With a bit of prep. It's not one large fire. There are solid portions to walk on, rivers, lakes and oceans of liquid fire, nodes of other elements like earth, air and water, and palaces. You can adventure there if you prepare for the heat and such.
Right, but 4e's Elemental Chaos simply improved on this drastically in terms of 'adventurability'. All the elements exist in the EC, as well as an open-ended list of 'domains'. You can have a region of pure fire if you want, those exist, as well as regions of fire+ice (and the resulting fogs and steams I would assume). Its an infinite place, so anything must exist somewhere.
I mean, I'm sure you could put the same things in the old GW version of the inner planes, it just wasn't how it was envisaged. You kind of had to adulterate the concept, whereas the WA version does it naturally.
Since when has pointless meant that it shouldn't be in a game. You've just eliminated the band of misfits trying to stop the invading army, and who need the help of the PCs, and many other great ideas and situations.
I think when he says pointless he means stuff that will never really matter and probably won't even ever come up. Things that literally are just in the book and you read them, but they never show at the table at all.
Assuming you're talking about Sigil, there's no such leader. The Lady of Pain doesn't lead the city in any way. She's more of a security system than anything else.
but she is quite a Mary Sue nonetheless. I always found Sigil to be a bit silly myself, though I admit that it at least has gaming potential. In some sense it seemed kind of TOO gamist. Its interesting that this is one of the few locations in GW that is directly reproduced with almost no changes in 4e WA.
Whereas I ran many adventures on many planes and used those books. Maybe you just lack the imagination required to run adventures out on the traditional planes. That's perfectly fine. I have trouble running Oriental Adventures. Nobody can do every genre well
There's no such setting put out by TSR or WotC. All of them are settings where the players are capable of making lasting changes. You just have to think on a much larger scale out on the planes.
I disagree about the Planescape GW. Its very concept is something that is inevitable, inexorable, has existed forever, and has a structure, purpose, and function entirely beyond even the gods who seem to live on it as basically vermin. Obviously you can change that, but in any larger sense, as written, it is vastly beyond what any PC can affect.
The World Axis of 4e OTOH is quite the opposite. The struggle between the order of the gods and the chaos of the primordials is fundamental, but approachable. The stakes are human and comprehensible, and a small band of heroes could easily be the most influential actors in the entire grand scheme, the lynchpins of the defense/destruction of the whole multiverse, or at least the world itself.
And its a stage on which everything is not set. While the GW is vast and you could certainly invent some niche to cram anything into, the WA is fundamentally open. There's always room for another Astral Dominion or Elemental Realm in there. 4e's MotP starts out with a whole discussion of how to USE the material in play, and quite a lot of it is directly usable without further preparation, up to a point. Its a masterful blend of possibility, color, and crunch.
