# Dragon 370 - Design & Development:  Cosmology



## Shroomy (Dec 10, 2008)

The newest "Design & Development" column was posted today; subscribers can read it here.

The most important piece of information IMO is that all the WotC campaign settings released will use the World Axis cosmology; there is even some hints about how it impacts Eberron.


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## demonsquidgod (Dec 10, 2008)

What's a World Axis?


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## Shroomy (Dec 10, 2008)

demonsquidgod said:


> What's a World Axis?




Its the name of the 4e cosmological model.  The world is between two parallel planes, the Feywild and Shadowfell, and two media planes, the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos.


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## MerricB (Dec 10, 2008)

"Anyway, World Axis sounds cooler than the Great Bobbin." - Rich Baker.

That's a really good and interesting article. 

Cheers!


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## Vael (Dec 10, 2008)

Clearly Rich has never experienced the awesomeness of Bobbin Threadbare and the Loom.

While I wasn't exactly happy with changing Eberron's Cosmology, I really liked it, I understand the logic, and am still looking forward to seeing Eberron next year.


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## MerricB (Dec 10, 2008)

Vael said:


> Clearly Rich has never experienced the awesomeness of Bobbin Threadbare and the Loom.
> 
> While I wasn't exactly happy with changing Eberron's Cosmology, I really liked it, I understand the logic, and am still looking forward to seeing Eberron next year.




I dare say that the new cosmology for Eberron will likely play very similar to the old.

Cheers!


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 10, 2008)

I'm with them for much of the article, but there's one minor problem and one *big* problem with the thought process here. 

#1:


			
				Rich Baker said:
			
		

> Infinite planes stagger the imagination. If things were really infinite, you could walk for millions of miles across the burning plain of Avernus and not actually be any bit closer to your goal. And how many devils does it take to fill an infinite plane with a suitable population density? DMs just handwaved these questions before, but we wondered if it was really necessary for everything to be infinite when most D&D games visited just a few specific points of interest in each plane.




This is a "it's not really broke" angle. Like the size of halflings, _no one had a problem with it_. Infinite planes don't stagger the imagination, and the quantity of devils is a pointless question and has always been. You could walk millions of miles to your goal because you traveled at the speed of plot, exactly the way most D&D games travel. Limited Planes don't *fix* anything. No one mapped out all of Avernus, no one bothered to count the number of devils in Hell, and no one ever felt a need to. Infinity wasn't a problem, it was a solution: there's infinite possibilities here.

With that said, even "finite" planes are too big to map and STILL no one is asking how many devils exist in the nine hells, so it's not like anything has really changed.

Which is really the hallmark of a pointless change. No one cares.

#2:


			
				Rich Baker said:
			
		

> So why is it so important that all D&D worlds should use that same cosmological chassis? Two answers: monster origins and spell effects. These are important because they’re hardwired into the game. We don’t want to create settings where you have to change some piece of information in the monster stat block to fit it into the setting. Likewise, we want the same spell (power, ritual, or magic item, really) to work the same way in each setting, regardless of cosmology. If we create a +3 shadowslayer sword, we don’t want the DM to have to work out what’s a shadow monster and what isn’t. Likewise, the shadow crossing ritual ought to work the same way in any setting. We don’t want to print settings with long lists of exceptions and modifications to powers and effects. It’s better to use a setting’s “exceptionalism currency” to deal with the specific locales and entities you have to deal with, not the mechanical workings of planar creatures and travels.




IMO, this kind of thinking is thinking is almost entirely bass ackwards.

FIRST of all, and most importantly, having a different cosmology helps define what is important in your world. I mean, this is basically the real reason that human cultures over the aeons have all come up with different cosmologies (Dante's vision of Hell/Purgatory/Paradise, Miltonian "world on a string"/"music of the spheres" heliocentrism, the Hindu wheel of existence, Nordic Ysgard, et cetra ad nauseum). To lack support for this customization in D&D is lazy, narrowminded, and ultimately at cross-purposes to actually telling the story you want to tell. 

SECOND of all, but related, is that one cosmology is not truly universal. Like I talked about in the thread on "what is Core," settings define themselves by including things that others don't and excluding things that others include. If you can't exclude the feywild or the astral sea or the far realm or the elemental chaos, or the shadowfell, if you can't include, I dunno, a plane of dreams or a plane of parallel consciousness, or a million extra Earths, or something like the thread "A Nameless City on a Many-Named Sea" cultivates, you're shoehorning in things that were never meant to fit, that don't fit, and that are frankly incongruous, and you're leaving out things that would help define and differentiate the setting.

Now, I understand their reasons for making One True Cosmology. But there is too much sacrificed on the altar of convenience here. In a game that expects me to come up with on-the-fly narrative acrobatics for Shroedinger's Hit Points, they can't expect me to figure out what a shadowslayer sword or a shadow creature or the shadow crossing ritual is in a campaign that wants to make itself unique by excluding the shadowfell? *REALLY*? They have no problem chucking encounter-limited tripping at me and expecting me to totally be okay with that exception to the way the world normally works, but excluding or altering a subset of abilities is somehow too vastly complicated for my little lizard-brain? Are you serious? I can read a 900 page instruction manual for the game, but I can't quite understand when a shadow-thing might not work if I decide there's no shadowfell? Do you think I'm that dumb?

So because I don't just want to tear it down, let's see an alternative. How about we see how I would have it done:

Step 1: You know that things are going to have alternate cosmologies, alternate dimensions, different afterlives, and all sorts of interesting variations on worlds to explore. You know this. The real world does it, fantasy literature does it, every thing that you are ripping off culling for inspiration from does it, and it is something that a DM should not only be able to do, it is something they should be encouraged to do. Make your world your own, twist your cosmology to your own ends, and this is a _good thing_. Yes, I do want to hear about your world's alternate multiversal model.

Step 2: *Don't hardwire the assumed cosmology into the game rules*. Really, it's that simple. Maybe PC's in certain settings won't fight shadow creatures. That should be okay. Maybe PC's in certain settings won't shadow walk. That should be okay. Maybe there will be no gods in some settings, and maybe no fey in others. That should be okay, too. Maybe your little ritual doesn't have universal application. Really, what's the big deal? 

Oh, wait, maybe this is the big deal:



			
				James Wyatt said:
			
		

> We want Eberron players to be able to buy a book like Manual of the Planes and use it in their games.




...so I can't have a world modeled after the Norse cosmology because you want to sell more copies of the _Manual of the Planes_?

Shouldn't the _Manual of the Planes_ have told me really how to make those new cosmologies, then? Shouldn't it have been more of a toolkit (a la the 3e MotP) and less of a "Now Everyone Needs Dragonborn" moment? Maybe said: "Hey, if you get rid of the Shadowfell, here are some things to consider..." instead of "OH GOD NO DON'T GET RID OF THE SHADOWFELL! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!" Instead of getting a toolkit, I get a brick wall that I can beat my head against while I'm trying to figure out my setting's own cosmology.

*deep breath*

But there's a lot of thought that I like, too. For instance, this:



			
				James Wyatt said:
			
		

> * Exotic adventuring environments
> * Homes of deities
> * Homes of outsiders and elementals
> * Alignment focused (outer planes)
> ...




It's a good list of what the planes are and should be, and I don't mind dropping the alignment angle at all on this one. 

This:


			
				Rich Baker said:
			
		

> The Elemental Planes were unusable. With the exception of the plane of Air, they were pretty much instantly lethal to unprotected characters. Most of the relatively few adventures set in these places actually took place in air pockets in the otherwise hostile planes. Places you can’t go to aren’t very useful for the game.
> 
> ...
> 
> ...






			
				James Wyatt said:
			
		

> The Ethereal Plane might be one of the most broken parts of the old D&D cosmology, and I don’t think it’s missed much...We cut a great big knot of crazy rules when we killed the Ethereal Plane. Ghosts could just be insubstantial and phasing -- they didn’t need to exist on another plane (and have a special ability that let them manifest in the world). All the complicated rules about what effects passed from the world to the Ethereal Plane (and vice versa) -- like magic missile and the gaze of a basilisk -- could just fade into history. If we want effects in the game that let characters walk through walls, we can still have them. They just give the characters phasing rather than transporting them to another plane of existence.




I mostly agree with that list. I mean, I know demons and devils weren't _really_ that similar and that good planes didn't _have_ to be boring, but making good planes more exciting and demons and devils more different is basically a good idea, and I think 4e did a good job on that, as far as I can tell (I haven't seen anything about "good planes" yet, but I'm looking forward to 4e's take on Celestia). I also have no love of planes that are just there to travel through, so ditching the Ethereal Plane (and the host of wonky rules it brings with it), without stopping the ability to move through walls, was a good idea. 

So, yes, a lot of good stuff, but one *very bad idea* that needs to be abandoned tout suite.


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## Shemeska (Dec 10, 2008)

Shroomy said:


> The most important piece of information IMO is that all the WotC campaign settings released will use the World Axis cosmology;




Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid decision.

It's also what I expected of them.


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## Shroomy (Dec 10, 2008)

I've actually read multi-page threads about the nature of the infinite plans and it made my eyes bleed.  I shall never go down that road again.

As for your second complaint, well, I see your point and if it makes any difference, I think that I read somewhere that the 4e MotP does give some guidance to DMs in creating their own cosmologies (isn't there where the Great Wheel part comes in?), but I also understand that WoTC is also in the business of selling books and they need to maximize their audience.  Though they specifically mention monster origin and spell effects, they're biggest concern, given the reference to the FC series in relation to Eberron, seems to be how the fluff impacts sales.  IMO, they're in a bind, as if they don't anchor planar content in at least some kind of fluff, they get flack, and if they do anchor it to fluff, it is less appealing to people who use specific settings that differs from the initial fluff.  While I personally really like the World Axis cosmology based purely on the fluff, I can immediately see the benefit of a unified but extremely flexible cosmology (with the flexibility coming in through individualized Astral Domains, for instance).


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## Shroomy (Dec 10, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid decision.
> 
> It's also what I expected of them.




Its no dumber than forcing the Great Wheel on Athas or Krynn.


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## Shemeska (Dec 10, 2008)

Shroomy said:


> Its no dumber than forcing the Great Wheel on Athas or Krynn.




There's a difference between using a cosmology for a world that otherwise didn't have one already fully fleshed out, especially when those worlds had very little to no interaction with the planes at large. The cosmology wasn't intrusive there, and each world retained its unique features, even such things as Athas's Gray and Black.

WotC is happily retconning settings into their shiny new cosmology, and in the process stripping setting unique elements in order to have everything stuck into that 4e default core cosmology. That's horrible design.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> ...so I can't have a world modeled after the Norse cosmology because you want to sell more copies of the _Manual of the Planes_?




Do you have a secret decoder ring that extracts secret messages noone else can see to turn a statement about the cross-utility of their products into a declaration that you cannot do something you want in your home game? Where can I get one of those?



> Shouldn't it have been more of a toolkit (a la the 3e MotP) and less of a "Now Everyone Needs Dragonborn" moment?




I don't have the 4e MotP, so I dunno how much space it devotes to non-World Axis cosmologies, but the 3e MotP only has 20 pages of non-Great Wheel toolkit. If the 4e one devotes 10% of its page-count to other cosmologies, then it's an equivalent toolkit.


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 10, 2008)

> I've actually read multi-page threads about the nature of the infinite plans and it made my eyes bleed. I shall never go down that road again.




Excepting that this is the internet and all the weirdness that entails, I am curious as to how and why this is the case. I mean, the infinity always seemed pretty straightforward "you travel at the speed of plot"-ness to me. In PS it was given some more specific treatments and ramifications, but everything was given that in PS.  As a general nature, why did it boggle you?

It is entirely possible that I am just totally ignorant as to how or why that may be a problem (or how changing "infinite" to "finite, but for all intents and purposes still containing anything and everything you want" fixes it). 



> As for your second complaint, well, I see your point and if it makes any difference, I think that I read somewhere that the 4e MotP does give some guidance to DMs in creating their own cosmologies (isn't there where the Great Wheel part comes in?), but I also understand that WoTC is also in the business of selling books and they need to maximize their audience. Though they specifically mention monster origin and spell effects, they're biggest concern, given the reference to the FC series in relation to Eberron, seems to be how the fluff impacts sales. IMO, they're in a bind, as if they don't anchor planar content in at least some kind of fluff, they get flack, and if they do anchor it to fluff, it is less appealing to people who use specific settings that differs from the initial fluff. While I personally really like the World Axis cosmology based purely on the fluff, I can immediately see the benefit of a unified but extremely flexible cosmology (with the flexibility coming in through individualized Astral Domains, for instance).




It's a bind, but it's not a new one. It's the same puzzle that has faced every single edition before it, and it is that balancing act between being a game (with a specific, limited field) and being a system (broad enough to accommodate very different games). 

It should be trivial for D&D to not hardwire the cosmology in. Heck, in a lot of ways, it's easier in 4e than it is in 3e. What does your campaign loose if you ditch the Shadowfell? You maybe change some origins on the fly and re-fluff a ritual or two if you need to, but most of the time, it won't even affect anything. 

So what's the big deal? Why tell me I can't/I shouldn't/you won't? If it's _even easier_ in 4e, and 3e decided to do it (to much acclaim, no less!), the only other answer this article seems to give is a financial one: because at some point, we want to sell you a book about the Shadowfell, and if you don't use it (or if our published settings don't use it), that means that less people will buy it. 

That answer _blows_. Rather than a book on the shadowfell, give us a book about Realms of the Dead (including the shadowfell as the penultimate example, but giving us alternates and letting us see in your toolkit how you made it). Any book that is too narrow in focus to appeal to every group almost regardless of campaign setting style probably needs to have its focus broadened, anyway. 

I don't mind the World Axis cosmology as a generic fantasy/D&D cosmology. It's fine for that. It works, it's good with Planescape, I'm content with it. But to pretend that it's appropriate for every setting is absurdly misguided, it robs DM's of one of the more enjoyable aspects of world-building, and the arguments against it don't hold up under scrutiny. It doesn't match the way people _actually play the game_. It doesn't match the way the _world actually works_! It robs vitality and variety from the game. 

It's a bad idea in so many ways. 



> Its no dumber than forcing the Great Wheel on Athas or Krynn.




This I totally agree with. I think 3e's method of "multiple cosmologies" was an _awesome_ thing. It meant I could have my Great Wheel Olympus in Planescape and that some greek-inspired campaign setting could have a more authentic Olympus that worked better for it, and we'd all be happy about it. The bits on cosmology in the 3e _Deities and Demigods_ were awesome. The alternate cosmologies in the Manual of the Planes were awesome. They even had great traction! Eberron's dream world and the Orrey setup were very popular, and they came basically right from the 3e MotP!

I don't like shoehorning every cosmology into one. Forcing the Great Wheel on everything is as bad as forcing the Great Bobbin on everything.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> I don't like shoehorning every cosmology into one. Forcing the Great Wheel on everything is as bad as forcing the Great Bobbin on everything.




I completely agree with this. I understand why they want to do it, for cross-utility purposes, but I like different cosmologies for different worlds.


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## Shroomy (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Excepting that this is the internet and all the weirdness that entails, I am curious as to how and why this is the case. I mean, the infinity always seemed pretty straightforward "you travel at the speed of plot"-ness to me. In PS it was given some more specific treatments and ramifications, but everything was given that in PS.  As a general nature, why did it boggle you?
> 
> It is entirely possible that I am just totally ignorant as to how or why that may be a problem (or how changing "infinite" to "finite, but for all intents and purposes still containing anything and everything you want" fixes it).




Oh, I don't have a horse in the infinite vs. finite race (and for all practical purposes, as you say, the planes as experienced by the players were finite anyways), it was the just the tedious and endless philosophical navel-gazing, especially over something that doesn't mean anything.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> It's a bind, but it's not a new one. It's the same puzzle that has faced every single edition before it, and it is that balancing act between being a game (with a specific, limited field) and being a system (broad enough to accommodate very different games).
> 
> It should be trivial for D&D to not hardwire the cosmology in. Heck, in a lot of ways, it's easier in 4e than it is in 3e. What does your campaign loose if you ditch the Shadowfell? You maybe change some origins on the fly and re-fluff a ritual or two if you need to, but most of the time, it won't even affect anything.
> 
> ...




I make more allowances for financial considerations, but I don't think it is as bad as you say.  Is it as good as creating a planar tool-kit or presenting multiple cosmologies?  Probably not, but overall, I felt that the 3e approach was more or less paying lip service to those ideas instead of actively supporting them, given the general level of support for non-Great Wheel planar material (I really liked Eberron's planes, but other than Xoriat and Dal Quor, you never really got to know them very well).  If anything, the approaches you favor are probably too niche to justify an entire book (at least one published in the way WoTC needs to do business); _Dragon_ articles and 3PP publications would probably better serve your needs.


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 10, 2008)

> Do you have a secret decoder ring that extracts secret messages noone else can see to turn a statement about the cross-utility of their products into a declaration that you cannot do something you want in your home game? Where can I get one of those?




If I'm Playing By The Rules, I can't change the cosmology.



> the 3e MotP only has 20 pages of non-Great Wheel toolkit. If the 4e one devotes 10% of its page-count to other cosmologies, then it's an equivalent toolkit.




False Equivalency, and It Does Not Follow. 



> I completely agree with this. I understand why they want to do it, for cross-utility purposes, but I like different cosmologies for different worlds.




See, WotC? When *TLR* and I agree, you know something's up. 

I would've said the same for Raven Crowking and I, but we're seeing eye to eye more often since 4e came out.


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## Mouseferatu (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> If I'm Playing By The Rules, I can't change the cosmology.




Nonsense. The _MotP_ has a section on how to do exactly that: Change the cosmology to suit your tastes.

The whole "One cosmology to rule them all" applies to _published_ settings. Yes, that means it's the cosmology that's going to get the _vast_ majority of the details, but the book doesn't even try to claim that it's restricting what you can do in your own game, and in fact gives you suggestions on how to do what you're saying it doesn't let you do.


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## Mouseferatu (Dec 10, 2008)

Now, that said, I admit that I'd have preferred that some of the published settings be permitted to keep their own, unique cosmology. I'm not a huge fan of the "one over all," and I liked the fact that, in 3E, Eberron was _completely_ separate from the other settings.

I understand the reasons behind it, and I like the way they melded the old Eberron with the new World Axis cosmologies. I think it works and works well. But if I ruled the world, I probably wouldn't have gone that route.


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 10, 2008)

Shroomy said:
			
		

> Oh, I don't have a horse in the infinite vs. finite race (and for all practical purposes, as you say, the planes as experienced by the players were finite anyways), it was the just the tedious and endless philosophical navel-gazing, especially over something that doesn't mean anything.




Ah. Well, that I mostly just chalk up to "it's the internet..." Philosophical navel-gazing over meaninglessness is _rampant_. 



			
				Shroomy said:
			
		

> I make more allowances for financial considerations, but I don't think it is as bad as you say. Is it as good as creating a planar tool-kit or presenting multiple cosmologies? Probably not, but overall, I felt that the 3e approach was more or less paying lip service to those ideas instead of actively supporting them, given the general level of support for non-Great Wheel planar material (I really liked Eberron's planes, but other than Xoriat and Dal Quor, you never really got to know them very well). If anything, the approaches you favor are probably too niche to justify an entire book (at least one published in the way WoTC needs to do business); Dragon articles and 3PP publications would probably better serve your needs.




It was probably the best part of the 3e MotP, and the buzz from where I'm sitting confirmed that. The 3e MotP was largely regarded as an awesome resource, in part because of this. The 3e planar set up was heralded for finally allowing each setting to do a cosmology that made sense for it, rather than being forced into the Great Wheel. 

The approach I favor actually wants to broaden the niche. I'd rather have a book on _Realms of the Dead_ that talked about different afterlives and gave us models for them (and creatures and adentures to have in them), as well as how to make your own, than a book on just the Shadowfell. I'd rather have a book on cosmologies that talked about different planar arrangements and gave us models for them (with the Great Bindle as the penultimate example) than a book on the Great Bindle. I'd rather have a book on possibly infinite visions of hell rather than a book just on the Nine Hells. 

A book on Realms of the Dead doesn't loose its value if someone doesn't use the Shadowfell. A book on cosmologies doesn't loose its value if you don't play with the Great Bindle. 

That allows you to keep a broad appeal for your books, and also lets you embrace the fact that cosmology should be very customizable. WotC should be rushing to give us different ideas for how to build our worlds, not putting up walls and saying "Sorry, Midgard, you're going to have to have a Court of Stars, too!"


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## doctorhook (Dec 10, 2008)

demonsquidgod said:


> What's a World Axis?






MerricB said:


> "Anyway, World Axis sounds cooler than the Great Bobbin." - Rich Baker.
> 
> That's a really good and interesting article.
> 
> Cheers!






Vael said:


> Clearly Rich has never experienced the awesomeness of Bobbin Threadbare and the Loom.



Am I the only one whose group refers to this as "The _Pokéball_ Cosmology", on account of the diagrams of it?

It's a term of endearment, really; we quite like the thing!


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 10, 2008)

> Nonsense. The MotP has a section on how to do exactly that: Change the cosmology to suit your tastes.
> 
> The whole "One cosmology to rule them all" applies to published settings.




Fair point. I should've specified that if I'm playing by the published rules, all the settings that I will play in will have the same cosmology.

I still think that's a bad thing. 

Good.  Yes, I was barking at the wrong tree with those two sentences. I apologize for them. 

...how about settings published through the GSL? Would not using the shadowfell constitute a redefinition? 

I don't like it limiting published settings. It feels bad, just like when the Great Wheel did it.


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## Mouseferatu (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Good.  Yes, I was barking at the wrong tree with those two sentences. I apologize for them.
> 
> ...how about settings published through the GSL? Would not using the shadowfell constitute a redefinition?
> 
> I don't like it limiting published settings. It feels bad, just like when the Great Wheel did it.




That, I couldn't say. I have no idea what the GSL is going to say regarding third-party cosmologies.

And like I said, I actually agree to an extent--I'd prefer that certain settings not use the World Axis--but it's not anything I can't live with. (It helps that I'm a much bigger fan of the World Axis than I ever was of the Great Wheel, and that I feel the World Axis concept is more flexible.)


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> ...how about settings published through the GSL? Would not using the shadowfell constitute a redefinition?




The planes are not included in the SRD currently, as far as I can tell. The only Shadowfell mention is the Shadowfell gloves in the PHB, but the section in the DMG SRD titled "World" lacks the planes.

To me, it seems to force you to develop your own cosmology if you want to explore cosmological issues.


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## doctorhook (Dec 10, 2008)

Mouseferatu said:


> Now, that said, I admit that I'd have preferred that some of the published settings be permitted to keep their own, unique cosmology. I'm not a huge fan of the "one over all," and I liked the fact that, in 3E, Eberron was _completely_ separate from the other settings.
> 
> I understand the reasons behind it, and I like the way they melded the old Eberron with the new World Axis cosmologies. I think it works and works well. But if I ruled the world, I probably wouldn't have gone that route.



Generally speaking, I love the 4E cosmology! That said, I also love Eberron, and I was worried that the cosmology changes might **** Eberron up, so to speak.

After reading this article, I'm cautiously optimistic! I'll be happy, as long as I can still say, "There's thirteen planes! They each orbit Eberron, and at times can either spill into Eberron or become nigh-inaccessible!" I'll be okay, if all it now means is that I describe this group of planes as Elemental Planes, others as Astral Dominions, a handful as either Feywild or Shadowfell Planes, plus a "Region of Dreams" (or is it Astral?) and a "Far Realm". I'd still like it if the Eberron default is that these are the only planes, excepting perhaps the very occasional demiplane.

If this is the biggest upset I have to deal with about 4E Eberron, I'll be dandy.


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## Roman (Dec 10, 2008)

I don't like a design approach that tries to overhomogenize, shoehorn or retcon settings. This has been recurring throughout the editions of D&D, but often in different guises.

AD&D used the Great Wheel for all published settings. On the positive note, however, it did allow for the exclusion of material from the setting that was not deemed suitable. 

3E wisely enabled each setting to have its own cosmology. Unfortunately, it decided to go the retcon route for Forgotten Realms, which was artificially removed from the Great Wheel. Sure, Eberron having a new cosmology is a good idea, but the retcon of Forgotten Realms was less so. 3E also, regretfully, insisted that all core material be usable in all published settings. 

4E uses the World Axis for all published settings and previous settings are retconned into the cosmology. As far as I understand it, not only continues with the 3E 'innovation' that all core material should be usable in all published settings, but it takes it a step further and insists that all materials should be usable in all published settings.


