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

[EATherrian]

I miss the modrons.

Also, for some reason this talk of "planes that don't make sense" made me think of Traveller world-building, where you randomly rolled up features of a world and then had fun trying to figure out how it could possibly exist like that.

People don't seem to like random much anymore. I love it. I still prefer rolling for a character and figuring out how to make the scores work then making a character and setting the scores such. It's a problem I see more now, all characters have the same scores, just in different attributes. And I'm also sure I'm not the only one who made a sector with random worlds. OK, it was a domain....

edited to add: I didn't think this needed a different post but I whole-heartedly agree with that Cat story. These models are just a way to see the Cosmology, maybe they all exist together from different points of view.

 

[I'm A Banana]

From my time in the old World of Darkness, I can report that a reality shaped by belief tends to run into troubles with other cosmological tropes you might want to establish. When I was helming Werewolf: The Apocalypse, I frequently found that I had to outright ignore or disagree with Mage: The Ascension if I wanted the themes of Werewolf to come through. Specifically, Mage had a very strong "humans are the most important creatures in the universe because their belief shapes the universe itself." Werewolf, on the other hand, was about "Humans are not the most important things in the universe, and in acting like they are, they're doing a lot of damage to everything else." You probably wouldn't get the same problem in D&D exactly, what with the consensus winding up including humans, gnolls, neo-otyughs, aboleth, couatl, devils, etc. (It would raise a lot more interesting questions, though. What if human belief is a minority? What would a world be like where what humans believe is not strong enough to overcome what the more numerous orcs and goblins believe, or what dragons believe?)

I think the big leap of logic that needs to be made to see it in PS-style is this:

There is not just one universe.

The universes overlap. According to my understanding of the "consensual cosmology," in a world where humans believe they're the most important and werewolves believe that humans aren't the most important, they're both right. The world responds to both of those beliefs as if they were true.

The only time that can't hold is when they come into direct conflict in the narrative somehow (when humans are blatantly disregarding the laws of nature and the werewolves have to stop them; or when the werewolves ar exterminating humans and the humans have to fight them off). Where they come into conflict, the answer is often academic in the face of the tooth and fang and sword and gun.

I mean, how do you even prove the truth of something like that, from the standpoint of a native? You can't, really. You're not in any position to ask the Creator with any sense of certainty (and, in D&D, even the Creators could be lying out their wazoo, according to certain beliefs).

I tend to think that overly defined universes kind of cut the creative threads and philosophical disputes before they get going. From the perspective of the role we're playing, there's no reason that mutually exclusive things can't be simultaneously true.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Wait, what? The freedom to mold reality by force of belief is a limiting thing? That's pretty much the 'anything can potentially occur' stamp on a cosmology, and that's a limit to what you could do? I'm confused. It's a lot more open to change and diversity than a much more limited, static system.

You really are twisting around what I was trying to say into a totally different point.

Basically, you are taking one thing you consider to be an advantage to the "power of belief" system, which is the "infinitely mutable" idea, and then you saying that I am arguing against that advantage rather than the system which has that advantage. Or rather, you are simply implying that the only way to have an infinitely mutable setting is to base it on the power of belief, which is totally false. There are countless ways to have an infinitely mutable setting without relying on that assumption. As other people have pointed out, the easiest way to do so is to simply make no such assumption at all.

Besides, the "infinitely mutable" nature of the "power of belief" is false, since by its nature what people don't believe to be true can't be true, so there is no real way to create a conflict between people's beliefs and the actual truth of the world within such a setting. That means there are certain plots and stories that can't be told within such a setting, so it is not truly infinitely mutable. Once you place a limiting guideline or rule of any sort upon something, then it can no longer be said to be all-inclusive, no matter the kind of rule you place.

However, if you want to know what I really meant, my comment was directed much more at the very specific idea that the power of a god, or even the very divinity of a god, is directly related to how many people worship that god. I detest that concept with a passion, for a variety of reasons ranging from general gut reaction to my preferences for alternative systems and stories that can only be told in alternate systems.

