D&D General D&D's feel vs. what D&D should keep - final comparison

[Faolyn]

Forcing myself real hard to think of one, I just come up with the fact that the positive energy plain turns your into hyper Deadpool and will pop you like a zit if you heal too much.

But that brings us right back to 'immediately lethal' as the con for a big chunk of it.

The weird thing is that WotC had a perfectly good positive energy plane model in Serra's Realm and has NEVER used it for anything.

Also, the dependence on alignment is an instant non-starter for me.

Reread the Planescape books. There's tons of interesting things in the Great Wheel. However, most of those things can simply be imported into a different cosmology.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Reread the Planescape books. There's tons of interesting things in the Great Wheel. However, most of those things can simply be imported into a different cosmology.

The one I read ended up in a fortress made out of a giant worm that rolled around one of the thirty hells D&D has knocling around like so many Marvel Satans for some reason. No more.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Reread the Planescape books. There's tons of interesting things in the Great Wheel. However, most of those things can simply be imported into a different cosmology.

There are tons of interesting things in the Great Wheel because it's a setting put together by creative people doing creative things - but the issue is that not many of them are there because of the Great Wheel.

 

[Faolyn]

There are tons of interesting things in the Great Wheel because it's a setting put together by creative people doing creative things - but the issue is that not many of them are there because of the Great Wheel.

Yeah. Which is why I'm perfectly fine with using a different cosmology.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

In my case because the whole thing feels very artificial and looks like a box-ticking exercise where they've specifically added extra versions of heaven or hell just to say that they are there. What am I supposed to do with the LGG heaven of Bytopia/the Twin Paradises and how is it not redundant when put between the Seven Heavens and Elysium. Or the block between Acheron, the Nine Hells, Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus. That honestly reads to me as if someone just looked up "Hell" in a thesaurus and took five different words.

Exactly this. When I first looked at the Great Wheel Cosmology in 5e, I thought "Oh, cool! Look at all of these planes of existence! I'm sure that in the near-50 years of D&D's history that these have all been well-thought-out and detailed to have them included in campaigns, especially as places for the PCs to journey to!"

Then I spent about an hour or two reading about the planes in the DMG. I quickly fell in love with a few of the planes (Mechanus, Limbo, the Feywild and Shadowfell, the Astral Plane, the Elemental Planes, the eternal war aspects of Ysgard and Acheron, and a few others), but also began to realize that a lot of the planes were lacking in description and/or largely redundant with other planes. I really liked the idea of Carceri as "the Escape Room to End All Escape Rooms", but it barely had any description in the DMG and other official sources, so I never really ended up using it (I used it one time, and it was because of an extremely unlucky roll from a PC against a casting of Prismatic Spray).

I also got a few questions, like "Why the heck are there 7 different flavors of Heaven and 7 others for Hell, but no Plane of Mirrors, Dream/Nightmare Realm, Death World, Twilight Forest, or . . . [etc]?", "What's the difference between the Beastlands and the Feywild?", "Why are the embodiments of pure chaos [Slaad] evil, multicolored frog-men and not Fey?!?!", "Why do we have two different planes of War? [Ysgard and Acheron]", "Why isn't there a plane of Dragons and another of Giants?", "Why isn't there a Mount Olympus Plane if there's a Hades, and why isn't Hades the Underworld!?!?", "Why do we need a plane for Neutral Evil fiends [the extremely boring and uninspiring Yugoloths], and why is the plane for Neutral Evil fiends not the Neutral Evil Plane of Existence [Hades]!?!?" and "Why the heck are all of these redundant planes of existence different from each other, and not just separate parts of different, bigger, and more interesting plane of existence?"

I like Planescape (not from experience, I like the idea of it, though). I like planes-hopping, extraworldly weirdness. However, there's just too much overlap in the Great Wheel, and it just felt like grid-filling, "Okay, we have one plane of existence for every one of the 9 alignments, now let's do another for every in-between of those different alignments!". There are times when a "grid-filling" game design mindset has been beneficial, but the Great Wheel isn't one of them.

/end rant

 

[Faolyn]

I like Planescape (not from experience, I like the idea of it, though). I like planes-hopping, extraworldly weirdness. However, there's just too much overlap in the Great Wheel, and it just felt like grid-filling, "Okay, we have one plane of existence for every one of the 9 alignments, now let's do another for every in-between of those different alignments!". There are times when a "grid-filling" game design mindset has been beneficial, but the Great Wheel isn't one of them.

