I actually have no bias on this point. If D&D5 goes Planescape, I will love it, because it is Planescape. If it goes Astral Sea, I will love it, because it is the Astral Sea. The fact that Planescape was ham-handed about its incorporation of material from other D&D settings that wanted nothing to do with it is not bias, it's reality. The Dark Sun material goes out of its way to cut the setting off from the then-established Great Wheel cosmology, and the Planescape material just keeps reeling it back in.
That behavior is the source of most of the resentment the community feels toward Planescape and why the setting is so controversial today. If they'd just left well enough alone maybe there wouldn't be such backlash today.
I think that Planescape's "controversial" nature is, if not entirely fabricated, then at least overstated by those who simply don't care for its design philosophy. The Dark Sun example you raised is actually a good point about this.
The idea that Dark Sun was completely cut off from all other campaign settings before Planescape came along is an idea that starts to fragment when you look at it closely. The
Black Spine adventure is about a githyanki invasion of Athas from the Astral Plane.
City by the Silt Sea has an artifact that allows Dregoth to travel the planes. Ravenloft's
Forbidden Lore boxed set (and, later,
Domains of Dread) have an entire Island of Terror plucked from Athas. Spelljammer's
Complete Spacefarer's Handbook explicitly addresses the question of spelljamming and Athas's crystal sphere.
Defilers and Preservers talks about the chances and hazards of getting to the planes from Athas and vice versa.
Athas was isolated, but it never tried to present itself as not being a part of the AD&D Great Wheel cosmology, or unconnected to other campaign settings. Planescape's few mentions of Dark Sun characters or items aren't really a factor in that. The "controversy" in that regard is overblown.
That's not how I read it. It's inarguable that the D&D4 cosmology destroyed more than it created, because of the sheer quantity of material published for Planescape, but to say that the cornerstone of D&D4 cosmology design was "invalidation" -- in your words -- really marginalizes the new content.
I understand that it's not how you took the statement, but I feel pretty confident in saying that that's what [MENTION=11697]Shemeska[/MENTION] meant. It's not a statement regarding the nature or quality of the new content - it's that part of the design philosophy in making the new content was that it invalidate the old content.
The biggest example for me remains the divisions between the Ethereal and its coterminous planes and the Astral and its coterminous planes. It has many consequences, but perhaps the most visible is spellcasting. Playing a wizard or cleric in Planescape is a nightmare (admittedly, an entertaining nightmare for some), because there's this arbitrary (in my opinion) split between the two halves of the cosmology. Ethereal spells don't work on the Outer Planes. Astral spells don't work on the Inner Planes. Elemental spells "work" on the Outer Planes (for some reason), but are /colored/ by the plane they're in. Every Outer Plane has its own list of spell school effects. Clerics lose an insane amount of power when traveling to the Inner Planes. Powerful magic doesn't work, full stop, in the "center" of the Outlands. And ALL of this can be hand-waved if your character is carrying the right "key."
This entire system is incredibly thematic, which is great; unfortunately it is also monstrously and unnecessarily complicated.
Well, let's look at that in greater detail. I don't see the split between the Astral/Outer Planes and the Ethereal/Inner Planes as being arbitrary, since it's explained in what I thought as a clear fashion that neither directly reach each other, but both reach the Prime Material Plane. In that regard, the multiverse is shaped something like a large letter "V," where the Outer and Inner Planes are the two tops ends of the V, Astral and Ethereal Planes are the center of the two lines, and the Prime Material Plane is the point where the two touch.
The reason that "elemental" spells work on the Outer Planes is because they're not "elemental," per se; that is, they don't draw on or use the energies of the Inner Planes. You don't open a tiny portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire when you cast a
fireball spell. You do, however, utilize the Ethereal Plane when you cast a
secret chest, so to me the reason for why some spells work on a given plane and others don't is self-evident.
It's also worth noting that the failure of magic in the Outlands is by stages (e.g. spell levels) rather than being binary (it's also the one thing you mentioned that can't be fixed by spell keys or power keys). Likewise, clerics don't lose that much power when travelling to the Inner Planes if their deity is on the Outer Planes - it's much more restrictive between different Outer Planes.
Of course, none of this is an inconsistency with the actual material. Things vary, to be sure, but that variance is in keeping with the rules and principles of the setting itself. Nothing is self-contradictory. And, as you noted, some people quite enjoy this.
