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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dungeonosophy" data-source="post: 7731734" data-attributes="member: 6688049">That's your view. As you wish. Blowing up the world everytime there's an edition change is also a lot of work - with a mixed payoff.In my view, the Realities concept is very elegant. It simplifies things. If consciously taken up again by WotC, it would untangle the designers' minds, so that it's no longer necessary to blow up the world every time there's a new edition. We just shift the lens to the Sixth Reality of the D&D Multiverse, which has always existed.Sure, there could be some sort of "event", just for the fun of it, for marketing purposes, but the nuts and bolts of it would be taken care of by the Reality Shift.So what Reality are the 2E Arcane Age products set in then?The other settings did shift through the different rules sets too. Yes, there could be a Reality which painstakingly modeled which rules sets were used by which setting at which time (with a 2E incursion during the Arcane Age?!). That's what I call the Transitive Reality - there could be more than one way of figuring that out - someone would need to sit down with the "Temporal Chronology of the Primes" and see how the edition changes matched up with the calendar dates of each world. Yes, you're right, there could be a Mixed Reality, where the D&D Worlds do not all shift to the same "rules reality" at the same time. If the dates don't all match up, it would mean that a Reality Shift occurs when travelling to that world via spelljammer or planewalking.Such a Mixed Reality would be especially strange in regard to Mystara. Since the 2E Mystara appeared in the Planescape cosmology all of a sudden, without comment, as if it had always been there. And the OD&D Mystara had explicitly said that the entire 1E Multiverse was in a separate Reality not reachable by ship or planewalking - only reachable by Alternate World Gate or *reality shift* spell.Yes, such a Transitive-Mixed Reality could be figured out. And that's actually sorta what TSR/WotC did, but unconsciously, with much unspoken, convoluted handwaving.And yet...once the 2E Mystara walks on screen (without comment or event), does the Classic D&D Mystara which is featured in hundreds of products just not exist anymore?What about when the 2E Mystara then refers to events in its past which are depicted with 2E rules? Did the Classic Mystara Reality never exist?The Realities concept - which is already an official or semi-official (though overlooked) part of the D&D Multiverse - respects that the different depictions of each world still exist (past, present, and future) - it's just that they're no longer supported by the current product line.</blockquote>

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