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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3785120" data-attributes="member: 4937">That is pretty much exactly my point.  You can divide DMs into two groups: those that don't set adventures on the elemental plane of fire, and those that do.  Those that don't set adventures on the elemental plane of fire will likely ignore any changes to the cosmology.  Those that do have adventures there don't have the problem that WotC is trying to fix, because obviously, they find it a worthy spot to set adventures.For me, the irony is that ideas for the elemental plane of fire are well described in fairy tale and fantasy literature.  There is a 500 page supplement that has just been published on visiting that plane that supposedly has hundreds of adventure ideas.  I seem to remember a published adventure for the four elemental planes way back in 1st ed. AD&D Manual of the Planes days.  Planescape describes the locations in detail, and there are bits and peices of flavor scattered all over.  If you are not interested in setting adventurers on the planes as they've been described, in most cases you probably aren't interested in setting adventures on other planes period.If there is any problem with the elemental planes as described it is that they are too alien of places for most DMs or players to get there heads around (after planescape did a number on the outer planes, they are one of the few alien places left in the cosmology).  They are hard to use not because they are unusable, but because life doesn't give you good reference points for what an infinite plane of air is like (for example, you can't fall even if you can't fly) or an infinite plane of water (there is no water pressure, when most people intuit that it would be infinite).  This is what I was getting at when I said that they were throwing out anything that made 20'x30' rooms with two doors 'hard'.  The environment doesn't lend itself to what most people are doing.  But as for myself, anything that wasn't alien I'd just assume set on my world.  If I'm reaching into my tool chest for an alternate plane, its precisely because I want something that is wierd and alien.  I have a similar feeling about outsiders - don't try to turn them into funny looking humanoids with special powers just to make them easier to understand.  If I want an outsider, then I want it to be really alien.   When I hear them say, "The elemental planes aren't conducive to adventures", what I hear them to mean is, "The elemental planes aren't conducive to adventures in the familiar pattern."   The appear to want to take away the alienness of the place so that adventuring on planes other than our own is fundamentally no different than adventuring anywhere else.  I consider this dumbing down the cosmology.At best, we are going to get new elemental planes that are effectively the same as the old planes but with a 'New and Improved' sticker stamped on them.  At worst, we are going to get every plane of existance looks basically like Earth with a slightly different color pallette.</blockquote>

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