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## Roman (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> This is a "it's not really broke" angle. Like the size of halflings, _no one had a problem with it_. Infinite planes don't stagger the imagination, and the quantity of devils is a pointless question and has always been. You could walk millions of miles to your goal because you traveled at the speed of plot, exactly the way most D&D games travel. Limited Planes don't *fix* anything. No one mapped out all of Avernus, no one bothered to count the number of devils in Hell, and no one ever felt a need to. Infinity wasn't a problem, it was a solution: there's infinite possibilities here.
> 
> With that said, even "finite" planes are too big to map and STILL no one is asking how many devils exist in the nine hells, so it's not like anything has really changed.
> 
> Which is really the hallmark of a pointless change. No one cares.




Provided that planes are almost incomprehensibly HUGE (yes, I like the sense of scale bordering on the mind-boggling) I have no issue either way - the planes can be truly infinite or they can simply be vast. I guess this sort of meshes with your point that it is a pointless change, because no one cares. 



Kamikaze Midget said:


> IMO, this kind of thinking is thinking is almost entirely bass ackwards.
> 
> FIRST of all, and most importantly, having a different cosmology helps define what is important in your world. I mean, this is basically the real reason that human cultures over the aeons have all come up with different cosmologies (Dante's vision of Hell/Purgatory/Paradise, Miltonian "world on a string"/"music of the spheres" heliocentrism, the Hindu wheel of existence, Nordic Ysgard, et cetra ad nauseum). To lack support for this customization in D&D is lazy, narrowminded, and ultimately at cross-purposes to actually telling the story you want to tell.




I agree completely. 



Kamikaze Midget said:


> SECOND of all, but related, is that one cosmology is not truly universal. Like I talked about in the thread on "what is Core," settings define themselves by including things that others don't and excluding things that others include. If you can't exclude the feywild or the astral sea or the far realm or the elemental chaos, or the shadowfell, if you can't include, I dunno, a plane of dreams or a plane of parallel consciousness, or a million extra Earths, or something like the thread "A Nameless City on a Many-Named Sea" cultivates, you're shoehorning in things that were never meant to fit, that don't fit, and that are frankly incongruous, and you're leaving out things that would help define and differentiate the setting.




Again, we are in perfect agreement here. 



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Now, I understand their reasons for making One True Cosmology. But there is too much sacrificed on the altar of convenience here. In a game that expects me to come up with on-the-fly narrative acrobatics for Shroedinger's Hit Points, they can't expect me to figure out what a shadowslayer sword or a shadow creature or the shadow crossing ritual is in a campaign that wants to make itself unique by excluding the shadowfell? *REALLY*? They have no problem chucking encounter-limited tripping at me and expecting me to totally be okay with that exception to the way the world normally works, but excluding or altering a subset of abilities is somehow too vastly complicated for my little lizard-brain? Are you serious? I can read a 900 page instruction manual for the game, but I can't quite understand when a shadow-thing might not work if I decide there's no shadowfell? Do you think I'm that dumb?




Actually, it's even worse than you say. There is absolutely no reason that a shadowslayer sword needs to have any cosmological plane to back it up whatsoever. You can easily just say that a shadowslayer sword affects creatures with the shadow subtype/origin/descriptor/whatever it is called in 4E. There is really no reason why the shadow subtype/origin/... has to be tied to some shadow plane. It can just as well refer to creatures somehow tied to shadow having some sort of shadow essence without being otherworldly. As far as I am concerned their argument on this matter is mostly spurious. 

To be frank, I don't even see a reason why shadow creatures should be in every setting. If they don't fit, than they shouldn't be there, as far as I am concerned. Fair enough, it is the commercial policy to make sure they are, but as pointed out above that certainly does not require a uniform cosmology.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

_"The Elemental Planes were unusable"_

Yes. Sure. But they used to be sources of primal energy, the place where elementals come. Should every plane be a dungeon to explore? Sorry, this is a very poor idea.

_"Infinite planes stagger the imagination"_

It seems your imagination is kinda short. Infinite or not infinite, what difference does it make? If you walk from A to B does it matters if the plane is infinite or not? Infinite means less maps, enforcing creative ways to travelling... finite is like "let's map the place, explore, kill the boss and take the loot".

_"Good planes were boring"_

Probably, but they were there for a reason: background. Again you want every place to be a dungeon?


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Roman said:


> I don't like a design approach that tries to overhomogenize, shoehorn or retcon settings




Same here.

After trying FRCS4E I'm done: I won't play FR4E. What they did to magic destroeyd what was Faerûn to me, granted, I'm not the biggest fan of it.

While I like DMing using the new system I am very worried about some ideas popping up. 

EVerything must be "useful", everywhere is a "dungeon"... geez... it seems the 4E guys only care about dungeon crawling and super adventures from the past.

Wotc boards are worst than ever, crowded by people saying things like "Miniatures are as important as the game now, get over it"...

Again, time to adapt things... more work to DMs who don't want to be pigholed.


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## FireLance (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> Again, time to adapt things... more work to DMs who don't want to be pigholed.



Erm, if you're a DM who doesn't want to be pigeonholed, wouldn't you want to adapt things _by definition_? So, the amount of additional work for such a DM is zero?

Not seeing how one cosmology for all published settings is any different from a handful of different cosmologies from different settings here.


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## Stogoe (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> Should every plane be a dungeon to explore?



I certainly don't want fifty pages detailing the endless layers of the planes of Instant Death.  That sort of thing is worse than useless.  I want page count to describe Places You Can Venture To, and not "Oh, these places are so extremely awesome cool and you can never go there, ha ha".


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## Giltonio_Santos (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> _"The Elemental Planes were unusable"_
> 
> Yes. Sure. But they used to be sources of primal energy, the place where elementals come. Should every plane be a dungeon to explore? Sorry, this is a very poor idea.
> 
> ...




This. Exactly.


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## Elphilm (Dec 10, 2008)

Roman said:


> I don't like a design approach that tries to overhomogenize, shoehorn or retcon settings. This has been recurring throughout the editions of D&D, but often in different guises.



Precisely my thoughts.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 10, 2008)

Why even have different settings if they're all going to have the same cosmology? Now every setting can just be a different continent or region of the same world. 

I really don't see how you can retcon the cosmology of Athas or Krynn into this new model and not completely change what those settings are. 

Like I said, why even do different settings at this point if they want to make it all the "same"?


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## Aeolius (Dec 10, 2008)

Vael said:


> Clearly Rich has never experienced the awesomeness of Bobbin Threadbare and the Loom.




I always thought a D&D bard based on Loom would be interesting.

As for 4e's cosmology... meh... I miss the ethereal plane.


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## Tarril Wolfeye (Dec 10, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> I really don't see how you can retcon the cosmology of Athas or Krynn into this new model and not completely change what those settings are.



Athas is easy. An almost empty Astral Sea and 'Divine' Power coming from Primordials. There's a strong elemental theme to clerics on Athas and if I remember correctly Templars got their spells because the Sorcerer Kings tapped some Elemental-Vortex thingy.


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## Grazzt (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> _"The Elemental Planes were unusable"_
> 
> Yes. Sure. But they used to be sources of primal energy, the place where elementals come. Should every plane be a dungeon to explore? Sorry, this is a very poor idea.




Agree with ya



> _"Infinite planes stagger the imagination"_
> 
> It seems your imagination is kinda short. Infinite or not infinite, what difference does it make? If you walk from A to B does it matters if the plane is infinite or not? Infinite means less maps, enforcing creative ways to travelling... finite is like "let's map the place, explore, kill the boss and take the loot".




Agree with ya here too. All the way back to 1e, I or my players never really gave much thought to whether the plane was infinite or not. Who cares. If they traveled there, their goal was to get from A to B. So- as KM said originally, pointless change.



> _"Good planes were boring"_
> 
> Probably, but they were there for a reason: background. Again you want every place to be a dungeon?




Every place has to be a "dungeon" it seems. I never found the Good-aligned planes boring; neither did my players (1e, 2e, 3.x). Maybe we're in the minority here, who knows.


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## thundershot (Dec 10, 2008)

I could personally care less... I have my own world, and my own gods (I use a modified version of the PHB/DMG gods). I use the planes how they are out of the book.

The one thing that I'm still wondering (and it's for future reference if it ever comes to be) is can characters still use the planes to travel to other worlds like in Planescape and Spelljammer (since we've got them combined now)? If they ever do a new Dark Sun setting, I'd love for my characters, at higher levels, be able to go there so I can have some adventures in a harsh setting like that.



Chris


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## Nikosandros (Dec 10, 2008)

Grazzt said:


> Every place has to be a "dungeon" it seems. I never found the Good-aligned planes boring; neither did my players (1e, 2e, 3.x).



Neither did I nor my group... we liked the good planes and even, gasp!, the elemental planes.


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## Lacyon (Dec 10, 2008)

Grazzt said:


> I never found the Good-aligned planes boring; neither did my players (1e, 2e, 3.x). Maybe we're in the minority here, who knows.




Players in my group never found the Good-aligned planes at all.


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## vagabundo (Dec 10, 2008)

Lacyon said:


> Players in my group never found the Good-aligned planes at all.




My players never found the planes at all.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Stogoe said:


> I certainly don't want fifty pages detailing the endless layers of the planes of Instant Death.




Neither do I. Where I've asked for it?

It's more like: _"fire elementals come from Elemental Plane of Fire, if you're not into pyro don't bother. On the other hand we have this cool place called Elemental Chaos where all elemental planes touch each other and it's party everyday"_.

See? Would be easy to keep all of them and add ELemental Chaos. If I thought that while typing what could professional RPG designers do?


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## balard (Dec 10, 2008)

Man, I love 4th edition. I really do. Its a blast. But I HATE all the Rich Baker ideas about the planes in general. I try very hard to glance over than. They are awful. I agree with the above posters in everything. "All planes must have dungeons", "Planes must be finite", "This plane are boring", "Devils and Demons are the same"(by the way, tell me know how do you recognize a demon, a devil, an archon and an angel in this edition?), "One cosmology to rule then all". All is dumb. I think one cosmology is cool IF the setting in question doesn't have one. Eberron is a great setting with a great cosmology. 

And for gods' sake, if you don't have shadowfell, what changes? Really? The shadowfell creatures not even go in and out like the old ethereals. "This shadar-kai dude can not exist without shadowfell, even if the dark elf here can". 

I was sad with the round of layoffs from WotC, even sadder when I saw Rich Baker wans't in there. At least make the guy do only mechanical stuff, because his fluff is awful!


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## Hussar (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> Neither do I. Where I've asked for it?
> 
> It's more like: _"fire elementals come from Elemental Plane of Fire, if you're not into pyro don't bother. On the other hand we have this cool place called Elemental Chaos where all elemental planes touch each other and it's party everyday"_.
> 
> See? Would be easy to keep all of them and add ELemental Chaos. If I thought that while typing what could professional RPG designers do?




But the question remains - why bother?  Why bother having locations that you CANNOT use?  What, exactly, does the Elemental Plane of Earth look like?  Big solid rock from top to bottom.  Whooo, so, I can do what exactly?  Oh, that's right, nothing.  So what if earth elementals come from there?  They can come from anywhere and still be earth elementals.  

I've never, ever understood this obsessive need for gamers to have useless flavour.  If it cannot be used for anything other than "background", why bother?


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## Imban (Dec 10, 2008)

I always liked the Elemental Plane of Fire. I mean, so there have routinely been spells and effects in D&D that send your foeman to Hell, which is ostensibly a bad thing, but well... Hell's well-established as a place you can go to and dungeon hack through, so spells like Hurl Through Hell that temporarily send enemies to Hell shouldn't really have great efficacy in harming someone if you think about it too hard.

On the other hand, the Elemental Plane of Fire is *an entire universe of nothing except fire*. Sending someone *there* does them immediate and obvious harm, because it's *an entire universe of nothing except fire*.

And really, this avoids requiring much text detailing the layers of the Plane of Instant Death, because it's a huge homogenous area of instant death. What *gets* the detail are the areas of the plane, like the City of Brass, which are worth going to, rather than worth sending someone on an all-expenses-paid trip to if you really don't like them.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 10, 2008)

Hussar said:


> But the question remains - why bother?  Why bother having locations that you CANNOT use?  What, exactly, does the Elemental Plane of Earth look like?  Big solid rock from top to bottom.  Whooo, so, I can do what exactly?  Oh, that's right, nothing.  So what if earth elementals come from there?  They can come from anywhere and still be earth elementals.
> 
> I've never, ever understood this obsessive need for gamers to have useless flavour.  If it cannot be used for anything other than "background", why bother?




It's called imagination. Just because it exists "in game" and is described as such a place, doesn't mean the players ever have to go there. Or that there aren't pocket areas they can visit. What's so horrible about the fact that it serves only as an origin for creatures that get summoned to the regular world? I mean, this is a *fantasy* game, why should that be such a stretch?


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## Stoat (Dec 10, 2008)

My specific beef with the Elemental Plane of Fire is this:  to adventure there, a PC must have some means to be immune to fire.  What is the primary attack form of those creatures native to the Elemental Plane of Fire?  Fire.

In other words, if you're adventuring there, most of the natives either can't harm you at all or find their attacks greatly weakened against you.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Hussar said:


> I've never, ever understood this obsessive need for gamers to have useless flavour.




It seems that it's not useless for a lot of people here so "useless" isn't a very polite word to use.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Stoat said:


> In other words, if you're adventuring there, most of the natives either can't harm you at all or find their attacks greatly weakened against you.




Looks like we are split into people who think all places are exploring ground and people who think some places work just fine as background.


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## Imban (Dec 10, 2008)

Stoat said:


> My specific beef with the Elemental Plane of Fire is this:  to adventure there, a PC must have some means to be immune to fire.  What is the primary attack form of those creatures native to the Elemental Plane of Fire?  Fire.
> 
> In other words, if you're adventuring there, most of the natives either can't harm you at all or find their attacks greatly weakened against you.




If you're adventuring there, you're in the City of Brass, which is populated by efreeti who cast spells and wield swords, and also cool enough that it's tolerable for non-fire-immune PCs.

If you go there because someone told you to go to Hell now, you are in an ocean of fire and it sucks to be you.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> It seems that it's not useless for a lot of people here so "useless" isn't a very polite word to use.




So, how do you use the planes of fire in your game?


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> What's so horrible about the fact that it serves only as an origin for creatures that get summoned to the regular world?




Because I want my books to be full of material I can use in a game, not descriptions of places my players cannot and will not go. Having several different variants of "GO HERE AND YOU DIE" with palette swaps for the elements is useless to me, because I'm concerned with campaign-building, not universe-building.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 10, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> Because I want my books to be full of material I can use in a game, not descriptions of places my players cannot and will not go. Having several different variants of "GO HERE AND YOU DIE" with palette swaps for the elements is useless to me, because I'm concerned with campaign-building, not universe-building.




It's a total fallacy to think that this is what any prior edition of D&D did. The original 1 ED Manual of the Planes gave you what you wanted with areas of each elemental plane that had pockets of other elements...thus providing you with the dungeons you'd want, without having to turn the entire plane into one big "slightly different but comfortable" finite dungeon. 

That's the beauty of an infinite plane.

We both get what we want.


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## Stoat (Dec 10, 2008)

Imban said:


> If you're adventuring there, you're in the City of Brass, which is populated by efreeti who cast spells and wield swords, and also cool enough that it's tolerable for non-fire-immune PCs.




Your point is well taken.  I was thinking more of PC's wandering about in the less civilized portions of the plane.



avin said:


> Looks like we are split into people who think all places are exploring ground and people who think some places work just fine as background.




So it seems.  My preference is certainly for material that the PC's can interact with directly.  I would not buy a Manual of the Planes that was primarily background.  I prefer the Inner Planes (or Elemental Chaos, or whatever) to be places where staunch heroes might dare to venture.  

It also seems that if a plane is just going to be background, it doesn't need too much detail.  "Knowledge Arcane DC: 20 -- Fire Elementals hail from the Plane of Fire, an infinite expanse of blazing flame where mortals cannot hope to survive."  If you aren't going there, how much information do you need about it?


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> So, how do you use the planes of fire in your game?




Planes of Fire are the bornplace of most creatures related to fire. Their gods live there. 

So far, no player of mine wanted do adventure there, but they often are in places where boards of one plane touches other, so they can walk around fire instead of just burn. Kinda like 1E used to be...

Isn't much like Elemental Chaos should be? A place where people can adventure? I didn't killed the plane and used that concept far before 4E.

So is that Elemental Plane that important? Of course it is (to me). A noble salamander chased by a party fled to the Elemental Plane of Fire (dice never lie) and folks needed to find another way to get what they need that time.

More than fleeing to a volcano, that was his Plane of origin, a place of Power to him, and my players decided to avoid the "let's use protection from fire" way. It's a matter of not trivializing everything.

I see that people keep saying they don't want places where people will never go on the books and I find it very very weird and intriguing.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> It's a total fallacy to think that this is what any prior edition of D&D did.




No, it's not. The majority of previous MotPs were useless to me in terms of out-of-the-book usable content. You can't tell me that my personal experience in my own games is a fallacy, friend.



> The original 1 ED Manual of the Planes gave you what you wanted with areas of each elemental plane that had pockets of other elements...thus providing you with the dungeons you'd want, without having to turn the entire plane into one big "slightly different but comfortable" finite dungeon.




Yes, it gave me small areas, while the rest of that plane was an endless sheet of fire that is worthless to me and the games I run.



> That's the beauty of an infinite plane.




Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and this beholder finds it ugly as hell.



> We both get what we want.




No, because I would still have a book with a ton of stuff that is useless to me. That's not me getting what I want.


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## Zil (Dec 10, 2008)

Grazzt said:


> Every place has to be a "dungeon" it seems. I never found the Good-aligned planes boring; neither did my players (1e, 2e, 3.x). Maybe we're in the minority here, who knows.



The Good aligned planes certainly did not have to be boring.  I used them quite extensively in the 3E era of my long running Planescape game.   In fact, my players spent quite some time on Mount Celestia and Bytopia and they never once complained about those planes being boring.

However, if you go into game adventure design and decide in advance that plane X is monolithically boring or lethal, then you've already trapped yourself in a somewhat limited creative box.


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 10, 2008)

FWIW, with a lot of the questions, I see it as a continuum.

Were demons and devils the same? Not really. Is it still cool to make them more different? Yes.

Were the good planes boring? My campaigns say otherwise. Is it still cool to make them more exciting? Heck yeah.

So I'm supportive of the design team's efforts there. 

I guess with the 4e changes from "Planes of Instant Ouch" to "Planes to Adventure In," I'm just an unabashed fan.  Awesome alien places to send my heroes without the need for high-magic weirdness is neat, and I'm glad 4e supports this more. Could they have preserved the original energy-like planes, too? Sure, they could've. But if it just boils down to fluff, what's the big deal?

I guess the main question with that is: what about these inhospitable planes was appealing to you when you were playing the game or designing the world? Why did you like a Plane of Only Fire? How was it useful to you? What did you do with it? And what can't you do with it now that it's a Plane of Elemental Chaos that you could do with it then?



			
				The Little Raven said:
			
		

> Yes, it gave me small areas, while the rest of that plane was an endless sheet of fire that is worthless to me and the games I run.
> ...
> No, because I would still have a book with a ton of stuff that is useless to me. That's not me getting what I want




Well, on the first point, people seem to be saying that it's OK to have places in existence where the PC's can never really go (unless the plot calls for them to and thus gives them Plot Immunity vs. that place). It's OK to have a big empty field of fire because the PC's don't need to go there unless they're being burned by their enemies (in which case, all it needs to do is damage).

On the second point, because those planes aren't meant to be adventured in, you don't need a lot of stuff about them. You could just have an entry like:

*Plane of Fire*: This plane is inhospitable to most mortal life. It kills creatures not completely immune to fire. Its only inhabitants are rumored to be creatures made of and immune to fire who see it as a paradise. 

And then move on to the more interesting places.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 10, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> No, it's not. The majority of previous MotPs were useless to me in terms of out-of-the-book usable content. You can't tell me that my personal experience in my own games is a fallacy, friend.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Wow, somehow I get the feeling you don't really think of me as a friend.  

The fallacy, my fellow gamer, is that any book told you that "you can't go here in any form or fashion or you will die." That's simple truth, not something subjective. 

I really find it hard to believe that you would want your players to explore the ENTIRE plane of fire. I get the sneaking feeling that you just want to argue in that regard. 

And just so I'm clear, you're saying that an infinite plane, that gives you the areas you can use in your game, and areas I can use and not use in my game, is useless to you? 

Once again, I get the feeling you just want to argue.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> Yes, it gave me small areas, while the rest of that plane was an endless sheet of fire that is worthless to me and the games I run.




I lost you.

The planes are infinite, so how can you guys say it's "small areas"?

This areas can be the size you want to be.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> On the second point, because those planes aren't meant to be adventured in, you don't need a lot of stuff about them. You could just have an entry like:
> 
> *Plane of Fire*: This plane is inhospitable to most mortal life. It kills creatures not completely immune to fire. Its only inhabitants are rumored to be creatures made of and immune to fire who see it as a paradise.
> 
> And then move on to the more interesting places.




There you go: QFT.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> The fallacy, my fellow gamer, is that any book told you that "you can't go here in any form or fashion or you will die." That's simple truth, not something subjective.




I never said any form or fashion. When a plane is described as an endless expanse of fire in which I cannot survive without constant protective magics, that is a plane that is worthless to me. When you multiply that out to 6 or more planes, that's big chunks of worthless material to me.



> I really find it hard to believe that you would want your players to explore the ENTIRE plane of fire. I get the sneaking feeling that you just want to argue in that regard.




No, I don't want them to explore the entire plane of fire, *because I don't want a "Plane of Fire*." I want planes that I want my players to explore all parts of.



> And just so I'm clear, you're saying that an infinite plane, that gives you the areas you can use in your game, and areas I can use and not use in my game, is useless to you?




When it is presented as "Plane of Endless Burning Stuff" or "Plane of Infinite Rock," and maybe 30% of the material is useful, and only with modifications on my part, that book is useless to me.



> Once again, I get the feeling you just want to argue.




Assigning motivations to other posters is rude. And against the forum rules.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> The planes are infinite, so how can you guys say it's "small areas"?




Small areas of the planes, such as the City of Brass. If I'm getting 5 pages on the Plane of Fire, and only a few paragraphs is useful to me, then I am not getting my money's worth from that material. Extend that out over several planes (elemental, energy) and that's a large chunk of content that I have no desire to own, since I won't use it.



> This areas can be the size you want to be.




...by changing things, which means I'm doing my own work anyhow. The point of being able to pick up the book and use things from it without having to change a large amount of material is convenience, since I don't have time to dwell on cosmologies and universe building with my schedule.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> When it is presented as "Plane of Endless Burning Stuff" or "Plane of Infinite Rock," and maybe 30% of the material is useful, and only with modifications on my part, that book is useless to me.




As much as a "everywhere is a dungeon" book is useless to me... 

There's a lot of dungeons and adventures detailed coming from DDI Dragon, what I need is more fluff, inspiration, forbidden places.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> As much as a "everywhere is a dungeon" book is useless to me...




Which is why I've never tried to claim my experience is universal.


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 10, 2008)

The Little Raven said:
			
		

> No, I don't want them to explore the entire plane of fire, because I don't want a "Plane of Fire." I want planes that I want my players to explore all parts of.




Do your campaign worlds have places that your PC's can never/should never/will never go?

The question being posed seems to be: what's wrong with planes that the PC's can never/should never/will never go to?



> When it is presented as "Plane of Endless Burning Stuff" or "Plane of Infinite Rock," and maybe 30% of the material is useful, and only with modifications on my part, that book is useless to me.




That's not necessarily true, though. It doesn't have to be. Limiting inhospitable planes to a few sentences that basically say: "If you go here, you die, but there are creatures immune to that death that live here, and they throw parties, and you're not invited, but you could crash it with this ritual" is pretty simple. 

I like having the planes be some place I can adventure in all over the place, and I still don't know what having "forbidden places" really gains you, but I can respect it as a different opinion.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> Small areas of the planes, such as the City of Brass. If I'm getting 5 pages on the Plane of Fire, and only a few paragraphs is useful to me, then I am not getting my money's worth from that material. Extend that out over several planes (elemental, energy) and that's a large chunk of content that I have no desire to own, since I won't use it.




Do you already have the new Manual of Planes or are just assuming there will be more adventure ground described on it?





The Little Raven said:


> ...by changing things, which means I'm doing my own work anyhow. The point of being able to pick up the book and use things from it without having to change a large amount of material is convenience, since I don't have time to dwell on cosmologies and universe building with my schedule.




What would you have to change? Were the "small" 1E areas smaller than what's coming on 4E? How do you know if that "small" areas on 1E are smaller than the "large" areas 4E motp brings?

I could understand your idea of "100% places my players can explore", but I fail seeing logic on this "size" argument.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> Which is why I've never tried to claim my experience is universal.




