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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9577785" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Then I have no idea how to parse the things you have said in the thread.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.</blockquote>

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