D&D General DnD cosmology - Which Edition do you prefer?

[Undrave]

Boaf, it can be relationships between each other, for one, and second even if it's with the PCs, it does not have to be one of worship.

If there's no worshipper that means no agents in the mortal plane to oppose the PC or hire them. No worshippers means they remain distant and unknowable. You need one point of contact between PC and the Gods for them to matter.

 

[Jer]

Which is the prime reason why I have an extreme dislike for the Great Wheel. There's just a ton of grid-filling in it. It's not making an interesting cosmology just to make an interesting cosmology, it's creating redundant planes of existence because you pre-decided exactly how many planes of existence you wanted. Just leaving out the redundant planes and making the cosmology not be wheel-shaped would make for a far superior cosmology, IMO.

Grid-filling is what a lot of early D&D was about. But specifically I think the original idea for the outer planes was to brainstorm as many after lives from religions and myth and legend first, and then after the fact they realized that they could be shoved into an alignment grid if they made up a few extra, rather than the other way around.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

I have never played World of Warcraft or researched its cosmology/lore, so I think you're talking about someone else. Maybe @Yaarel?

I far prefer Eberron's Cosmology and 4e's World Axis Cosmology.

Can't remember who honestly. Avatars change so I've clearly disassociated something.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Grid-filling is what a lot of early D&D was about.

Yeah. And I think that's just bad design.

 

[Krachek]

I vote for 5ed because they try to remove cosmology from core rules.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Just like in any cosmology, but the labels are not random. The labels represent principles at war with each other, like in most well-written books of the gemre.

What genre has a prerequisite of allegiances drawn by poorly draw caricatures of attitudes?

The only I know some of D&D's forerunners did it with using Chaos for Evil, and I know Planescape did it, but the only one of those books ended with a fight inside a giant worm rolling through Hell and I gave up ecause I was pretty sure the pages were laced with something, but I am not aware of any genre where this is a mainstay. Even Saturday Morning Cartoons have given up on 'He's evil because... Evil'.

 

[Fifinjir]

I think both Great Wheel and World Axis overly “physicalizes” their non-earthly realities too much for my liking, but it’s a matter of degree. In the Great Wheel I can still see something that vaguely resembles the central principles that underlie religions. Not just “x is god of y” Wikipedia entries, but the ideas and questions theologians and laypeople wrestle with. What’s more, it at least pays lip service to the outer planes being incarnations of immaterial concepts, even if they don’t go nearly far enough with it.

All in all, if I was a peasant in the Material Plane and I asked a priest why the world was so scary and violent, I’d be more satisfied with the explanations the Greet Wheel gives than the World Axis.

 

[haakon1]

The one from the edition I first played …

 

[cbwjm]

Yeah, I know all of that. I hate alignment, and I especially hate the redundant planes in the Great Wheel (why the hell is Pandemonium necessary? Just make it one of the levels of the Abyss. Or Hades? Why is Carceri evil? It's just a planar prison. It probably shouldn't even be a full plane of existence, just a large demiplane. Why do there need to be two different planes of war? War is war! Why does basically every plane have 5+ layers for no good reason? This cosmology is overly convoluted and makes no sense!!!)

About half of the planes of existence in the Great Wheel are unnecessary. If you want to base a cosmology off of alignment, fine. Make there be a Lawful Evil Plane, a Chaotic Good Plane, and a True Neutral Plane and whatnot. But you don't need a plane of existence for every in-between alignment (Lawful-Neutral-Evil, Chaotic-Neutral-Good, Lawful-Good-Neutral, etc).

They're necessary, I'd say, because they represent real world mythological planes, albeit renamed. Since they set up the gods from real world mythology, they also needed the planes of existence found within that mythology. That's what I think anyway.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

They're necessary, I'd say, because they represent real world mythological planes, albeit renamed. Since they set up the gods from real world mythology, they also needed the planes of existence found within that mythology. That's what I think anyway.

That still doesn't explain the many redundant planes, or why we're suddenly trying to cram real-world ideas of afterlives into a very rigid and judgmental alignment chart. You don't need both Acheron and Ysgard, just make one plane of war. You can include the different ideas of war in that single plane (glorious wars of righteousness versus endless pointless wars that cause a lot more harm than good). You don't need Pandemonium, we already have a very chaotic plane of evil that the idea would fit nicely into (the Abyss). We don't need Gnome/Halfling Heaven and Elf Heaven, just combine the two things, they're pretty similar. Hades doesn't need to be a completely separate plane from Tartarus/Carceri, in the mythology they were both a part of the Underworld. A ton of planes of existence have multiple layers with different names, Tartarus can just be a layer of Hades.

I could go on. There's just a ton of redundant ideas and planes in the Great Wheel.