Shemeska said:
I respectfully disagree Chris
Your prerogative.
I must respect your point of view as it applies to the way you want to play and enjoy the story of the game.
However, in a more general sense, the statistics of the entities in question back me up, especially in 3e. You've really only cited (your preferred) stories, which one writer or another chose to insert into the cosmology. Often that insertion comes with no regard to the fact that, statistics and the game ramifications of divine power aptly considered, the deity in the battle could kick the crap out of the fiends in the battle.
It also bears mentioning that the official take on archfiends, especially in 3e, is that they don't grant spells the way gods do. If a character has the cleric class, and is devoted to an archfiend, the miraculous power comes from the cleric's faith, not the archfiend.
The interesting thing is, considering the things you've said, that once you can read and absorb the scope and the context of the cosmological arrangement in 4e, you might really dig it. Archfiends have their place, their power varies and might rival that of a god, and one even is a god. Notably, that god is surrounded by subservient archfiends that he trained in deicide. Certainly, the gods have something to fear from archfiends in 4e—more than they ever did in iterations of the D&D cosmology where divine power made deities nearly all-powerful.
The real dichotomy in 4e is the origin of the being in question. All gods are Astral beings, as are all devils. All demons are Elemental beings. This is regardless of where they live now (Lolth in the Abyss is still an Astral entity).
And these simple truths will help those who want to use the monster stats of the entities in question in ways different from those proposed by the 4e implied setting. Nothing in 4e is going to stop you from using the planar monsters in a
Planescape or
Fiendish Codex or
Greyhawk sort of way. The labor involved
might be as difficult as stripping or swapping a monster origin or minor keyword (such as devil to demon). Then mix with your favorite fluff, and you're good to go.
I'll put it another way. The 4e cosmology has less baggage and more clarity, making it easily accessible and easily alterable. Really, I can't see how that isn't a boon to noobs and grognards alike. New players get in on a ground floor of sorts. Veteran players can use all the cool stuff from
Fiendish Codex, for instance—even the stats. You should be able to use those as a guide for adding a monster to your 4e campaign if you just can't wait for the official 4e release.
As an aside, as anyone in the game industry, video or tabletop, will tell you, it's more important to appeal to noobs than to grognards. That's especially true when the grognards can easily fit their preferred stories into a new system—unlike with many video games.
Besides, there is more to the cosmology than people are talking about and know about now. A whole other aspect, which I think has been mentioned but nobody seems to have picked up on, comes into play. That aspect is important to the balance of the whole D&D cosmos.
