D&D 5E 4E Cosmology

1st: Do you have to be so adversarial in these discussions? I am just trying to have a friendly conversation about something I find interesting.

2nd: What are you talking about? You quoted my response to TwoSix's comment (not your comment), which was their response to another of my comments.* I was simply clarify that my original comment was about D&D and not the other games they mentioned. I could have also added that I haven't even played those games so how could I be discussing them!

*Here was my comment:

The game I was referring to was D&D. TwoSix was bringing up Mage Ascension and Werewolf after the fact. I thought they might have been confused so I clarified. What did I do so wrong to deserve your ire here?
My apologies. I accidentally clicked "quote" for the wrong person. I meant to reply to the post immediately after yours, which was in reply to me.

As for being adversarial, I was responding to someone who has been both flippant and dismissive, and then openly said they wrote my argument off with a strawman (literally, substituting a different situation that proves them right and me wrong).
 

log in or register to remove this ad

My apologies. I accidentally clicked "quote" for the wrong person. I meant to reply to the post immediately after yours, which was in reply to me.

As for being adversarial, I was responding to someone who has been both flippant and dismissive, and then openly said they wrote my argument off with a strawman (literally, substituting a different situation that proves them right and me wrong).
No worries, it happens. Thank you for taking the time to explain!
 

So do I which is why I am going to be more explicit. When you insert the word "completely" into there you are as far as I can tell making a strawman' argument. And I pointed this out in my reply to you. I just didn't use the explicit word strawman.
How could I be making a strawman argument if I'm talking about positions no one in this thread could possibly be making?

I set up the example specifically so I could show how two people could have a set of specific, testable beliefs where neither was completely right nor completely wrong...that was the whole point. I was showing that you cannot have two people claiming exactly contradictory things and yet both being correct of the same thing, in the same sense, at the same time.

Others--as cited below, per your request--have said that this is not true. There was even a citation from the books--which references how planar powers can alter what others see of it--to "prove" that this therefore means that perception defines reality in those places.

And even if you aren't making a direct strawman based on your misunderstanding of other peoples' positions it appears that what you are banging on about is a position that (a) no one currently replying to you hold and (B) is a common misrepresentation of positions people present do hold. And you seem to be making no attempt to separate the two.
(a): see below.
(B): If I have misrepresented a position, I apologize, but I'm not sure which position I am misrepresenting. As said, multiple people told me perception/belief defines reality in this context, and that every perception/belief is true, which is the specific viewpoint I've been pushing against.

And the reason it feels like you are trying to derail the thread with a strawman' is that you were at one point claiming there were only three possibilities. I pointed out explicitly that there was a fourth (which happens to be what I consider to be the correct one about this world) - and everything you have said since (especially insisting on the word "complete") appears to be an attempt to define this fourth possibility out of the discussion.
Your link is to the wrong target, I believe. But yes, I have made that claim. There can only be three options on any given hypothesis: either that specific hypothesis is correct, or it is not, or it is missing some key detail ("incomplete"). I gave the example I gave to demonstrate how two people could articulate an overall position where no one is completely right, but on any given point either someone is actually right or no one is actually right about that specific thing.

Frex: the World Axis explicitly has a serious problem with "Outsiders", that is, dead souls that went to the Astral Sea, but failed to properly connect with their deity's divine domain. As a result, 4e-style "Outsiders" are stuck, unable to truly enter the afterlife they deserve. (As I know I've mentioned several times, one of my favorite things about 4e Bahamut is that he's actually trying to solve this problem, when all of the other deities, including good ones, are content to just shrug and say, "Welp, reality broke, can't fix it.") This is not only a provable, testable claim (are there soul-forms that cannot go to their appropriate domain?), it's one that drives a number of serious conflicts in the cosmological background of the World Axis.

Conversely, in the Great Wheel, there is no such problem. "Outsider" there just means any being whose soul IS its body (what 4e would call a "soulform"), and that body is specifically made of the stuff of an Outer Plane. All souls go to exactly the plane they're supposed to, there is no gumming up of the works, and there is no serious conflict/problem waiting in the cosmological wings. Reality works exactly the way it's supposed to, even if that ends up assigning a person to somewhere they aren't happy to go.

