basically, in terms of your question “flexibility’s always good, right?” My answer’s “No.” Flexibility has a cost, in terms of setting focus. Given that GMs have every right to just ignore and add bits to canon anyway, in their own games, I don’t see why your wouldn’t just make strong statements of intent in the game materials, knowing people can water them down as much as they like, rather than making pre-watered statements.

Creating a new monster to do the exact job of an extant monster, based on trivial setting canon, is a waste of designer time, company resources, book space, and player money and time. This has been done, for sure, but that fails to alter my perception of the process as ridiculous. It’s better to use the same resources to create a truly unique creature and simply leave trolls in the setting. The easiest way to leave trolls in the setting is to say nothing about them at all, unless they are somehow defining to the setting. That’s my whole point.

@Marduk: I don’t think I said FR NPCs do all the important stuff, but I see how I might have given such an impression. I agree that Toril is big enough for thousands of stories. That fact is no defense for using novels as setting canon.

I’d say that the deeds of figures in constantly expanding canon always has the potential to threaten the deeds of those playing the game. At the heart of the matter, you’re right. The threat is only as big as the participants allow it to be. Some participants, however, have less perceived control or less willingness to be flexible than you.

@sealionii: The truth is that, from a business standpoint, it’s often nonviable to have a policy that all writers know all canon, especially when that canon is huge due to unnecessary media bloat. Although I agree that DMs and players should consider canon only as much as they desire to, the desires of individuals in a game group can differ. Further, as I said, some players have a hard time changing or ignoring official canon.

@Enerla: I’m not sure why you say my approach is one of the worst absolutes, then go on to agree with it, since I support the use of defining absolutes in setting material. I advocate the trimming of trivial absolutes, or better yet, avoiding the introduction of trivial absolutes.

@Justin: I agree up ’til we start introducing supplements that advance the timeline too much. Such supplements need to be carefully crafted with tools that allow players and GMs to ignore or change elements that clash with home campaigns. Such clashes are bound to happen.

However, I would counter that a game set the Cuban Missile Crisis:

(a) Can be pretty cool, even though we historically know how the Cuban Missile Crisis turned out;
(b) Could easily allow PCs to change the course of history if they’re actually in a position to do so;
(c) Will, in fact, change the world;
(d) Is made even cooler if the PCs are rubbing shoulders with JFK or Castro [i]if the PCs are doing so as equals[/i]; and
(e) Could just as easily be a fictionally-created event

With all that being said, however, I still think Dream Pod 9 had it right with Heavy Gear: They set a baseline year and provided comprehensive support for a “jumping off” point starting with that year. They also provided an evolving future history in a separate series of “canon-advancing” supplements. There are ways in which this model could be improved, but it was very effective at giving the best of both worlds.

Lets speak about an “old” absolute.

You have a dwarven civilization that is developed in a certain way because they are unable to cast arcane spells, their race cannot (and won’t) use arcane energies. If you say it isn’t absolute what happened? You killed a defining trait of dwarves, and most of their civilization is built on a trait you killed,.

By killing absolutes saying they should never happen (which is an absolute) you will end up removing absolutes, hen removing their effects on settings, but as you change setting for this, a lot of other stuff will be unexplained / illogical, and you will have to remove even more.

You roll back what was done by NPCs? But how much of it? Soon you will kill even more of the uniqueness of the setting. You have to add back missing races, missing spells, etc. because you don’t want to take them away, but to have a spell developed by a certain wizard you have to add that wizard “back” to the setting, but then he needs his history, his homeland, etc…

When an absolute IS a defining trait of a race / world it should STAY as absolute. If it isn’t a defining world and is relatively safe to modify it (without hurting other players, etc) it can be removed.

For Dungeon Masters and players, canon should only be considered to the degree that it enhances the the campaign. The restraints that a setting’s canon imposes are important guideposts, but should not, at the level of individual campaigns, be considered absolute mandates or prohibitions.

My usual method is simply to start with a small section of a published game world that I like, place my campaign there and not worry about any published information beyond that. To take an example, for a long time I ran a campaign set in Greyhawk’s Gran March, but when the ‘Greyhawk Wars’ came along, I simply ignored them because they didn’t fit with the conflicts and themes going on in my game at the time.

The Lord of the Rings is halfling propaganda. It is written by Bilbo and Frodo to present themselves as heroes rather than thieves. Bilbo: “Oh, I found the ring. I told a lie about winning it because just finding it seemed so unlikely, and I feel just terrible about lying to my friends. You know, if they hadn’t asked I wouldn’t have had to lie. It’s really all their fault, you see.” Frodo: “Yes, the Phial of Galadriel and her personal monogrammed box containing magic fertillizer and the only Mallorn tree seed in existence were gifts to help us on our quest to fence… er, destroy, yes, destroy the One Ring. We definately didn’t steal them. Or the One Ring. Or that Palantir thingy, which was of course given back.” Sauron was an idiot to place his power into something a halfling could carry.

As for the feeling that NPCs like Drizzt are doing all the important work in the setting, I don’t understand that. My impression, from reading the setting books and most of the novels, is that the Forgotten Realms has plenty going on all the time and the stories in the novels are only a small fraction of it. The only NPC with truly significant power is Elminster, and he doesn’t do much directly. Indeed, he is very useful for providing adventure hooks *because* he doesn’t do things himself. “Hmm, there’s a demon causing trouble at the next table over… too much of a bother to stand up and destroy it myself, I’ll send these fools.”