Besides, I may as well say that I don't consider infinite mutability to even be a valuable trait in a setting, since I prefer to simply create a large number of settings that each have a much more specific feel and limited set of traits. The overall mutability of the game is basically the same either way (since the only limitations on any game of D&D are the limitations placed upon it by the players and DM), so neither approach has any advantage whatsoever.

 

[Hairfoot]

If the OP is still relevant at this point, I do like that the 4E cosmology makes the physical negotiation of the planes more accessible, but it seems to come at the expense of some of the mysticism of planar travel that could be had with the Great Wheel.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

A thing that doesn't work in a "Belief is power and shapes reality" setting:

A dead god returns. Nobody worshipped him anymore. Those that even remember him consider him dead and gone. But yet, he does. How can he ever get back to "reality" if that would require someone believing in his return?

The hidden truth about the origin of the world (or another, important thing). Nobody knows it anymore. But there are still some ancient texts speaking of it. The texts were gone, and nobody expected to find the. But digging up the ruins of an old temple unveils some of them, and unveils a terrible secret that no one would have believed.

How could such a scenario work without anyone already knowing about it and believing it?

 

[avin]

A thing that doesn't work in a "Belief is power and shapes reality" setting:

A dead god returns. Nobody worshipped him anymore. Those that even remember him consider him dead and gone. But yet, he does. How can he ever get back to "reality" if that would require someone believing in his return?

The dead god should not return by himself.

The dead god returns when people start worshipping him again.

 

[CapnZapp]

I feel the Great Wheel was a well detailed *example* of a cosmology, but I don't think it makes for a good default. I think the 4e presentation of cosmology lends itself much better to homebrewing, particularly for the starting DM who simply wants to add a few planes/domains here and there without having to worry about where they fit into some kind quasi-scholarly structure of alignment, elements and energies.

I agree.

Now the cosmology is much more undefined, ad hoc and therefore mysterious (as in "not bound by laws or predictability").

All good, IMHO.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The dead god should not return by himself.

The dead god returns when people start worshipping him again.

What's with the should? Aren't you in the end telling me that this is a story I can't do under the assumption of "Belief is power and shapes reality"?

 

[avin]

What's with the should? Aren't you in the end telling me that this is a story I can't do under the assumption of "Belief is power and shapes reality"?

The "should" was more like a suggestion for "a campaign where belief is power and shapes reality, the worshipper's belief that their god would return awoke him", not a rule for every campaign around.

In your campaign you could do anything you want. (editing) The texts could be the trigger. Even if that gods name is unknown by now, the text refer to him, to what he has done. The guy who read that is really impressed with what he reads and the god slowly is triggered to woke up. Maybe he made that on purpose, like a guarantee of comeback

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Don't be to focused on this example. The main gist is that stuff can exist that no one knew or believed. A dead god returning is an example for that. If believe shapes the reality, that cannot happen, because the point was no one believed it. (Of course, if only a few believe it, it stands to question why their singular belief is so much stronger than that of the rest of the world.)

The dead god returning on his own can have special consequences - first, he might be without allies. No one expected him, no one wanted him. But yet he is there, taking an interest in things, defying expectations, wrecking plans. The unique thing might be contacting him peacefully and figuring out what he wants, how or why he came back. You can't hope for proxies to help them (like cultists that still worshipped him.)

Hey, you don't even have to return him alone. It could just be that the cultist that returned him find themselves surprised that he is decidedly not how they or the rest of the world expected or believed him to be. He doesn't see them as allies, but as pathetic weaklings and destroys the cultists first. He doesn't enter a fight with Bahamut as everyone would have expected, aind instead destroys Vecna. So, what's really going on? How did he trick the cultists? Did he change? How could he, if he was dead? Is he even himself or did something else came through that summoning circle? Again, what does he want?