Planescape, 4e, and the problem of worlds without history

[TwinBahamut]

I doubt I can convince you that Planescape is actually cool, but I do want to comment on a few of your criticisms.

I think your points about some design decisions being driven by symmetry are correct. I also agree with you that the blood war feels contrived. My argument, however, is that the actual implementation of these aspects of Planescape is significantly more than their one-line descriptors. For example, the blood war, while given a weak premise, was fleshed out to become a viable campaign setting unto itself. Its value was in its ultimate execution, not simply its initial premise. The same goes for planes built to satisfy a symmetrical alignment system. Reading the original Planescape boxed sets, it's hard not to be impressed with how expansive and interesting these places really were.

Note that this is very common in D&D. No one is impressed if you say that you wrote an adventure about a death cult that must be stopped by the PCs. The payoff is almost always in the details.

This is a fair point, but you also have to keep something in mind: I never have seen a proper Planescape book in my life. You can criticize me for judging the setting so harshly without ever seeing an actual setting book for it, but I can counter that by asking you how I could possibly get a good feel for the setting in the first place. I started playing D&D at the same time 3E was launched, and by that time the actual Planescape setting was already an old, probably out-of-print product.

Instead, I got treated to the 3E Manual of the Planes, which carried over all of the traditional concepts of Planescape, without whatever details you think redeems the setting/cosmology. After all, they didn't just reprint all of the old stuff and convert it. They held to the ideas of Planescape, like you are asking them to do again, but that is not the same thing as keeping Planescape alive. Ultimately, the only parts of Planescape that continue to persist past the 2E era are those "contrived one-line descriptors".

I guess, the question is: "Why hold to tradition and keep propagating the ideas of Planescape's Great Wheel, if the actual details that made the setting good are not being continued as well?" At this point, trying to limit 4E cosmology to Planescape merely locks new players into playing a cosmology that is only really fun and useable for the people who have been playing since the 1E or 2E days.

On a totally different note, I will claim that, even at the "one-line descriptor" level, the 4E cosmology is better than the Great Wheel cosmology. The four main planes of the new cosmology have very strong mythological resonance and numerous other advantages. On the other hand, the core assumptions and nature of the Great Wheel often weakens and distorts the ability of the players and DM to understand the game world using their own experiences and preconceptions, since it is so unusual, abstract, and overly symmetrical. For example, the Blood War is inherently a bad idea for a core setting assumption because the idea of an absolute separation between "demons" and "devils" is very weird to someone unfamiliar with D&D, let alone the idea that this difference is somehow more important to the demons and devils than the battle between good and evil. On the other hand, the idea of a "world of the dead" like the Shadowfell is seen everywhere in myth and fantasy, so it is easily comprehensible and thus more easily adaptable and usable.

 

[Sammael]

You know, whenever there is a Rifts or Palladium related topic, people always say "yeah, the rules suck, but the world is AWESOME." This has been a standard response for years now. The reason? Continuity. Well, that, and some pretty nifty ideas to begin with. And everything ties together in the Megaverse.

People almost never say that D&D has AWESOME worlds. One of the reasons, in my opinion, is that D&D has never been able to decide whether it wants to be a DM toolkit for creating homebrews, or a rich, detailed campaign setting. As a DM toolkit, it's always been... too detailed. Its rich, detailed campaign settings have never been... integrated enough. So each new generation of designers tries something new, and, in my opinion, fails to fix this issue.

D&D needs a nice, richly detailed, fantastic campaign setting at its core. I thought for sure that's what WotC intended to do with Eberron, and I was fine with that choice, even though I disliked the setting. It also needs to produce one or more DM world-building sourcebooks, which would allow the DM to create his own world, cosmology included (for those DMs who even bother with the cosmology - we seem to be in a minority).

And finally, WotC needs to leave Planescape alone. For all the cries of hatred towards Planescape and the Great Wheel, it seems that WotC designers revert to plundering it for ideas all the damn time. Where's the creativity, gentlemen? If your target audience can't stand the Great Wheel and wants the Astral Sea and its domains instead, and if you don't know what the hell a guardinal is, and there is all this damnable symmetry (which is false, q.v. the Rule of Threes) please lay your hands off the setting I happen to like. Leave it in the past and by all means, produce new and exciting and, above all, ORIGINAL material for your new customers. Those who want to plunk Great Wheel planes into the Astral Sea can do so easily.

EDIT: This marks my 2000th post on ENWorld. w00t!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

EDIT: This marks my 2000th post on ENWorld. w00t!

Congratulations. Onwards to the next 2000!

 

[TwinBahamut]

And finally, WotC needs to leave Planescape alone. For all the cries of hatred towards Planescape and the Great Wheel, it seems that WotC designers revert to plundering it for ideas all the damn time. Where's the creativity, gentlemen? If your target audience can't stand the Great Wheel and wants the Astral Sea and its domains instead, and if you don't know what the hell a guardinal is, and there is all this damnable symmetry (which is false, q.v. the Rule of Threes) please lay your hands off the setting I happen to like. Leave it in the past and by all means, produce new and exciting and, above all, ORIGINAL material for your new customers. Those who want to plunk Great Wheel planes into the Astral Sea can do so easily.

