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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9574508" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It is impossible for certain specific kinds of knowledge to be totally complete. Other kinds of knowledge can be complete. Anything that operates by a Lagrangian (for non-math folks: anything where calculus works smoothly, no weird jumps or gaps) and possesses a symmetry (e.g. "physics is the same whether you're spinning CW or CCW") is mathematically proven to have a conservation law, for example. That's complete knowledge on that specific area. Paired variables--such as time/energy, or position/momentum--are subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle--but even then, we can set boundaries on what something can or can't be."Connected to", but not located within. Which was the specific point I was making. Again, these are very simple, basic "how does planar travel work?" claims, that cannot all be simultaneously true. You have:1. Great Wheel: The Astral Plane is akin to a backdrop or substructure, which touches all planes, inner and outer alike. You can travel from any plane to any other plane as you like via the Astral Plane, without needing to go along any specific path (though some are easier than others).2. World Tree: The Astral Plane is a "channeled" transitive plane, meaning it exists as connections between points, not as a space in which other things are located. It's literally tree-shaped. You must, always, return to a Prime Material plane before traveling to another Inner or Outer plane via the Astral.3. World Axis: The Astral Sea contains within it specific divine domains. You can easily traverse between any of those domains and the Sea overall, which surrounds each of them. It's much more difficult to go from the Astral Sea to any other planes, especially the Elemental Chaos.I don't see any way that it is possible for all three of these statements to be completely true--which, again, is what I was told before, that two people can uphold any two of these models and both be completely correct. The World Tree's planar travel explicitly excludes things that the other two explicitly permit. It cannot be simultaneously and in the same sense the case that you absolutely must return to the Prime via the Astral before you can then go to some other Inner or Outer plane, and also be the case that you can just travel via the Astral Plane between any two non-Prime planes as you like.Yes...but that has no bearing on the trilemma. The law of non-contradiction recognizes differences of time, sense, and (for lack of a better term) "target". That is, A and Not-A can be true sequentially (one is true at one time, and another is true at a different time); or they can be true in different senses (e.g. A is true for arcane magic, while Not-A is true for divine magic); or they can be true of different things (e.g. A is true of the cosmological space surrounding Toril, while Not-A is true for the cosmological space surrounding Eberron). You've just given another spin on "in different senses."Travel via the Astral. Other methods, obviously, exist. But in the World Tree, you cannot travel directly from Plane A to Plane B via the Astral.AFAIK, no 5e book has ever said anything about the World Tree cosmology other than to recognize that it's a model some people have used, so there is no citation for what you want, neither for nor against. Hence, we must rely on the authority of previous works--and those previous works, even as late as 3e, explicitly say that Astral travel from one plane directly to another is not possible.And what I keep telling you is that someone else in this thread explicitly said that they were ACTUALLY true. That each person's perceptions were, in fact, true, in the same sense, of the same thing, at the same time. That is what I'm negatively reacting to.If you assert that the books have these reams and reams of information about the Great Wheel and that they're just really wrong...well, I guess I find that really weird because that feels like a LOT of space wasted on "facts" that aren't true and can be confirmed as untrue. Why do they harp so hard on a bazillion tiny details of a theory that is riddled with falsehoods and only true enough to be useful some of the time (since, by implication, other theories must be useful at other times).The map is not and never has been the problem. It's the specific, testable, cosmological claims that each cosmology makes which explicitly contradict one another.Well, that and the problem others have highlighted, which is "Oh, sure, you can try this other thing. You'll just have to completely reinvent 3/4ths of the Monster Manual and deal with having zero support for your cosmology, all while casting aside mountains of highly detailed worldbuilding. But sure, you can do that! If you really, really want to." That is, the books give, what, a page? If that? of lip-service to the idea that other cosmologies might be valid, and then spend some fifty pages going into exhaustive detail about just one specific theory and all the cool things present in it.It's not hard to see which of these things is billed as Quite Clearly Correct, and which are billed as "well...I guess...if you have to".</blockquote>

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