And I never said you did.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Do your campaign worlds have places that your PC's can never/should never/will never go?




To some limited extent, some do, because sometimes I create hooks to go places which don't get picked up. Otherwise, no, I do not create places that my players will not see. As I said, I'm into campaign-building, not universe-building.



> The question being posed seems to be: what's wrong with planes that the PC's can never/should never/will never go to?




And I've answered that: it's useless to me in a book that I am purchasing to use the material in my game.

If you want planes like that, then that's cool. However, we'll disagree on what published materials should present in that regard, and a product that satisfies you may not satisfy me.



> I like having the planes be some place I can adventure in all over the place, and I still don't know what having "forbidden places" really gains you, but I can respect it as a different opinion.




I can respect people wanting different things than I do. However, when it comes to what will be in a published book, I will definitely want (and push for) material that is useful to me, even if it comes at the expense of what someone else wants.


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## Harlekin (Dec 10, 2008)

*It's all about screentime*



avin said:


> _"The Elemental Planes were unusable"_
> 
> Yes. Sure. But they used to be sources of primal energy, the place where elementals come. Should every plane be a dungeon to explore? Sorry, this is a very poor idea.




Interestingly enough, everybody arguing for elemental planes being useful cites pockets or border regions as areas the PCs may visit. Aren't those places exactly like the new elemental chaos? If so, all the new cosmology does is reduce the emphasis on the places that are not likely to see screen time, while giving DMs more tools to run adventures in places the PCs may actually visit. 

I'm also somewhat confused, why "place for the PC to visit" ="dungeon". Is an attempt to call every place that may get a lot of screen time a dungeon, even if the PCs do no fighting or looting there, but instead interact with the locals and marvel at the surroundings while the players get to roleplay?


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## Imban (Dec 10, 2008)

Harlekin said:


> Interestingly enough, everybody arguing for elemental planes being useful cites pockets or border regions as areas the PCs may visit. Aren't those places exactly like the new elemental chaos?




You missed me pointing out the utility of the Elemental Plane of Fire as an ocean of fire that you do not want to go to, but instead want people who you do not like to go to.

So Hell, basically, only Hell in D&D's been an adventure area for a long time.



> I'm also somewhat confused, why "place for the PC to visit" ="dungeon". Is an attempt to call every place that may get a lot of screen time a dungeon, even if the PCs do no fighting or looting there, but instead interact with the locals and marvel at the surroundings while the players get to roleplay?




Most of the locals in the planes are unflaggingly hostile. It's a dungeon.


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 10, 2008)

> To some limited extent, some do, because sometimes I create hooks to go places which don't get picked up. Otherwise, no, I do not create places that my players will not see. As I said, I'm into campaign-building, not universe-building.




Mentioning some place my characters will never go to helps me to build a more robust setting for the campaign.

If I have a character say another character is "tougher than a Nordian!" I don't need to have the players go to Nordia. They know that Nordia is full of tough people, and that's enough. That's all I really need. 

If I have a character say to another character "I will burn you in the dimension of Pure Fire!" I don't need to know the price of tea there or how they build castles there. I just need to know that it's a threat. 

It's more about having believable characters and dialogue than it is about pointless work.



> And I've answered that: it's useless to me in a book that I am purchasing to use the material in my game.
> 
> If you want planes like that, then that's cool. However, we'll disagree on what published materials should present in that regard, and a product that satisfies you may not satisfy me.
> 
> I can respect people wanting different things than I do. However, when it comes to what will be in a published book, I will definitely want (and push for) material that is useful to me, even if it comes at the expense of what someone else wants.




My preferences are more like yours on this, but I guess I'm not as big of an extremist on it. I want adventuring locations, but I don't need to be able to slay goblins anywhere in the multiverse, so as long as the product isn't dominated by 10 page entries on stuff my players will never see, I can stomach there being places my players will never see, just like I'm okay with there being a Nordia they never go to.


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## Harlekin (Dec 10, 2008)

*Infinite planes are silly*



avin said:


> _"Infinite planes stagger the imagination"_
> 
> It seems your imagination is kinda short. Infinite or not infinite, what difference does it make? If you walk from A to B does it matters if the plane is infinite or not? Infinite means less maps, enforcing creative ways to travelling... finite is like "let's map the place, explore, kill the boss and take the loot".




I would say exactly the opposite. If you think planes should be infinite (rather than just really big), you haven't considered what that means. Many elements of planescape canon for example don't work with infinite planes:

The blood war: A battle that kills 10 Million fiends is meaningless if there are infinite fiends.

Sigil: Sigil is finite, so it cannot have doors to every place in even one infinite plane. In fact doorways from Sigil can only reach 0% of all places in an infinite plane.

History: One of the most important events in planescape history is when a region shifts from one plane to another. However, if both planes are infinite, such an event is meaningless to everyone but the inhabitants of that region, as both planes have the same size and population before and after the event. No balance of power shifts.

In summary, a universe with infinitely large planes cannot be affected by a finite number of individuals in a finite time. The fraction war is then pointless. Not to mention anything the players do.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Harlekin said:


> Interestingly enough, everybody arguing for elemental planes being useful cites pockets or border regions as areas the PCs may visit. Aren't those places exactly like the new elemental chaos?




Well, I said that, just check my posts 




Harlekin said:


> I'm also somewhat confused, why "place for the PC to visit" ="dungeon". Is an attempt to call every place that may get a lot of screen time a dungeon, even if the PCs do no fighting or looting there, but instead interact with the locals and marvel at the surroundings while the players get to roleplay?




Maybe you missed another post of mine where I said Elemental Chaos was used by me (and in pocket size even in 1E) long before 4E, a place where all elemental planes colide.

The point is: was it real necessary to remove elemental planes for this new concept to be useful? Looks like not.

I DM 4E and I like it. I'm a DDI subscriber and so far what you described ("marvel at the surroundings while the players get to roleplay") is farm from what 4E is offering... it's more like: "Elemental Chaos? Nice, lava is hindering terrain, roll iniative"...


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 10, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> It's called imagination. Just because it exists "in game" and is described as such a place, doesn't mean the players ever have to go there. Or that there aren't pocket areas they can visit. What's so horrible about the fact that it serves only as an origin for creatures that get summoned to the regular world? I mean, this is a *fantasy* game, why should that be such a stretch?



Sooo.... making fantasy locations usable by the DM as a place PCs can actually adventure is somehow not imaginative? Inventing boring, homogeneous places the PCs _can't_ go to shows imagination?  How is having a plane which is just where creatures of a particular type come from and PCs can't visit more cool than someplace those same creatures still come from, but the PCs can travel to? 

Nothing is lost, so many possibilities gained!

My own 3E campaign's cosmological history has elementals cast more as antagonists, wanting to rip the world apart and return it to it's primordial essences. If I wanted to have the high level PCs take the fight to an Archelemental demigod, my options were pretty limited. I mean, why would a powerful fire deity dwell in a location that's relatively safe for adventurers to attack? More logically, he'd reside at the "center" of the plane, the superheated core. As mentioned, PCs would have to make themselves immune to fire, and hence totally immune to most of the attacks which creatures of the plane use, which is boring. Also, you know what I'd always have on hand as a powerful resident of an elemental plane to deal with Prime Material interlopers? Dispel Magic. Save or Die. Poof.

The Elemental Chaos, however, lets me create fiery locations for the bad guys to reside without them being completely just fire. Making the Elemental Planes someplace PCs can actually explore and interact with isn't tantamount to making them just another a "dungeon". How is being freed to create really cool locations with fantastic features based on the churning chaos less imaginative then setting things either in a pocket of air or solid element? 

Regarding the World Axis: I don't think people see how flexible it actually is. It's really just a stripped down Great Wheel: Prime Material, Astral Plane and the Inner Elemental Planes, with a couple of co-existing planes. Add the Outer Planes back in as Domains, and there you go.

Making the domains in the Astral Sea independent "widgets" was a great move. Now one can keep the core model and use whatever "Outer Planes" they desire. I'm sure this is the approach they'll be using for Eberron. So, yeah, all published settings will use the World Axis model, but they'll still be highly customizable and unique.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Harlekin said:


> In summary, a universe with infinitely large planes cannot be affected by a finite number of individuals in a finite time. The fraction war is then pointless. Not to mention anything the players do.




It depends how powerful these "beings" are. As a DM I can say: "it's butterfly effect time" and a single death is changing the way the universe moves, so your argument isn't entirely accurate.

How much players in a finite Toril can do to change universe? Finite or infinite holds nothing in a game of fantasy.


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## Harlekin (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> The point is: was it real necessary to remove elemental planes for this new concept to be useful? Looks like not.
> 
> I DM 4E and I like it. I'm a DDI subscriber and so far what you described ("marvel at the surroundings while the players get to roleplay") is farm from what 4E is offering... it's more like: "Elemental Chaos? Nice, lava is hindering terrain, roll iniative"...




Well, I'm happy if elements of the planes that don't get screen time do not use up book space either. If the elemental planes were still out there, we would expect them do be described in more than a few sentences. Which is a waste.  

I agree though that focusing on places to adventure should not mean turning everything into a combat scene. Especially memorable NPCs are important. I hope that Wotc uses their DMG2 to provide a lot of help on generating interesting non-combat encounters.


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## Harlekin (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> It depends how powerful these "beings" are. As a DM I can say: "it's butterfly effect time" and a single death is changing the way the universe moves, so your argument isn't entirely accurate.
> 
> How much players in a finite Toril can do to change universe? Finite or infinite holds nothing in a game of fantasy.




Wouldn't even a change due to the butterfly effect require an infinte amount of time? Chaotic effects do generally not affect infinitely large systems.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Harlekin said:


> Wouldn't even a change due to the butterfly effect require an infinte amount of time? Chaotic effects do generally not affect infinitely large systems.




Not really. 

The mentioned death was an accident. Unfortunately a shipment of wood for constructing a church for Elf-god-dude road killed some Orc-god-priest. Orc god decided to piss off elves and send a rain of fire over some tree top city 12 minutes later.

And then war was made...

You are talking about physics... D&D has fled physic school foor some swimming


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## Harlekin (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> Not really.
> 
> The mentioned death was an accident. Unfortunately a shipment of wood for constructing a church for Elf-god-dude road killed some Orc-god-priest. Orc god decided to piss off elves and send a rain of fire over some tree top city 12 minutes later.
> 
> And then war was made...




And to even tell all the infinite number of elves about the war will take infinite time. If you don't tell all of them only finite numbers on bith sides will be involve, so only finite numbers will die. So after the war you will have as many elves as before the war. Nothing changed.


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## Harlekin (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> You are talking about physics... D&D has fled physic school foor some swimming




I'm talking logic and internal consistency, not physics. We are set up to think about finite numbers, the infinite makes everything wonky. Hence it makes much more sense to say a plane is "really big", rather than infinite.


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## TerraDave (Dec 10, 2008)

Who had a problem with infinite planes: me

It always seemed like mathematical illiteracy, I mean our entire universe with its billions of years of history and trillions of stars is not infinite, and one million such universes is not infinite (nor is one trillion such universes)…but some place for some gods and their servants to hang out is? (yes, some cosmology invokes the infinite, but even that is usually broken up into the finite, like finite cycles of time). 

Did this matter, no, but in the same way that other parts of the game I didn’t like didn’t matter, I ignored it. It only really annoyed me when the 666 Layers of the Abyss became the Infinite Layers of the Abyss. That is, from something cool, to something dumb and meaningless. 

So I am glad that the game was changed just to cater to me. I support all such changes. I will be emailing Rich Baker with more personal requests, which I expect him to implement.


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## Scribble (Dec 10, 2008)

hehe I thought that infinite layers of the abyss thing was particularly annoying too... It was pretty much ALWAYS the 666 layers in my games (when I used it.)

I never had a major issue with the great wheel cosmology... It was imaginative. I'll admit there were a number of planes I never used though. Plane of rock...  Never really came up much.  I also found it kind of static... Since every plane was linked to an alignment, adding new ones was kind of patchwork at best.

I like the new cosmology. I wouldn't say it's "better" but it IS a neat idea, and it's different. It's a new idea for me to use. We did the great wheel... 3 times already. Why not try something else for a bit?


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

TerraDave said:


> It only really annoyed me when the 666 Layers of the Abyss became the Infinite Layers of the Abyss. That is, from something cool, to something dumb and meaningless.




Er, who said 666 is cool? It's a "dumb and meaningless" number kids love to write like they were evil incarnate 

What some think it's cool some think it's dumb and meaningless, no news here.

And this is a fantasy game, inifinte is a fantasy tool, why people keep comparing our universe to some place where people can cast fireballs?


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

Harlekin said:


> I'm talking logic and internal consistency, not physics. We are set up to think about finite numbers, the infinite makes everything wonky. Hence it makes much more sense to say a plane is "really big", rather than infinite.




Granted, but I don't really think D&D world works with our logic.

Logic, numbers, chemistry, phisics... all this work at the same time, like a clockwork on our universe... in an universe where trolls and dragons live I guess "really big" and "infinite" are made of the same clay.

Infinite to me is an endless playground to keep adding stuff.

Finite, to me, it's a word where all mystery is lost.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> Finite, to me, it's a word where all mystery is lost.




"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

We live in a finite universe. Mystery is most certainly not lacking in it.


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## avin (Dec 10, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> We live in a finite universe. Mystery is most certainly not lacking in it.




Do we?

Universe is expanding to where? What's there to expand that's not our universe? How far it goes? Mysteries...

But this is a discussion I prefer not to enter. My english is poor and crude, I won't be able to be clear here.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> Do we?




Most theories point that way.



> Universe is expanding to where? What's there to expand that's not our universe? How far it goes? Mysteries...




Yes, mysteries that don't require an infinite universe or plane. Hell, our world is incredibly finite, and there's no shortage of mystery on it.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 10, 2008)

Sir Brennen said:


> Sooo.... making fantasy locations usable by the DM as a place PCs can actually adventure is somehow not imaginative? Inventing boring, homogeneous places the PCs _can't_ go to shows imagination?  How is having a plane which is just where creatures of a particular type come from and PCs can't visit more cool than someplace those same creatures still come from, but the PCs can travel to?




That wasn't the point I was ultimately trying to make. I think the fact that the core design of D&D's fluff is heading in a direction that makes every campaign setting the same, is a bad idea. They design philosophy needs to back away from that, and allow a more balanced look at different versions instead of trying to retcon and shoe horn everything into one tidy package. 

Such a place that would be virtually inaccessible to the PC's isn't necessarily cool or uncool, but it may be a concept that fits a particular setting, depending upon the settings being told. Its pretty unimaginative to automatically disclude such possibilities. Anything that limits my choices is certainly limiting my imagination.


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 10, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> Such a place that would be virtually inaccessible to the PC's isn't necessarily cool or uncool, but it may be a concept that fits a particular setting, depending upon the settings being told. Its pretty unimaginative to automatically disclude such possibilities. Anything that limits my choices is certainly limiting my imagination.



Changing the way these planes are set up in 4E opens up MORE choices for a DM to set  adventures. Including the choice you seem to prefer of just saying "You can't go to this plane" or "You can only go to the City of Brass on this plane". 

In fact, I find it funny that you're basically arguing _for _limits. The Inner Planes of previous editions did not present as many options for a DM or players to explore as the current setup, which is the point. 

It's easier to start with a model more open to setting adventures and let the DM exclude the options he'd rather not have than start limited and have nothing to support the DM's that want to open it up with more options.

The MotP is going to have info on setting up your own cosmologies as well. So options for your own setup will still be there. No DM will be straitjacketed with the World Axis if he doesn't want to be for his own campaign. It's just that WotC's _published_ material has a baseline the cosmology so that the PHB, DMG and MM material will work with as presented in all settings. And, as was mentioned in the interview, it's still flexible enough to allow something like Eberron's shifting planes to be utilized within it as well, so it'll have a unique cosmology built on the _framework_ of the World Axis.


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## doctorhook (Dec 10, 2008)

I am amazed at how disenfranchised some people get at the mention of increased utility in their games.

Everything, every location that was possible in previous editions' cosmology is still perfectly workable under the World-Axis/Pokeball-cosmology. You need a Bytopia? Hey look, there it is, floating in the Astral Sea! You need to link your material plan super-volcano to a planar realm of fire incarnate? Here's a handy continent-sized region of concentrated flame within the Elemental Chaos.

Everything that used to work still does, and now it's a heck of a lot simpler explain a bunch of things; it's win-win! Where's the problem?


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 10, 2008)

Sir Brennen said:


> Changing the way these planes are set up in 4E opens up MORE choices for a DM to set  adventures. Including the choice you seem to prefer of just saying "You can't go to this plane" or "You can only go to the City of Brass on this plane".
> 
> In fact, I find it funny that you're basically arguing _for _limits. The Inner Planes of previous editions did not present as many options for a DM or players to explore as the current setup, which is the point.
> 
> ...




You're still not getting what I'm saying. I'm not arguing for one *or* the other, I'm saying you can have *bot*h. Someone said that you shouldn't have a seperate plane where the PC's can't go without serious magic or face instant death. I say you can have both. 

How is having 1+1=2, instead of just 1 arguing for limits? I'm arguing for more choices.


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## Imban (Dec 10, 2008)

doctorhook said:


> Everything that used to work still does, and now it's a heck of a lot simpler explain a bunch of things; it's win-win! Where's the problem?




At least for me, it removes the utility of "Go to Hell"-type spells, something D&D sadly did to Hell itself years ago, but now finally expanded to every plane.

I mean, here's the thing: if you're throwing someone at random into the Elemental Plane of Fire, or the Negative Energy Plane, or the Positive Energy Plane, it's quite clear you wish them grievous harm and the cause of their grievous harm is apparent both intuitively (burnt to a crisp in an ocean of fire / drained of all life in a dark void / exploded into rainbows and sparkles by life energy) and borne out by what the rules and setting say about these places.

If you throw someone at random into Hell, it's quite clear that you wish them grievous harm (unless they're a devil, I guess) and the cause of their grievous harm is probably intuitively apparent (torn apart by a monstrosity in Hell, cast into the lake of fire, whatever) but not borne out by what the rules and setting say about Hell, which is that it's a bad place to be due to all the devils, but it's a place that's generally survivable and which high-level heroes can and should go to in order to kick ass and take names.

"But," you cry, "surely there are oceans of fire in both Hell and the Elemental Chaos!", and you'd be right. The thing is that once you've made these places adventuring locales instead of The Bad Place, you lose the immediate and intuitive resonance of being sent there = bad, and have to further specify that your spell is putting them in a place that causes them immediate grievous harm.

And at this point, it doesn't have any more resonance with me than a spell which teleports you into the crater of the nearest volcano for a round or two.

(tl;dr: It's cool to be able to say "Go to Hell" and mean it, but it only works if Hell is unequivocally bad.)



TerraDave said:


> Who had a problem with infinite planes: me




Basically everything this man says in this post, I agree with. I always just read the "infinite" planes as being finite but usually immense in order to avoid nonsense with infinity. Especially with some, like the Outlands with its finitely-spaced-out (!) border towns, you had to do far too much logical twisting in order to maintain the plane's infinity, whereas declaring it to be finite was far easier.

The only one of these that didn't bug me was Sigil, because it being on top of an infinitely high mountain was just a cute little "you can't get there from here" paradox. (I mean, as long as you assumed a finite amount of Rilmani lived in a finite amount of spots along a finite lower region of the mountain.)



avin said:


> Er, who said 666 is cool? It's a "dumb and meaningless" number kids love to write like they were evil incarnate




Oh yeah, 4e *totally* doesn't cater to kids who love acting like they're evil incarnate and 666 layers wouldn't have *any* resonance among the kind of people who're the target market for 4e's Tieflings and such.


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## Scribble (Dec 10, 2008)

Imban said:


> At least for me, it removes the utility of "Go to Hell"-type spells, something D&D sadly did to Hell itself years ago, but now finally expanded to every plane.




Shrug. 

I'd trade more info I might actually use in my game for your ability to turn a teleport spell into an instant death spell anyday. 

I'm selfish like that.


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## Imban (Dec 10, 2008)

Scribble said:


> I'd trade more info I might actually use in my game for your ability to turn a teleport spell into an instant death spell anyday.




Those kind of spells already exist in 4e. (c.f. Warlock's Hurl Through Hell.) I just don't think they're as cool as they used to be, especially Hurl Through Hell, which you get at a level where you may well be going to Hell personally to punch people out.


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## WhatGravitas (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> Mysteries...



If you don't find mysteries in the modern world, you're not looking hard enough. Seriously.

On finite/infinite: I think the real main thrust of the change is _encouraging_ creativity.

With infinite planes you, as a DM, have freedom to put more stuff into it as you like, but ultimately, it has to fit the general idea of the plane - the plane is sort of a category.

With finite planes, but infinite place for completely new planes, you are instead encouraged to create an entirely new plane for something you have thought of instead of shoehorning it into an existing infinite plane.

This has also the side-effect of making the cosmology more modular and I think it's a win-win situation:

WotC can produce entirely new planes where authors can run rampant with their ideas instead of having to adhere to the theme of a plane. And as DM, I can do the same, encouraging me to think up completely new stuff instead of building on the own - but the "finite but still freaking big" still gives one the room to put themed and fitting material into these planes.

Cheers, LT.


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## Lacyon (Dec 10, 2008)

Imban said:


> Those kind of spells already exist in 4e. (c.f. Warlock's Hurl Through Hell.) I just don't think they're as cool as they used to be, especially Hurl Through Hell, which you get at a level where you may well be going to Hell personally to punch people out.




When I play a warlock, that's _exactly_ how I'm going to flavor Hurl Through Hell when I get it. Thanks


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## Ktulu (Dec 10, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> There's a difference between using a cosmology for a world that otherwise didn't have one already fully fleshed out, especially when those worlds had very little to no interaction with the planes at large. The cosmology wasn't intrusive there, and each world retained its unique features, even such things as Athas's Gray and Black.
> 
> WotC is happily retconning settings into their shiny new cosmology, and in the process stripping setting unique elements in order to have everything stuck into that 4e default core cosmology. That's horrible design.




No, it isn't.  It's finding the middle ground between having older stuff that people would like to see updated (spelljammer, planescape, etc...) but still wanting more than 4 people to buy it.

If you like the old version, that already exists.  I don't want what Kenzer did with Kalamar.  Don't give me the same book I already own with a few changes to the mechanics, along with a word search replacement from "Grey elf" to "Eladrin".

I love the fact that all settings will have the same wireframe.  That's easier to get players to agree to try out setting x or y.  Thank you, WotC.  You guys get it.


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 10, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> You're still not getting what I'm saying. I'm not arguing for one *or* the other, I'm saying you can have *bot*h. Someone said that you shouldn't have a seperate plane where the PC's can't go without serious magic or face instant death. I say you can have both.



Okay, I'm not saying you shouldn't have such planes. But for the company putting out the actual game, it makes much, much more sense for them to open up that design space and give DM's a wider range of options for setting adventures.

Each edition of D&D has had an established core cosmology. When making such a cosmology, certain choices have to be made (even if some were done so unconsciously). This adds consistency when designing spells, creatures, adventures, etc. which are connected to the planes.

In this edition, they decided, yes, having planes where you can't go without serious magic or face instant death was something they didn't want. Now they've got additional locations which they can publish material about in a way that can be actually used in a campaign.

Does this imply you can't have planes which are inaccessible? Do the rules really need to spell out you also make access to a given plane more restrictive if you want? You have the ability to do this if you want. Therefore, both options exist.

However, I think that choosing the option of having any plane be inaccessible cascades into closing more options to the DM and players, and therefore is a limit itself. I can choose A and have 1, 2 and 3, or I can have B and... that's it.


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## Storminator (Dec 10, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Do your campaign worlds have places that your PC's can never/should never/will never go?
> 
> The question being posed seems to be: what's wrong with planes that the PC's can never/should never/will never go to?




For me, the answer is no. There is not a single place in my multiverse that is defined to be out of bounds. Some places may be less accessible or hospitable, but they can get there. Having them _choose_ not to go there is something completely different. 

PS


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## Aldarc (Dec 10, 2008)

avin said:


> Er, who said 666 is cool? It's a "dumb and meaningless" number kids love to write like they were evil incarnate
> 
> What some think it's cool some think it's dumb and meaningless, no news here.
> 
> And this is a fantasy game, inifinte is a fantasy tool, why people keep comparing our universe to some place where people can cast fireballs?



Calls for realism in fantasy or fantasy in reality generally never is upheld consistently, but only when it is convenient for the argument particular. 



Drkfathr1 said:


> How is having 1+1=2, instead of just 1 arguing for limits? I'm arguing for more choices.



