D&D 4E 4E Devils vs. Demons article

[Charwoman Gene]

The real questions we should be asking are these:
Does it have dungeons?
Does it have dragons?
Does it have transients who kill things for money?
Do you roll a d20?

My D&D games fail 3 out of 4.

 

[Belorin]

So, let's see if we can extrapolate what's coming.
It has already been said that the way alignments are used is changing, the Nine Hells are an astral dominion among other deific abodes in the Astral Sea meaning that they may no longer be connected as they were on the Great Wheel.
The Abyss, which gapes like a festering wound in the landscape of the Elemental Tempest, sounds like the Elemental Planes won't have defined borders, but a continuous landscape comprised of all 4 elements. (possibly containing the Para & Quasi-elemental palnes also)
Of course this is all supposition on my part. :\

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

My D&D games fail 3 out of 4.

Then they win 1 out of 4! Congratulations, you play D&D!

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm actually really looking forward to, IMC, explaining the shift from 3e to 4e.

My PS setting was already supposed to be several hundred years in the future of current Planescape. This massive change will mean that the Faction War is officially Ancient History, berk!

 

[Branduil]

So, let's see if we can extrapolate what's coming.
It has already been said that the way alignments are used is changing, the Nine Hells are an astral dominion among other deific abodes in the Astral Sea meaning that they may no longer be connected as they were on the Great Wheel.
The Abyss, which gapes like a festering wound in the landscape of the Elemental Tempest, sounds like the Elemental Planes won't have defined borders, but a continuous landscape comprised of all 4 elements. (possibly containing the Para & Quasi-elemental palnes also)
Of course this is all supposition on my part. :\

My guess is alignment will be nothing but a way of describing characters and things with minimal gameplay rules.

 

[Shade]

I must have missed the book in which Sigil appears in 3rd edition. What was it called?

Manual of the Planes
Planar Handbook
Expedition to the Demonweb Pits
Issues of Dragon and Dungeon

 

[Wormwood]

My guess is alignment will be nothing but a way of describing characters and things with minimal gameplay rules.

*crossing fingers and toes*

 

[TwinBahamut]

Maybe I am jumping into this thread a little late, but...

I really like the new idea behind Demons and Devils. It works well. Someone else in this thread phrased it well when he said that instead of just arbitrarily dividing based on alignment, and trying to explain it from there, now they are being divided based on actual role. In other words, the designers are designing things based on how fun it is for the players and DMs, rather than trying to achieve some kind of ideal symmetry in the D&D cosmos. In 4E, some random magical apocalypse (or maybe just a really well organized group of PCs) can come by and completely wipe out the Nine Hells or the Abyss, and the world will be better of for it, rather than it triggering some kind of absolute setting implosion.

Regardless, I am more interested in these planar set-ups, the Astral Sea and the Elemental Tempest. Both sound like the elegant fusion of Transitive Planes and the general concepts of the Inner and Outer Planes. The name Astral Sea implies a certain ability to sail across it, with different realms acting as islands, rather than different realities. I like that. And the Elemental Tempest seems to be fusing all the elemental planes with Limbo, essentially recreating the realm of Chaos from Milton's Paradise Lost. In Milton's work, Chaos is the realm of churning elements from which all physical matter is derived, and Heaven, Hell, and the Earth all exist as islands within it. It is a much more interesting concept then seperate and nearly featureless pure elemental planes. And certainly, "Elemental Tempest" is a better name for such a place than "Limbo" ever was. Who on Earth thought it was a good idea to name the realm of chaos, where nothing is stable, with a word which is often used to mean "stasis"?

Anyway, I think these hints of the new cosmology bode well.

And to clear up a point from much earlier in the thread... Yes, Greek/Roman mythology is a clear case of modern gods fighting primordial gods. Jupiter never fought against the primordial Uranus, but only because his father Saturn beat him to it. A father was defeated by his son, who was in turn defeated by his son. Oh, and in Norse myth, the entire human world was created from the dead body of a primordial frost giant that was slain by Odin and his brothers. And then there is Horus, who fights his uncle Set after his father Osiris is slain. There is plenty of precedent for generation conflict in mythology.

Also, I really think people need to remember that we don't even know if Demons are CE and Devils are LE, or even if CE and LE exist. We do know that something has changed in the definition of chaotic.

 

[see]

I think people greatly overestimate how much the average D&D player cares about demon origins or planar cosmology. More people are likely to be upset by the omission of their favorite race or class than if the Jello plane of Cosbyopolis is missing.

The cosmology is just part of the many, many flavor changes that we know about. We know gnomes are out and tieflings are in. There are apparently going to be eight classes in the PHB, and one of them is the warlock; that means at least 4 core 3e classes are gone from the initial release. Vancian spellcasting is minimized. Fighters are going to have limited-use special powers. And so on and so forth.

Will it be mechanically in the same basic mold as past versions of D&D? Sure. Will it still be fantasy? Yeah. Just like the Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

The cosmology is just part of the many, many flavor changes that we know about. We know gnomes are out and tieflings are in. There are apparently going to be eight classes in the PHB, and one of them is the warlock; that means at least 4 core 3e classes are gone from the initial release.

All of which means a lot less than you seem to imply it does, given that they have explicitly said that all of the "missing" elements will reappear in due time.

Vancian spellcasting is minimized. Fighters are going to have limited-use special powers.

These are real changes, but no more so than the introduction of classes separate from races (First Edition AD&D) or feats which grant abilities beyond those of a character's race and class (Third Edition D&D).

Maybe it's just that, to me, Dungeons & Dragons has never been all that specifically tied to the various flavour elements found in the core rules.

If Vampire: The Masquerade had reached a fourth edition, and they completely cut out half of the original clans found in the first edition and replaced them with a combination of other clans from later in the game's history and all-new clans, then I think there would have been the sort of case that "the game is not the same" as you're trying to establish for Fourth Edition D&D.

And, indeed, when White Wolf published their fourth Vampire game, it was a new game which did something much like what I describe. The reason it's true of Vampire and not of D&D, though, is that Dungeons & Dragons has never been as intimately tied to its setting assumptions as Vampire. It has always been a more generic, flexible game, by intention and design.