I don't entirely agree with the first part of your post, but I can get behind this paragraph. As I have mentioned before, one of the greatest weaknesses of the 4E Manual of the Planes is that it does nothing but mine the Great Wheel and Planescape in order to fill in the gaps of the new cosmology, and that just doesn't work. The Abyss is a good example of this, since it is supposed to be a region of the Elemental Chaos, but its actual description presents it as being nothing more than a slightly tweaked version of the Great Wheel Abyss, so it hardly seems like it fits the Elemental Chaos at all. The addition of the old Astral Plane color pool concept into the Astral Sea nearly manages to wreck the fantastic imagery of the plane and reduce it all to blandness again. Meanwhile, the excellent new planes of the Feywild and Shadowfell seem under-developed and lack detailed thought and imagination in the book. If nothing else, there is a surprising lack of discussion of the nature and role of the dead in the Shadowfell, which is bizarre considering its nature as the plane of the dead.

 

[avin]

As a 3.5 and 4E DM World Axis doesn't bother me, Wheel or Axis aren't canon for me...

...what bothers me is this "everywhere is a playground, everywhere is a dungeon" 4E vision.

I like planar games in shades of gray and 4E fluff is too colorful for me.

Sammael has a point: Wotc, leave Planescape for Planescape fans. I want Planescape Torment, not Temple of Elemental Evil (which rocks from the rules point of view but sucks in story).

 

[Keefe the Thief]

No, please Wotc, bring out 4e Planescape with changes as you see fit. I can subsequently do what i did with FR: use all the different versions as desired.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I think Planescape was awesome, and it remains one of my all-time favorites.

However, it should be remembered that Planescape was primarily intended as a setting in its own right, and that's not what was needed for the new edition. Instead, what was needed was a planar cosmology as an adjunct to Material Plane adventures - somewhere where the PCs could go for a couple of adventures, and then return to. Since Planescape deemphasized the importance of any individual material prime world, there was always the risk that the player characters, upon discovering a door to Sigil, would simply stay there and not return to their home plane, derailing any plans the DM might have had for his campaign and forcing it into an entirely new direction as they explore this new, alien environment.

In the 4E cosmology, the material plane is "the center of the universe" much more than in previous editions, thanks to the fact that both the Feywild and the Shadowfell strongly echo it. And for a "generic cosmology", this is a lot more useful than the highly detailed Planescape cosmology, no matter how well-crafted it was.

I am content with the existing Planescape material - it has managed to cover all the planes in detail and thus can be considered fairly "finished". The new cosmology has a lot of interesting ideas as well which take planar adventuring in new direction, and it has a lot of potential for the future. I will watch with interest how it will develop, even if it isn't Planescape.

 

[timbannock]

I disagree that the 4e cosmology is simplified relative to the Great Wheel cosmology. It is much less stratified, predefined and ordered, but every one of the planes of the Great Wheel can be placed easily in the Astral Sea, Elemental Chaos, Shadowfell, Feywild or World. In fact, since there's no exhaustive detailing of the realms or assignment of the various planes to alignments, you can include many planes (such as those found in Beyond Countless Doors supplement) more easily than you could in the Great Wheel. If any DM enjoys the structure of the Great Wheel, the entire kit and kaboodle can placed right in the Astral Sea, complete with all of the connections between the various planes.

This is very true. Before MOTP came out in 3e, I had my characters interacting with Sigil and the Planes.

Here's how I do it: there are several views of the Planes (just like in Planescape). Some people believe in the Great Wheel as it was in 2e. Some believe it's more nebulous than that, and the connections aren't quite that stratified. This fits with Planescape's ideas of belief and perspective just fine.

And EVERYONE agrees that the crazy amounts of magic interactions and the depowering of clerics by planar distance to their deity's realm were stupid.

 

[Dausuul]

As is change for the sake of change. My argument is that much of that tradition became both color and background, and thus was something other than the route application of past ideas.

I despise Planescape and always have. I found the Great Wheel (in its 1E, pre-Planescape incarnation) fascinating to read about, very evocative, but in the end not something I'd want to use in an actual game. The 4E cosmology is the first time in my entire gaming career that I've been willing to use the "default" cosmology more or less as written... although that may change once I see the new Manual of the Planes.

I will concede that Planescape is a rich and detailed setting, and for those who are into that type of setting, it's brilliant. But it's way too detailed, intricate, and specialized to be D&D's default cosmology. The default cosmology needs to be open, flexible, and not too detailed, leaving plenty of room for individual DMs to put their stamp on it. I think 4E does a bang-up job with this.

If Planescape is ported into 4E, it should be as a separate setting in its own right, not shoehorned into everything else. If that port doesn't happen, well, nothing's stopping you from taking your old 2E setting material and using it in 4E.

 

[Nifft]

I spent lots of time trying to justify something that looked like the Great Wheel in my mostly-alignment-free homebrew setting.

Now I vaguely resent having to spend that time designing it again, but it looks like the building blocks are better suited to my purpose. I'll probably end up with something that looks like neither the Great Wheel nor the 4e cosmology, but will use the 4e mechanics.

Cheers, -- N