I fail to follow your reasoning here. If you argue for 2, you are still arguing for impossing a limit, but now it has only advanced by a unit of 1, which remains to be seen as to how much utility of "option" is gained in the advancement of 1 to 2. Furthermore, it is also just as easy for the opposing side to make a similar argument in which the Elemental Chaos has numerous locations that would be inaccessible by PCs given the danger of the surrounding Chaos. And instead of confining elements to just a cosmetic cosmology in which elements are mostly restricted to simply their particular elemental plane, DMs using the Elemental Chaos could choose to keep the elementals in ever-changing elemental domains amongst their own kind or DMs could choose to have the elementals roam around the Elemental Chaos in battles within. To argue that the use of particular elemental planes somehow creates more options than the Elemental Chaos seems short-sighted based on the set-up of the Elemental Chaos.


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## Shemeska (Dec 10, 2008)

Sir Brennen said:


> In fact, I find it funny that you're basically arguing _for _limits. The Inner Planes of previous editions did not present as many options for a DM or players to explore as the current setup, which is the point.




The hell they did. The inner planes of previous editions had more options than the hand-holding "Don't make it too dangerous! Then adventurers won't come to our extraplanar dungeon! Oh noes!" I see in the 4e planar design.

By stripping any serious level of hostility from some of the planes, you water down the wonder and challange of actually adventuring in those planes, even as you strip depth and background flavor from the cosmology.

By no means was the elemental plane of fire just a blank, endless, YOU DIE NOW! plane of flames. Just skimming _The Inner Planes_ by Monte Cook from the later days of 2e that's blazingly clear, even when the book happens to be narrated by a crazy slaad named Xanxost. In the 1e/2e/3e Elemental Plane of Fire you could have adventurers step through a portal and trudge across a plain of compacted ash, intermingled with the crumbling bones of dead Azers, slain centuries ago by a theocratic empire of Salamanders. The PCs could struggle across the landscape, crossing lakes of cooling lava covered only by a thin crust, sweating from the heat as they search for the ruins of the Azer capital city where a longstanding campaign antagonist searches for a relic of Imix, once worshipped by those same Azers, hoping to use it to summon the Elemental Prince to the prime material.

The Elemental Plane of Fire wasn't just a monolithic stretch of fire. And saying that it was displays either an ignorance of previous editions' material on the plane, or a blatant misrepresentation of it.

The 4e cosmology by its nature is placing limits by what the design team feels is proper for your campaigns, and in the process it's happily twisting previous campaigns to fit that sterile, homogenous view. Nothing in the previous cosmology from 1e/2e/3e precluded anything from the 4e planes from happening therein.


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## ProfessorCirno (Dec 10, 2008)

I find this article wonderfully refreshing, as I was starting to run low on things with 4e that I really, really, *really* disliked.

PS: DEAR KAMIKAZE STOP POSTING WHAT I WANT TO POST BUT FASTER AND AMAZINGLY MUCH MORE ARTICULATED.


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## Aldarc (Dec 10, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> The 4e cosmology by its nature is placing limits by what the design team feels is proper for your campaigns, and in the process it's happily twisting previous campaigns to fit that sterile, homogenous view. Nothing in the previous cosmology from 1e/2e/3e precluded anything from the 4e planes from happening therein.



I fail to see how the converse could be held true in regards to the Great Wheel. The move from the Great Wheel to the World Axis has merely traded one set of limitations for another.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 11, 2008)

Aldarc said:


> I fail to see how the converse could be held true in regards to the Great Wheel. The move from the Great Wheel to the World Axis has merely traded one set of limitations for another.




But at least in previous editions the Great Wheel wasn't used for every setting. The new World Axis is.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 11, 2008)

Aldarc said:


> Calls for realism in fantasy or fantasy in reality generally never is upheld consistently, but only when it is convenient for the argument particular.
> 
> I fail to follow your reasoning here. If you argue for 2, you are still arguing for impossing a limit, but now it has only advanced by a unit of 1, which remains to be seen as to how much utility of "option" is gained in the advancement of 1 to 2. Furthermore, it is also just as easy for the opposing side to make a similar argument in which the Elemental Chaos has numerous locations that would be inaccessible by PCs given the danger of the surrounding Chaos. And instead of confining elements to just a cosmetic cosmology in which elements are mostly restricted to simply their particular elemental plane, DMs using the Elemental Chaos could choose to keep the elementals in ever-changing elemental domains amongst their own kind or DMs could choose to have the elementals roam around the Elemental Chaos in battles within. To argue that the use of particular elemental planes somehow creates more options than the Elemental Chaos seems short-sighted based on the set-up of the Elemental Chaos.





Let me try this reasoning for you, and I'll keep it simple: How does "finite" give you more than "infinite"? 

Would you have liked my point better if I had expressed it as 1+1+1+1+1 etc etc etc etc. 

Gimme a break.


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## Mouseferatu (Dec 11, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> But at least in previous editions the Great Wheel wasn't used for every setting.




That's only true of 3E. In 1E and 2E, it _was_ used for everything.


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## Scribble (Dec 11, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> The hell they did. The inner planes of previous editions had more options than the hand-holding "Don't make it too dangerous! Then adventurers won't come to our extraplanar dungeon! Oh noes!" I see in the 4e planar design.




If that's what you see then thats what you see...

Personaly I see setting material and info that inspires me (The Dm of my group) with new ideas, and adventure opportunities.

I also see setting ideas that are easier for me to  blend together without jumping through hoops.

New ideas and inspiration sources are cool.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 11, 2008)

Mouseferatu said:


> That's only true of 3E. In 1E and 2E, it _was_ used for everything.




No, the Great Wheel was not used for Dragonlance in 1E, nor was it used for Dragonlance in 2E or Darksun in 2E.


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 11, 2008)

> I find this article wonderfully refreshing, as I was starting to run low on things with 4e that I really, really, really disliked.
> 
> PS: DEAR KAMIKAZE STOP POSTING WHAT I WANT TO POST BUT FASTER AND AMAZINGLY MUCH MORE ARTICULATED.




 Hey, I'm not as down on the vast majority of these things.

But one cosmology to rule them all is kind of dumb in my eyes (despite their reasons).

Also, as the last few pages have demonstrated, infinite planes are only a problem if you're thinking too hard about fantasy. 

"Infinite," for all intents and purposes, means "Contains whatever you want." As that doesn't change at all between any edition of D&D's planes, changing infinite to finite is just as pointless as making halflings four feet tall as opposed to two-and-a-half feet tall. It doesn't change anything, it just scratches a particular designer's itch to change the verbiage.


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## Scribble (Dec 11, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> "Infinite," for all intents and purposes, means "Contains whatever you want." As that doesn't change at all between any edition of D&D's planes, changing infinite to finite is just as pointless as making halflings four feet tall as opposed to two-and-a-half feet tall. It doesn't change anything, it just scratches a particular designer's itch to change the verbiage.




It also lets them al ACTUALLY (in game actually) be floatin around in the astral sea, and not just philosophically so.

Like if you were sailin around in the astral sea, you could see the "edge" of one of the planes. Can't really do that with an infinite plane.


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## demonsquidgod (Dec 11, 2008)

I have always hated the Infinite planes idea. It is mutually exclusive with many other key concepts in the game. If there are an infinite number of demons and an infinite number of devils than every time a book tells me that the devils use their superior tactics to keep up with the demon's overwhelming numbers it's a lie because they have the same number of troops. And when the books tell me that eight of the nine lords must lend legions of their armies to supplement the armies of the first layer of hell than that must also be a lie because the first layer would have an infinite number of legions to begin with and would never need reinforcements. 

There are too many other instances where the rest of the fluff clearly works from the idea of finite numbers and areas. They say the planes are infinite but they never really extrapolate their ideas from that basis. It always felt tacked on.

Plus, infinite planes make for a static universe. If there are an infinite number of demons and devils the bloodwar will never end. It doesn't even make sense.  You could defeat them with some kind of uber reality warp spell but it is impossible to have any effect at all by physical warfare. Similarly the forces of good could never defeat the forces of evil. 

And, really, the amount of room I have to play with as a worldbuilder is the same. Just because they say there's a limit doesn't mean you know where it is. But it does mean that there's vague hope that maybe if you raised an army that was large enough and unbelievably powerful enough you could s
torm the gates of hell itself and win.


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## Hussar (Dec 11, 2008)

> In the 1e/2e/3e Elemental Plane of Fire you could have adventurers step through a portal and trudge across a plain of compacted ash, intermingled with the crumbling bones of dead Azers, slain centuries ago by a theocratic empire of Salamanders. The PCs could struggle across the landscape, crossing lakes of cooling lava covered only by a thin crust, sweating from the heat as they search for the ruins of the Azer capital city where a longstanding campaign antagonist searches for a relic of Imix, once worshipped by those same Azers, hoping to use it to summon the Elemental Prince to the prime material.




So, exactly why can't you do this in now?  If the Elemental Plane of Fire looks like this, how are the changes suddenly "stripping any serious level of hostility from some of the planes"?  After all, what you describe could be visited without any real magical protection, or at least a Dispel Magic spell isn't instant death.

Seems like the planes were already pretty stripped of any serious level of hostility if I can step through a portal and survive unprotected all the way back in 2e days.

Look, it all comes down to this.  Do you want setting elements that are purely decorative or do you want them to be decorative AND functional.  Put me 100% in the second camp.  Areas of "THOU SHALT NOT PASS" are interesting and all, but, ultimately nothing more than window dressing.  It's all very well and good to detail the wars between the Archomentals of Good and Evil, but, if the planes are so inimical to life that you cannot visit them, then who cares?  The PC's can have no effect on it, so, it's fanfic.


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## Hussar (Dec 11, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> :... as pointless as making halflings four feet tall as opposed to two-and-a-half feet tall. It doesn't change anything, it just scratches a particular designer's itch to change the verbiage.




I dunno about anyone else, but, this one ALWAYS bugged me.  I looked at my 3 year old daughter and realized that she was the same size and weight as a halfling.  Suddenly expecting her to have an 18 strength was just really jarring to me.

And before ANYONE mentions Chimpanzees, take a look at what a chimp weighs.  It's a heck of a lot more than a halfling.  Yes, they might be similar heights, but, they've got nearly double the mass.  

Sorry, totally off topic, but, this is one change that I'm really glad they made.


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## Harlekin (Dec 11, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> "Infinite," for all intents and purposes, means "Contains whatever you want." As that doesn't change at all between any edition of D&D's planes, changing infinite to finite is just as pointless as making halflings four feet tall as opposed to two-and-a-half feet tall. It doesn't change anything, it just scratches a particular designer's itch to change the verbiage.




See, for me infinite is a buzzword used by people that do not actually know what it means, when all they are trying to say is "very big". There is a fundamental difference between something being big but finite and something being infinite. Several posters in this thread have shown fundamental problems with infinite planes. 

Nevertheless you argue that changing the wording is change for change's sake? Note that finite, large planes provide exactly the same play experience as your idea of infinite planes, but at the same time get rid of several inconsistencies in the world design. Hence they are strictly superior. I would think that maintaining "infinite" planes, just because they existed before is conservation for conservation's sake.


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## Aldarc (Dec 11, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> Let me try this reasoning for you, and I'll keep it simple: How does "finite" give you more than "infinite"?
> 
> Would you have liked my point better if I had expressed it as 1+1+1+1+1 etc etc etc etc.
> 
> Gimme a break.



Because after a certain point, infinity has no real sense of real meaning or substance in game terms. Despite the Elemental Chaos being finite, it's ever-changing and chaotic nature makes for a singular plane that can act nigh-infinite and varied ways or at least more ways than you could possibly use it for and certainly more than planes dedicated to singular elements.


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## I'm A Banana (Dec 11, 2008)

> It also lets them al ACTUALLY (in game actually) be floatin around in the astral sea, and not just philosophically so.
> 
> Like if you were sailin around in the astral sea, you could see the "edge" of one of the planes. Can't really do that with an infinite plane.




I can see that argument, but it's just as easy to say that infinite planes can have an edge (they can be infinite in the interior). Plenty of infinite planes had edges in earlier editions (celestia's first layer was infinite beach, for instance). 

That's kind of the catch 22. For any reason one may think of to change it to "finite," "infinite" works equally as well. That's kind of why I don't have a problem with the...finitude? per se, I just think it's dumb to have to change it. It's not really broken. Pointless change for the sake of it. Wasted energy, basically.  



> See, for me infinite is a buzzword used by people that do not actually know what it means, when all they are trying to say is "very big". There is a fundamental difference between something being big but finite and something being infinite. Several posters in this thread have shown fundamental problems with infinite planes.




Halflings are really 3/4ths of a human, not half of them. Does that mean "Half" is just a buzzword used by people that do not actually know what it means?

No, it means you are thinking too hard about fantasy.

Seriously, this is 4e. You could be forgiven for wanting precise definitions of infinity in 3e. In 4e, "infinite" is an end purpose, just like "encounter powers" are or the "small" size category is. However you want to fluff away infinity, the long and short of it is that it contains everything any DM ever wants it too.

Oddly enough, changing it to "finite" doesn't change that reality. All it does is scratch an itch (and guess what? now others have to scratch a different itch that the change caused). It's pointless.


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## kilamanjaro (Dec 11, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> The hell they did. The inner planes of previous editions had more options than the hand-holding "Don't make it too dangerous! Then adventurers won't come to our extraplanar dungeon! Oh noes!" I see in the 4e planar design.
> 
> By stripping any serious level of hostility from some of the planes, you water down the wonder and challange of actually adventuring in those planes, even as you strip depth and background flavor from the cosmology.
> 
> ...




My copy of the Inner Planes says that unprotected characters take 6d10 fire damage each round and another 1d10 from breathing the super heated air.  Sounds like instant fiery death to me.


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## Harlekin (Dec 11, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> I can see that argument, but it's just as easy to say that infinite planes can have an edge (they can be infinite in the interior). Plenty of infinite planes had edges in earlier editions (celestia's first layer was infinite beach, for instance).
> 
> That's kind of the catch 22. For any reason one may think of to change it to "finite," "infinite" works equally as well. That's kind of why I don't have a problem with the...finitude? per se, I just think it's dumb to have to change it. It's not really broken. Pointless change for the sake of it. Wasted energy, basically.




So the change works equally well for you and better for others. That sounds like the perfect reason to change it. If we wait for changes that improve everyone's game, we'll not get any evolution at all.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Halflings are really 3/4ths of a human, not half of them. Does that mean "Half" is just a buzzword used by people that do not actually know what it means?
> 
> No, it means you are thinking too hard about fantasy.
> 
> Seriously, this is 4e. You could be forgiven for wanting precise definitions of infinity in 3e. In 4e, "infinite" is an end purpose, just like "encounter powers" are or the "small" size category is. However you want to fluff away infinity, the long and short of it is that it contains everything any DM ever wants it too.




See i think internally consistent fluff is necessary in every edition, no mater how awesome it is. 



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Oddly enough, changing it to "finite" doesn't change that reality. All it does is scratch an itch (and guess what? now others have to scratch a different itch that the change caused). It's pointless.




That itch seems to be mostly a general resistance to change though.


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## mhacdebhandia (Dec 11, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> By no means was the elemental plane of fire just a blank, endless, YOU DIE NOW! plane of flames.



I agree with you. However . . .


Shemeska said:


> Just skimming _The Inner Planes_ by Monte Cook from the later days of 2e that's blazingly clear, even when the book happens to be narrated by a crazy slaad named Xanxost. In the 1e/2e/3e Elemental Plane of Fire you could have adventurers step through a portal and trudge across a plain of compacted ash, intermingled with the crumbling bones of dead Azers, slain centuries ago by a theocratic empire of Salamanders. The PCs could struggle across the landscape, crossing lakes of cooling lava covered only by a thin crust, sweating from the heat as they search for the ruins of the Azer capital city where a longstanding campaign antagonist searches for a relic of Imix, once worshipped by those same Azers, hoping to use it to summon the Elemental Prince to the prime material.



. . . I say "this region exists in the Elemental Chaos".

What have I lost, using the Fourth Edition cosmology? Nothing apart from the meaningless ability to state that X and Y locations technically lie on wholly separate planes.

If you're going to allow relatively friendly locales like "a plain of compacted ash" and "lakes of cooling lava covered only by a thin crust" in your Elemental Plane of Fire, you're already halfway to Fourth Edition's combining every "elemental" location into a single enormous maelstrom. *Especially* considering that both Ash and Magma were given their own quasi-elemental and para-elemental planes in Second Edition, and were thus intrusions into plane of Fire in any case.

To be perfectly frank, as far as I'm concerned the only thing that's genuinely lost from Planescape in the switch to the Great Axis cosmology is the Outlands and its gate-towns . . . and, you know, in a lot of ways I'd really like to see the gate-towns reused as locations in the natural world. Everything else in Planescape can exist as locales on different planes or in a slightly different configuration; since it was never more than metaphorically true that the Grey Wastes lay between Baator and the Abyss, for instance, there's nothing to stop you from saying that's still true.


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## Aldarc (Dec 11, 2008)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> I can see that argument, but it's just as easy to say that infinite planes can have an edge (they can be infinite in the interior). Plenty of infinite planes had edges in earlier editions (celestia's first layer was infinite beach, for instance).
> 
> That's kind of the catch 22. For any reason one may think of to change it to "finite," "infinite" works equally as well. That's kind of why I don't have a problem with the...finitude? per se, I just think it's dumb to have to change it. It's not really broken. Pointless change for the sake of it. Wasted energy, basically.



Why is there such resistance then to an incredibly simple change of wasted energy? Is it really change for the sake of it? How did you determine that? 



> Halflings are really 3/4ths of a human, not half of them. Does that mean "Half" is just a buzzword used by people that do not actually know what it means?



In which case it's an exaggeration, just as it would be an exagerration to say that the planes are infinite. 



> No, it means you are thinking too hard about fantasy.



Pot and kettle. 



> Seriously, this is 4e. You could be forgiven for wanting precise definitions of infinity in 3e. In 4e, "infinite" is an end purpose, just like "encounter powers" are or the "small" size category is. However you want to fluff away infinity, the long and short of it is that it contains everything any DM ever wants it too.
> 
> Oddly enough, changing it to "finite" doesn't change that reality. All it does is scratch an itch (and guess what? now others have to scratch a different itch that the change caused). It's pointless.



Then why the resistance?


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## ki11erDM (Dec 11, 2008)

Found your problem,



Harlekin said:


> I'm talking logic




You have to remember that: enworld=(D&D + internet)/rules lawyers
And logic is completely void from that equation.


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## Mouseferatu (Dec 11, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> No, the Great Wheel was not used for Dragonlance in 1E, nor was it used for Dragonlance in 2E or Darksun in 2E.




Originally, Krynn had its own cosmology. I _think_ Planescape tried to include it later on, but as I'm not sure if I remember that right, 'll give you that one.

Athas, however, _technically_ existed within the Great Wheel--it was just isolated by various "dimensional walls." (That's why there was an Athas-based domain in some of the latter 2E Ravenloft products.)


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## El Mahdi (Dec 11, 2008)

Mouseferatu said:


> I forgot about Krynn; I'll give you that one.
> 
> Athas, however, _technically_ existed within the Great Wheel--it was just isolated by various "dimensional walls." (That's why there was an Athas-based domain in some of the latter 2E Ravenloft products.)




I believe it was also possible, albeit extremely difficult, to reach it by Spelljamming through the Phlogiston (but I think the currents, or somesuch, makes it nearly impossible, and even more difficult to sail away from Darksun).


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## Shemeska (Dec 11, 2008)

Mouseferatu said:


> Originally, Krynn had its own cosmology. I _think_ Planescape tried to include it later on, but as I'm not sure if I remember that right, 'll give you that one.




The original _Dragonlance Adventures_ includes the names of a number of planar locations associated with Krynn's gods, but it doesn't establish and detail any sort of distinct cosmology. Still during 1e [Edit: in the same year even], the original _Manual of the Planes_ established that Krynn was within the Great Wheel cosmology. Planescape continued with that assumption during 2e, but it didn't originate it.


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## M.L. Martin (Dec 11, 2008)

Mouseferatu said:


> Originally, Krynn had its own cosmology. I _think_ Planescape tried to include it later on, but as I'm not sure if I remember that right, 'll give you that one.




  Krynn had its own distinct cosmology in _DRAGONLANCE Adventures_ . . . and was included in the Great Wheel in the 1E _Manual of the Planes_. Basically, Weis & Hickman said 'no, DL is independent', while TSR staff tended to say 'yes, DL is part of the D&D multiverse'.



> Athas, however, _technically_ existed within the Great Wheel--it was just isolated by various "dimensional walls." (That's why there was an Athas-based domain in some of the latter 2E Ravenloft products.)




  I'd call _Forbidden Lore_ (November 1992, the first product in which Kalidnay appeared) 'early 2nd edition', myself, and William W. Connors has van Richten mention Athas in an introduction to a DRAGON article in #174 (October 1991). Granted, the good Doctor also refers to the setting as 'Ravenloft' in-character there . . .


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## M.L. Martin (Dec 11, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> The original _Dragonlance Adventures_ includes the names of a number of planar locations associated with Krynn's gods, but it doesn't establish and detail any sort of distinct cosmology. Several years later, and still during 1e, the original _Manual of the Planes_ established that Krynn was within the Great Wheel cosmology. Planescape continued with that assumption during 2e, but it didn't originate it.




   Actually, if memory serves me correctly, the _Manual of the Planes_ came out in the _same_ year as DLA. Let me check . . . Ah, yes. According to RPG.net's game index, both of them were 1987 releases.


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## Shemeska (Dec 11, 2008)

kilamanjaro said:


> My copy of the Inner Planes says that unprotected characters take 6d10 fire damage each round and another 1d10 from breathing the super heated air.  Sounds like instant fiery death to me.




You know what, it's a hostile environment. That means that adventurers need to prepare for that challenge. It's no different than having an angry dragon lairing on a mountain the PCs are quested to adventure on - the dragon will attack intruders so oh no should we remove the dragon because it makes that mountain less friendly to adventure in? Or should we remove the kobolds from the dungeon because they make the dungeon hostile with their devious traps? Of course not. Nor should we turn on the air conditioning in the landscape surrounding the City of Brass, or snuff the flames of Phlegethon, or force the ice devils of Cania to provide hot cocoa to chilly travelers. Some places on the planes are difficult, so are places like Undermountain and Castle Grayhawk, but that doesn't stop any of them from having been the location of many of D&D's most awesome and challenging adventures for the decades prior to 4e fixing everything and making all those places no longer suck as they seem to want folks to believe.

Apparently I'm in a mood for hyperbole tonight.

It's a challenge for PCs to overcome in all cases. Some places are more dangerous than others, and rather than water them down, it seems right for PCs to know when they can take that challenge, and then enjoy their success when they've earned it by overcoming that difficulty.


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 11, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> It's a challenge for PCs to overcome in all cases. Some places are more dangerous than others, and rather than water them down, it seems right for PCs to know when they can take that challenge, and then enjoy their success when they've earned it by overcoming that difficulty.



To me a challenge is an encounter PCs have to struggle and think their way through, or at least make lots of prayers to the dice gods.

Checking off the spell on your list to give the party fire resistance before you step onto the plane doesn't feel like much of a challenge to me. It's just common sense, especially given the mono-elemental nature of the Inner Planes.

In the Elemental Chaos, players don't know _what_ to expect, because at any moment they could be hit with anything. All manner of elemental creatures are about, sometimes composed of a mix of elements. And it's the Elemental _*Chaos*_... they could be fighting those creatures while trapped on a slab of earth circling a lava whirlpool during a raging ice storm with red lightning crashing around them.

Now that's a challenge.


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## Staffan (Dec 11, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> No, the Great Wheel was not used for Dragonlance in 1E, nor was it used for Dragonlance in 2E or Darksun in 2E.



For most of the setting's life, Dark Sun was just as connected to the Wheel as any other setting, though it was de-emphasised. Even so, you had Dragon Kings (one of the first books for the setting) refer to the Inner planes, the Black Spine adventure had an invasion of Githyanki (and assorted other planar stuff), City by the Silt Sea had a psionic mirror that could be used for planar travel, and The Will and The Way had psychoportation powers used for connecting to both inner and outer planes. I also recall seeing references to Dark Sun in a Planescape book or two (probably In the Cage and/or Planewalker's Handbook).

It wasn't until one of the product lines last sourcebooks, Defilers & Preservers (1996, one of three books released in the product line's last year), that the concept of the Grey blocking planar travel showed up. It was still part of the Wheel cosmology, it was just hard to get there.

It was officially off the grid from Spelljamming since 1992 though, when (IIRC) the Complete Spacefarer's Handbook mentioned that the sphere with Athas in it was not on any known space charts, or something like that.


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## Shemeska (Dec 11, 2008)

Sir Brennen said:


> Now that's a challenge.




