D&D General The D&D Multiverse: Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die

[Snarf Zagyg]

The Amber series blew my mind when I first read it around age 12 or so. Honestly, if you want a primer on how parallel worlds can be, it's really the go-to original source.

Amber is actually a two-fer for me.

The series blew my mind when I first read it. (The First Chronicle s with Corwin, Merlin... eh...).
And the Amber RPG did as well, because a diceless RPG? WOAH.

 

[billd91]

I get your point, but I'm just not sure I agree, and that's largely because we have so many, many, MANY more anecdotal stories today with 5e because of social media and online forums, and a general view of what works and what doesn't work.

For OD&D/1e, we know this stuff happened, but we don't have as much anecdotal information about what worked and what didn't. We have a few examples that made it into official products - Murlynd with his six shooters in Greyhawk, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, the Queen of the Demonweb Pits, but at least for me, I know that some of these were reviled outliers at many tables even way back in the 1e/2e days. I don't know that we really know how well these genre-breaking pieces made it into the day to day table. We have a sense it's more excepted because guys like Gygax and Hargrave would throw this stuff into their games, but I'm not sure they made it into everyday tables.

And furthermore, IF they did, at some point, people did start to rebel against it. Maybe these rules just didn't really handle this stuff all that great? Great, my longsword does 1d8 damage, but you gave this guy a laser gun that does 2d10 (or whatever it was), and at some point, my guess is all this experimental genre clashing probably didn't work too well, and players and DMs realized it pretty quickly. So I'm just not so sure this stuff was that well tolerated even then.

I think it's important to note that you're also not sure the stuff wasn't broadly well tolerated either. That's the nature of anecdotes and sparse media for reporting. It only becomes something you can make reliable inferences from when you collect it systematically and consistently with appropriate sample building methodologies.

For my part, we played Barrier Peaks, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, Dungeonland, Isle of the Ape - and we had a fun time of it. We crossed multiversal barriers to try to unmake the Sword of Kas in modern day Milwaukee to keep it out of the hands of the Lord of the Pit and his Hadur Xu'calani followers. But it is also true that these were generally exceptions to our regular adventuring, most of which were a bit more traditional fantasy/swords and sorcery. It was a game - we were creating stories - many of which were very weird to look back on, but fun. That was the point.

 

[Charlaquin]

I get your point, but I'm just not sure I agree, and that's largely because we have so many, many, MANY more anecdotal stories today with 5e because of social media and online forums, and a general view of what works and what doesn't work.

For OD&D/1e, we know this stuff happened, but we don't have as much anecdotal information about what worked and what didn't. We have a few examples that made it into official products - Murlynd with his six shooters in Greyhawk, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, the Queen of the Demonweb Pits, but at least for me, I know that some of these were reviled outliers at many tables even way back in the 1e/2e days. I don't know that we really know how well these genre-breaking pieces made it into the day to day table. We have a sense it's more excepted because guys like Gygax and Hargrave would throw this stuff into their games, but I'm not sure they made it into everyday tables.

And furthermore, IF they did, at some point, people did start to rebel against it. Maybe these rules just didn't really handle this stuff all that great? Great, my longsword does 1d8 damage, but you gave this guy a laser gun that does 2d10 (or whatever it was), and at some point, my guess is all this experimental genre clashing probably didn't work too well, and players and DMs realized it pretty quickly. So I'm just not so sure this stuff was that well tolerated even then.

Indeed, cultural evolution doesn’t just happen for no reason. It can be modeled like biological evolution, with ideas as analogous to genes (the original meaning of the word “meme” before it became a term for a funny image shared on the internet). And like genes, memes may mutate randomly, but the success or failure of a given mutation is determined by selective pressures within the environment. If weird fiction is an endangered species, it got that way because of selective pressure against weird memes within the culture.

I do think, though, that weird fiction is making a comeback. Crossovers are all over pop culture right now, and that has fostered an environment where weirdness is often a more beneficial trait.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think it's important to note that you're also not sure the stuff wasn't broadly well tolerated either. That's the nature of anecdotes and sparse media for reporting. It only becomes something you can make reliable inferences from when you collect it systematically and consistently with appropriate sample building methodologies.

I mean, I think the fact that the culture of the game moved away from it is good evidence against its broad tolerance. Like I said in my previous post, cultural evolution doesn’t happen for no reason. It’s likely that the level of tolerance for weird fiction within the broad D&D playing culture has ebbed and flowed over time, as a result of various external factors creating evolutionary pressures favorable to and unfavorable to weird fiction at various points throughout the game’s history. It does seem that factors were more favorable in the game’s early history, grew less favorable over time, and is now trending towards favorability again.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In short, while I think that overall 5e has done an amazing job of incorporating numerous diverse cultural cues and viewpoints, the one thing it is not so great at is allowing the "weird" exception. Something which has long been baked into D&D's DNA.

We may agree on very little, Snarf, but on this? I am 100% with you.

5e very much tries not to have, nor allow, the weird unless people jump through half a dozen hoops.

