Why? If I wanted to do an underwater adventure today I would have to go buy scuba gear.
Dragon 370 - Design & Development: Cosmology
- Thread starter Shroomy
- Start date
Why? If I wanted to do an underwater adventure today I would have to go buy scuba gear.
I'll rephrase: a design flaw in the existing spells that were supposed to allow you to adventure underwater.
Well, I have to apologize for my earlier claims that your comments were vaguely insulting - you've successfully demonstrated what being insulting really looks like.
Look, I'm not saying every decision they made for 4E is some brilliant and world-changing innovation. What I'm saying is that some of the things you dismiss as no one ever caring about are things that I, and people in my gaming group, cared about!
I'm sorry I don't have recorded proof of this. I imagine there are discussions about these things online, but I never took part in them. But I did find some of these issues - the size of halflings, and the uselessness of the Elemental Planes - to be annoying, long before I ever heard of 4th Edition. I didn't complain about them online, so no, I don't have proof of this - but they were certainly topics that came up with my friends.
Oh, not often, I'm not trying to claim this is some fundamental problem that disrupted our games constantly! But I know I regularly laughed at the absurd size of halflings - and saw at least one RPGA game disrupted by a DM who penalized halflings for being too small to easily reach enemy's vital organs. (An issue more with other elements of 3rd Edition, but the size issue was definitely there.)
I never had a problem with infinite planes, but I'm not going to assume that means that the same holds true for all other gamers!
And there are issues that I didn't think about until the designers discussed fixing them, such as the overlap among the metallic dragon types - it never occured to me before, but I found it a good idea when they mentioned it. And there are plenty of issues in which I disagreed with the changes they made and the reasons behind them - but I'm not going to suggest that means that my viewpoint stands in for all gamers, and that anyone who disagrees with me is lying, and a bad person, and a bad gamer. (Which, frankly, is what you have been suggesting in your various posts.)
I'm sorry you feel some of 4E's defenders are overzealous. Honestly, I'm not even going to disagree with you on that. But the fact that you aren't willing to accept the posters in this thread who have stated that their own experiences are in line with the designer's reasoning - and these are posters who have seemed perfectly civil and reasonable in their statements - the fact that you are not only unwilling to accept what they have to say, but suggesting they are outright lying, and are somehow actively dragging the game down... I'd say that indicates that the one who is truly being irrational and unreasonable is you.
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Aeolius
Adventurer
After which they would die and be reincarnated as water-breathing races... problem solved
AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
I don't pay for Dragon and Dungeon, and I probably won't buy 4e MotP. Can someone tell me if the article, of the book, leave room for published settings to add on to the World Axis when the case needs it? Or to alter the World Axis planes when the case calls for it?
Drifting back to squeezing the Athas square peg into a World Axis round hole. I think I can explain the presence of nearly everything in the World Axis as being part of Athas' setting.
The Shadowfell: It's the Gray. As I recall, doesn't an excerpt from the MotP even say The Gray is one of the many names for Shadowfell? Slight descriptive change and boom, done.
Astral Sea: Astral Plane and the Outer Planes were there in 2e products. The Githyanki invasion from the Black Spine adventure came through a crack in the planar/dimensional barrier, they had to come from someplace.
Elemental Chaos: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water (the Dark Sun cleric book) very much described as places characters could walk around. They don't get there except at high levels and through a method that gives them some protection against inhospitable heat. No infinite earth or fire. However, if we can work in some descriptive changes to the cosmology, the Elemental Chaos could give us room for the paraelemental planes of Magma, Rain, Silt, and Sun. The thing is though, the elemental lords of Air, Earth, Fire, and Water, were (more or less) "good guys" fighting The Wasting, and extending The Wasting empowers the masters of the paraelements. So if 4e primordials could be divided into "beneficial" guys (air, earth, fire, water) and "bad" guys (magma, rain, silt, sun) all battling over ground in the Elemental Chaos, then we have a nice 4e fit for Athas.
Feywild: As long as I could say the Feywild was only accessed in the heart of druid groves, then I'd be mostly fine. But as soon as someone can setup a method to cross into the faerie realm of wooded bounty, you instantly have access to resources you could return with and become instantly wealthy. Feywild would need to be either blocked off from Athas like the rest of the multiverse was so as to prevent plane hopping adventurers from returning with heaps of gold and metal (in Feywild's case, wood and food) and becoming the next dynastic merchant house in one swoop. Or Feywild would need to be drastically altered in description to be nearly unrecognizable as other settings experience it. Will World Axis allow for such a descriptive change? Or allow Feywild to be cut off as definitively as the Outer Planes were in 2e?