Which I could already get in Limbo, without having to deny myself the Elemental Planes as well.


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## mhacdebhandia (Dec 11, 2008)

As I said in my earlier post that you're apparently content to ignore, Shemeska, by even giving your PCs compacted ash or cooled magma to walk on you're making the Elemental Plane of Fire "safe for adventure".

You still haven't explained how "every crazy and dangerous elemental place you can imagine all exists within an enormous maelstrom" is worse for the game than "there are four Elemental Planes, and where they touch there are four Para-Elemental Planes, and where the Elemental Planes touch the Positive and Negative Energy Planes there are eight Quasi-Elemental Planes".

I say the Elemental Chaos is better than the Inner Planes of earlier editions because it contains everything about them which was good and useful in any sense. There's plenty of room in the Elemental Chaos for a void of negative energy where nothing, not even vacuum, exists. There's plenty of room for lakes of barely-hardened magma surrounding the palace of a salamander king, or honeycombed tunnels through the realm of some crazy earth spirit, or whatever else you liked in Planescape.

The only thing that you can't have is the ultimately useless "elegance" of separating all these places out into individual planes.


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## Harlekin (Dec 11, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> You know what, it's a hostile environment. That means that adventurers need to prepare for that challenge. It's no different than having an angry dragon lairing on a mountain the PCs are quested to adventure on - the dragon will attack intruders so oh no should we remove the dragon because it makes that mountain less friendly to adventure in? Or should we remove the kobolds from the dungeon because they make the dungeon hostile with their devious traps? Of course not. Nor should we turn on the air conditioning in the landscape surrounding the City of Brass, or snuff the flames of Phlegethon, or force the ice devils of Cania to provide hot cocoa to chilly travelers. Some places on the planes are difficult, so are places like Undermountain and Castle Grayhawk, but that doesn't stop any of them from having been the location of many of D&D's most awesome and challenging adventures for the decades prior to 4e fixing everything and making all those places no longer suck as they seem to want folks to believe.
> 
> Apparently I'm in a mood for hyperbole tonight.
> 
> It's a challenge for PCs to overcome in all cases. Some places are more dangerous than others, and rather than water them down, it seems right for PCs to know when they can take that challenge, and then enjoy their success when they've earned it by overcoming that difficulty.




The problem is, a Fire plane dealing that much damage is a meaningless challenge as there are only two outcomes:
1) The party is underprepared and an instant TPK occurs.  This is  frustrating and boring as an outcome and will be avoided by both DMs and players at all costs.
2) The party is adequately protected. Then the nature of the plane is entirely neutered and the adventure might as well be happening on the prime material plane. Such protection does not even reduce the options of the party by much as being adequately protected requires only a single spell for the entire party (in 3rd).

As 1) rarely happens unless a DM is tired of his game, 2) is usually the scenario under which players enter the elemental plane of fire. Thus, by being super-lethal, the plane of fire becomes very vanilla in actual play.


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## Charwoman Gene (Dec 11, 2008)

I like the fact that the 4e designers created a bunch of heterogeneous planes and are being slammed by fans of homogeneous planes as creating homogeneous planes.

4e was a risky move.  It sorta "gave the finger" to armchair (and non-armchair) GMs whose used the rules to world-build or basically get all tingly inside about the planes, independent of actual in-game use.  4e was intentionally designed, top to bottom to eliminate this non-gaming activity as a design goal.


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## avin (Dec 11, 2008)

Discussion remains, points are being made and I still think removing 4 planes and putting a soup in its place is reducing my number of choices.

More: no matter which color people try to paint it I bet Elemental Chaos will be just another big dungeon.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Dec 11, 2008)

avin said:


> Discussion remains, points are being made and I still think removing 4 planes and putting a soup in its place is reducing my number of choices.
> 
> More: no matter which color people try to paint it I bet Elemental Chaos will be just another big dungeon.



Which makes it different from an Elemental Plane .. how?


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## avin (Dec 11, 2008)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> Which makes it different from an Elemental Plane .. how?




Elemental Planes are prohibitive places, just like the sun or the center of earth. Should we remove them just because players can't swimm on lava?

Are you trying to argue that all almost all 4E stuff we have isn't a "big dungeon"...?


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Dec 11, 2008)

avin said:


> Elemental Planes are prohibitive places, just like the sun or the center of earth. Should we remove them just because players can't swimm on lava?



Lava, Sun, Center of Earth are part of our world. The sun doesn't need a definition - it's there, we know how it looks like, and we accept it as a given thing. Lava is actually something you can interact with. The Center of Earth might exist, but we do not need to define anything and just presume it exists in our world. We do not go there, so we do not describe it any further. 

The Cosmology is made up. Why make up a cosmology containing lots of elements that you do not use? Why spend time defining something that you do not use? sure, we could just say. "Oh, there are pure elemental planes, but no one goes there and cares for it". 



> Are you trying to argue that all almost all 4E stuff we have isn't a "big dungeon"...?



Define "dungeon". Apparently your definition is that every place the characters will go is a dungeon. By that definition, yes, everything (at least every place) in 4E is a dungeon. 
I say every place the characters want to go to has a potential for conflict. Not necessarily melee combat or trap detection type of conflict. 
Maybe I am narrow-minded that way. I think there is always a goal the players or their characters should have that something is stopping them from. Maybe they want to find a treasure. A trap or monsters might block their way. Or just the fact that they need to travel half the countryside is the think that's blocking them and they have to overcome. Or the cities mayor deeming them unworthy of getting some treasure. Or the mayor saying they can get the desired treasure if they perform a different task.
Or they desire an information. The guy with access to it needs to be found, and then to be convinced of giving them. All that introduces a conflict. But it doesn't require a dungeon.

What are the conflicts of the Elemental Plane that _only_ work if the plane is composed of a single element? What conflict couldn't I also run on the Elemental Chaos? The City of Brass was located on the Elemental Plane of Fire, but one of its features was that it was not just flames and fire alll around, but that it was habitable and provided a structure, containing organizations and people with their own motivations and goals. 
Now it's in the Elemental Chaos. And works just as well. Because you weren't using the Elemental Plane of Fire, you used the City of Brass.

Everything interesting about the Elemental Planes has been moved to the Elemental Chaos.


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## avin (Dec 11, 2008)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> Everything interesting about the Elemental Planes has been moved to the Elemental Chaos.




Interesting for you, for sure. The moon isn't interesting just because you can adventure there without a space ship?

The mere existence of elemental planes is far more interesting than elemental soup, for me.

"Elemental planes is a part of our universe. They don't need a definition - it's there, we know how it looks like, and we accept it", I'm not asking for more than that.

What you seem to want, correct me if I'm wrong, please, is every place written in books have "potential conflict". It looks like you don't like scenario as I do. Feel free to correct me.

I'm strongly against RPG books where every corner is a potential adventure place. I want good planes, elemental planes, boring places to add a feel to the game... I respect DMs which want everything killable and lootable but disagree, this is not for me.

Maybe you have another sources I don't have. Core books, RPGA Adventures, DDI Dragon articles, all point to combat combat combat. Removing prohibitive planes is giving more room to combat combat combat.

Every place is where action happens, everywhere there's a troll waiting... this is 4E (which rules I like and DM but which world and direction I change to what I need), this is points of light... this is the direction Wotc decided to go and I don't like it, so you're probably wasting your breath trying to convince me that "dumbing down planes" (my opinion only) is cool and adds to roleplaying...


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Dec 11, 2008)

avin said:


> so you're probably wasting your breath trying to convince



Yes. I am.


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## avin (Dec 11, 2008)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> Yes. I am.




TLDR: I don't think Elemental Chaos is a bad idea, I just wished Wotc made it a veeeeery large place where the elemental planes connect.


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## D.Shaffer (Dec 11, 2008)

I'm not sure WHY this is such a big deal with people, honestly...

Old Way: This is the plane of fire. It's a place filled with elemental fire that's inimical to those not prepared for it.

New Way: This is a large, continent sized pocket of fire in the Elemental Chaos.  It's a place filled with elemental fire that's inimical to those not prepared for it.

Seriously...what's the real difference here?  It looks like it's a pure semantics issue, to me. For most people adventuring in the area, it's going to amount to a name change.  Is being able to call it 'The Plane of Fire' really THAT important to most people?


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## avin (Dec 11, 2008)

D.Shaffer said:


> For most people adventuring in the area, it's going to amount to a name change.  Is being able to call it 'The Plane of Fire' really THAT important to most people?




Because adventuring in The Elemental Plane of Fire is not like adventuring at Elemental Chaos.

Plane of Fire is mostly like inside a star (rough comparation) while at E.C. you can walk.

People adventuring is not the same thing as story background, also.

Yeah, they change what I liked, I change it back on my games, ok, fine, everybody happy, but why is so hard to some people understand that this change matters a lot for a lot of people...?

Update: I'm outta here, this topic is pointless


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## D.Shaffer (Dec 11, 2008)

avin said:


> Because adventuring in The Elemental Plane of Fire is not like adventuring at Elemental Chaos.
> 
> Plane of Fire is mostly like inside a star (rough comparation) while at E.C. you can walk.



I dont beleive the various MotP made the Plane of Fire quite THAT bad, so you seem to be in house rule territory to begin with.

Beyond that...According to who?  What, exactly, is stopping anyone from saying 'This area of Elemental chaos?  Pure fire.  Hot. Dont go in there.'  How is making one area a plane and the area just a region of a plane really that different?

Again, what are you gaining my making an entire PLANE of the stuff as opposed to just a really large region of it in the elemental chaos?


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## Asha'man (Dec 11, 2008)

Shaffer, you are right in one thing: You can put anything in the Elemental Chaos that you could in the Elemental Planes. Probably even more, since it's the elemental *chaos* and you can throw everything together as you like it. But which you use is a mattter of cosmology and setting assumptions. Are Matter/Energy as important as alignment forces in your metaphysics? If so, each should have its own plane of origin, unless you also have the "Ideological Chaos". These are the building blocks of the cosmos, and having them there, or not, and in which constellations, says a lot about what kind of world it is. 

For example, in my homebrew world I use a simplified and modified Great Wheel with the three Transitive Planes, four Elemental Planes, two Energy Planes and nine Outer Planes. I don't use the "in-between" outer planes because I couldn't make the symmetry interesting, so I folded the bits I liked from those planes into areas on their neighbor planes. I thought the quasi/paraelemental planes were clutter, so those environments are now found only on the borders between the (finite, thank you very much) inner planes. Are those inner planes monolithic and inhospitable? You bet. Fire in the material sense is what the inhabitants of Elemental Fire *breathe*. They drink liquid flame and their structures are solid fire-stuff, in many different varieties just as Material beings build in brick and wood and glass.  And I can hear the naysayers already: "Needless symmetry! Useless fluff! Fancruft! Arm-chair-DMing!"

And it's true, the way they define these terms, but so the **** what? I am an unrepentant armchair DM. World-building is one of my favorite pastimes. The ideas I base the homebrew on should be followed through consistently throughout the setting, or what's the point? If the layout of a setting demands areas to exist that normal PCs ostensibly can't interact with, then so be it. As one previous poster wrote, our world's physical makeup demands the existence of the inside of the sun. Of course we can't ever go there, but  but it has to be there, or it wouldn't be the same world! So it might be with the Elemental Planes, or any other foreign plane, in an RPG setting. And why should the PCs expect to be able to exist there anyway? They are literally not made for that world, it should by rights and by all logic be alien and inhospitable. And if that's your taste, it allows for an interesting perspective on the setting when you run an Efreeti game, or it shines a bit of spotlight on the master pyromancer when he can go where no mortal has ever gone before, or it reinforces the otherness of the Azer character who can go where all the other PCs would instantly die, but can't have a drink of water.

Of course, a commercially published setting should allow for as many games and types of game as possible, and should appeal to a wide audience. Different setting assumptions from my homebrew are to be expected, and are probably a better choice for them. But don't say that there's no difference, because the cosmology of a setting strongly informs what the setting is like, beyond just "what you can have there".


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## thundershot (Dec 11, 2008)

Wow. This thread got turned upside down. 

Who cares? If you want the unusable old elemental planes, stick 'em in in addition to the chaos. It won't matter because you can't really adventure there anyway... See? Simple. Just say they're there.




Chris


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## Squizzle (Dec 11, 2008)

thundershot said:


> Wow. This thread got turned upside down.
> 
> Who cares? If you want the unusable old elemental planes, stick 'em in in addition to the chaos. It won't matter because you can't really adventure there anyway... See? Simple. Just say they're there.
> 
> ...




The problem comes from some people having such an animus against games being played--by people they've never met--differently than they play them (or as they appeared in books they once enjoyed), that they have to make it known how incredibly wrong certain types of play are. 

My general sense is that when you have conflicting views of the Right Way to play, you get insoluble arguments. When you have a vocal minority with an emotional commitment to a Right Way and a significant majority who doesn't see the value of that way, you get protracted, theatrical, and often histrionic spitting into the wind. (Look at anything described as a "culture war", or indeed "edition war", for example.)


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## Scribble (Dec 11, 2008)

avin said:


> Elemental Planes are prohibitive places, just like the sun or the center of earth. Should we remove them just because players can't swimm on lava?




If I want to have an adventure set in the middle of the sun... I shouldn't be able to do so? 

Hollow World was one of my favorite products ever. 

Making it an elemental chaos didn't really remove anything, as other have pointed out it's all there. They just made it all happening in the same place. You can even have more challenges then before:

"Oh crap, you mean that ice bridge we used to cross the sea of lava is gone now? Oh oh..."



> Are you trying to argue that all almost all 4E stuff we have isn't a "big dungeon"...?




Are you going to argue we shouldn't have Dragons in it either?


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## Aldarc (Dec 11, 2008)

avin said:


> Because adventuring in The Elemental Plane of Fire is not like adventuring at Elemental Chaos.
> 
> Plane of Fire is mostly like inside a star (rough comparation) while at E.C. you can walk.



Yet somehow in this inside of the star, characters can travel perfectly fine to the City of Brass? Contradictions within contradictions. There is again nothing prohibiting you from making 99.999 percent of the Elemental Chaos from being off-limits to the players. The design of the EC grants far greater options and flexibility to DMs by permitting the EC to be either much in nature of the insurpassable elemental planes of old or expanded to permit greater access of travel to characters as the DM deems fit to the story. All limitations you see to the EC in comparison with the elemental planes seem almost entirely self-imposed. 



> Yeah, they change what I liked, I change it back on my games, ok, fine, everybody happy, but why is so hard to some people understand that this change matters a lot for a lot of people...?
> 
> Update: I'm outta here, this topic is pointless



Whether or not the change matters substantially to a lot of people is highly debatable. People seem to often think that sometimes their views must be the prevailing norm because they are somehow right.


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## Pseudopsyche (Dec 11, 2008)

I am relatively new to being a DM.  During my abortive attempts to run 3E games, I never considered travel to other planes, which seemed too "out there" and whose cosmology seemed too confusing.  Even without planar travel, I was always intimidated by the prospect of world building or of mastering a published campaign setting.  Now, as I run my first viable campaign, I've learned not to worry too much about aspects of the campaign world that won't impact the players, and I'm itching to lure my party into a Domain of Dread or into the Feywild!

Of course, I understand that not every DM's needs are the same as mine.  In fact, I will take this opportunity to express my sincere regrets that the changes WotC has made--a default Points of Light framework and a more accessible cosmology--have benefitted me at the expense of those who were inspired by the old cosmology.  What works for me is to focus my attention on the part of the setting with which the players interact, and I appreciate WotC's decision to devote their attention to producing material that directly aids me in this regard.  I can only hope that experienced DMs who enjoy world building will continue to use own cosmologies and know how to focus on what's important.  But I need all the help I can get.


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## SkidAce (Dec 11, 2008)

Aldarc said:


> People seem to often think that sometimes their views must be the prevailing norm because they are somehow right.




Exactly what I see on both sides of this discussion.


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## Stogoe (Dec 11, 2008)

SkidAce said:


> Exactly what I see on both sides of this discussion.



Ah, false equivalence!  That's what was missing from this thread.

Seriously, though, there are two sides here - the side that hates the new stuff because it's different, and the side that's patiently trying to show how all the old stuff is still right where they left it, and how it's not really missing from the new stuff anyways.


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## Hussar (Dec 12, 2008)

Stogoe said:


> Ah, false equivalence!  That's what was missing from this thread.
> 
> Seriously, though, there are two sides here - the side that hates the new stuff because it's different, and the side that's patiently trying to show how all the old stuff is still right where they left it, and how it's not really missing from the new stuff anyways.




No no no.  You are entirely wrong.  The two sides are one of trying to preserve the heart and soul of D&D while the other side is busily dismantling and murdering every sacred bovine that has made our beloved hobby ... well... beloved by all and sundry.

All changes must only be viewed from either of those two sides and any other side is just an illusion in your mind.



/end sarcasm.

Hrm, as has been said UMPTEEN times in this thread alone, EVERYTHING you could do with the old planes YOU CAN STILL DO.  There is absolutely, zero, nothing, nada, zilch that you can do with the old planes that you cannot do now.  But, apparently, that's not good enough.  We must never, ever deviate from the completely fabricated cosmology of the past and must ever walk in lock step with books that have been out of print for over a decade.

Ok, maybe the sarcasm hasn't quite ended.


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## Spatula (Dec 12, 2008)

Shroomy said:


> The most important piece of information IMO is that all the WotC campaign settings released will use the World Axis cosmology; there is even some hints about how it impacts Eberron.



Ugh.

Just... ugh.

From the sounds of things, it's seeming like Eberron's world history gets changed to the primordial-gods war.  Interest in 4e Eberron campaign setting... waning...

I would say this is bad news for Dark Sun as well (if they decide to do it) but I already knew they were going to screw that one up, based on this need of theirs to fit every piece of every book into every setting.


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## FireLance (Dec 12, 2008)

Ta-daa!


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## avin (Dec 12, 2008)

FireLance said:


> Ta-daa!




(that's how it always worked for me and looks like a better explanation for the elemental chaos)


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## avin (Dec 12, 2008)

Scribble said:


> You can even have more challenges then before.




The point I was making is Elemental Planes were background on my campaign, not adventuring grounds. Forbidden places. 

The change was made to make everywhere an "adventuring place" (dungeon everywhere hyperbole), which doesn't work well for me.

Dudes, I'm trying to leave this post, I guess I have said everything in this regard... strange thing is, no matter if I'm using fourth edition, disliking the new cosmology makes me sound like a minority "spitting against the wind" like somebody else said... 

I'm not against changing, I'm quite the opposite, but there's no change that will please all.


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## Lord Zack (Dec 12, 2008)

If you can do everything you could do in the old cosmology with the new cosmology why was the cosmology changed at all?


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## D.Shaffer (Dec 12, 2008)

Lord Zack said:


> If you can do everything you could do in the old cosmology with the new cosmology why was the cosmology changed at all?



A square is within the group of objects known as a rectangle, but not all rectangles are squares.

Elemental Chaos lets you do things with elemental forces you couldnt do as easilly with the planes written as they were.  Namely, it's easier to venture into the 'Elemental' realm without dieing so it's easier to hold adventures there. Also, Chaos as a primordial force that made up the world has more ties to real world legends and myth.


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## FireLance (Dec 12, 2008)

Lord Zack said:


> If you can do everything you could do in the old cosmology with the new cosmology why was the cosmology changed at all?



Because the new cosmology has things that weren't in the old cosmology.


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## Aeolius (Dec 12, 2008)

Lord Zack said:


> If you can do everything you could do in the old cosmology with the new cosmology why was the cosmology changed at all?




Because WotC hates the Ethereal Plane?


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## TheWyrd (Dec 12, 2008)

Aeolius said:


> Because WotC hates the Ethereal Plane?




The Ethereal plane has been pretty backwater since 3rd edition decided you could get to the inner planes through the astral anyway.

For the record.. I'm selfishly unmoved by the change to the planes. My homebrew, created in combination of with the 3e Manual of the Planes and Dieties and Demigods looks quite a bit like the 'world axis' model if the Elemental Chaos and Shadowfell switched places. Go team me.


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## thundershot (Dec 12, 2008)

Squizzle said:


> The problem comes from some people having such an animus against games being played--by people they've never met--differently than they play them (or as they appeared in books they once enjoyed), that they have to make it known how incredibly wrong certain types of play are.
> 
> My general sense is that when you have conflicting views of the Right Way to play, you get insoluble arguments. When you have a vocal minority with an emotional commitment to a Right Way and a significant majority who doesn't see the value of that way, you get protracted, theatrical, and often histrionic spitting into the wind. (Look at anything described as a "culture war", or indeed "edition war", for example.)




That's what I don't understand. If you don't like how it's done, change it. No one from WOTC is going to come to your house and force you to play it "by the book". My campaign doesn't have half-elves (or any other half-*) but I don't force that upon anyone else. 

The rules are more like guidelines... 



Chris


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 12, 2008)

TheWyrd said:


> For the record.. I'm selfishly unmoved by the change to the planes. My homebrew, created in combination of with the 3e Manual of the Planes and Dieties and Demigods looks quite a bit like the 'world axis' model if the Elemental Chaos and Shadowfell switched places. Go team me.



Here's the illustration of my own 3E cosmology. The 4E version will see the equivalent to the Ethereal dropped and the 4 elemental planes changed into the EC, but otherwise not much else. The Astral Sea (aka Pranas) is actually encapsulated in a domain, which is split into two halves itself. The Shadowfell is literally a shadow cast on the The World by the prison domain of a powerful primordial deity, and intersects the Feywild (aka Shula), which is the origin of the Shadar-Kai and other Shadow-fey. (It also casts the shadow across the Astral Sea, but I haven't delved into the repercussions of that yet...)

Though they float in the Astral Sea, domains of certain deities are actually visible to mortals as the moons which orbit the World.

There. Cake + Eat.


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## Lizard (Dec 12, 2008)

I cannot recall any time in my life when I cared that teleportation used the astral plane or that ghosts "needed" the ethereal plane. I've run plenty of games where teleportation just meant "You go poof!" and ghosts may have had the "Ethereal" quality, but all that meant was a set of specific game effects, no need to drag in the planes. As for infinite planes... meh. My cosmologies tend to have finite planes, but infinite planes don't bother me -- if you figure there's infinite material worlds, then, you need an infinite number of devils to plot against them, and an infinite number of angels to stop them. I always felt each "part" of an infinite plane was "close to" a given game world, so that if you were on World A, you'd go to the hell/abyss/heaven region which was for "your world", and you'd have little reason or motive to wander far enough to find someone else's "part" of the plane -- but you could if you really wanted to, I guess.

Overall, yeah, more meaningless change for change's sake, pretty typical of 4e design and trivially ignored by player's and DMs. As is likewise typical, the design focus is on conformity and "how we think you should play", not on "Here's some great tools! Build what you want with them!", which was the 3e model -- but I guess they've found that people buy a lot more of the "Build a TIE Fighter" lego kits than the "Here's 500 pieces, build what you want" kits, and did their game design accordingly. Can't blame them for Giving The People What They Want -- I just blame the people.

Me, I will do what I always do -- roll my own cosmology and deal with any trivial rules issue when they come up. I do not need a "plane of shadow" to have a creature with the "shadow" type. It's kind of amusing -- they're getting away from one of the key design conceits of 4e, which is that there's a total disconnect between the game rules and the game world. "Shadow" doesn't need to mean a thing, and really doesn't -- a creature with the "Shadow" keyword can manipulate/affect assorted numbers in assorted ways, and that's ALL it means. Two "shadow" creatures might actually be totally different in origin and backstory, they just have a common set of mechanical tricks, and are affected by any power which targets "shadow", however defined.  

(Pretty much every campaign I've run in the past 20-odd years has been part of the same sprawling meta-universe anyway, whether I have been using GURPS, Hero, D&D, or SOTC, and whether it was fantasy, pulp, superheroes, sci-fi, or modern horror. My cosmology is highly fractal, with complex levels of meta-reality. The entire Great Wheel is just a local phenomenon of a small cluster of realities... )


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## Scribble (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> Overall, yeah, more meaningless change for change's sake, pretty typical of 4e design and trivially ignored by player's and DMs.




That always makes me kind of giggle... After they give a whole page full of reasons they made the change, someone calls it change for change sake... 



> As is likewise typical, the design focus is on conformity and "how we think you should play", not on "Here's some great tools! Build what you want with them!"




And then immediately follows it with a statement assigning a motive to the design which contradicts the first statement anyway... 


Also I disagree. I'm finding making changes and playign with the 4e tools to be a much easier task then I ever did in 3e... So to each his own I guess.


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## Lizard (Dec 12, 2008)

Scribble said:


> That always makes me kind of giggle... After they give a whole page full of reasons they made the change, someone calls it change for change sake...




I should be more accurate.
"Change to fix problems no one had."