I will say, however, that one of the very things that made the "Gygaxian multiverse" start to have cracks and fissures...was Gygax himself. Not any of the (many, many) quotes you can find out there where he said something controversial, though! The issue was the fixity of the Inner and Outer Planes. Whether Gygax intended it or not, things ossified (possibly even fossilized!) around this mechanistic, modernistic, "clean" classification.

And in that regard, I actually think 4e's World Axis was an effort to bring back some of the weird, without having to jettison the stuff people loved about the clockwork-universe model of the Great Wheel. That is, the World Axis more or less says that all of the various elemental planes, and the Abyss, and a whole bunch of other stuff besides, all of that is somewhere in the super-infinite (no aleph terminology here!) Elemental Chaos, where the raw magic of STUFF is super strong. The same goes for the other five places. The Prime Material (which was often just called "The World" IIRC) could host any material plane, and even the great weirdness of Athas was presented as a very, very distant Prime Material where, from its perspective, either nobody won the Dawn War, or the Primordials did and then just sort of abandoned the world. The Feywild can cover every possible variation of Fairyland, from Annwn to Wonderland to Ys to Avalon to Tír na nÓg and many, many more. The Shadowfell can cover Dracula's castle, every place where hauntings impinge upon mortal affairs, Mirkwood, every graveyard where the wall between life and death is thin, etc. And the Astral Sea both absorbed many of the characteristics of the Ethereal, and put essentially every other "domain" plane, places dedicated to something specific or special, into its own little potentially-infinite pocket within the even-infinite-er Astral.

Point being, it re-integrated the idea that there could be regular Worlds Beyond This One, while also keeping the "you can step under a bent yew and appear in Fairyland" element that made the rigid, defined planes compelling in the first place.

I think 5e could stand to bring back at least that part of 4e, and it's part of why I was disappointed to see the Great Wheel return with such force, for lack of a better term. When the Great Wheel is understood to be just one cosmologist's dream of a beautiful, perfect, symmetrical, consistent framework for a cosmos that resolutely refuses to be trapped in boxes like that (in other words, when the looseness of things like the World Axis are allowed to be just as true, From A Certain Point Of View), we get to have our cake and eat it too. Odin gets to sacrifice himself to himself, and yet still get the knowledge and power that result from the sacrifice.

 

[Micah Sweet]

We may agree on very little, Snarf, but on this? I am 100% with you.

5e very much tries not to have, nor allow, the weird unless people jump through half a dozen hoops.

I will say, however, that one of the very things that made the "Gygaxian multiverse" start to have cracks and fissures...was Gygax himself. Not any of the (many, many) quotes you can find out there where he said something controversial, though! The issue was the fixity of the Inner and Outer Planes. Whether Gygax intended it or not, things ossified (possibly even fossilized!) around this mechanistic, modernistic, "clean" classification.

And in that regard, I actually think 4e's World Axis was an effort to bring back some of the weird, without having to jettison the stuff people loved about the clockwork-universe model of the Great Wheel. That is, the World Axis more or less says that all of the various elemental planes, and the Abyss, and a whole bunch of other stuff besides, all of that is somewhere in the super-infinite (no aleph terminology here!) Elemental Chaos, where the raw magic of STUFF is super strong. The same goes for the other five places. The Prime Material (which was often just called "The World" IIRC) could host any material plane, and even the great weirdness of Athas was presented as a very, very distant Prime Material where, from its perspective, either nobody won the Dawn War, or the Primordials did and then just sort of abandoned the world. The Feywild can cover every possible variation of Fairyland, from Annwn to Wonderland to Ys to Avalon to Tír na nÓg and many, many more. The Shadowfell can cover Dracula's castle, every place where hauntings impinge upon mortal affairs, Mirkwood, every graveyard where the wall between life and death is thin, etc. And the Astral Sea both absorbed many of the characteristics of the Ethereal, and put essentially every other "domain" plane, places dedicated to something specific or special, into its own little potentially-infinite pocket within the even-infinite-er Astral.

Point being, it re-integrated the idea that there could be regular Worlds Beyond This One, while also keeping the "you can step under a bent yew and appear in Fairyland" element that made the rigid, defined planes compelling in the first place.

I think 5e could stand to bring back at least that part of 4e, and it's part of why I was disappointed to see the Great Wheel return with such force, for lack of a better term. When the Great Wheel is understood to be just one cosmologist's dream of a beautiful, perfect, symmetrical, consistent framework for a cosmos that resolutely refuses to be trapped in boxes like that (in other words, when the looseness of things like the World Axis are allowed to be just as true, From A Certain Point Of View), we get to have our cake and eat it too. Odin gets to sacrifice himself to himself, and yet still get the knowledge and power that result from the sacrifice.

To be fair, the World Axis was hardly considered "just as true" as the Great Wheel during the 4e era. Rather, it was literally the New World Order. They just changed how the universe worked. 3e's Manual of the Planes did a better job than any other version of D&D in presenting multiple options.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

They just changed how the universe worked.