What about Athas' The Black: Shadowfell would become The Gray. But The Black is a pretty significant part of Athas as the domain of the Shadow Giants, the (eventual) prison of Andropinis, and the location where The Hollow (Rajaat's prison) is found. Does the World Axis allow published setting to invent something to tack on when a world's cosmology calls for it? If so, then again, there is room for World Axis in Athas.
Drifting back to squeezing the Athas square peg into a World Axis round hole. I think I can explain the presence of nearly everything in the World Axis as being part of Athas' setting.
The Shadowfell: It's the Gray. As I recall, doesn't an excerpt from the MotP even say The Gray is one of the many names for Shadowfell? Slight descriptive change and boom, done.
Astral Sea: Astral Plane and the Outer Planes were there in 2e products. The Githyanki invasion from the Black Spine adventure came through a crack in the planar/dimensional barrier, they had to come from someplace.
Elemental Chaos: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water (the Dark Sun cleric book) very much described as places characters could walk around. They don't get there except at high levels and through a method that gives them some protection against inhospitable heat. No infinite earth or fire. However, if we can work in some descriptive changes to the cosmology, the Elemental Chaos could give us room for the paraelemental planes of Magma, Rain, Silt, and Sun. The thing is though, the elemental lords of Air, Earth, Fire, and Water, were (more or less) "good guys" fighting The Wasting, and extending The Wasting empowers the masters of the paraelements. So if 4e primordials could be divided into "beneficial" guys (air, earth, fire, water) and "bad" guys (magma, rain, silt, sun) all battling over ground in the Elemental Chaos, then we have a nice 4e fit for Athas.
Feywild: As long as I could say the Feywild was only accessed in the heart of druid groves, then I'd be mostly fine. But as soon as someone can setup a method to cross into the faerie realm of wooded bounty, you instantly have access to resources you could return with and become instantly wealthy. Feywild would need to be either blocked off from Athas like the rest of the multiverse was so as to prevent plane hopping adventurers from returning with heaps of gold and metal (in Feywild's case, wood and food) and becoming the next dynastic merchant house in one swoop. Or Feywild would need to be drastically altered in description to be nearly unrecognizable as other settings experience it. Will World Axis allow for such a descriptive change? Or allow Feywild to be cut off as definitively as the Outer Planes were in 2e?
What about Athas' The Black: Shadowfell would become The Gray. But The Black is a pretty significant part of Athas as the domain of the Shadow Giants, the (eventual) prison of Andropinis, and the location where The Hollow (Rajaat's prison) is found. Does the World Axis allow published setting to invent something to tack on when a world's cosmology calls for it? If so, then again, there is room for World Axis in Athas.
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Fifth Element
Legend
Your next line was: 4e has far more of the latter than it needs, and saying, "Well, just ignore it!" leads to the question "Why buy it?"
Since you wrote '4E' rather than 'D&D', I interpreted it to mean you found it a fault in 4E alone.
I don't see why the Feywild has to be wooded. To me, the Feywild is about wilderness. For most pseudo-european settings, wilderness means forests, because that's what was there before the place was settled. But you also have majestic mountain peaks, oceans, savannahs, and, yes, deserts. They're just "more" than the mundane versions. In the Feywild forests, you get lost more easily, because that's the main danger in a mundane forest (other than wild beasts, and you get those in all kinds of wilderness). In the Feywild deserts, you would maybe dehydrate faster, because that's the main danger of mundane deserts. Feywild mountains are harder to climb and more treacherous. Feywild oceans have more unpredictable currents. And so on.
AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
So for you, would it be close to accurate to say that the Feywild is the reflection of the world, but turned up to 11?
WotC seems to describe the Feywild as a majestic "reflection" imbued with arcane energy. Turning Athas' wilderness up to 11 is far from majestic. I'm not sure how well a whole plane imbued with arcane energy works in a setting where arcane energy sucks the life from living beings. Then begins a possible thought experiment on what the macro effects are going to be for the setting as a whole with such a plane. One would, I think necessarily begin to need to redescribe, maybe even reflavor, the Feywild to make it fit.
Of course, if we are going down the route of the Feywild being an arcane-imbued majestic reflection of the world, and in the world merely using arcane magic without restraint destroys living things (plants and creatures both) . . . maybe The Black--a lightless, frigid domain filled with little but wisps of utter darkness--is the ultimate condition for the Athasian Feywild? Heh. But then we're back to inventing something else entirely again.
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