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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5691031" data-attributes="member: 82106">As far as the 'fluff' things go, alignment and cosmology:As others have said, you can use 9 alignments if you want, there are ALMOST no mechanics based on alignment anyway, it is just a label that says "this is a REALLY bad guy, this is a bad guy, this guy goes either way, this is a good guy, this a REALLY good guy". For PCs it is basically meaningless, just RP. The 4e cosmology actually has a bunch of nice things going for it. For one thing it actually mirrors classical mythology much more naturally than the 'Great Wheel' did. In Greek myth for instance the world was made by Cthonic deities and ruled by titans in the beginning, who were then overthrown by the Olympian gods who made the world into an ordered regulated place. 4e cosmology is fairly similar. The whole Primordial/Elemental Chaos vs Divine/Astral Sea dichotomy and struggle is a really natural story generator. At a more practical level the 4e cosmos both delivers all the goods you could get with the Great Wheel but also more. It also gets rid of some redundancies. Instead of having 2 infinite hazy non-material planes (Astral and Ethereal) there is now just one, the Astral Sea. Instead of 6 elemental and however many para/semi elemental planes there is the Elemental Chaos. No more wondering why Cryonax wants to invade the Elemental Plane of Fire where he would pretty much instantly melt. The whole thing just makes more sense and allows for more combinations and interesting locations, plus you can drop all the old time locations in there too. The City of Brass is in a HOT FIRE part of the Elemental Chaos, which works fine.Since there is no longer a rigid structure that MUST be filled out with a specific number of outer planes and can't have more or less there are more opportunities. You can simply create an Astral Domain that does what you want and you don't have to explain how it manages to fit into the rest of the planes. The Feywild/Shadowfell also key into myth and legend pretty well. Previous cosmologies barely had any kind of room for Fairy Land, a major element of Western European myth and legend, 4e does. Likewise the Shadowfell works great for all kinds of dark corners of the universe/land of the dead/etc. Again though, since game mechanics are not closely tied to the cosmology and can easily be refluffed (and the new cosmology really isn't THAT radically different in terms of what it does) there's no difficulty at all using the Great Wheel with 4e. 4e MotP even mentions this as an option. I'd say the main thing I'VE perceived as a DM with 4e is that it is less constraining and easier to use. Lots of things that tended to break plots are more constrained, the cosmology is more open, game prep is streamlined, non-combat mechanics are much simpler and easier to use but cover more situations, etc. The game is pretty hard to break too. 3.5 broke easily. Unless you're really super sensitive about the very last +1 in 4e you'll find that messing around with stuff or inventing some way for a PC to do some new thing you thought of won't really break anything much.</blockquote>

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