I've played D&D actively from 1978-1986 and 2000->Present. During all that time, I've heard people bitch about armor class, hit points, 1-shot magic users, boring fighters, etc. I've never heard "Halflings are too short!" or "The elemental planes are useless!" or "How do you map an infinite plane?" Yet, it's fixing these non-problems that the current dev team seems most proud of, and it's been a consistent irritation to me since 4e was announced.






> Also I disagree. I'm finding making changes and playign with the 4e tools to be a much easier task then I ever did in 3e... So to each his own I guess.




To each their own, I suppose. I find the extreme balance obsession in 4e to be very.... scary, I guess is the right word. I'm afraid to touch anything for fear the perfectly balanced mechanism might go spinning madly out of control. 3e I was very comfortable sticking a finger in the wind and saying "Good enough for government work"; with 4e, I feel if I want to come up with a new exploit/spell/prayer I'd better build a spreadsheet and make sure my new ability is not the slightest bit better, or the slightest bit worse, than any existing ability. I feel constrained. I find the one-size-fits-all cosmology to be another example of constraint, even if it's only for "official" worlds, it's part of an attitude that has shifted D&D from being a generic toolkit for fantasy gaming to being a set of rules usable only in one fantasy world. It's becoming closer to a setting-based game than a genre-based toolkit, and while I am perfectly capable of (and intend to) using it to do what I want with it, I feel I have to fight the design intent to do so, that the dev team is no longer on "my side", if you follow me.

I'm sure there will be lots of cool stuff in the MOTP, I just feel I'm going to need to do more work to extract what I like from what I don't than I had to in previous editions.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> I should be more accurate.
> "Change to fix problems no one had."




Yeah, you should be more accurate, since people have expressed problems they had with the previous cosmologies, which 4e has fixed for them. What you mean is "Change to fix problems I (Lizard) never had."


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## Lizard (Dec 12, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> Yeah, you should be more accurate, since people have expressed problems they had with the previous cosmologies, which 4e has fixed for them. What you mean is "Change to fix problems I (Lizard) never had."




"...and that I never saw expressed in any ongoing forum debates despite being active in gaming forums for pushing two decades."

Most of the "problems" people had with the D&D cosmology was the same problem I have with 4e -- that the Great Wheel was the one, official, cosmology and worlds had to be hammered into it. 4e keeps THAT problem, just changes the cosmology. Why not take this opportunity to REALLY kill a sacred cow and make MOTP an in-depth guidebook on building your own universe, complete with, say, three or four sample cosmologies? (Great Wheel, World Axis, whatever Eberron uses, and something totally original?)

Now, maybe, WOTC got all sorts of feedback from fans in the form of "I've never admitted this to anyone else, but I really hate infinite planes! Please get rid of them! PS: Don't tell anyone I told you!". Somehow, though, I doubt it.

It doesn't really harm anything, as the planes can still be "as big as you need them to be", but it also doesn't SOLVE anything, as they're still too big to map in any kind of detail, and you still need to completely reinvent them if you're using a non-standard cosmology.


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## avin (Dec 12, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> Yeah, you should be more accurate, since people have expressed problems they had with the previous cosmologies, which 4e has fixed for them. What you mean is "Change to fix problems I (Lizard) never had."




And now some people who never had problem with cosmology is having...


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## Scribble (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> I should be more accurate.
> "Change to fix problems no one had."
> 
> "...and that I never saw expressed in any ongoing forum debates despite being active in gaming forums for pushing two decades."




Lack of people bitching on a message board about soemthing doesn't mean it's not problematic.

I never in my history of gaming used planes like fire or earth. It wasn't such a horrible issue that I felt the need to take to a message board and complain... I just ended up using something else, and ignoring the pages about the giant neverending earth plane. I just didn't feel like dealing with all the hassles of setting an adventure there. It wasn't really a concious, man this needs to be fixed. It was more of an unconcious, it doesn't really inspire me thing.

Now that they've made the elemental chaos, already I've been inspired with ideas for adventures. I'm guessing from the sounds of it they feel there are more of me out there.




> To each their own, I suppose. I find the extreme balance obsession in 4e to be very.... scary, I guess is the right word. I'm afraid to touch anything for fear the perfectly balanced mechanism might go spinning madly out of control. 3e I was very comfortable sticking a finger in the wind and saying "Good enough for government work"; with 4e, I feel if I want to come up with a new exploit/spell/prayer I'd better build a spreadsheet and make sure my new ability is not the slightest bit better, or the slightest bit worse, than any existing ability.




Really? Thats exactly how I felt with 3e... Everytime I tried to adjust something or play with something it sent a bazillion other things spiralling out of control.

4e for me feels like it balances what needs to be balanced, and leaves the other parts up to taste.

I feel like 3e told me something like:

The DC for walking on ice is X.

Whereas 4e says to me: 

Use a balance check to walk on ice. Set the DC depending on how much of a challange you want.

I REALLY like that.




> I feel constrained. I find the one-size-fits-all cosmology to be another example of constraint, even if it's only for "official" worlds, it's part of an attitude that has shifted D&D from being a generic toolkit for fantasy gaming to being a set of rules usable only in one fantasy world. It's becoming closer to a setting-based game than a genre-based toolkit, and while I am perfectly capable of (and intend to) using it to do what I want with it, I feel I have to fight the design intent to do so, that the dev team is no longer on "my side", if you follow me.




Again I get the opposite reaction. I feel like the great wheel constrained me more then anything I've seen so far, just in the very idea that it's a closed system. Adding stuff to it was patch work at best. 

So far what I'm seeing from 4e is a system that can be built on, and modified. And the MoTP excerpts I'm seeing show the general idea of how planes work, giving you the tools to build your own.


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## Lizard (Dec 12, 2008)

avin said:


> And now some people who never had problem with cosmology is having...




I never used the "official" cosmology anyway, so changing it doesn't mean much. What bothers me is the attitude, a return to the idea of central control, a "shared world" which every gamer is expected to play in, the hard-coding of setting assumptions into the rules -- a very strange thing indeed, when the rules go out of their way to not attempt to "simulate" any kind of reality.

"We're going for a very abstract, narrative-based rules system...but you have to have the Feywild/Shadowfell to use it properly." Huh?


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## MrMyth (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> I should be more accurate.
> "Change to fix problems no one had."
> 
> I've played D&D actively from 1978-1986 and 2000->Present. During all that time, I've heard people bitch about armor class, hit points, 1-shot magic users, boring fighters, etc. I've never heard "Halflings are too short!" or "The elemental planes are useless!" or "How do you map an infinite plane?" Yet, it's fixing these non-problems that the current dev team seems most proud of, and it's been a consistent irritation to me since 4e was announced.




To chime in with others: 
I've never had an issue with infinite planes. 
I've always thought tiny halflings were absurdly silly, but never cared about it beyond that. 
I've been frustrated on multiple occasions at the way 3.x handled the elemental planes. 

You may not have had these problems, but others did - the designers _were listening to gamers_, not just inventing problems to solve. Maybe the problems weren't widespread, sure, but outright claiming that no one was bothered by them seems to be claiming a level of awareness well beyond what any of us has access to.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 12, 2008)

MrMyth said:


> Maybe the problems weren't widespread, sure, but outright claiming that no one was bothered by them seems to be claiming a level of awareness well beyond what any of us has access to.




It's also incredibly dismissive when you state that these people don't exist, or the problems they have don't actually exist.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> "...and that I never saw expressed in any ongoing forum debates despite being active in gaming forums for pushing two decades."




Ah, the "I haven't seen it, therefore it does not exist." argument.


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## Lizard (Dec 12, 2008)

Scribble said:


> I feel like 3e told me something like:
> 
> The DC for walking on ice is X.
> 
> ...




See, to me, if I see "The DC for walking on ice 12", I can say, "OK, this is very slippery ice, so it's DC 18" or "This is ice with sand and gravel in it, let's make it DC 10". It's very easy to go from "what I imagine" to "what the rules need to be to include it in the game". With 4e, it's more like "The party is level X, so I need a DC Y challenge for them. What makes sense for that?" I have to work from number->thing, instead of from thing->number, and maybe it's due to a lack of experience with the system, but I feel I need to do more mental work to get the same result. (For another example, in Hero system, I might start with "I want a really intense fire burst... that's energy damage, obviously, and it should be about 12d6". The 4e way, in contrast, seems to me to be saying "You want a 12d6 energy blast -- now decide what it is."

Does that make sense?

I am used to imagining a world, or a setting, or a scene, or a character, and then turning them into numbers. 4e starts with the numbers. (In 3e, I'd day, "This ogre uses a large axe. An axe does 1d12 and his Strength is 18, so that's 1d12+4 damage." In 4e, you start with "A brute of this level should do 2d10 damage. I guess that could be a large axe." I'm willing to grant that, with practice, this could be just as easy, and possibly even more creativity-inducing, but right now, it's a major hump to crawl over.)



> Again I get the opposite reaction. I feel like the great wheel constrained me more then anything I've seen so far, just in the very idea that it's a closed system. Adding stuff to it was patch work at best.




Sheesh, with infinite planes, you could add ANYTHING -- and still use "official" content.  But like I said, the issue isn't "The great wheel is constraining" but "an official, rules-bound cosmology is constraining". 3e took pains to make sure the Great Wheel was one model of many, one of the better innovations. This was a chance for the 4e designers to do something REALLY daring, but instead of doing so, they just replaced one cosmology which only worked for some games with ANOTHER cosmology which only works for some games -- and they did so in a way which was tightly bound to the rules, making it much harder to pry it loose.

4e seemed to want to go towards a system where "rules" and "world" where firmly divided, and now, they're muddying it again. I find it very hard to really figure out what the overarching design goal is. Every time I think I've got a handle on it, they change their minds.


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## Lizard (Dec 12, 2008)

MrMyth said:


> You may not have had these problems, but others did - the designers _were listening to gamers_, not just inventing problems to solve. Maybe the problems weren't widespread, sure, but outright claiming that no one was bothered by them seems to be claiming a level of awareness well beyond what any of us has access to.




I have mysterious cosmic powers.

I just find it hard that the gamers WOTC were listening to weren't any of the ones posting on USENET, here, RPG.net, etc. There's a lot changes in 4e which, while I may not like them, I clearly see were responses to ongoing player debates -- broken multiclassing, fighters and other melee types being "dull", summoners with their armies of NPCs (who summoned other NPCs...), etc. Then there's a lot of "problems" which, frankly, feel like they made them up to justify their design changes, instead of just saying, "I always hated this. I thought it was dumb. Now that I'm in charge, I'm changing it. Neener.", or even "This was always like this. It worked, and no one thought about it too hard. We've got something new we think is better, so we're going to use it, instead."

Hey, if someone wants to dig up a thread from, say, 2005 or so where you've got people ranting about these problems and demanding they be fixed, I'll grant you that I'm wrong.


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## Lizard (Dec 12, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> Ah, the "I haven't seen it, therefore it does not exist." argument.




Solipsism FTW!


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## The Little Raven (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> Solipsism FTW!




More like FTL. Reasonable discussion is difficult when you dismiss people and their experiences out of hand.


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## Lizard (Dec 12, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> More like FTL. Reasonable discussion is difficult when you dismiss people and their experiences out of hand.




I'm not dismissing them, I'm saying I never encountered them -- BEFORE the designers announced "These are the problems, we're fixing them!" Then, all of a sudden, we have this great surge of people saying "Oh yeah, I always hated that!" and "Woo! At long last!"

Where were you all for the last 35 years of D&Ds history? How did WOTC find this Silent Majority? And why didn't they find them back in 2000?

Let me put it this way: Suppose one of the biggest changes in 5e is "Elves no longer have pointed ears!", and, suddenly, out of nowhere, you have people claiming "Wow! I'm so glad they fixed that! I can't believe it took so long!" Wouldn't you find it at least a little... odd? Wouldn't you wonder "Where were all the ENWorld threads on 'Why pointy ears suck!' all this time?"

That's what I'm experiencing with a lot of 4e changes. This feeling of "So, where did all these people come from?" 

Trying to keep this on topic to MOTP -- why is a mandated cosmology necessary? Were people REALLY confused by switching between Eberron and Forgotten Realms? Why is the "backstory" of the gods warring with titans written into the very structure of the universe? Why do we need an "origin" for devils? Aren't these precisely the things that a DM is supposed to decide for him/her self?


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> Sheesh, with infinite planes, you could add ANYTHING -- and still use "official" content.  But like I said, the issue isn't "The great wheel is constraining" but "an official, rules-bound cosmology is constraining". 3e took pains to make sure the Great Wheel was one model of many, one of the better innovations. This was a chance for the 4e designers to do something REALLY daring, but instead of doing so, they just replaced one cosmology which only worked for some games with ANOTHER cosmology which only works for some games -- and they did so in a way which was tightly bound to the rules, making it much harder to pry it loose.



What is so tightly bound to the rules that you can't easily pry the existing cosmology apart and substitute your own? Really?

And what's wrong with having a baseline cosmology for new DM's who want to just run some adventures, not build a whole cosmos? What's wrong with having a default origin and story to tie things like Giants and Elementals together? This baseline helps published material be consistent and able to expand/explore the core assumptions. People complain about lack of fluff in 4E... how much less would there be still if there was no core metaphysical model and mythology to reference flavor-wise for spells, creatures and adventures?

However, I don't see how - in any way - any of this is immune to reconfiguring or outright elimination in a homebrew campaign. You don't need a Fey plane for fey creatures to exist in your campaign.  You don't need a plane of Shadow to have creatures of material darkness. You don't even have to have all the elemental planes mixed together if you don't want. What does it change mechanically? 4E actually tried to remove a lot of the mechanical links to things like magic and planes. Previous editions would would have many rules elements significantly altered if you, for instance, removed the Astral Plane.

Really, the 4E cosmology is very modular, more-so than the Great Wheel, which was slavishly - and at times, nonsensically -  tied to the Aligment game mechanic. Look at the World Axis: World, Astral Sea, Elem. Chaos, Domains (which the Abyss could be considered) and a couple of co-existent planes. You could arrange these in any way you want, remove elements, add elements... what changes?


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> I'm not dismissing them, I'm saying I never encountered them -- BEFORE the designers announced "These are the problems, we're fixing them!" Then, all of a sudden, we have this great surge of people saying "Oh yeah, I always hated that!" and "Woo! At long last!"



I think that's a bit of a mis-representation. I'll be the first to admit that I hadn't noticed or given much thought to some of the things which were changed. But once they were, and we got a peak behind the curtain of the designer's reasoning behind them, I've found my reaction is quite often "Oh, yeah. I guess it does make more sense to do it this way. Huh. Cool."

My guess is many people that support particular changes in the game had a similar experience.


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## Lizard (Dec 12, 2008)

Sir Brennen said:


> What is so tightly bound to the rules that you can't easily pry the existing cosmology apart and substitute your own? Really?




Since the reason given for having a unified cosmology is precisely that, I'd have to say so.



> And what's wrong with having a baseline cosmology for new DM's who want to just run some adventures, not build a whole cosmos? What's wrong with having a default origin and story to tie things like Giants and Elementals together?




I'm all for samples, and if someone wants to use a sample as written, go for it. I'm against an "official" cosmos, especially one which is tied to the rules. (I also tend to dislike the way monsters are now tied together with each other, but that's another thread...)




> Really, the 4E cosmology is very modular, more-so than the Great Wheel, which was slavishly - and at times, nonsensically -  tied to the Aligment game mechanic. Look at the World Axis: World, Astral Sea, Elem. Chaos, Domains (which the Abyss could be considered) and a couple of co-existent planes. You could arrange these in any way you want, remove elements, add elements... what changes?




Apparently, the words "I never used the Great Wheel" are invisible when I type them, since people keep telling me how much better the current system is to it...

I like toolkits. I like examples showing how to use the toolkits. I don't like pre-built, "You VILL use zis und you vill LIKE it!". 4e has far more of the latter than it needs, and saying, "Well, just ignore it!" leads to the question "Why buy it?"

Assume I have my own ideas for a cosmology for 4e, that uses stuff close to what I alredy use (Feywild/Shadowfell are more or less the way I've done that stuff for ages; ditto "Domains" instead of planes, all my gods had their own worlds floating in the Astral, some large, some small, none infinite), what does MOTP offer me? What's in it for people NOT interested in the default cosmology, and how easy is it to use without it?

(Honestly, the 4e cosmology is closer to my homebrew than any previous 'official' cosmology; I was just hoping for something so cool or inspiring I'd say "Wow! I HAVE to add/use this!" What it sounds like from the preview is I'll mostly be mining Crunchy Bits and ignoring the rest.)


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> I'm all for samples, and if someone wants to use a sample as written, go for it. I'm against an "official" cosmos, especially one which is tied to the rules. (I also tend to dislike the way monsters are now tied together with each other, but that's another thread...)



But if WotC makes material, what "sample" do they use? A different one each time? None? Neither of these solutions is very appealing. Choosing one and using it consistently makes more sense, so that one sample becomes the "official" cosmos. 



> Apparently, the words "I never used the Great Wheel" are invisible when I type them, since people keep telling me how much better the current system is to it...



I was just pointing out that the World Axis _is_ a toolkit compared to the rigid Great Wheel cosmology.



> I like toolkits. I like examples showing how to use the toolkits. I don't like pre-built, "You VILL use zis und you vill LIKE it!". 4e has far more of the latter than it needs, and saying, "Well, just ignore it!" leads to the question "Why buy it?"



 But you'd buy a book that has multiple "sample" cosmos, even though you may not use any of them? Then just consider the core cosmology a sample. When you get down to it, that's what it really is. There's nothing that says "You VILL use zis...", but it's there if you want to.



> Assume I have my own ideas for a cosmology for 4e, that uses stuff close to what I alredy use (Feywild/Shadowfell are more or less the way I've done that stuff for ages; ditto "Domains" instead of planes, all my gods had their own worlds floating in the Astral, some large, some small, none infinite),



 Yeah, yeah... same as me, probably like many other DMs as well...



> what does MOTP offer me? What's in it for people NOT interested in the default cosmology, and how easy is it to use without it?



You have a Feywild and Shadowfell-like planes and Astral, and you don't know what a book with detailed versions of these planes has to offer you? 

Bwuh?

You don't have to use the core cosmology in it's entirety to realize there's going to be a ton of material that you could add to your own corresponding planes. It doesn't matter how they fit the overall model. If you have these individual planes so throughly detailed that you have no need for additional source material or inspiration, then good on you. Most DMs probably aren't in the same boat.


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## Miyaa (Dec 12, 2008)

You know, I've always thought the terms "infinity" and "finite" for planes had less to do with how much could cover a plane, but rather how large could a plane grow. A finite plane had limits as to how big it could get, but an infinite plane may have a determined finite plane size, but infinite room to grow.

Or they both could be used interchangeably, like how a Koch snowflake or a Mandelbrot set in mathematics where the area maybe finite, has infinite length.

Our Universe could meet this definition. It may have a finite area at this time, but the length could be infinite. And unless astronomers re-figure the rate of growth of the universe, the universe could keep on expanding infinitely, that is without stopping.

At anyway, that's how I'm defining what is an infinite plane and what isn't. Otherwise, spells that allow players to create their own demiplane would either not work or be too powerful, god-like even.


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## Scribble (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> See, to me, if I see "The DC for walking on ice 12", I can say, "OK, this is very slippery ice, so it's DC 18" or "This is ice with sand and gravel in it, let's make it DC 10". It's very easy to go from "what I imagine" to "what the rules need to be to include it in the game". With 4e, it's more like "The party is level X, so I need a DC Y challenge for them. What makes sense for that?" I have to work from number->thing, instead of from thing->number, and maybe it's due to a lack of experience with the system, but I feel I need to do more mental work to get the same result. (For another example, in Hero system, I might start with "I want a really intense fire burst... that's energy damage, obviously, and it should be about 12d6". The 4e way, in contrast, seems to me to be saying "You want a 12d6 energy blast -- now decide what it is."
> 
> Does that make sense?




It makes sense sure... I just feel like you're doing the exact same thing in either case. In both cases you're increasing the DC and making the event more challanging. 4e I feel just gives me more tools for knowing how that's going to interact with my PCs...

Maybe it's just the way my brain works or something?

I feel like 3e wanted to kind of database everything. Like here is ice. The dc to walk on it is X. Here is dirty ice, the dc to walk on it is Y. Here is wet ice, the dc to walk on it is Z...

Whereas I feel like 4e gives me more of the behind the scenes of it. Here are the DCs that your party will find hard, easy, or avaerage. Use whichever it most appropriate to the situation. 

So I might describe the ice as slick, and muddy... But the DC won't be a hard set in stone number somewhere.

Which also helps avoid those annoying rules lawyers... "You said the ice was muddy! The DC shouldn't be the DC you said... whaaaaaaa...." 



> I am used to imagining a world, or a setting, or a scene, or a character, and then turning them into numbers. 4e starts with the numbers. (In 3e, I'd day, "This ogre uses a large axe. An axe does 1d12 and his Strength is 18, so that's 1d12+4 damage." In 4e, you start with "A brute of this level should do 2d10 damage. I guess that could be a large axe." I'm willing to grant that, with practice, this could be just as easy, and possibly even more creativity-inducing, but right now, it's a major hump to crawl over.)




I think it is... Generally I build my adventures the way you described the first part, and let the numbers 4e provides just fall in place.

Like in 3e I would put said ogre into place then think: "Crap he's not doing enough damage, he'll get trounced..." Then I'd have to worry about finding ways to up his power a bit. magic weapkn, swapping feats, changing the weapon etc...

4e I just modify his level, and the numbers change for me. Again Maybe it just matches how my brain works better?



> Sheesh, with infinite planes, you could add ANYTHING -- and still use "official" content.




it was more the alignment symetry thing... Like if I wanted to add the plane of nevernding fluffy lollypop bunny hell... it wouldn't be the great wheel anymore it would be the great egg shaped thing. 

Like if I assume the great wheel is correct, and each alignment has a plane tied to it, and then I see a great idea for a plane in Dragon... how do I work that one in... Each aignment has a plane except for this alignment which has two for some reason...



> But like I said, the issue isn't "The great wheel is constraining" but "an official, rules-bound cosmology is constraining". 3e took pains to make sure the Great Wheel was one model of many, one of the better innovations. This was a chance for the 4e designers to do something REALLY daring, but instead of doing so, they just replaced one cosmology which only worked for some games with ANOTHER cosmology which only works for some games -- and they did so in a way which was tightly bound to the rules, making it much harder to pry it loose.
> 
> 4e seemed to want to go towards a system where "rules" and "world" where firmly divided, and now, they're muddying it again. I find it very hard to really figure out what the overarching design goal is. Every time I think I've got a handle on it, they change their minds.




Haven't seen the book yet, but the table of contents looks like it starts off with a discussion of using the planes, the traits of various planes, and modifying things for your own use... Sounds like it's open to your own ideas.

I think the overall goal is making things usable across the entire spectrum, rather then a "control" thing.

Like if I game in a setting that doesn't have an astral plane, I can't use all that info full of astral monsters/items. It's wasted paper to me.

But if I'm in ebberon, even thought the cosmology is customized towards ebberon, I can stil use that forgotten realms stuff.


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## Jhaelen (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> I've never heard "Halflings are too short!" or "The elemental planes are useless!" or "How do you map an infinite plane?"



Well, in my 3E campaign I only allowed the tallfellow variant for halflings. I didn't see it as a problem, per se, but standard halflings definitely were too short!

I agree, that the infinite planes are really a non-issue. The deadliness of the elemental planes, though, that's a different matter:
Several of my players outright refused to even contemplate traveling there when I presented it to them as an adventure option. That definitely indicates that there was a problem (or at least a perceived problem).


Lizard said:


> Let me put it this way: Suppose one of the biggest changes in 5e is "Elves no longer have pointed ears!", and, suddenly, out of nowhere, you have people claiming "Wow! I'm so glad they fixed that! I can't believe it took so long!"



Well, the ears of D&D elves aren't that problematic. But don't get me started on WoW-style elves! Their ears are ridiculous! If Blizzard wants to win me over, they'll definitely have to get rid of those ears first 

The way I see it, the changes to the cosmology have been made because they decided they wanted to have a kind of 'best-of' of the existing cosmologies. E.g. Eberron's take on the planes was really well-received, so they modified the standard cosmology to include aspects of it. And the 4E Feywild was the best idea they ever had. The presentation of the fey has always been extremely lame in D&D. Fey slowly started to get more interesting in the end of the 3E era and now, in 4E, they're just awesome.

In my 3E campaign I banned elves as a player race to turn them into something that was closer to the sidhe I knew from novels and other rpg systems like Ars Magica or Changeling.
So naturally, I welcome the 'official' changes made to the fey.