Travelling between planes specifically using the Astral was another example (where GW and WA agree, but WT does not). A third is the "sloughing off" of layers from one plane to another (e.g. Arcadia used to have three layers, now it has two, and it having two layers is still canonical in the 5e version). A fourth is the nature and origin of angels, which is something the World Axis and the Great Wheel differ on quite strongly. I'm sure if I went digging I could find more. These things--"Do planes slough off layers that accumulate too much of the wrong alignment?" "Can you ever travel specifically through the Astral directly to another Outer plane?" "Do souls consistently go to the post-life destination they're supposed to?"--are yes/no questions. On these things, the only possibilities are that model A is correct and model B is wrong, or model B is correct and model A is wrong, or both model A and model B are wrong. There is no possibility where both model A and model B can claim, of the same thing, in the same sense, at the same time, that P is true and also that not-P is true.

Now, it could be the case that model A's claim P was true before and model B's claim not-P is true now (not true at the same time). It could be that P is true, but only within a restricted sub-space of reality, while not-P is true of a different restricted sub-space (not true of the same thing). It could be that P is true in one sense, while not-P is true in another, e.g. a person is generally some shade or tone of orange-y color, but they can be "blue" because they're feeling sad.

But it can't be the case that two people can correctly claim of the same thing, in the same sense, at the same time, the statement P and the statement not-P. At least one of them is wrong.

Light is a particle. Light is a wave. Anyone who says that light is exclusively a particle or exclusively a wave is one of the just over eight billion living people on this planetwho is wrong about something. Why is "there exist people who are wrong about something?" a remotely interesting thing to discuss?
It was useful as an example of the way that (1) bundles of claims--"cosmologies" in the current discussion--can have a mixture of correct and incorrect claims, (2) on any individual claim, if the statements are in fact incompatible, then at least one person must be wrong, and (3) that you can have specific claims where both(/all) of the positions taken are false, meaning nobody actually has the correct answer among the set you're reviewing. I was recognizing that cosmological models can be incomplete or incorrect on specific things--but, in the doing, demonstrating that no more than one position on any given claim (true, false, or incomplete) can be the correct position. My "Alice" and "Beth" are both mistaken about what kind of thing a photon is (it is both inherently a wave and inherently a particle, and those two natures cannot be sundered from one another, even though that does not comport with classical, macro-level experience.)

(I consider metamodernism worth discussing because I think it the best model of reality we have and because too many people haven't heard of it)
I'm unsure of how to reply here, as I was unfamiliar with the term myself, and having investigated it, it appears to be mostly a theory of aesthetics and literary criticism (a pendulum swinging between the "sincere seriousness" of modernism and the "ironic playfulness" of postmodernism). Would you be willing to more precisely explain its application here?

[Citation needed]
Ask and ye shall receive:
While it's true that this is how it's often presented in 2E, we're also speaking about a cosmology that requires impossible things to be true, like an infinitely tall spire that also has a very visible start and end point. I think there's something to be said that the cosmology of planes of pure thought need not be objective reality because of how perception plays into things.
I would say that the outer planes are the realms spirit, thought and belief. They are not physical. Beings that go there impose their own reality. It behaves like the physical world because the planar travellers believe it behaves like that.
This really seems to be a you issue. If you can't imagine why it might not be possible to take a photo on an outer plan, I can see why you get yourself straightjacketed into a narrow concept of what the outer planes could be. It is an issue I struggle with too, so I get it. However, nothing in D&D is ever presented as absolute IMO. D&D is very clear that it is your game, you make it what you want.
"Beings there impose their own reality." "...a cosmology that requires impossible things to be true." "...it might not be possible to take a photo on an outer plan [sic]".

All saying that perception/belief is not merely making it so (for example) one person sees the blue sides of a cylinder and says it's a blue rectangle, while another sees the white top of a cylinder and says it's a white circle, but that perception/belief outright defines reality.

Note that it is explicitly the position of at least one of these (dave2008) that all these models of the cosmology are true.

