Alzrius
The EN World kitten
No one is telling anyone that they must do anything. Saying that people are is a form of edition warring.
D&D 5E L&L 1/7/2013 The Many Worlds of D&D
No one is telling anyone that they must do anything. Saying that people are is a form of edition warring.
That is what you appear to be doing, it is so dull that every time the planes are mentioned in a thread, you seem to storm in with an anti-Planescape, pre-4th Ed blows, edition warring crusade.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
I believe you're mistaken here. 2E had the Astral as being the connection from the Prime Material Plane to the Outer Planes, whereas the (Deep) Ethereal was the connection between the Prime Material Plane and the Elemental Planes. Shadow was just a demiplane then.
3E had the Astral as being the plane that connected all other planes. The Ethereal was reduced to what was, in 2E, simply the Border Ethereal; it no longer connected various planes. Shadow was, very obliquely in a few books, said to connect to other cosmologies.
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
Well, it was, wasn't it? D&D4 deviated from it more or less completely, really. The Great Wheel hasn't been D&D for four years. So it sounds to me like your point is less that the developers or community see Planescape as inviolate and more that you like the Astral Sea more and are sorry to see it go.
Which I agree with, honestly, but you should avoid hyperbole. Particularly if your stated goal is to avoid edition warring.
Careful, #Shemeska, your bias is showing. Planescape did a lot to update the AD&D1 Manual of the Planes, but the fact is that D&D4 filled in a lot of gaps that even the Planescape canon left open, and the rewriting of the planes did more to unify D&D under a single cosmology than all of Planescape's ham-handed shoehorning of Athasian halflings into Sigil's Hive.
More isn't always better. It's true that the Astral Sea cosmology is simpler than the Great Wheel, but I'd argue that the change did more good than harm. Aside from a few truly numbskull decisions like combining the erinyes with the succubus, and thinking Chaotic Good is not a thing while Lawful Good is SUPER GOOD, the new cosmology has internal consistency that Planescape lacked precisely /because/ it was built on some very shaky foundations from AD&D1 and contradicted as few of them as possible.
I love Planescape, but it's clear to me that the designers of D&D4 looked back at the history of D&D cosmology and made some hard decisions about unifying concepts to give the game a home that was exclusively its own, rather than just reprinting what had come before. I really appreciate the difficulty of that effort and the quality of the result.
Generally speaking, when someone starts saying a new thing is bad because it is not like the old thing, I start to get nervous. Do you have /specific/ complaints about the D&D4 identification of eladrin or archons? Because again, I find the new stuff more internally consistent than the old material.
By the same token, I can argue that there was a lot of garbage given a pass because of historical provenance, which is never -- scratch that, /rarely/ -- a good reason to do anything.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Whoa, hold on there. I think that calling something "ham-handed shoehorning" is letting bias show, don't you?
Shemeska was simply talking in regards to creating material that builds on previous material, as opposed to invalidating it. That's not a measure of quality; it's simply a notation of the methodology used.
Can you be more specific in regards to what internal consistency you feel that Planescape lacked? I ask this because "internal consistency" is making sure that various elements are defined the same way when used in multiple instances, and I'm not sure where you're saying Planescape failed at that.
Leaving aside that everyone has their own opinions on the quality of the results, the cosmology was always "a home that was exclusively its [the game's] own," as its cosmological elements weren't cribbed from another game. Now, if you meant that it was taking real-world mythologies and appropriating them as part of that, that's true, but that's always been a part of D&D - from the monsters to the magic, it has a strong tradition of pulling from many sources, which I see as a strength, not a weakness.
How are the new eladrin more "internally consistent" than the old ones? Where did Planescape use eladrin in a self-contradictory manner? That said, it's worth noting that liking something because it has a long history is no particular reason to become nervous - people like things for multiple reasons, and adherence to tradition is no more or less qualitative than any other reason.
That's a perfectly respectable opinion, but no more or less so than an opinion that the stuff you thought was "garbage" was made out of gold, and that historical provenance (or rather, continuity) can indeed be a good reason to do something (even more than rarely).
Savage Wombat
Hero
Just a thought.
Two people are driving down a road, not to get to a destination but to enjoy the sights along the way. Some they like, some they don't. They don't always agree.
And when they come to a fork, they disagree on which path to take. Ultimately they go down one - and one passenger likes the new route, and the sights along the way - and the other does not.
It is perfectly reasonable that the one passenger wish to continue along the current path and his enjoyment of those sights.
It is perfectly reasonable that the other passenger wish to travel back to the fork and take the other path. He doesn't enjoy these sights and wants to go back to the ones he liked.
Neither passenger is wrong in any way. They merely have a difference of opinion. And there's nothing wrong with having a difference of opinion. No one is trying to force the other passenger to do what he wants. But there's only one car - the discussion needs to happen.
Two people are driving down a road, not to get to a destination but to enjoy the sights along the way. Some they like, some they don't. They don't always agree.
And when they come to a fork, they disagree on which path to take. Ultimately they go down one - and one passenger likes the new route, and the sights along the way - and the other does not.
It is perfectly reasonable that the one passenger wish to continue along the current path and his enjoyment of those sights.
It is perfectly reasonable that the other passenger wish to travel back to the fork and take the other path. He doesn't enjoy these sights and wants to go back to the ones he liked.
Neither passenger is wrong in any way. They merely have a difference of opinion. And there's nothing wrong with having a difference of opinion. No one is trying to force the other passenger to do what he wants. But there's only one car - the discussion needs to happen.
Quite right. The discussion ought to happen.
But it ought to happen civilly - without raised voices, rancor, name calling, and such. It also ought to happen including someone who actually has control over the car! Here, we have the problem that neither is occurring. We have two passengers. Neither is the driver. These passengers are sitting in the back seat, arguing over the driver's choice. Maybe they hope that eventually the driver will hear them shouting at each other, or something, I dunno. But there's a point when the argument of backseat drivers makes the experience for everyone else pretty miserable.
This goes for folks on both sides of this argument. Yes, Hussar's so darned consistent on this point, over many threads over time, that it has become annoying. I suspect he is no longer doing his position any favors. But, for some of you others - nobody is making you respond to Hussar. If you ignored him, he'd be left ranting at the air, and would quickly get bored. But, no, every time he start up, you have to try to prove him wrong, because, apparently, "Someone is wrong on the internet!" We eve have Ignore Lists to help you with that.
So, please, stop making the trip miserable for everyone else, people.
True enough. Which is why WotC is trying to drive an off-road vehicle between both roads so that people who travel behind it can see their road through the trees on both sides. The travelers just have to decide whether driving this stylish new 5th edition of car and only seeing part of their former road is better or worse than driving their old edition car that they've driven for years along the same familiar roads they've already been down.
In the 3E MotP this was not oblique. It was stated plainly and clearly.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Hm, I don't recall that being there; the first place I remember it is from the Player's Guide to Faerun - that may be because that reference explicitly called out that it connected the Realms cosmology to the Greyhawk one.
