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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ripzerai" data-source="post: 4001886" data-attributes="member: 38324">You could just as easily say that it's dumb for the "villains" to turn their firepower against the "heroes" rather than their true enemies.The only thing that is dumb is for a villain to ignore their main goals. If you think that their primary thoughts are, "I, as a villain, am naturally opposed to you, a hero, first and foremost." then naturally it would seem misguided for them to turn their firepower against anyone else, though the simpleminded nature of this attempt at characterization should be obvious. The words "hero" and "villain" are subjective (in a way that Good and Evil are not). The Hellbound: The Blood War boxed set included a minicomic about a cambion who sought only to become a "hero" in a battle against the baatezu. Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells defined the baatezu as beings created by the "gods of law" to exterminate the forces of the Abyss, an origin myth that if accepted would make it natural for the Blood War to be their primary goal. What would be "dumb" in this case would be for them to waste firepower against the forces of Good, whom they have no quarrel with. And, in Fiendish Codex II, they don't. In fact, they have a pact with Lawful Good that prevents any mutual aggression. They tempt mortals in order to bring more power to their plane, but only within the restrictions of their pact. They make hot war with only one group, the demons. What I object to most is the lack of imagination in WotC's rationales for the change. It would be easy enough to make a connection between the Abyss and the Hells if they wanted one, after all; they could both be connected to the Shadowfell, for example, in order to harvest the souls there. They claim that the Blood War doesn't affect the PCs directly and therefore isn't useful in a game, but this shows both an unacceptable lack of imagination and ignorance of the fact that there was an entire boxed set published in 2e devoted to involving the PCs directly with the Blood War. The claim that demons and devils need to be more different than they were in 3e in order to make the game "better" isn't even accompanied by the pretense of a rationale. We're supposed to simply take it on faith, I guess, that the more different two creatures are the better they are, as an axiom.Off the top of my head, the PCs could be hired by one side or the other to perform tasks for them, which may coincidentally be for the "greater good." They may be hired by celestials to smuggle good-aligned weapons to the fiends, hoping they'll kill each other off all the faster. They could work to destroy the portals the fiends are using to use the Material Plane (or another plane) as a battlefield. They can work to play one villain against another. They may be hired as mercenaries in the war. They may become enmeshed in the schemes of the yugoloths to prolong the war or to end it (and different groups of 'loths may have different schemes). They may be called to protect or relocate groups of innocent refugees of the Blood War battles.To say that a war - any war - isn't a useful background for generating plots is so unimaginative that I can't muster much respect for anyone who would go there.As for why some people don't like the idea of the Blood War, it's because their personal conception of the planes is based more on Milton than Moorcock (or Colin McComb). It's a matter of personal taste, in other words, and those who would attempt to fabricate "rational" justifications for their taste are forced to say some very stupid things.</blockquote>

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