WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[Maxperson]

Does it count as homebrewing it away if you never once mention it and it effectively never exists? Or do you have to explicitly say "hey this thing that was made decades ago that has never been true in my world and that I've never mentioned isn't true in my world"

The latter. If something is default, then it exists in the background even if never mentioned or used. If you want it to be gone, you have to explicitly remove it.

Because, funny enough, when the Shadowfell was created in 4e... the negative energy plane wasn't put back into the cosmology. So the Shadowfell was created to work without the negative energy plane. Sure, the Forgotten Realms campaign book for 4e said it was part of the creation of it, but Nerath was the default world of 4e, and it never had a Negative Energy plane nor does Shar exist in that world to create the Shadowfell by taking energy from the Negative Energy Plane.

I mean, I guess you could claim that all settings are subservient to FR lore that came out later, and that all settings and lore from are also subservient to it, but that seems rather silly to claim that Nerath and Eberron must obey the lore of The Forgotten Realms, and not the other way around.

Wait. So the positive and negative planes had nothing at all to do with FR, but suddenly because in one single edition it was mentioned only in FR, it's an FR thing?

Oh, I see. They work differently. So fire can exist without cause in the Outer Planes, because they work differently. But the inner planes fire MUST have come from the Elemental Plane of Fire and no other possible cause should even be considered.

Was there something about, "If you don't want it to be there you can homebrew it away" that you don't understand? Because where I come from, home brewing it away qualifies as another possible cause. Short of homebrewing it away, it remains in the background and that's how the prime worlds work.

After all, the Great Wheel is only the best guess of fallible mortals, so it must be 100% irrevocably true in all circumstances.

The existence of the positive and negative planes is not tied to the great wheel, so this is a non-argument.

The long and the short of it is that those two planes exist by default. If you want them gone, explicitly get rid of them.

 

[Maxperson]

Pretty sure no real-life players have ever been attacked by a dragon before.

So that's an argument that sexual assault is just fine in the game as long as it's done by something that doesn't exist in real life. I'm absolutely certain that's wrong and that a dragon sexually assaulting a woman in the game would be traumatic and painful to a player who has been raped.

 

[Maxperson]

Violence can have a purpose. If I punch someone and break their nose, there can be a good reason for me doing so. Such as defending my life or the lives of others.

So you're saying that all violence in the game should be limited to those very, very few good reasons?

 

[Micah Sweet]

No.

Violence can have a purpose. If I punch someone and break their nose, there can be a good reason for me doing so. Such as defending my life or the lives of others.

There is no valid reason to sexually assault someone. You cannot get a "good outcome" by sexual assault, you cannot claim to have saved lives via sexual assault. Comparing the two is completely inappropriate and shows a profound lack of understanding.

While I agree, it is also fair to say that violence in RPGs is hardly used even by the PCs always to defend their lives or the lives of others. Certainly not by the bad guys.

 

[glass]

Right. But see, a conversation on ideas doesn't have to stop just because someone says "I like this idea".

If the best response you can up with is "you're wrong", then better if it did stop there.

However, going with "Well, that's just like.. your opinion man" doesn't make me any more likely to change my mind or alter my position, because I am fully aware it is my opinion.

Nobody is trying to change your position on anything, except maybe to convince you that you preferences are not superior to other mine or @Micah Sweet's.

 

[BrokenTwin]

Any topic is fine in-game, provided that potentially sensitive topics are opted-in prior to. Violence as a general topic isn't something that needs to be discussed beforehand with D&D, because you're explicitly opting in to violence as an option by using the D&D ruleset (the majority of the rules are about surviving or inflicting violence). If I wanted to play a game where physical violence was strongly discouraged or disallowed entirely as a form of conflict resolution, I wouldn't use any edition of D&D for it.

As to the whole planar arguments... I strongly dislike the grid-like micro-dividing "every concept needs its own plane" of the Great Wheel setup. It feels like meticulous bookkeeping for the sake of meticulous bookkeeping. I can't think of a single advantage of having multitudes of subdivided elemental planes of salt and sulpher and steam over just having one roiling elemental chaos that can easily have planet-sized chunks of nothing but salt or steam or whatever.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Doing a bit of research has turned up a really annoying trend that seems to have caught on in just the past year: there are just a ton of sites that just assume FR lore is not just the default D&D lore, but the core and only.

I just found a number of sites (not sure of the original) that talk about how the World Axis was created to explain the Spellplague.

 

[Voadam]

As to the whole planar arguments... I strongly dislike the grid-like micro-dividing "every concept needs its own plane" of the Great Wheel setup. It feels like meticulous bookkeeping for the sake of meticulous bookkeeping. I can't think of a single advantage of having multitudes of subdivided elemental planes of salt and sulpher and steam over just having one roiling elemental chaos that can easily have planet-sized chunks of nothing but salt or steam or whatever.

With the Great Wheel's four big elements instead of a one roiling elemental chaos it is more support for having the distinctions between elements, for things like elementals, elemental casters and schools of magic, etc throughout the game system. There is a different narrative power if a pyromancer is someone tapping into a core fundamental building block of the world that can be seen in a scheme applicable to lots of aspects of the game rather than just a flavor of magic unconnected to anything else.

All the paraelemental planes are just extrapolations of those core elements at their borders and interactions with other things.

 

[Voadam]

Doing a bit of research has turned up a really annoying trend that seems to have caught on in just the past year: there are just a ton of sites that just assume FR lore is not just the default D&D lore, but the core and only.

I just found a number of sites (not sure of the original) that talk about how the World Axis was created to explain the Spellplague.

My understanding is that it started with FR wanting a reboot for the new edition because they felt most everyone was overloaded by the spawling lore and so they were planning big stuff that included changes to the world cosmology, through the spellplage. The 4e core team saw their new ideas and liked the cosmology stuff so much that they adopted them and made a non-FR version of them core which came out for 4e core well before anything in 4e FR came out.

The last 3e FR stuff hinting to 4e FR changes was the timeline extension of the Grand History of the Realms but I remember that as mostly being about god shakeups.

So my understanding is that there was a 4e FR indirect connection, but it was they just liked the changes and made a version of them for the new core, not to make FR directly core.

4e's default points of light and Nentir Vale is different than the Realms even though the cosmology is similar.

 

[BrokenTwin]

With the Great Wheel's four big elements instead of a one roiling elemental chaos it is more support for having the distinctions between elements, for things like elementals, elemental casters and schools of magic, etc throughout the game system. There is a different narrative power if a pyromancer is someone tapping into a core fundamental building block of the world that can be seen in a scheme applicable to lots of aspects of the game rather than just a flavor of magic unconnected to anything else.

All the paraelemental planes are just extrapolations of those core elements at their borders and interactions with other things.

Why isn't a pyromancer tapping into the elemental chaos tapping into a core fundamental building block of the world? I'm not sure how having rigidly divided planes offer more support for a variety of elementals and not less. If I want to create a mud elemental for my game I can safely pull it from the elemental chaos and not worry if there's a plane of mud or something for it to originate from.

And all the paraelemental plans just being extrapolations of other planes is part of my issue with it. It feels like things like the plane of steam were created not because there was interesting narrative potential in their existence, but to fill boxes on a spreadsheet. And feeds into the need to categorize things that shouldn't be easily categorized, making them feel less magical in the process.

To reiterate: I'm not saying the Great Wheel is terrible design, just that I'm not personally fond of it.