Elemental Planes Killed

[SkidAce]

Oh, frigging Christ, absolutely. I'm having as much fun speculating on what WotC is gonna do with the Elemental Planes as anybody, but there's basically no chance I'm gonna use them no matter what. The classical four elments--and the Chinese and Wicca five element options, too--are completely cliche and way too inherently illogical for my modern mind to work with. It's just a really silly abstraction of reality that I cannot buy into.

What do you call it when you thought you were intelligent, savy, and connected with your social group...but then you see numerous people who whole heartedly say things you disagree with?

Differing opinions is fine....but when I used to be in the majority....but now I'm not. Now I don't NEED to be in the majority...I just realize that the "gaming world" has snuck up and changed around me. I think I have either become isolated, stopped "growing", or just plain left behind.

I don't feel stagnant.

Maybe I'm just old.....oh well no worries. It's not a cosmic problem after all, I have a career, a family, friends, and games.

Just feels odd though. Odd indeed.

 

[Dinkeldog]

Now, I'm confused. Do people care about this sacred cow, or don't they? Obviously, people think we already have something worth caring about or this thread wouldn't exist.

That's a false dichotomy. It's possible that the people that are complaining don't really care about this sacred cow, they just want to complain about everything that is changing because it is changing.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Ultimately, it is down to the developers, but I don't think it necessarily has to do with thier read on what the majority wants.

Yes, because they have no compelling interest on being able to pay their mortgage or car payments ...

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Maybe I'm just old.....oh well no worries. It's not a cosmic problem after all, I have a career, a family, friends, and games.

And you also have the Internet, where every setting, including the previous D&D metasetting, will be supported by fans in perpetuity and, via PDF, available indefinitely as well.

What's more, between the hinted-at cosmology changes and the explicitly stated demon/devil changes, I am very confident that there are big name third party publishers working on old school planar settings and monster books right now for 4E. Heck, some of them may well go on sale by GenCon 2008, meaning folks can transition between games and keep most of what they liked about the old TSR multiverse without missing a beat.

If I were such a publisher -- and I am not -- I would have already contacted a number of the big planar writers and developers and got them working on it. It should be noted that a lot of the writers and developers we might list have been extremely silent on this subject ...

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

In the two homebrew cosmologies I've done, neither included a traditional version of the elemental planes.

In the first, they were replaced with a single plane called Eidolon which was home to countless platonic "pure forms", including elementals.

For the second I went back to the roots of the classical elemental paradigm, the pairing of warm/cold and wet/dry qualities. This lead to an obvious association with weather, and the four seasons. So I ended up with the Springlands, the Summerlands, the Autumnlands and the Winterlands.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Well, if the goal is to make them usable places for PCs to have adventures, they need some change.

Especially Earth. "You're embedded in solid rock. Have fun!"

I'm guessing that they will do the fairly obvious change of detailing key sites on the planes like the City of Brass.

The Scarred Lands setting did a pretty god job of this.

 

[Mercule]

In the two homebrew cosmologies I've done, neither included a traditional version of the elemental planes.

In the first, they were replaced with a single plane called Eidolon which was home to countless platonic "pure forms", including elementals.

For the second I went back to the roots of the classical elemental paradigm, the pairing of warm/cold and wet/dry qualities. This lead to an obvious association with weather, and the four seasons. So I ended up with the Springlands, the Summerlands, the Autumnlands and the Winterlands.

I like both of those alternatives.

 

[Shemeska]

If I were such a publisher -- and I am not -- I would have already contacted a number of the big planar writers and developers and got them working on it. It should be noted that a lot of the writers and developers we might list have been extremely silent on this subject ...

That would be awesome, but I doubt it will happen. I really don't see WotC letting anyone near previous planar IP, even if just to prevent competition for $ from people interested in planar campaigns.

 

[Shemeska]

I'm guessing that they will do the fairly obvious change of detailing key sites on the planes like the City of Brass.

Well the City of Brass was decently detailed in 3e. Not as in depth as the 2e looks at the city, but the detail was there. WotC could have done a heck of a lot more in terms of detailing noted locations on the planes in 3e (rather than blowing 1/3 of the planar handbook on touchstones and their random encounter charts), but most of the flavor text seemed to be on the back burner till very late in the edition (when we had some amazing work like FC:I).

 

[Shemeska]

What I'm failing to see is why this should be the sacred cow that anyone would care about. Now, if they'd eliminated classes, levels, hit points (or instituted the "death spiral"), those would bother me.

Because game mechanics don't inspire me. I could care less about the rules. I could run the numbers side of a campaign using a deck of cards and a bent penny if it came down to it, and how I run the numbers and the rules crunch around them doesn't (and in my opinion should only to a minimum) reflect upon and impact the flavor/fluff/setting.

The planes, including the elemental planes as of their 1e/2e/3e conception, -really- inspired me. I started playing in 3e, and now on the cusp of 4e I've written somewhere over 2500-3000 pages worth of planar material. Radically altering the flavor assumptions and wholesale content and focus of the planes in 4e is a pretty hard pill to immediately swallow when I've put that much work into, and gotten that much enjoyment and creative spark out of, the 1e/2e/3e cosmology material.

That much effort and enjoyment of the material is why people are objecting to that particular sacred cow being made into chuck.