It's not necessarily a weakness, but -- again, in my opinion -- it means that there is nothing quintessentially **D&D** about Planescape. A lot of AD&D2 settings had similar problems. Dark Sun goes out of its way to throw out core D&D concepts. Spelljammer, too. Birthright is another good example. In a lot of ways, the AD&D2 settings were about diversifying D&D, and that's not terrible, but I think it's a big part of what killed the brand. I /like/ the idea of a universal D&D cosmology. I /like/ the idea of an Athas with recognizable D&D races and class roles. I like D&D as /D&D/.
I honestly believe there is /strength/ there.
This is another area of fundamental disagreement between us, then. When we got paladins in the 3.5 incarnation of Dark Sun in
Dragon magazine, I cringed. That represented a degree of homogenization that I didn't find desirable at all. I think that the diversification of the campaign settings was a good thing, as it showed that D&D could be more than a pastiche of a pulp/Tolkien mixture.
I won't go so far as to say that D&D should necessarily try to be all things to all people, but the game was created by drawing on a diverse background of literary and mythological materials, and trying to broaden its horizons and mix-and-match various aspects is where I believe its greatest strengths lie.
I'm going to try to keep this brief because this post is already too long. D&D has never handled elves well. They're immortal, but they're not really. They're accomplished woodsmen, but they're also powerful wizards. They're fae, but they're also real. Instead of embracing this dichotomy, every edition of D&D prior to 4th tried to solve the problem by introducing more subspecies of elf. That's all the AD&D2 eladrin are -- super elves. They're not just to elves what angels are to humans; they're strongly implied to be the same things elves are, just on the other side of whatever veil it is that separates PC elves from NPC elves.
Insofar as the depiction of elves goes, I lay that one largely at the feet of Tolkien, since most of the "PC race" demihumans are lifted fairly whole-cloth from Middle-Earth (though, to be fair, the idea of "powerful elven wizards" doesn't seem to be too Tolkien-esque, I suppose). That said, I'm not sure what you mean by 2E's eladrin not being to elves as angels are to humans, since that struck me as exactly what they are. Unless I'm misremembering, mortal petitioners can become eladrin, after all (unlike, say, the guardinals), which sort of puts them in the same boat as angels - now, this was divided up by mortal alignment, rather than mortal race, but that's not something that ever concerned me.
Now, I /liked/ AD&D2 eladrin. I did. They're some of my favorite extraplanar entities. But the D&D4 solution of breaking the elf down into two parts -- its prime material mundane identity, and its extraplanar fae identity -- just /works/ for me. Finally I see in the rules, on paper, the relationship between grey, high, and wood elves the way that I have always understood it in my mind. The AD&D2 eladrin still exist in D&D4 -- but the division between them and their PC kin has been shattered.
See, I saw it fundamentally differently. I didn't assign much differences to various elven "sub-races" in 2E, as to me they were little more than somewhere along the lines of being somewhere between sub-species and ethnicities, in terms of how different they actually were. They all still fell under the umbrella of "mortal elves," as opposed to their fey, seelie counterparts that were the eladrin.
The 4E version of eladrin basically reduced them to a similar standing as the various elven sub-races, removing the "extraplanar fae identity" altogether. Yes, they were from the Feywild, but that seemed to manifest as making them nothing more than blink-elves. Now, that did shatter the division between them and their "PC kin," but in doing so it made them little different from them. If all they wanted was another sub-race of elf, why not just make another sub-race of elf?
Anyway, that's it in a nutshell. It's good metaphor for a lot of the design that went into D&D4: "we have two things that should be one." See also succubus/erinyes for a situation where that logic failed them.
I don't see it as being that cut and dried, at least in terms for how prevalent that particular design philosophy was in 4E. Things like merging the Elemental Planes and the Abyss seemed more like "we have this one thing, that should be two."
I'm not having this argument with you, because OT shenanigans, but holy CRAP do I disagree.
This doesn't strike me as being off-topic. This is the sort of discussion and debate that's not only on topic, but vigorous and enjoyable.
That's why I said, "By the same token."
Ah, fair enough then.
Eliminating the default cosmology would, of course, eliminate the need for us to travel down the road in the first place.