It honestly sounds like a mangling of both Mage: the Ascension and Planescape where perspective makes reality. Which doesn't"t mean "all beliefs are correct" but "with enough power we can make our belief the objectively correct one"
The problem, that causes "all beliefs are correct" to occur, is that people have said--repeatedly--that there is no objective reality, that perception and belief mean any "story" people tell about it is true, etc. The example dave2008 gave early on was that, within Norse mythology, Valhalla exists and is verifiably there, which (somehow) means there's no problem that the World Axis exists and is verifiably there in the same space, in the same sense, at the same time, as both the World Tree and the Great Wheel. Even though those three things cannot possibly all be verifiably true of the same space, in the same sense, at the same time.
 

My apologies. I accidentally clicked "quote" for the wrong person. I meant to reply to the post immediately after yours, which was in reply to me.

As for being adversarial, I was responding to someone who has been both flippant and dismissive, and then openly said they wrote my argument off with a strawman (literally, substituting a different situation that proves them right and me wrong).
And this is a blatant strawman. I didn't write your argument off with a strawman - I wrote it of AS a strawman. That you are the one making strawman arguments.
 

And this is a blatant strawman. I didn't write your argument off with a strawman - I wrote it of AS a strawman. That you are the one making strawman arguments.
How could I possibly be making a strawman argument?

I was giving examples about quantum physics. Ones rooted in things real, actual people really did think and advance before our understanding of quantum physics matured. There really was an intense debate about whether light was a wave (as required by things like Newtonian optics) or a particle (as required by Einstein's then-recently-proven photoelectric effect). That's not a strawman. That's a literal, actual argument real people once had. I used it as an example to show that it is possible for both people to be claiming something wrong, when the correct answer is some other, third thing (in this case, wave/particle duality).

Again, how could this possibly be a strawman? I wasn't ascribing these positions to anyone. I wasn't claiming anyone holds positions like it. I was simply giving a demonstration of a clear example where two people are making testable claims about their world, where some of those claims are right and some of them are wrong. For each, I specifically gave them two claims they were wrong about, and one claim they were right about. One of the two claims was something both of them were wrong about...which is literally explicit recognition of something you tried to skewer me with, which is that a cosmology can be incomplete or contain inaccuracies!

This was about what characters INSIDE the cosmology say. None of us is inside any of these cosmologies (thank the good Lord!)

Who was I strawmanning?
 

If this thread is just going to be a conversation of people accusing each other in bad faith of straw-manning, I may end up putting this whole conversation on mute.
 

Long post coming up.

I came into TTRPG’s in my early 20’s during 4E. As a system, 4E remains my absolute favourite. I own all the books and I wish I could play it again with my group. So I was the target audience and consumer of 4E products.

The only thing I don’t like about 4E is the cosmology. Though I get why it exists the way it does.

The cosmology to me is just about what I thought a basic generic fantasy cosmology would look like. In fact it’s exactly what I thought of when I thought about fantasy cosmology. The only thing that surprised me was that Hell was located in the heavens and the place I thought of as hell was a place of chaotic elements. Basically I found it boring.

So I tried to figure out how to make it interesting. The thing is I wasn’t that good at the time when it came to any kind of world building (I’m still kind of bad at it), and the Great Wheel only has a single page to it in the 4E Manual of the Planes (and looking back on it doesn’t really tell you how it works). Everything I came up with in an attempt to make it more interesting just made it more generic.

And to me that’s the strength of the World Axis cosmology. It is so basic, generic, and simple that anyone can easily understand it, and add to it.

In comparison the Great Wheel is so strange, weird, and complex, that the best way to introduce someone to it is to do so slowly. But to me the Great Wheel cosmology in all its strange, weird, and complex glory was something I had never seen before!

Seriously, to me the Great Wheel was like an epiphany of what a cosmology could look like, and when I finally learnt about it my imagination went wild with possibilities, which is something that the World Axis never did. Yggdrasil, The River Styx, Olympus, the Outlands, Sigil’s Factions, the Phlogiston and Crystal Spheres!

The Great Wheel is not a generic fantasy cosmology, it is unique to D&D. And every setting that I’ve come across that uses something similar was made after the Great Wheel was already made and designed to easily work with it.

That’s why I like the Great Wheel.
 

