Dragon 370 - Design & Development: Cosmology

[Lizard]

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?

 

[MrMyth]

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.

 

[The Little Raven]

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.

 

[The Little Raven]

"...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.

 

[Lizard]

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.

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.

 

[Lizard]

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.

 

[Lizard]

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

Solipsism FTW!

 

[The Little Raven]

Solipsism FTW!

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

 

[Lizard]

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?

 

[Sir Brennen]

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?