Dragon 370 - Design & Development: Cosmology

[TheWyrd]

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.

 

[thundershot]

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

 

[Sir Brennen]

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.

 

[Lizard]

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... )

 

[Scribble]

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.

 

[Lizard]

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.

 

[The Little Raven]

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."

 

[Lizard]

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.

 

[avin]

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...

 

[Scribble]

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.