Sorry for the late response. I didn't see you had quoted me within this wall of text.
All saying that perception/belief is not merely making it so (for example) one person sees the blue sides of a cylinder and says it's a blue rectangle, while another sees the white top of a cylinder and says it's a white circle, but that perception/belief outright defines reality.
That is not what I am suggesting.
Note that it is explicitly the position of at least one of these (dave2008) that all these models of the cosmology are true.
That is also not what I am suggesting.

Ideally I would discuss my ideas with you. But you honestly, my impression is that have a habit of making assumptions and just spitting on everyone else's ideas. I feel like you want to argue that your view is correct and not discuss different ways of looking at things. It always feels like you are trying to prove something. IMO, there is nothing to prove, this is a fantasy RPG game. It is supposed to be fun.
 

There can only be three options on any given hypothesis: either that specific hypothesis is correct, or it is not, or it is missing some key detail ("incomplete").
Hypothesis: I am Australian. Correct (when I advance the hypothesis). False (when you advance the hypothesis).

Hypothesis: The screen in front of pemerton is visible, in the forward arc of vision. Correct (when I advance the hypothesis). False (when you advance the hypothesis).

Etc.

You are assuming that the language used to describe planar states of affairs doesn't have relativistic or reflexive terms like "I" or "forward". But that is not self-evident. Especially once we're talking about a fantasy setting.

EDIT: In case it's not obvious, there are quite respectable views that elements of language that are not regarded as relativistic/reflexive by speakers, nevertheless in fact have a type of relativistic/reflexive element.
 

That is not what I am suggesting.

That is also not what I am suggesting.
Then I have no idea how to parse the things you have said in the thread.

Ideally I would discuss my ideas with you. But you honestly, my impression is that have a habit of making assumptions and just spitting on everyone else's ideas. I feel like you want to argue that your view is correct and not discuss different ways of looking at things. It always feels like you are trying to prove something. IMO, there is nothing to prove, this is a fantasy RPG game. It is supposed to be fun.
For what it's worth, I apologize for antagonizing you. I cannot fully make good on that apology because I don't fully understand what I did wrong.

If I have made assumptions, I don't know what they are. I have no interest in "spitting" on anyone's ideas. I've simply said that I don't understand how the things I quoted, which do include explicitly saying that perception/belief defines reality, and that multiple contradictory models can somehow all be true, could possibly make any sense, other than by asserting that there are no facts, just beliefs/perceptions.

If your position is "well, none of these things are even right anyway", I don't understand how that squares with the degree of detail and specificity that the Great Wheel--whatever version is being discussed. It's quite clear to me that we're supposed to take this at face value, and at the very least treat it as mostly correct, particularly in the areas where it makes explicit claims about what is real and what is not, what can be done and what cannot, where one can go and where one cannot, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't understand how it is even possible to assert that the world is a huge mass of unknowns. The Great Wheel is not presented as a huge mass of unknowns. It is presented as "a place for everything, and everything in its place." That's precisely what I dislike about it so much. Needless symmetry is merely a symptom of that.

I never really paid much attention to the World Tree (even though theoretically that was the cosmology when I started playing D&D, in early 3e), but I very much prefer its structure to the Great Wheel. Even if I still like the World Axis better, the World Tree has its charms. At least the its nature comports better with merely being a documentation of "what we have seen thus far", leaving well open the possibility of additional hidden/lost/missing/etc. planes, rather than a complete and precise accounting like the way the Great Wheel is continually presented.

Another way of saying that: You lose the fundamental nature of the Great Wheel if there are any additional Outer Planes. Because then they can't, even in principle, be fit into the "pure Courteous Fashionable, blended Courteous Fashionable/Neutral Fashionable, pure Neutral Fashionable, blended Neutral Fashionable/Sarcastic Fashionable, pure Sarcastic Fashionable" etc. You can't have 1:1 correspondence between alignment and outer planes anymore, which causes the whole "planes slough off parts that deviate too much" to no longer function. You throw off the afterlife. Etc., etc.

It's not just needlessly symmetric (half the "lower" planes are nigh-indistinguishable). It's also...well, for lack of a better term, "closed" unless you decide to undermine the very foundations of the system.
 

Trending content

Remove ads

Top