Forked Thread: The Great Wheel

[I'm A Banana]

I fall into this weird category of a reluctant 4e DM and huge Planescape fan who doesn't so much mind a lot of the 4e changes to the planes.

From my perspective, all of 3e and 2e stuff still exists in 4e, and could still be just as important from a "planar" view. No yugloths in the MM is no reason why they can't be out there; a diagram of the planes that isn't the Great Wheel doesn't mean that the Great Wheel model isn't valid. The biggest effect is the reduction of alignment influences, but that actually helps my PS game, since alignment and philosophy interact a little oddly.

I'm excited to run my PS4e game, complete with Eladrin from the Feywild instead of Arborea and the Shadowfell replacing a lot of the Gray Waste and other cosmologies coming right up to 4e's default cosmology and giving them a big smooch (my Bariaur are from an actual nordic cosmology, not some nordic land put into a slot on a wheel).

I'm a giant critic of 4e in many respects, but the planes aren't yet one of them.

Maybe the MotP will send me into fits of fury, but so far, so good.

 

[avin]

And thank god. The "cram as much background information into the books as possible" mindset has to die.

Well, MM4E seems to have as much background for monsters as toilet paper... happy?

 

[avin]

The MM had probably the lowest amount of flavor text for any MM of any edition to date.

What? MM4E has any fluff? I should have missed it...

 

[Henry]

What? MM4E has any fluff? I should have missed it...

Oh, come now! There's less flavor text, it's true, but it still has a pretty significant amount. I was reading the Archons, a new class of critter for 4E, and it was pretty detailed info, enough to figure out what their reason for being was, and where you should drop them in a game.

Honestly, the trend since 1990 or so to keep making the outer planes less and less dangerous is something I've disliked. Sigil is an interesting idea, but frankly I dislike ANY attempt to create a safe haven in the planes for mortals - back in 1E, the tendency was to make the planes HOSTILE, HOSTILE, HOSTILE - like a war zone, you needed (magical) support to survive there long, you needed a clear entrance and exit strategy, and you needed a goal to follow to avoid dying due to a mob of demons, devils, valkyries, etc.

With 2E came the impetus to offer low-level adventures, courier missions, diplomatic missions, things to get low-level PCs who COULDN'T do anything but talk their way out, or follow a DM's prescribed path for how the adventure should go. Unkillable gods and god-minions? Got to follow the path or you get slapped. Follow this golden trail amidst the danger, and you're OK, instead of having the power to choose what path you want to pursue and let the consequences fall. That's one thing that buggged me about the Lady of Pain -- her sold purpose was to be an ultimate unbeatable jack-slapping tool for PCs to keep them in line and justify why a city would exist in the middle of everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

That's the part that always bugged me about Planescape; you can convert people to your way of thinking -- but you can't do it by the sword as an option, because you get cut to ribbon or get mazed, with no save.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

Well, MM4E seems to have as much background for monsters as toilet paper... happy?

Do people intentionally ignore the "Lore" section, or is it just really easy to miss?

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Do people intentionally ignore the "Lore" section, or is it just really easy to miss?

The worst Lore entry in the 4eMM has got to be the Bear.
"Cave bears live in caves"

Some lore entries are filled with useful background material like the Fomorians. Others are completely anemic, and make the monster in no way interesting.

 

[DandD]

The worst Lore entry in the 4eMM has got to be the Bear.
"Cave bears live in caves"

Some lore entries are filled with useful background material like the Fomorians. Others are completely anemic, and make the monster in no way interesting.

To be honest, the entry to the bear in the Monster Manual isn't that bad.

 

[TwinBahamut]

I never really liked the Great Wheel at all. There are countless things about it that either make no sense, are completely redundant, or are simply over-designed. It is a giant mess of terrible ideas. I honestly can't think of a single thing I liked about it as a cosmology that isn't done much better elsewhere.

However, I really like the standard cosmology of 4E. It is elegant, approachable, and evocative. The Feywild fills an important niche that the Great Wheel completely lacked, the Faerie Otherworld/Spirit World seen in folklore across the world. The Shadowfell is a interesting equivalent that makes a great Netherworld/Dark World and would make for some great adventures. The Elemental Chaos is vastly better than the old Inner Planes simply because it is actually dynamic and complicated (though its similarity to the Chaos in Milton's Paradise Lost and ancient myth also helps). And the Astral Sea is simply a much more manageable and easier to use version of the entire Outer Plane cosmology, and the idea of it being a wide sea above the stars is so much more evocative than than the old, empty Astral Plane. The entire cosmology can easily contain everything from the old Great Wheel, but it puts it in easier to comprehend packaging that allows more complicated interactions between the individual aspects than ever before.

Still, I don't understand the argument that the new planar cosmology is "safer" or that someone is holding the player's hands in it. If anything, it should be far more dangerous than before. I mean, if you don't play up the incredibly great hazards of wandering into the Feywild or Shadowfell then you simply are not being true to the stories that inspired them.

The Elemental Chaos has every single hazard that you might have encountered on any of the Great Wheel Inner Planes or Limbo, plus a large number of Demons thrown into the mix. However, instead of these dangers being nicely packaged into little homogenous compartments (where you can safely protect yourself from all of them with a single elemental-resistance spell), they are thrown together into a chaotic landscape of conflict, where you can be suddenly thrown from a land of blazing fire into the depths of a raging frozen sea or caught in a battle between Efreet and Ice Demons at any moment. It is a beautiful land for adventure, but hardly safe.

Meanwhile, the Astral Sea is far more dangerous than the Outer Planes ever were. It contains all the hazards they had, but it has much fewer of the protections they had in place. In the Great Wheel, you could at least be certain that you were not at risk of being attacked by Devils on a trip to Mount Celestia, but in the Astral Sea that can happen just as easily as you can be assaulted by Githyanki pirates while trying to flee from a Formian army. Actually, since Angels are no longer as nice as they were in 3E, even being protected by Angelic armies is no guarantee of safety, since you are much more likely to end up fighting them.

Overall, the raw unpredictability of the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos makes them far more dangerous then the structured and predictable Great Wheel ever was.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

That's one thing that buggged me about the Lady of Pain -- her sold purpose was to be an ultimate unbeatable jack-slapping tool for PCs to keep them in line and justify why a city would exist in the middle of everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

That's the part that always bugged me about Planescape; you can convert people to your way of thinking -- but you can't do it by the sword as an option, because you get cut to ribbon or get mazed, with no save.

I have to disagree here; I always felt that one of the big points of the Lady of Pain was to show that, even in Planescape, a place where just about every question or mortality and the gods were answered there were still some mysteries that couldn't yet be solved. I think that's one of the big disconnects with Planescape and other settings; Planescape isn't about converting people by the sword or mass murdering those that disagree. You still kill things and take their stuff, but now you do more then just that. Really, Planescape was one of the - if not the - first setting to say "It's not all about fighting."

 

[Kobold Avenger]

That's the part that always bugged me about Planescape; you can convert people to your way of thinking -- but you can't do it by the sword as an option, because you get cut to ribbon or get mazed, with no save.

Using the sword for everything, that's the way of thinking that bugs me with so many other players. Now while I know there must be a balance between killing everything and talking to everything. I see the view of "everything must be killed" as much of a wrong as "everything can't be killed". If only one approach is valid all the time, a game gets boring fast.