It's one thing to dislike the way they marketed the changes made in 4E and a completely different thing to dislike the changes themselves. I didn't like the marketing but I do like the changes.


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## MrMyth (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> Hey, if someone wants to dig up a thread from, say, 2005 or so where you've got people ranting about these problems and demanding they be fixed, I'll grant you that I'm wrong.




Wait, wait, wait - are you saying that, in order for you to admit you are wrong, you are unwilling to accept people stepping forward and _outright stating _that they felt some of these things were problem, and instead demand online threads as the only proof you will accept?

Look, I can accept that you found this odd and were dubious about whether any gamers actually thought this was an issue. _But you have gamers, in this thread, saying that was the case_. To still insist that this problems were imaginary isn't just dismissive - it is _insulting_. You are basically saying that we are lying about our experiences, or that there is some sort of conspiracy to invent support for these decisions made for 4E.

Could it possibly be that the reason for the support is that there are people that honestly agree with the decisions made and the reasons behind them??

I'm not saying _you_ have to agree with them. I'm not even saying you are wrong to initially not believe anyone could think these things were problems. But it seems pretty irrational that, after people have directly told you that they did in fact think these things, you claim it is only natural to _still _express disbelief...


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## Dire Bare (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> I should be more accurate.
> "Change to fix problems no one had."



Now this makes me giggle.  There have been numerous posters in this thread alone who have basically said, "Yeah, I've thought those were problems too and my homebrew has already taken them out."  I'm in that camp too.

But I guess we don't count, seeing as how we disagree with you and your, ah, reasoning.


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## Fifth Element (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> I don't like pre-built, "You VILL use zis und you vill LIKE it!".



I don't get this. All editions of D&D have presented a bunch of stuff without providing a real alternative, some of which you might not like. Suddenly 4E is faulty for doing the same thing?



Lizard said:


> What's in it for people NOT interested in the default cosmology, and how easy is it to use without it?



Probably about as much as in previous editions? If you don't use D&D's default cosmology, whichever version it might be, then the Manual of the Planes, whichever edition it might be, will be of limited interest.


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## MrMyth (Dec 12, 2008)

As far as the infinite planes topic itself, I can't say that I found the new planar set-up in any way more limiting than the old one. (And, indeed, more freeing in some aspects.) I was sad to hear the Great Wheel would be going initially, but I've definitely become impressed with the new cosmology, and have felt it started to fire up inspirations in a variety of places. (Namely, Feywild and the Elemental Chaos, and how certain primordials might form something of a connection between the two.


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## M.L. Martin (Dec 12, 2008)

Lizard said:


> To each their own, I suppose. I find the extreme balance obsession in 4e to be very.... scary, I guess is the right word. I'm afraid to touch anything for fear the perfectly balanced mechanism might go spinning madly out of control. 3e I was very comfortable sticking a finger in the wind and saying "Good enough for government work"; with 4e, I feel if I want to come up with a new exploit/spell/prayer I'd better build a spreadsheet and make sure my new ability is not the slightest bit better, or the slightest bit worse, than any existing ability.




  This explains some things. It baffles me, but it explains some things.
  I felt exactly about 3E _exactly_ the way you feel about 4E. This may be due to not enough actual play and too much reading and following online discussions, but from nearly the beginning, it gave me the impression of 'This is a finely balanced, highly interwoven and coherent system--and we've hidden a lot of the basic assumptions from you. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Tinker Here." 4E has the same level of rigor in its powers, but at least it's more transparent about the kind of results it thinks you should be getting.
  Now, if 3E was transparent or loose enough for you to feel comfortable winging it, then I understand your fondness for it better than I have. I usually felt that if I had to deal with the rigor and detail of 3E, I might as well go with HERO or M&M and at least get the transparency and design flexibility 3E lacked--and I know you can handle HERO, so your passion for 3E puzzled me. 



> I feel constrained. I find the one-size-fits-all cosmology to be another example of constraint, even if it's only for "official" worlds, it's part of an attitude that has shifted D&D from being a generic toolkit for fantasy gaming to being a set of rules usable only in one fantasy world. It's becoming closer to a setting-based game than a genre-based toolkit, and while I am perfectly capable of (and intend to) using it to do what I want with it, I feel I have to fight the design intent to do so, that the dev team is no longer on "my side", if you follow me.




  D&D has _always_ been bipolar in this regard, largely due to the magic system (not just Vancian, but the arcane/divine split and other quirks), monsters, and hidden assumptions discussed above. 1E was a stew, 2E tried to broaden things, 3E seemed to want to have it both ways by both increasing flexibility but undercutting that with hidden assumptions and designing for the 'core D&D experience'. 4E is for 'playing D&D', even moreso than 1E and 3E, IMO.

   (And to make my biases clear, I was excited about 4E and think it got a lot of things right, especially in the math, artifacts, and shifting monsters from a 'race-centered' to 'class-centered' style, but I think it's too close to the core experience for someone like me, who's fonder of the outliers.)


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## Fallen Seraph (Dec 13, 2008)

Yeah I am the same as Matthew, I find that the transparency of the math and the fact that the balance has lots of support/fall backs that I feel much easier messing around with the math.

As for the cosmology, I too find it easier to mess with cause well it is more "generic" and more giving us certain areas that generate specific ideas and feelings. We know what a Feywild be like what a Shadowfell be like, etc. As such we can easily use those to build our own cosmologies.

I am finding both rules wise and the way fluff has been done it is much easier for me to run the gambit from low-fantasy to fantasy-sci fi, to high-fantasy, to mystery, etc.


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## Spatula (Dec 13, 2008)

Scribble said:


> So I might describe the ice as slick, and muddy... But the DC won't be a hard set in stone number somewhere.
> 
> Which also helps avoid those annoying rules lawyers... "You said the ice was muddy! The DC shouldn't be the DC you said... whaaaaaaa...."



Not really, because (just as in 3e) there's an appropriate DC "set in stone" in the books.  The rules lawyer says, "We're level X, so the DC is either n1, n2, or n3... or, x1, x2, x3 if the DM is using the errata'd numbers..."



Jhaelen said:


> E.g. Eberron's take on the planes was really well-received, so they modified the standard cosmology to include aspects of it.



They did?  Where?



Matthew L. Martin said:


> I felt exactly about 3E _exactly_ the way you feel about 4E. This may be due to not enough actual play and too much reading and following online discussions, but from nearly the beginning, it gave me the impression of 'This is a finely balanced, highly interwoven and coherent system--and we've hidden a lot of the basic assumptions from you. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Tinker Here." 4E has the same level of rigor in its powers, but at least it's more transparent about the kind of results it thinks you should be getting.



3e doesn't hide its basic assumptions.  It's even chock full of sidebars telling you why the non-intuitive bits are the way they are.  4e isn't any more or any less transparent, although I suppose the number of online interviews these days gives us some more insight than we had back in the early days of 3e.


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## Spatula (Dec 13, 2008)

Sir Brennen said:


> And what's wrong with having a baseline cosmology for new DM's who want to just run some adventures, not build a whole cosmos? What's wrong with having a default origin and story to tie things like Giants and Elementals together?



Nothing wrong with the "baseline" world.  The problem is forcing every setting to be that same world.  What's the point of the different settings if they're all the same?


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## M.L. Martin (Dec 13, 2008)

Spatula said:


> 3e doesn't hide its basic assumptions.  It's even chock full of sidebars telling you why the non-intuitive bits are the way they are.  4e isn't any more or any less transparent, although I suppose the number of online interviews these days gives us some more insight than we had back in the early days of 3e.




   What's the proper total attack bonus and AC/saving throw bonuses for a warrior-type of 12th level, then--factoring in expected feats, stats, magic items, and the like?

   This is what I was complaining about--the game gives you a lot of tools, but it doesn't tell you the results it expects you to get from those tools, especially the magic items. The "Expected Wealth" system was one of the chief offenders. Yes, it was a step forward, but it was like doing a point-based generation system with a raw number of points, but no minimums or maximums for fundamental character abilities. The inclusion of "system mastery" elements was another strike against this.

  4E improves this with magic item levels (which debuted in late 3.5) and Page 42, although the errata on the latter is disheartening, I admit.


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## Spatula (Dec 13, 2008)

Matthew L. Martin said:


> What's the proper total attack bonus and AC/saving throw bonuses for a warrior-type of 12th level, then--factoring in expected feats, stats, magic items, and the like?



What's the expected damage of an 11th level paragon path encounter power?  An infernal lock gets 3d8+Con (avg 13.5+mod) to 1 target within 10 squares, +10dmg on a conditional basis.  A spellstorm mage gets 4d6+Int (avg 14+mod) to all creatures in a 5x5 square within 20 squares, and creates a wall of difficult terrain around the targets that does 10 dmg to any that pass through it.  What's the transparent formula for designing new powers?  How much expected damage are various riders worth in a power?  Range?  Area effects?



Matthew L. Martin said:


> This is what I was complaining about--the game gives you a lot of tools, but it doesn't tell you the results it expects you to get from those tools, especially the magic items.



Right, but then 3e wasn't really concerned with that sort of thing.  Numbers are built from in-world reasons rather than game reasons (all undead have 1/2 BAB, etc.), and whatever you end up with in the end is what you end up with.  It wasn't until later in the design cycle that we see that lack of concern was getting in the way of developing a usable encounter building system, and thus we have 4e's generally superior way of looking at things.  That doesn't make 3e non-transparent, just not as well put together as 4e.


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## Lizard (Dec 13, 2008)

MrMyth said:


> Wait, wait, wait - are you saying that, in order for you to admit you are wrong, you are unwilling to accept people stepping forward and _outright stating _that they felt some of these things were problem, and instead demand online threads as the only proof you will accept?




It would be proof a lot of people thought these things were wrong BEFORE the developers announced they were wrong. Given how people will rant on the Internet about the color of hobbit toenails on page 17 of an obscure module, I simply find it difficult that seemingly major problems with D&D have been present for 30-odd years and no one saw fit to complain about them in public. The deadliness of the elemental planes, for example, was either ignored ("You have the amulet of whatever that protects you, onwards!") or the planes were there as background fluff, never actually visited. I never heard anyone say, "I really WANT to run an adventure on the Plane of Earth, but I just can't!" (I personally felt the incredible hostility of the elemental planes was part of their charm, they were hideously inimical to "mortal" life, a place you could only go when you were closing in on demigod status, and when their energies spilled into the "real" world, strange and terrible things occurred...the idea of "safe" bubbles in these planes, and the sort of strange beings which might live in them, was also extremely appealing to me, and a great adventure seed. I love the idea of a town or settlement in a 'bubble' on, say, the plane of Earth (classic version), surrounded by literally infinite stone, ever aware that a shift in cosmic forces could crush them to nothingness, yet still home to those who, for whatever reason, need to be there...)

FWIW, I ran into a similar problem with generic undersea adventuring. A Water Breathing spell is subject to Dispel Magic, and all underwater races would know this and it would be the first line of attack against surface dwellers. I just created a higher level, non-dispellable spell. I didn't need to redesign how oceans worked. 



> Could it possibly be that the reason for the support is that there are people that honestly agree with the decisions made and the reasons behind them??




Sure. But I'd expect it to be in the form of "Wow, you know, I never thought of that before... but they're right!" as opposed to the form of "We ALWAYS thought this, we just didn't TELL anyone." The design diaries, etc, often state things in a way which makes it seem as every change they make is so self-evidently brilliant and long-demanded that it's completely inconceivable anyone could possibly have ever played the game any other way and still had fun, and, yes, that attitude does annoy me, and it is very often echoed by 4e's more outspoken partisans. I find 4e to be a game which has actually managed to transcend its fanbase. It's fun DESPITE the people who like it.


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## Lizard (Dec 13, 2008)

Fifth Element said:


> I don't get this. All editions of D&D have presented a bunch of stuff without providing a real alternative, some of which you might not like. Suddenly 4E is faulty for doing the same thing?




Did I say the other versions WEREN'T faulty?

1e was pretty absolutist. Female dwarves have beards! Or else!
2e I had no interest in, so I can't comment.
3e's MOTP presented several alternate cosmologies and had extensive discussion on how to interface your cosmology with the rules.
4e, judging from the preview, jumps back to 1e.

I fail to see how criticism of 4e equates to "Every/any other version was better!"




> Probably about as much as in previous editions? If you don't use D&D's default cosmology, whichever version it might be, then the Manual of the Planes, whichever edition it might be, will be of limited interest.




I still go back to the 1e MOTP for inspiration. Even though I don't use the layout of the planes, the sheer scope and spectable -- planes of SALT! of RADIANCE! Planes like infinite nested pearls, planes of giant metal cubes... -- is always inspiring to me. If the 4e MOTP provides that same sense of infinite possibilities, of things I would not have thought of on my own, it's worth it.


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## Lizard (Dec 13, 2008)

Matthew L. Martin;4586862
   (And to make my biases clear said:
			
		

> Drifting off topic a bit, one of the things which I finally came to like about 4e was precisely that last -- that, in effect, every "monster" is a "monster with class levels", and you can, pretty much, make every encounter unique, designing NPCs from the ground up with whatever Cool Powers they ought to have. 99% of the time in D20M and 3x, my players are fighting classed monsters, because they're cooler and because I don't like the idea of all the orcs vanishing when you hit 5th level -- you'll be fighting orcs at 20th level, they're just 20th level orcs. 4e seems to take this as a baseline, and once I broke through the mental block of seeing the various Monstername Verber things as *species* instead of *classed individuals*, the game made a lot more sense.


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## Lacyon (Dec 13, 2008)

Lizard said:


> The deadliness of the elemental planes, for example, was either ignored ("You have the amulet of whatever that protects you, onwards!") or the planes were there as background fluff, never actually visited.






Lizard said:


> I don't like pre-built, "You VILL use zis und you vill LIKE it!". 4e has far more of the latter than it needs, and saying, "Well, just ignore it!" leads to the question "Why buy it?"




If you take the time to reconcile these two statements, you'll understand why some people are happy that the irritating things they previously ignored or handwaved no longer need to be ignored or handwaved.



Lizard said:


> Sure. But I'd expect it to be in the form of "Wow, you know, I never thought of that before... but they're right!" as opposed to the form of "We ALWAYS thought this, we just didn't TELL anyone."






Lizard said:


> FWIW, I ran into a similar problem with generic undersea adventuring. A Water Breathing spell is subject to Dispel Magic, and all underwater races would know this and it would be the first line of attack against surface dwellers. I just created a higher level, non-dispellable spell. I didn't need to redesign how oceans worked.




I suggest that most of the people saying "We ALWAYS thought this" are the same people who handwaved did exactly this kind of thing.

The fact that you had to design a new spell to make underwater adventuring even close to a reasonable idea suggests a design flaw in the game. For my money, the fact that I needed designed such a spell wouldn't likely drive me onto message boards to gripe. But, in seeing one published by WOTC, I might say "FINALLY, that's been bugging me for so long."



Lizard said:


> I find 4e to be a game which has actually managed to transcend its fanbase. It's fun DESPITE the people who like it.




It is possible that a bit more benefit of the doubt is in order.


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## SkidAce (Dec 13, 2008)

Lacyon said:


> The fact that you had to design a new spell to make underwater adventuring even close to a reasonable idea suggests a *design flaw in the game*.




Why?  If I wanted to do an underwater adventure today I would have to go buy scuba gear.


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## Lacyon (Dec 13, 2008)

SkidAce said:


> Why? If I wanted to do an underwater adventure today I would have to go buy scuba gear.




I'll rephrase: a design flaw in the existing spells that were supposed to allow you to adventure underwater.


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## MrMyth (Dec 13, 2008)

Lizard said:


> I find 4e to be a game which has actually managed to transcend its fanbase. It's fun DESPITE the people who like it.




Well, I have to apologize for my earlier claims that your comments were vaguely insulting - you've successfully demonstrated what being insulting really looks like. 

Look, I'm not saying every decision they made for 4E is some brilliant and world-changing innovation. What I'm saying is that some of the things you dismiss as no one ever caring about are things that I, and people in my gaming group, cared about! 

I'm sorry I don't have recorded proof of this. I _imagine_ there are discussions about these things online, but I never took part in them. But I did find some of these issues - the size of halflings, and the uselessness of the Elemental Planes - to be annoying, long before I ever heard of 4th Edition. I didn't complain about them online, so no, I don't have proof of this - but they were certainly topics that came up with my friends. 

Oh, not often, I'm not trying to claim this is some fundamental problem that disrupted our games constantly! But I know I regularly laughed at the absurd size of halflings - and saw at least one RPGA game disrupted by a DM who penalized halflings for being too small to easily reach enemy's vital organs. (An issue more with other elements of 3rd Edition, but the size issue was definitely there.) 

I never had a problem with infinite planes, but I'm not going to assume that means that the same holds true for all other gamers!

And there are issues that I didn't think about until the designers discussed fixing them, such as the overlap among the metallic dragon types - it never occured to me before, but I found it a good idea when they mentioned it. And there are plenty of issues in which I disagreed with the changes they made and the reasons behind them - but I'm not going to suggest that means that my viewpoint stands in for all gamers, and that anyone who disagrees with me is lying, and a bad person, and a bad gamer. (Which, frankly, is what you have been suggesting in your various posts.)

I'm sorry you feel some of 4E's defenders are overzealous. Honestly, I'm not even going to disagree with you on that. But the fact that you aren't willing to accept the posters in this thread who have stated that their own experiences _are_ in line with the designer's reasoning - and these are posters who have seemed perfectly civil and reasonable in their statements - the fact that you are not only unwilling to accept what they have to say, but suggesting they are outright lying, and are somehow actively dragging the game down... I'd say that indicates that the one who is truly being irrational and unreasonable is you.


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## Aeolius (Dec 13, 2008)

Lizard said:


> A Water Breathing spell is subject to Dispel Magic, and all underwater races would know this and it would be the first line of attack against surface dwellers.




After which they would die and be reincarnated as water-breathing races... problem solved


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Dec 13, 2008)

I don't pay for Dragon and Dungeon, and I probably won't buy 4e MotP. Can someone tell me if the article, of the book, leave room for published settings to add on to the World Axis when the case needs it? Or to alter the World Axis planes when the case calls for it?

Drifting back to squeezing the Athas square peg into a World Axis round hole. I think I can explain the presence of nearly everything in the World Axis as being part of Athas' setting.

*The Shadowfell*: It's the Gray. As I recall, doesn't an excerpt from the MotP even say The Gray is one of the many names for Shadowfell? Slight descriptive change and boom, done.

*Astral Sea*: Astral Plane and the Outer Planes were there in 2e products. The Githyanki invasion from the _Black Spine_ adventure came through a crack in the planar/dimensional barrier, they had to come from someplace.

*Elemental Chaos*: _Earth, Air, Fire, and Water_ (the Dark Sun cleric book) very much described as places characters could walk around. They don't get there except at high levels and through a method that gives them some protection against inhospitable heat. No infinite earth or fire. However, if we can work in some descriptive changes to the cosmology, the Elemental Chaos could give us room for the paraelemental planes of Magma, Rain, Silt, and Sun. The thing is though, the elemental lords of Air, Earth, Fire, and Water, were (more or less) "good guys" fighting The Wasting, and extending The Wasting empowers the masters of the paraelements. So if 4e primordials could be divided into "beneficial" guys (air, earth, fire, water) and "bad" guys (magma, rain, silt, sun) all battling over ground in the Elemental Chaos, then we have a nice 4e fit for Athas.

*Feywild*: As long as I could say the Feywild was only accessed in the heart of druid groves, then I'd be mostly fine. But as soon as someone can setup a method to cross into the faerie realm of wooded bounty, you instantly have access to resources you could return with and become instantly wealthy. Feywild would need to be either blocked off from Athas like the rest of the multiverse was so as to prevent plane hopping adventurers from returning with heaps of gold and metal (in Feywild's case, wood and food) and becoming the next dynastic merchant house in one swoop. Or Feywild would need to be drastically altered in description to be nearly unrecognizable as other settings experience it. Will World Axis allow for such a descriptive change? Or allow Feywild to be cut off as definitively as the Outer Planes were in 2e?

What about Athas' *The Black*: Shadowfell would become The Gray. But The Black is a pretty significant part of Athas as the domain of the Shadow Giants, the (eventual) prison of Andropinis, and the location where The Hollow (Rajaat's prison) is found. Does the World Axis allow published setting to invent something to tack on when a world's cosmology calls for it? If so, then again, there is room for World Axis in Athas.


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## Fifth Element (Dec 13, 2008)

Lizard said:


> Did I say the other versions WEREN'T faulty?



Your next line was: _4e has far more of the latter than it needs, and saying, "Well, just ignore it!" leads to the question "Why buy it?"

_Since you wrote '4E' rather than 'D&D', I interpreted it to mean you found it a fault in 4E alone.


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## Staffan (Dec 13, 2008)

Eric Anondson said:


> *Feywild*: As long as I could say the Feywild was only accessed in the heart of druid groves, then I'd be mostly fine. But as soon as someone can setup a method to cross into the faerie realm of wooded bounty,



I don't see why the Feywild has to be wooded. To me, the Feywild is about *wilderness*. For most pseudo-european settings, wilderness means forests, because that's what was there before the place was settled. But you also have majestic mountain peaks, oceans, savannahs, and, yes, deserts. They're just "more" than the mundane versions. In the Feywild forests, you get lost more easily, because that's the main danger in a mundane forest (other than wild beasts, and you get those in all kinds of wilderness). In the Feywild deserts, you would maybe dehydrate faster, because that's the main danger of mundane deserts. Feywild mountains are harder to climb and more treacherous. Feywild oceans have more unpredictable currents. And so on.


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Dec 13, 2008)

Staffan said:


> They're just "more" than the mundane versions.



So for you, would it be close to accurate to say that the Feywild is the reflection of the world, but _turned up to 11_? 

WotC seems to describe the Feywild as a majestic "reflection" imbued with arcane energy. Turning Athas' wilderness up to 11 is far from majestic. I'm not sure how well a whole plane imbued with arcane energy works in a setting where arcane energy sucks the life from living beings. Then begins a possible thought experiment on what the macro effects are going to be for the setting as a whole with such a plane. One would, I think necessarily begin to need to redescribe, maybe even reflavor, the Feywild to make it fit.

Of course, if we are going down the route of the Feywild being an arcane-imbued majestic reflection of the world, and in the world merely using arcane magic without restraint destroys living things (plants and creatures both) . . . maybe The Black--a lightless, frigid domain filled with little but wisps of utter darkness--is the ultimate condition for the Athasian Feywild? Heh. But then we're back to inventing something else entirely again.


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## Sysbase (Dec 13, 2008)

Sounds pretty cool how custom can you get with it?


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## Miyaa (Dec 13, 2008)

Lizard said:
			
		

> I still go back to the 1e MOTP for inspiration. Even though I don't use the layout of the planes, the sheer scope and spectable -- planes of SALT! of RADIANCE! Planes like infinite nested pearls, planes of giant metal cubes... -- is always inspiring to me. If the 4e MOTP provides that same sense of infinite possibilities, of things I would not have thought of on my own, it's worth it.





Just curious: Did the 1e of the Manual of the Planes had a plane of *chocolate fudge pudding*? (Those black/brown/blue pudding monsters had to come from someplace, right?)


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## SkidAce (Dec 13, 2008)

Lacyon said:


> I'll rephrase: a design flaw in the existing spells that were supposed to allow you to adventure underwater.




Got it now....didnt understand your intent at first.  Thank you.


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## D.Shaffer (Dec 15, 2008)

Staffan said:


> I don't see why the Feywild has to be wooded. To me, the Feywild is about *wilderness*. For most pseudo-european settings, wilderness means forests, because that's what was there before the place was settled. But you also have majestic mountain peaks, oceans, savannahs, and, yes, deserts. They're just "more" than the mundane versions.



Exactly.  The Feywild is a 'concentrated' reflection of the natural world.  Athas is a land of desert, until you hit the jungles. Thus, the Feywild version is a 'more pure' form of that desert.  It's days are hotter, and the nights are cooler.  The colors are more vibrant and the vegetation that does exist is larger and also more dangerous.  And the fey? You dont want to know about the fey.

I rather like the idea someone had...the Feywild is nature 'turned up to 11'


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## avin (Dec 15, 2008)

What if Feywild and Shadowfell are just blocked or mortally dangerous (except for quick teleports) for people stay in?

Eladrins are banned to normal Arthas.


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## vagabundo (Dec 15, 2008)

Eric Anondson said:


> What about Athas' *The Black*: Shadowfell would become The Gray. But The Black is a pretty significant part of Athas as the domain of the Shadow Giants, the (eventual) prison of Andropinis, and the location where The Hollow (Rajaat's prison) is found. Does the World Axis allow published setting to invent something to tack on when a world's cosmology calls for it? If so, then again, there is room for World Axis in Athas.




