D&D 5E Positive & Negative Energy

[Casimir Liber]

Yeah...issue with the postive and negative material planes was that they were unexplorable as too hostile to life. So pointless to make adventures there really

 

[Lyxen]

Yeah...issue with the postive and negative material planes was that they were unexplorable as too hostile to life. So pointless to make adventures there really

We could have (and we had) adventures at the fringe of it, or places where they leaked, etc. but I absolutely saluted the invention of the Feywild and the Shadowfell by 4e, they are not only brilliant ideas, but they really brought feys back in to D&D.

 

[Casimir Liber]

We could have (and we had) adventures at the fringe of it, or places where they leaked, etc. but I absolutely saluted the invention of the Feywild and the Shadowfell by 4e, they are not only brilliant ideas, but they really brought feys back in to D&D.

Fully agree - in my world, the quasielemental areas adjut the Feywild and Shadowfell respectively

 

[jgsugden]

Yeah...issue with the postive and negative material planes was that they were unexplorable as too hostile to life. So pointless to make adventures there really

While I have had adventures take place there (both planes), they were major culminating events in a campaign. And that was cool - and was only possible because they were nearly unexplorable and hostile to life.

PCs go on adventures - and doing the impossible is a tool that can make adventures more memorable and notable. The positive energy plane, the negative energy plane, the far realm, the sun(s) ... these are places PCs are told they can't go - places beyond the realms of the mortal races. So, when they do go there it is a major big deal. It adds to the 'this is the big finale' vibe. The impossible journey is a cliche in longer stories ... to have the hero(es) go someplace impossible to go at the end of their journey - and then return triumphant. Think about it. It is a cliche for a reason.

There are a lot of people out there that do not know how to run high level adventures. They claim D&D doesn't work at high levels, and that you should stop campaigns at 13th level because the game falls apart around then. They often claim a major factor is that PCs have the power to do too much. This is one of many examples of things PCs can't do at 13th, and that you can save for that finale push at 19th or 20th level that leave doors to open and explore that are different than the things players have done countless times with lower level PCs.

 

[jgsugden]

...Feywilde was designed to be an adventurable positive material plane, shadowfel was designed to be an adventurable negative material plane. In 4e, a D&D cosmology was put together that focused on "how does this make for adventuring stories".

They did this with the Abyss, Astral and Elemental Planes as well.

Partially correct, but partially off as well.

The Feywild was not envisioned as an entension of the Positive Energy Plane. It was decided that they needed something to faciliate the world of the fey and give them that twilight realm that fey creatures could come from and leave. There were a lot of vague references to Fey in a variety of places - the Faerie Realm, the Arborea, etc... They decided that needed focus, so they moved them all to this new transitive plane. As the CR, historically, of fey was fairly low, and there were a lot of myths about people accidentally finding their way into the fey realms, they made it an equivalent, in power level to the shadowfell which shared many of the same accessibility issues.

Any ties between it and the positive energy plane was not there in the start of the Feywild, but many DMs have done what I did and tie the origin of the Feywild to the PEP.