/end rant

Yeah. I mean, just about every one of your questions has an actual answer in Planescape (or from the Manual of the Planes), but it's such a big convoluted mess of a cosmology that really needs to be trimmed. I sincerely hope that when WotC actually puts forth a Manual of the Planes or a Planescape book, it goes into more details on making your own cosmology. I'm sure most of us can do it just fine, but it would be preferable to just using the Great Wheel.

 

[TheSword]

Expecting the infinite planes to be detailed is a fairly futile thing to expect. The planes are infinite because they are constructs of belief not purely physical places. How many locations do you need to have written for you in order to make the worthwhile? There are plenty of examples of locations you might visit in the Planescape box sets.

I don’t believe Planescape was any kind of box ticking exercise. It was an attempt to integrate several different notions of what afterlife would be like, differentiated by alignment. I’m really not sure what is difficult to grasp between the themes of the lower planes. They all seem pretty separate and concrete to me. I also don’t see the problem with balance as a principal for a cosmology.

The campaign setting focused on the city of Sigil which was a complete melting pot and the gate towns. So there was plenty of nuance in the setting. The planes behind the gate towns were conceptual and provided the scale of the infinite multiverse with its multitudinous inhabitants and weird and wonderful inhabitants with their weirder ideas.

I’ll let you into a secret… if you want alignment removed from D&D and you want everything detailed in black and white ink, you ain’t gonna like Planescape. That said I get that it isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Then again I don’t like Ravnica or Taldorei so something for everyone yeah.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Yeah. I mean, just about every one of your questions has an actual answer in Planescape (or from the Manual of the Planes),

That's kind of the definition of a Thermian argument, you know. Most of the questions were more from a design standpoint and not a lore standpoint (like why the Underworld/Hades isn't the plane of death, and what the real purpose of two different planes of War are).

but it's such a big convoluted mess of a cosmology that really needs to be trimmed.

This is agree with completely.

I sincerely hope that when WotC actually puts forth a Manual of the Planes or a Planescape book, it goes into more details on making your own cosmology. I'm sure most of us can do it just fine, but it would be preferable to just using the Great Wheel.

I also agree with this, and would be on board with Wizards of the Coast taking a more personal, interactive stance on the Multiverse.

 

[Yaarel]

I have a number of difficulties with the Wheel.



One of the problems is, alignment is nonuseful for storytelling.

It is a given that D&D can be bizarrely inaccurate about Norse traditions. Even so, consider.

Odin is the blood brother of Loki, and the father of Thor. These three nature beings often hang out together. They are members of the same aesir family.

These nature beings are separate alignments. Thor is actually Lawful. Loki is clearly Chaotic. Odin is inscrutable, probably Neutral.

According to the D&D alignment Wheel, these beings dont coexist together. Suddenly, the Norse stories cant really happen, or else D&D drastically distorts and misrepresents the Norse stories.




The D&D cosmology deserves serious rethinking.

The cosmological setting deserves as much scrutiny as the gaming mechanics does.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Expecting the infinite planes to be detailed is a fairly futile thing to expect. The planes are infinite because they are constructs of belief not purely physical places.

But why are they even there except as vague background if you can't interact with them? And space may be infinite - but that doesn't mean that there's very much there. Space may be vast but it's somewhere that in most SF you travel through to get to interesting places.

The campaign setting focused on the city of Sigil which was a complete melting pot and the gate towns. So there was plenty of nuance in the setting. The planes behind the gate towns were conceptual and provided the scale of the infinite multiverse with its multitudinous inhabitants and weird and wonderful inhabitants with their weirder ideas.

I’ll let you into a secret… if you want alignment removed from D&D and you want everything detailed in black and white ink, you ain’t gonna like Planescape. That said I get that it isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Then again I don’t like Ravnica or Taldorei so something for everyone yeah.

I'll let you into a secret. Alignment undermines what makes Planescape an interesting setting - and indeed by the premises should be removable if something else takes over as dominant. Although some of the Factions can be matched up to the nine alignments many can't and, indeed, are uneasy alliances. (There's a reason why post Faction War the Mercykillers split, for example). Removing alignment from Planescape wouldn't change much - but the Faction War gutted the setting.

And no one wants e.g. everything in the Feywild to be detailed in black and white ink. Why would they? I mean it's Faerie - and is explicitly a mirror for the Mortal World. Bits are detailed of course. But "Fey mirror of where the PCs have spent their past few adventures and that's easiest to cross into where the correspondence is closest" is inspiring for specifics to interact with is inspiring in a way "infinite conceptual plane" isn't.

Or, to sum up, Planescape is a great idea for a setting that has always been weighed down by having to carry the Great Wheel round its neck. And the best bits of Planescape (Sigil and the Factions) are precisely those furthest from the Great Wheel's infinite planes.