The other NPCs may be fairly big fish, but they are lost in an ocean. How often do they do anything with more than local consequences? Even the gods are at a fairly low power level in the Realms, relatively speaking, because the average power level of adventurers, evildoers and bystanders is so high. So some NPC stopped Moander from coming back; so what? It would have only been a matter of time before someone else stepped in and destroyed/banished/ate it. When the gods were banished to the Realms, how many of them were killed, and how many went into hiding because they were worried about just such a fate? Their power to effect change in the world comes from their priests and their cults… if those aren’t widespread, neither is their influence. The PCs start small, but can become movers and shakers far more powerful than their ‘competition’ in the novels.

I have to admit that of the RPG settings I have used I have only ever read fiction for the Forgotten Realms, so I can’t speak to the others. But in the Realms, at least, the NPCs in the novels don’t threaten the heroism of PCs unless the DM wants it to happen that way. If you set your campaign in Icewind Dale while the novel characters are present, that’s your problem. But even if you want to use Icewind Dale as your setting, your players can still shine – just set it before the novels, or use the setting without including the NPCs from the books, or after the novel characters have left to do small-scale heroic deeds somewhere else. The novels don’t talk about your party saving Icewind Dale from certain destruction three times because the novels are about someone else. So write your own novels.

Throwaway comments are exactly what I’m talking about when I say “trivial absolutes.” It’s a trivial thing for a designer or novelist to write trolls were wiped out in the Cleansing Wars, frex. The game is better served when trivial specifics are just eliminated.

Your example of a good absolute is right on target with my thinking.

The disagreement is pretty fundamental. I think setting designers should be allowed to be absolute about forbidding elements of the game, as long as that is central to defining the setting. To the best of my knowledge there is, for example, no Nanotech Power Source in D&D 4. That’s an absolute, right there. If it gets written, should it be allowed into the Forgotten Realms? (I typed “Forgotten Reams”, which reminds me of why you are so, so right in so much you say about canon.) I think I’m agreeing with Seth White here.

To the expansion. When I launched the fifth edition of Ars Magica, I told all the authors, and the fans, that canon had been reset. Nothing from earlier editions was canon any more. The reason for this was, quite simply, that there was too much material, and some of it sucked. (Not a great deal of material, but the Garden of Eden in the Alps? Woo boy…) I wanted people to be able to write for the fifth edition without having to be experts on the previous seventeen years of obscure small-press publications.

And, in the process of developing the edition, I discovered I had to be even more draconian with authors. If you are writing about northern France, you can’t say anything new about southern France that isn’t already specified. You have to leave space for the authors of that bit to come up with their own ideas, without being constrained by some throwaway remark made by an author in another supplement.

So, it’s not just novels that can make a game a nightmare to design for. Designers who don’t retain a laser-like focus on the bit of the world they are supposed to be designing can create similarly large issues.

As a final point, there’s one type of absolute I think works extremely well in gaming material. “No-one has ever successfully done X.” Especially if followed up with guidelines on how the player characters can be the first.

Established canon can be fun to read and a good foundation for a game or campaign (which is the whole reason to pick up a setting in the first place). I find that a few restrictions tend to make me more creative than total freedom. But the moment I begin to fear canon, it needs to step aside. As I understand the Eberron setting, there are a few key facts, such as dragonmarks, the Last War and the Mourning, but nearly everything else is just what is most widely believed to be true. That’s what I think should be the typical approach to a setting. The DM should make an honest effort to stick with the established setting as only as long as it’s beneficial to adventure creation.

That sounds pretty cool. I’m gonna take a look at Birthright.

I think it’s ok to set certain facts in stone for a setting. I’m ok with absolutes, but they should be defining instead of trivial. I don’t think there needs to be any flexibility about certain core attributes of a setting.

A setting is defined by its differences. Dark Sun is not Eberron, and should never be mistaken for Eberron. I have no problem with a setting creating stringent rules on what is and what is not that setting. Perhaps it’s because my background is working with international brands, and I believe strongly in the importance of brand identity. As a result, I see no problem in creating limitations to set apart a product from its competition.

I’m ok with WotC saying flat-out: there are no trolls in Dark Sun. If the setting needs regenerating bipedal humanoids that are unafraid of death, then they can design creatures with those qualities that exist in that world. They just wouldn’t be trolls, since a troll is derived from Norse mythology and fits in the setting only slightly better than a viking or a longship. They could hypothetically create a setting that doesn’t include elves (though I’m uncertain if that would be successful or even if it would be D&D), and I’m ok with that.

Now Eberron is more flexible than Dark Sun; it states that anything published for D&D should have a place in the settting. But if I were to introduce Spelljammer ships or steampunk rifles in my Eberron game I shouldn’t be surprised if my players have reservations. That doesn’t mean these are bad game elements or that they might not be really fun. But they aren’t canon in core D&D. And as such, they aren’t Eberron. And if I bill my game as an Eberron game then it’s best I steer away from those non-canon elements without consulting my group to see if that would be fun for them.

A game is a social activity that has implied social contracts. If the players of the game want to adhere closely to published canon, then they should; if they don’t then it’s ok to deviate. And if players disagree, then they should work it out like adults. The game doesn’t belong to any one player, including the GM and no one should use something like canon to be a dick to their friends.

Leave room for the PCs to be the big heroes of the world. Drizzt is a great character, but no one wants him in their questing party.