It worked in a way that was vastly more compatible with different interpretations and indeed with the entire kind of fantasy D&D is about than the Great Wheel or similar though - it's no accident that even though they went back to the Great Wheel they retained significant elements of 4E's take. They'd have been better off if they'd retained the whole thing, but WotC didn't have the cojones for that, because 5E had to be an apology edition.

3e's Manual of the Planes did a better job than any other version of D&D in presenting multiple options.

It really did not. I suggest you re-read it.

It presents the Great Wheel cosmology in a particularly uninspired way and at great length. It has a few pages before that on making up your own cosmology, but basically only thinks much about fairly close and/or cut-down variants of the the Great Wheel, and then late in the book it has 20 pages of "variant planes", ranging from the genuinely inspired to the "Why did you waste time on this?".

What is interesting is you can clearly see some of the concepts that got used in 4E's World Axis beginning to emerge in that variant plane section.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It worked in a way that was vastly more compatible with different interpretations and indeed with the entire kind of fantasy D&D is about than the Great Wheel or similar though - it's no accident that even though they went back to the Great Wheel they retained significant elements of 4E's take. They'd have been better off if they'd retained the whole thing, but WotC didn't have the cojones for that, because 5E had to be an apology edition.

It really did not. I suggest you re-read it.

It presents the Great Wheel cosmology in a particularly uninspired way and at great length. It has a few pages before that on making up your own cosmology, but basically only thinks much about fairly close and/or cut-down variants of the the Great Wheel, and then late in the book it has 20 pages of "variant planes", ranging from the genuinely inspired to the "Why did you waste time on this?".

What is interesting is you can clearly see some of the concepts that got used in 4E's World Axis beginning to emerge in that variant plane section.

All of that is preference. Your first statement boils down to, "well, I think the World Axis was better". That doesn't refute my point at all, it just expresses your subjective feelings on the subject.

Your second statement doesn't refute me either. Whether you liked what they did in the 3e MotP or not, can you refute that they did a better job presenting alternatives in cosmology than any other edition of D&D? With at least one counter-example? Because that's the point I'm making.

My personal feelings about the World Axis (cool, but I prefer the Great Wheel) or the 3e MotP (I liked the 1e version and Planescape better across the board) are no more relevant to my post than your personal feelings about those things are.

 

[jolt]

In the early days, people not only incorporated Star Wars stuff into their game, they used D&S to play Star Wars. Especially early on, there weren't many other options. It wasn't that people were dissatisfied, but as time went on, there were more options with more directed play, or companies going for specifically generic systems like GURPS. Nowadays, when you vlcan have 6 different supers RPGs that play nothing alike, people tend to settle into very specific gaming wants.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

We may agree on very little, Snarf, but on this? I am 100% with you.

5e very much tries not to have, nor allow, the weird unless people jump through half a dozen hoops.

I will say, however, that one of the very things that made the "Gygaxian multiverse" start to have cracks and fissures...was Gygax himself. Not any of the (many, many) quotes you can find out there where he said something controversial, though! The issue was the fixity of the Inner and Outer Planes. Whether Gygax intended it or not, things ossified (possibly even fossilized!) around this mechanistic, modernistic, "clean" classification.

Good comment, and I don't disagree with any of it. I think you make good points about 4e, but I snipped them because I don't have anything to add to that.

The one thing I did want to address is this- I think you are both correct and incorrect. Yes, the rigidity of the outer planes (to you, to me, and to all right thinking people- which are the people that agree with us) became a problem.

But I'd argue (and I have, in a series of so many essays with so many words) that this may have been caused or started by Gygax, but it wasn't really his fault. Let me explain-

To me, the beginning of the end of the Gygaxian Multiverse was, weirdly enough, the Manual of the Planes, which was devised and released after Gygax was ousted. A lot of people really liked it, but the problem with that book is that it was 128 pages of detail about the various planes .... and do you know what it devoted to the infinite multiverse of Prime Material Planes?

.... three pages. In an APPENDIX. And it reduced the glorious diversity to three attributes that the DM would roll-
The Physical Factor (things like sentience is impossible, because all matter reacts with other matter and explodes, or nonsentient items like chairs are fully aware).
The Magical Factor- (from universal spell casting for all sentient beings limited only to their imagination, to no magic or imagination or creativity can exist).
The Temporal Factor- (weirdly, not all about time! It's really how closely linked the plane is to your prime plane; so it can go from very different because things are all different colors and planets lack atmospheres to the plane is similar to your prime, but millions of years in the past).

Importantly, it was boring, not helpful, and travelling to other prime planes had a decent chance of killing you from a random role of the dice.

So the book was basically, "Look how cool the outer planes are, but the primes? They suck." And that carried on after that.

I would argue that Gygax mainly thought of the outer planes as sources for stuff to come into the primes- devils, demons, solars, and so on. For him (and others at the time) the outer planes weren't interesting, because you had the infinite variety of the prime material multiverse. Both at his home table and in published adventures, he was constantly using the wild variety of the multiverse.

So I think it's pretty clear that Gygax never intended it, and that the calcification can be traced back to a specific book that was published after he left.

Anyway, this isn't arguing against what you're saying, so much as clarifying a small point. Like I wrote, good comment, no notes.