Sounds like it might fit in the underdark of the shadowfell, but I'm not up on the Cosmology of Athas.


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## justanobody (Dec 17, 2008)

Oh goody! Every campaign setting is the same, and it seems that the designers think everyone wants to play in their games....NOT!

The different cosmologies is what makes some settings good and others bad. Having the same just means that each setting will look a slight mirror reflection of the next. Might as well just remove all settings and make one global setting.


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## pemerton (Dec 17, 2008)

Lizard said:


> What bothers me is the attitude, a return to the idea of central control, a "shared world" which every gamer is expected to play in, the hard-coding of setting assumptions into the rules -- a very strange thing indeed, when the rules go out of their way to not attempt to "simulate" any kind of reality.
> 
> "We're going for a very abstract, narrative-based rules system...but you have to have the Feywild/Shadowfell to use it properly." Huh?



HeroWars and The Dying Earth both fit this description: abstract, narrativist-facilitating rules each tied to a specific world (Glorantha and Vance's Dying Earth respectively).



Lizard said:


> why is a mandated cosmology necessary? Were people REALLY confused by switching between Eberron and Forgotten Realms? Why is the "backstory" of the gods warring with titans written into the very structure of the universe? Why do we need an "origin" for devils?



It makes the game playable out of the box. This, in turn, makes the game more accessible to more players.



Sir Brennen said:


> And what's wrong with having a baseline cosmology for new DM's who want to just run some adventures, not build a whole cosmos? What's wrong with having a default origin and story to tie things like Giants and Elementals together? This baseline helps published material be consistent and able to expand/explore the core assumptions. People complain about lack of fluff in 4E... how much less would there be still if there was no core metaphysical model and mythology to reference flavor-wise for spells, creatures and adventures?



Agreed. I actually find the "lack of fluff" criticisms odd. It's true that there is less zoological information about monsters (feeding habits, size of brood, etc). But for me at least this is more than made up for by the increased amount of information (eg monster descriptions, monster lore suggested encounter groups) that expressly reveals a world of fantastic adventure.

I guess being told that rage drakes lay 4-6 spotted eggs a year suggests the possibilty for a slightly zany adventure involving a mad aristocratic collector and a large number of Dex checks. And it's true that 4e lacks this sort of thing.

But being told that Baphomet and Yeenoghu are rivals straight away sets up a coflict between minotaurs and gnolls that my PCs can get involved in (if the players read the MM they can even have their players set out to get involved in this conflict, sandbox style). I don't have to build a conflict around some zoological fact. The conflict has been provided for me - I just have to implement it.



Lizard said:


> Assume I have my own ideas for a cosmology for 4e, that uses stuff close to what I alredy use (Feywild/Shadowfell are more or less the way I've done that stuff for ages; ditto "Domains" instead of planes, all my gods had their own worlds floating in the Astral, some large, some small, none infinite), what does MOTP offer me? What's in it for people NOT interested in the default cosmology, and how easy is it to use without it?



I just got it today. I haven't read it yet. But I'd assume that, like earlier MotP, it's best approached as a campaign module. There's probably stuff in there that's interesting, even if you want to tweak it or adapt it rather than use it outright.

There's also some mechanical stuff that looks interesting (monster, paragon paths, rituals, items).


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Dec 17, 2008)

D.Shaffer said:


> I rather like the idea someone had...the Feywild is nature 'turned up to 11'



 *bows*


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## TheWyrd (Dec 17, 2008)

My absolute two favorite books for 3e were 'The Manual of the Planes' and 'Deities and Demigods'. What was best about these books was the toolkit nature of them. MotP had several example cosmologies in addition to the basic 'Great Wheel'. The Gods book took that and expanded it, building universes around each of the Pantheons it showcased. This was great.

The move to a single official cosmology saddens me, though I understand why they are doing it. Part of the marketing strategy is get people feeling that they are 'D&D Players'.. rather than 'Eberron Players' and 'Forgotten Realms Players'. This wasn't ever a problem for me, but if you're in sales and trying to get the most people possible to buy each of your books, I can clearly see where this would be a problem.

This is where the 'everything is core' idea is coming from as well. There used to be a WotC psionics board where people who played psionics would go to complain about how disenfranchised they are because other D&D players hate 'sci-fi' themed psionics. Clearly, there were people who weren't buying psionics books. Best to make them 'core' so that more people will buy the books.

Personally, I don't see anything bad in that. Do what you can to sell books and make them the best books you can so that more people will want to buy them. Throw in the things that people like and you'll make more sales. That's why both Spelljammer and Planescape have been given nods in the new MotP. Will I buy it? Only if someone doesn't give it to me for Christmas. And then I'll rip open the plane rules and write up my own cosmology.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 17, 2008)

justanobody said:


> The different cosmologies is what makes some settings good and others bad. Having the same just means that each setting will look a slight mirror reflection of the next. Might as well just remove all settings and make one global setting.




Yeah, because sharing the Great Wheel made Planescape and Greyhawk exactly the same, right?


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## justanobody (Dec 17, 2008)

The Little Raven said:


> Yeah, because sharing the Great Wheel made Planescape and Greyhawk exactly the same, right?




Avoided Planescape like the plague so wouldn't know. Never visited the Flaness either.


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## The Little Raven (Dec 17, 2008)

justanobody said:


> Avoided Planescape like the plague so wouldn't know. Never visited the Flaness either.




Ah, so you were making a blanket statement with no support for it, and plenty of published examples that directly refute it. Gotcha.


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## justanobody (Dec 17, 2008)

No I was saying that the idea of having a universal cosmology as per including deities as well as realms is not a good one.


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## underthumb (Dec 17, 2008)

I generally agree with those who see the "inhospitable" planes of past editions as wonderful, interesting background, and disagree that such places need to be upgraded in terms of their accessibility to players. The examples already given are instructive: the ocean, the sky, etc. We don't need to fill the sky with castles or make (normal) water breathable so that we can have more square-footage for adventuring. The ocean and the sky are beautiful in their own right, and their inhospitable qualities are part of their mystique.

I also want to acknowledge the point that many have already made: yes, as a DM, you can change things to be back to the way they were, or make this or that alteration to the new cosmology. But this seems beside the point, because it's always true of any change made to the game or its assumed world. At some point we have to agree that some design decisions are better than others and that changing the game's default assumptions makes a difference to people.

Planescape was my favorite setting, and one meta-aspect of Planescape that made it feel believable (rather than "real"), was its complexity. The outer planes were colorful, complex, numerous, and mind-bending. They were realms of ideas and of contradictions. Even the "narrators" of many Planescape books struggled with grasping the multiverse, sometimes disagreeing with the standard assumptions about the world. Consider Planescape's "Faces of Evil", a sourcebook on fiends. One of the authors of the texts notes that he believes the Abyss is not actually made of infinite layers, but simply has an ridiculously large finite number. Similarly, when I read posts about how foolish Planescape is because there are an "infinite" number of demons, I wonder whether Planescape's very real hesitance to reify its cosmology is ever taken into account.

Here's a quote from Hellbound: The Blood War on the "infinite" number of tanari:

"But planar scholars argue that the baatezu aren't so stupid as to fight an unwinnable war. They say that Baator's commitment alone is enough to prove that the numbers of the tanar'ri are not infinite, no matter what the bean-counters might think. Instead, these graybeards offer two possible schools of thought..."

Basically, the planes are hard to figure out, and the scholars disagree. Most campaign settings simply don't work that way: the DM is told "what's really happening" (for the most part) and things go on their jolly way. In Planescape, the DM is told that the very fabric of the cosmos and the nature of its inhabitants and its wars are the subject of debate, not of certainty.

And that, my friends, was the beauty of the old cosmology.


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## Fifth Element (Dec 17, 2008)

justanobody said:


> No I was saying that the idea of having a universal cosmology as per including deities as well as realms is not a good one.



No, with respect to cosmologies you said, and I quote, "_Having the same just means that each setting will look a slight mirror reflection of the next_".

Therefore any setting that has the same cosmology as another (say, Planescape and Greyhawk) is just a slight mirror reflection of that setting. That assertion is demonstrably false. And it has been demonstrated false.


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## Aldarc (Dec 17, 2008)

Is it really that much of a surprise that most of the supporters of the Elemental Planes and the Great Wheel cosmology appear to be Planescape fans?


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## avin (Dec 17, 2008)

Aldarc said:


> Is it really that much of a surprise that most of the supporters of the Elemental Planes and the Great Wheel cosmology appear to be Planescape fans?




Orly?


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## Jack99 (Dec 17, 2008)

Eric Anondson said:


> *Feywild*: As long as I could say the Feywild was only accessed in the heart of druid groves, then I'd be mostly fine. But as soon as someone can setup a method to cross into the faerie realm of wooded bounty, you instantly have access to resources you could return with and become instantly wealthy. Feywild would need to be either blocked off from Athas like the rest of the multiverse was so as to prevent plane hopping adventurers from returning with heaps of gold and metal (in Feywild's case, wood and food) and becoming the next dynastic merchant house in one swoop. Or Feywild would need to be drastically altered in description to be nearly unrecognizable as other settings experience it. Will World Axis allow for such a descriptive change? Or allow Feywild to be cut off as definitively as the Outer Planes were in 2e?






D.Shaffer said:


> Exactly.  The Feywild is a 'concentrated' reflection of the natural world.  Athas is a land of desert, until you hit the jungles. Thus, the Feywild version is a 'more pure' form of that desert.  It's days are hotter, and the nights are cooler.  The colors are more vibrant and the vegetation that does exist is larger and also more dangerous.  And the fey? You dont want to know about the fey.
> 
> I rather like the idea someone had...the Feywild is nature 'turned up to 11'




This is pretty much spot on how the Feywild is described in MoP. It's definitely not just woods and happy hippie eladrin wandering around glades, looking for friendly nymphs. It's a really nasty place, even more so if the world it reflects is a nasty place.


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## pemerton (Dec 18, 2008)

Now that I've started reading my copy of MotP, I don't understand all the outrage. It talks about variant cosmologies. It even has a sidebar telling you how to do the Great Wheel in 4e. What's the problem?


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## Phaezen (Dec 18, 2008)

pemerton said:


> Now that I've started reading my copy of MotP, I don't understand all the outrage. It talks about variant cosmologies. It even has a sidebar telling you how to do the Great Wheel in 4e. What's the problem?




Nerdrage, jumping to assumtions, and desperately searching for things to take offence at. Keeping discussion on the internet moving forward since, forever.

Phaezen


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## avin (Dec 18, 2008)

Phaezen said:


> Nerdrage, jumping to assumtions, and desperately searching for things to take offence at. Keeping discussion on the internet moving forward since, forever.




So are we all nerdragers because we discuss RPG on a RPG forum? Oh noes! 

I think it was a valid discussion, with interesting points from both sides.


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## Phaezen (Dec 18, 2008)

avin said:


> So are we all nerdragers because we discuss RPG on a RPG forum? Oh noes!




Just when we get carried away by speculation and rumor .  My current nerdrage for example is "The Crow" remake, but we are drifting off topic.  

As pemerton pointed out, variant cosmologies are discussed in the 4e MOTP and there is even allowance for The Great Wheel, this is despite much heated discussion upthread about how 4e is trying to make all settings look the same, based off a preview article.

Phaezen


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## Fifth Element (Dec 18, 2008)

pemerton said:


> Now that I've started reading my copy of MotP, I don't understand all the outrage. It talks about variant cosmologies. It even has a sidebar telling you how to do the Great Wheel in 4e. What's the problem?



That was the biggest surprise I found when I opened my copy. One of the first things I noticed when flipping through was the page on the Great Wheel. Based on comments here, I had assumed that would be nowhere to be found. The "Customizing the Cosmology" section was a surprise given that this book was supposed to tell me how to play my game. (Sometimes with a German accent.)


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## Fifth Element (Dec 18, 2008)

avin said:


> So are we all nerdragers because we discuss RPG on a RPG forum? Oh noes!
> 
> I think it was a valid discussion, with interesting points from both sides.



Much of it was definitely valid. Some of it was "Blargh!", not borne out by the actual content of the book.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 18, 2008)

My only real concern is the paragraph that says something to the effect of: all 4E supplements are going to assume the current world axis cosmology as standard. I'm hoping they mean the generic supplements and not the campaign settings, because I still don't think it works right for Athas and Krynn.


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## justanobody (Dec 18, 2008)

Many people seem to overlook that for some reaosn.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Dec 18, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> My only real concern is the paragraph that says something to the effect of: all 4E supplements are going to assume the current world axis cosmology as standard. I'm hoping they mean the generic supplements and not the campaign settings, because I still don't think it works right for Athas and Krynn.




I am afraid it is supposed to apply to campaign settings too, since they want to preserve the meaning of the "origin" identifier for creatures. Well, not everything the designers say has to be gold.


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## Umbran (Dec 18, 2008)

Phaezen said:


> Nerdrage, jumping to assumtions, and desperately searching for things to take offence at. Keeping discussion on the internet moving forward since, forever.





Insult, ascribing states of mind and motivations, and painting with a broad brush.

Pot calling the kettle black, sir.  Do not chide someone else when you aren't willing to do better yourself.

Folks, this is the holiday season.  Try to treat each other better.


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## Scribble (Dec 18, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> My only real concern is the paragraph that says something to the effect of: all 4E supplements are going to assume the current world axis cosmology as standard. I'm hoping they mean the generic supplements and not the campaign settings, because I still don't think it works right for Athas and Krynn.




I don't actually remember WHAT the cosmology of Krynn was... And Athas was just cut off right? I never had much experience with it.


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## TheWyrd (Dec 18, 2008)

Was flipping through it today in the bookstore. There's even a sidebar on the BloodWar. I seem to remember some complaints about that being missing. Its a short discussion but basically reads: "It has existed in the past. Currently is in a state of uneasy truce. Will likely happen again as plot demands."


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## Imban (Dec 18, 2008)

Scribble said:


> I don't actually remember WHAT the cosmology of Krynn was... And Athas was just cut off right? I never had much experience with it.




Athas was just cut off, because it was a Craphole Desert World where there was a pronounced lack of important things commonly available elsewhere, like metal and food. (The idea being that free teleportation to and from other dimensions with plenty of metal and food would be, well, bad for the setting.)

I actually don't remember much about Krynn's cosmology other than that the Abyss is different from normal D&D's and is where all the bad gods live, and the stars represent the gods, making "Star Pact" Warlocks in need of a few terminology changes to differentiate them from Clerics.


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 18, 2008)

justanobody said:


> No I was saying that the idea of having a universal cosmology as per including deities as well as realms is not a good one.



 Who was talking about that? It's demonstrably not the case, either, since we already have the 4E FR setting as an example, with many unique planes and deities (some of which were even incorporated into core for 4E.)

Comparing the 4e FR cosmology to the 3e (I have both books open right now), the only real differences are combining of the elemental planes into the EC, loss of those planes no longer supported in 4e (Energy and Ethereal) and the adding of the Feywild. Some of the domains got shuffled up a bit due to the Spellplague - like the Dragon Eyrie seems to have vanished and Bane managed to get his own domain - but the group overall is unique to FR. Even the EC has some unique locations (called realms) for the FR setting. Then, comparing it to the core, I do not see things like the Iron Fortress domain, or gods like Kord or Pelor. (However, FR has always borrowed from core in all editions, including things like the Nine Hells and Abyss or Colleron. But in no way is its cosmology and pantheon a "slight mirror reflection" of the core.)



Drkfathr1 said:


> My only real concern is the paragraph that says something to the effect of: all 4E supplements are going to assume the current world axis cosmology as standard. I'm hoping they mean the generic supplements and not the campaign settings, because I still don't think it works right for Athas and Krynn.



I believe this is referring to non-campaign specific material. 

But remember, the World Axis isn't an entire cosmology unto itself, so much as a framework. That framework has always existed in previous editions, it just wasn't as clearly spelled out. And it existed for the reasons stated in 4E - to allow magic related to the planes to have a consistent description of how it works, and, to a lesser extent, to not have to recreate origins of specific groups of creatures setting to setting. You can change these things, as the MotP points out, but you have to consider the impacts on existing mechanics and fluff assumptions.

The Forgotten Realms, even 2e and 3e, broke from the Great Wheel cosmology, but still used the framework elements of those editions: Astral, Shadow, Ethereal, Elemental and Energy. FR just took that framework and established it's own set of Outer Planes (nka Domains) unique to itself, so therefore it had it's own cosmology. 

The Great Wheel itself is merely a cosmology built on this core framework. 

Basically, what were called "Outer Planes" in previous editions are now "Domains", and that's usually where the greatest differences in cosmologies show up. 4E is built to make introducing these differences easier. 

3E Eberron showed how one could take the framework and introduce additional concepts of how the planes relate to each other, making things even more interesting.


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## Drkfathr1 (Dec 18, 2008)

I suppose you could add the Black and the Gray to Athas as demi-planes, but there's no precedent for the Feywild or the Shadowfell. Not a world-ending problem, but it disrupts continuity. And the Black was certainly NOT the shadowfell in any sense, though the Gray _almost_ was. 

For Krynn, the Abyss is a very different animal and there is also no precedent for the Feywild or the Shadowfell. 

Aside from the cosmology (and propably fodder for a different thread), I wonder how we're supposed to shoe-horn in Dragonborn, Tieflings, and Eladrin? 

I guess if you advance Krynn's timeline you can turn the Silvanesti into the Eladrin, Draconains evolving into Dragonborn, but no idea on Tieflings. And once again, when you do that, you eliminate some of the elements of the setting that made it unique. 

The uniqueness of those settings is what set some of them apart, trying to make them all the same diminishes that a great deal. 

All of this would be easily solved, and make everyone happy, by just saying: you know what, the default cosmology for D&D 4E is THIS, and we're going to write most of our books with that in mind, BUT for specific settings we will take into account their differences. 

I hold out hope that they'll still do that, but everything we've gotten so far says they want to homogenize all of the settings into one similar thing.


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## Shemeska (Dec 18, 2008)

Sir Brennen said:


> The Forgotten Realms, even 2e and 3e, broke from the Great Wheel cosmology,




FR used the Great Wheel cosmology in 2e, not any sort of variation. 3e retconned it into a new cosmology and glossed over the crossplanar material invalidated in the process. 4e FR promptly junked the 3e FR cosmology for the 4e default with a dash of whiteout and some scribbled over names.


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## Caliber (Dec 18, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> FR used the Great Wheel cosmology in 2e, not any sort of variation. 3e retconned it into a new cosmology and glossed over the crossplanar material invalidated in the process. 4e FR promptly junked the 3e FR cosmology for the 4e default with a dash of whiteout and some scribbled over names.




Technically, the 4E default grew out of the changes the FR team were implementing in FR. They drew up the whole Feywild/Shadowfell/EC/Astral Sea/Dominion thing and said ... hey this could be used in standard issue DnD as well! As so it was.


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## Sir Brennen (Dec 18, 2008)

Shemeska said:


> FR used the Great Wheel cosmology in 2e, not any sort of variation. 3e retconned it into a new cosmology and glossed over the crossplanar material invalidated in the process. 4e FR promptly junked the 3e FR cosmology for the 4e default with a dash of whiteout and some scribbled over names.



Ah, yes... I see that 2e FR did use the Great Wheel. Perhaps I was crediting the creators of 2E FR with too much creativity? 

However, my point still stands that neither the 3E or 4E FR cosmologies use the default cosmology of their editions, but do use the default _framework_. The 4E planes map, for the most part, to their 3E counterparts, not to the core 4E domains, so I don't know where you get that they were just  "a dash of whiteout and some scribbled over names".


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## pemerton (Dec 19, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> My only real concern is the paragraph that says something to the effect of: all 4E supplements are going to assume the current world axis cosmology as standard. I'm hoping they mean the generic supplements and not the campaign settings, because I still don't think it works right for Athas and Krynn.



The paragraph on p 13 says "all upcoming 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons game products assume that the World Axis cosmology is the one you're using in your campaign". Page 12 lists, as examples of "The World" for different campaigns, Abeir-Toril, Athas, Eberron, Krynn and Oerth.

I think this is pretty unambiguous - whatever 4e products there are for Dark Sun or Krynn, the present intention of WoTC is that those products will presuppose the World Axis cosmology.

There is also a discussion of travelling to other worlds. On p 7, we are told "If a traveller journeys through a fundamental plane into the trackless reaches outside the know dominions and realms, sooner or later he or she comes to the divine dominions or elemental kingdoms of different mortal worlds." On p 8 we are told that the anomolous planes (ie those whose exact nature and place in the cosmology is unclear) include "other mortal worlds". And the Random Portal Destination table on p 18 indicates a 1 in 20 chance of the portal going to an "Alternate World".

So both Planescape-y and Spelljammer-y type options seems to be alive and well in the official rules (the latter by travelling on Astral Skiffs or Spelljammers to the edges of the Astral Sea or the Elemental Chaos). And these options presuppose a degree of common cosmology.


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## Staffan (Dec 19, 2008)

Scribble said:


> I don't actually remember WHAT the cosmology of Krynn was... And Athas was just cut off right? I never had much experience with it.



Up until the release of Defilers & Preservers (one of the last books for Dark Sun), Dark Sun's cosmology was the same as everything else in 2e. It wasn't something the setting focused on (other than one adventure featuring a githyanki invasion, and an artifact designed to facilitiate planar travel in another), but there was nothing special about it. High-level clerics were expected to spend some of their time on their elemental planes.

Oh right, there was the stuff in Earth, Air, Fire and Water, the priest book for Dark Sun. They changed the paraelemental planes up a bit: Sun, Rain, and Silt instead of Smoke, Steam, and Ooze (Magma was the same). In the previous Dragon Kings book, the paraelemental planes had been referenced with their original names.

There were some references to Dark Sun in non-DS materials - Ravenloft had a domain taken from Athas, and there were scattered references in Planescape material. It was not compatible with Spelljammer though - the Complete Spacefarer's Handbook had a section on how it worked with different settings, and the section on Dark Sun basically said "Nope."

Defilers & Preservers added the concept of the Grey as an obstacle to planar contact (it had previously been used in the novels as a "realm of the dead". If you wanted to go to any other plane (or contact it with something like Contact Outer Plane), you had to roll d100+level and check against a table, leading either to success, failure, or getting stuck in the Grey. Getting to the Ethereal/Inner planes was easier than the Astral/Outer planes. Clerics got a free ride to their "own" planes though.


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## Dire Bare (Dec 19, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> Aside from the cosmology (and propably fodder for a different thread), I wonder how we're supposed to shoe-horn in Dragonborn, Tieflings, and Eladrin?
> 
> I guess if you advance Krynn's timeline you can turn the Silvanesti into the Eladrin, Draconains evolving into Dragonborn, but no idea on Tieflings. And once again, when you do that, you eliminate some of the elements of the setting that made it unique.




I'm guessing that Eladrin will get a retcon like they did in FR.  In the 4e FR book, all of a sudden Sun Elves and Moon Elves are (and always have been) Eladrin.  It wouldn't be all that different to retcon Silvanesti into Eladrin the same way.  No need to advance the timeline.  I'm not sure I'd like that, but that is what I'd expect.

_threadjack: the FR book does not make a clear distinction between the Sun/Moon elf Eladrins and the "new" Eladrins popping up in places like the Moonshaes.  Also, what about the "new" dark elves that are no longer Drow (from the events of the Lady Penitent series of books)?_

Dragonborn are easy.  What are Draconians, if not Dragonborn?  I'd simply use Dragonborn as they are . . . with artwork showing Krynnish Dragonborn looking like our classic Draconians . . . and then offer perhaps racial powers, feats, and/or paragon paths to more closely model some of the unique abilities of specific Draconian "breeds".  No evolution necessary.  _Although lets get some Draconian-sounding names for the so-called "noble" Draconians who currently have lame names . . ._

I'm hoping they keep Tieflings out of Krynn altogether, but I suspect they will include them.


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## Dire Bare (Dec 19, 2008)

Drkfathr1 said:


> My only real concern is the paragraph that says something to the effect of: all 4E supplements are going to assume the current world axis cosmology as standard. I'm hoping they mean the generic supplements and not the campaign settings, because I still don't think it works right for Athas and Krynn.



Heh, heh . . . at this point I'd be happy just to see Dragonlance and/or Dark Sun back in print at all, regardless of the cosmology!!

I don't see Krynn having any problems with the World Axis.  Use the 4e Abyss as is, and simply place the domains of all the evil gods there!!  Switch abishai from immortals to elementals and you're good!  Create some new astral domains for the good and neutral gods.

Athas, as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, was a bit schizophrenic and did not have a solid cosmology, it was retconned within the product line itself a couple of times.  And to me, the only awkward parts are the Gray and the Black, but I have confidence the WotC designers will figure that one out . . . if we do get a Dark Sun campaign book that is!


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