D&D 5E 4E Cosmology

[TwoSix]

You already lost me, and now you are forever dead to me. Our amicable time together on this board was nice while it lasted.

I was brainstorming mapping the 5 pure colors and the 10 color combinations to a corresponding Outer Plane, but I guess I'll keep that to myself.

 

[SkidAce]

That is when I felt liberated from the inorganic, mechanical, artificiality, and symmetry-obsessed Great Wheel. ...

This part you dislike actually made for a great 3 year campaign.

Why was the Great Wheel like that? Cause Ptah is the leader of the modrons, and was the 1st entity to emerge from Limbo and create the model of the Cosmos.

 

[Aldarc]

Why was the Great Wheel like that? Cause Ptah is the leader of the modrons, and was the 1st entity to emerge from Limbo and create the model of the Cosmos.

Sorry, but I am not and never was a fan of any of this. There is so much about the Great Wheel that is a massive turn-off for me.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Why is that a problem?

Because it means you have deleted truth. That's not a sacrifice I am willing to make.

Note that this is more than just "if enough people believe it, it becomes true." That's still a world where there is truth, it's just decided by majority vote, which is distasteful to me for other reasons, but not because truth has been outright eliminated. A world where each person's beliefs and perceptions really are all true, same time/thing/sense, is a world where "truth" has no meaning. Every statement you could possibly make is true, and anything you can convince yourself is true is, necessarily, true. No one can communicate because everyone has their own truth and it needs zero relationship to anyone else's truth. No one can make changes, because nobody can make something be true for someone else against their will. Reality collapses into an infinite string of genuinely solipsistic bubbles, each individual living out whatever beliefs and perceptions they have.

I can't accept that as a worldbuilding premise. It's actively antagonistic to the concept of storytelling, of achievement, of gameplay.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Just like with any statement made in life, a statement that asserts absolute surety about anything should be taken with a bunch of implied caveats.

Any descriptors attached to something as far-reaching as a cosmology should be assumed to be narrated from a limited perspective.

Then the books should actually present it that way. As in, they should present them within that fiction, from the words of a (fictionally) real person. White Wolf does this all the time, and there are several other publishes that do similar things.

If the cosmology isn't meant to be objective, make it subjective. Give it holes. Fuzz out the edges. Make it a li'l janky, or if it being not at all janky is the model's point, call out somewhere that it makes a claim that has failed to bear out, or where it ignored an inconvenient truth. And if we're not meant to take any model more seriously than any other, don't spend 10x-25x the page count on just one model with its extremely extensive, specific descriptions and testable, verifiable claims. Claims that any person who can cast even mid-level magic can test.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yea, I disagree pretty strongly with this.

The Great Wheel concept needs some sort of symmetry (ideally, some factor of 8 number of planes). It need 2 orthogonal axes of belief to orient itself (although I don't think they NEED to be L-C and G-E). The planes that do exist should be fairly familiar to what's already extant. I would argue you probably need Celestia, the Nine Hells, the Abyss, and maybe Limbo, but the rest of the planes are pretty negotiable.

But the planar layers growing and shrinking isn't fundamental. It gives a narrative hook, but it would be easy to come up with others for a Planescape game. Likewise the flow of souls. There's no NEED for the Great Wheel to be the one and only afterlife, it simply needs to be a place where the concept of the soul having value exists.

If so little of it is that important, why was it even made in the first place? I just don't understand such profligate worldbuilding if it truly serves no meaningful purpose, or is so minimally productive that it can be discarded without a second thought.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Because it means you have deleted truth. That's not a sacrifice I am willing to make.

That’s a you issue. D&D can’t be designed around your personal belief system. The world is full of people with different beliefs. It’s wrong to try and force other people to conform to your belief system. Philosophy taught me that.

 

[Umbran]

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.

In our actual reality, for specific, testable beliefs, sure.

In a fantasy reality, in which "reality" may not be as rock-hard as ours, perhaps. Like, we have a Feywild that locally changes to reflect the emotional state of people in it...

And goodness, once you get outside the physical sciences, you quickly lose a grip on beliefs being testable.

Why is that a problem?

Because then you get people taking ivermectin to protect them from covid, and losing their intestinal lining down the toilet... and still not being protected from covid.

I believe Douglas Adams' said it best, in referring to "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty".

 

[TwoSix]

If so little of it is that important, why was it even made in the first place? I just don't understand such profligate worldbuilding if it truly serves no meaningful purpose, or is so minimally productive that it can be discarded without a second thought.

Because the work is already done?

I mean, I can take the setting from Ravnica, attach it to the Great Wheel, and decide to have 15 planes instead of 16, one for each the 5 M:tG colors and color combinations. I can use like 80% of the material I have, and retcon/modify other stuff to fit my needs.

Worldbuilding material for D&D is ultimately just seeds to be used and modified for the campaign. There are games that are built around explicitly exploring a handcrafted setting. For example, I'm in a Dolmenwood game right now, which is a game I wouldn't modify the established setting much. And I think I mentioned WW games like Mage and Werewolf in this thread, where the default cosmology is deeply embedded in the ruleset.

D&D just isn't that game for me. All the worldbuilding backdrop is ultimately just a framing tool to set up new scenes.

 

[pemerton]

Okay.

Does any of this argument apply to things that aren't self-reflexive? Because all of your examples are already starting from an individual person's perceptions, and thus necessarily about an individual person's perceptions.

"You cannot travel via the Astral Plane between any Outer Planes, you must first return to the Prime Material and then travel outward again to the Outer Plane you wish to reach" is not reflexive in this way. "Every soul of a person who dies, unless trapped in some way, goes to the Outer Plane associated with their alignment" and "Some souls of people who die do not go to the afterlife appropriate to them, but are instead stuck in eternal limbo, genuinely unable to join the deity that matches who they were in life" are not reflexive in this way, and I don't see how both statements can be correct, and I certainly don't see how perception could affect the truth-value of any of these statements. (Planescape making it so metaphysics yield to sufficient density of belief is, naturally, a separate concern.)

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.

Here's a simple example: The chair is to the left of the table.

Now you could argue that that sentence - although a perfectly well-formed sentence of English - is, in its "deep structure" - elliptical. That its actual semantic content is The chair is to the left of the table from my perspective. But there are some costs to that account: (1) it entails that the sentence "The chair is to the left of the table" entails that I exist - which is a bit counterintuitive'; (2) it makes the sentence conceptually far more complicated than it seems to be from its surface grammar: as well as concrete objects and spatial relations between them, it also uses complex perspectival notions and reports on complex perspectival states of affairs.

Here's another: Its unlawful to walk down the street carrying a katana. That is generally true in my jurisdiction (Victoria, Australia). There are other places where its probably false. Does the actual semantic content of the sentence include a hidden clause or index that links it to a jurisdiction?

Here's another: There's no milk in the fridge. That might be true uttered by me looking bereftly into my milk-less fridge; but there are other contexts in which it is false. Again, there are serious scholars who argue for ellided clauses or hidden indices, but those views have costs of the same sort that I set out above for "The chair is to the left of the table".

You produce some sentences about the outer planes, assert without argument that they have no reflexive components, no hidden indices, etc and then conclude that "I certainly don't see how perception could affect the truth-value of any of these statements". I'm sure the autobiographical statement is true. But that doesn't mean that the dogmatic assertion has to be.