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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6152267" data-attributes="member: 2067">I don't really agree with this point.First, the idea of the game needing a "default setting" is suspect. These books are supposed to be instruction manuals for D&D, and if they are that, then part of how you play D&D is by creating your own setting. The instruction manuals should be showing you how to do that. There doesn't need to be a default. There should be example settings, but examples are different from defaults because there is no assumption that you will be using the example. The Great Wheel is a good example. Is is not a good assumption. Second, whatever example they use doesn't need to be the assumption for EVERY D&D WORLD ALWAYS. It's one thing to have a solid and flexible example cosmology. It's quite another to deploy that as a requirement for all of your settings, as this seems to be. The one is a useful model to follow and for DMs who don't want to think about it to opt into. The latter is pointless hegemony for the sake of it. If I want to set a game in Ravenloft, I shouldn't have to worry about where that sits in relation to Ysgard and the Elemental Plane of Vacuum and whatnot. If I set a game in Eberron, I shouldn't have to worry about where Ravenloft is and how to get to Bytopia. Third, when the books talk about extraplanar things, they don't have to be very specific. Okay, maybe the Demons are from Hell, but is this the Nine Hells a la Planescape, or Hell a la Christian mythology or Hel like Old Norse myths or Xibalba a la the Mayans or maybe Naraka from certain flavors of Buddhism. Maybe it's Hell as envisioned by comic books, or Hell like the Baha'i faith describes in which case, devils might just be creatures that were spiritually far from god -- humans, just twisted. Which one is it? Doesn't matter. It could be any of them. It could be ALL of them. It could be some of them and not others.And this is assuming the DM even uses devils in their game. For those that don't, it's even less necessary to make a specific, monolithic "hell" that they can come from. So I don't buy that it's necessary, design-wise. I also can't see how it's profitable. For every make-believe Hellscape the dev team thinks up (or shamelessly appropriates from other media or twists from history), that's a unique IP. That's a new potential hook for characters, enemies, settings...new worlds, new art, new fiction, new comics, new movies...all safely within your own proprietary version of Hell. Why settle for just one?I suppose I can sort of see a branding argument, but I think some of 4e's biggest missteps showed us all the harm that putting branding ahead of your design can do to a game (the GSL's infamous "you can't redefine elf" clause). Repeating 4e's (and 2e's) insistence on one overarching cosmology would be putting that branding ahead of the gameplay experience, harming the latter in pursuit of the former. There's millions of hours of games and adventures and settings and motifs that reinforce the D&D brand. A cosmology is not necessarily a strong addition to that (though I'm hardly a brand analyst, so maybe I'm way off base here).</blockquote>

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