D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....

[Hussar]

No, 2e already forced every world in the same multiverse. 4e simply made the misstake of forcing them into a different cosmos. 5e is going back to how things have been in D&D for the longest time. Why would you lose / not use them? Just take the stats and ignore the fluff. I can take a balors stats and say in my world these are the stats of the Rabbit of Caerbannog and not give a **** about what fluff these stats originally came attached to

Except that Balor's, for example, don't exist in a vacuum. I play with players who have all played for a decade or more. All of them have DM'd. All of them are fairly well versed in D&D lore. If I drop a Balor, that looks like a Balor, but, isn't really a Balor, they're always going to have questions on the mind. If I feature an adventure with a Balor side by side with three Ice Devils, it can get problematic, if I have players who care about D&D lore.

So, largely, most of the really strongly Planescape tied monsters, I simply ignore. Makes my life easier.

 

[Nikosandros]

In over three decades of gaming, I have never (at least to my knowledge) met anyone who didn't feel entirely free to reimagine some or all of the planar cosmology, if they chose to do so. I'm not saying such people don't/can't exist, but I find the concern that DMs will treat the Great Wheel cosmology as some sort of cage (no Sigil pun intended) to be... let's say "largely unfounded."

Indeed. For my longest running campaign, I liberally took a lot of elements from PS, but I changed them to my whim. As I've always done with all the campaign settings that I've used (often mixing stuff from several of them). I'd be very surprised to learn that what I do is somewhat unusual.

 

[Mouseferatu]

If I drop a Balor, that looks like a Balor, but, isn't really a Balor, they're always going to have questions on the mind. If I feature an adventure with a Balor side by side with three Ice Devils, it can get problematic, if I have players who care about D&D lore.

Feature, not bug, IMHO. It instantly tells the players "This campaign doesn't use the standard lore, do don't make assumptions."

 

[pkt77242]

I refer to the Basic rules. But they seem copy-pasted from the Standard rules.

For example, all clerics must worship gods. Therefore all settings must have gods. Per the rules as written.

Personally, I have been playing D&D for years now. Right now I am tired of fake-medieval tropes. My intention was to use the 5e rules for a modern setting, to play around with reinventions of current events and thought experiments concerning recent scientific developments. But the rules as written make this more enjoyable setting impossible.

Likewise the rules referring to the interconnectedness of all settings makes a modern worldview impossible.

It isn't just one thing mentioned once, but a death of thousand cuts everywhere seemingly in every paragraph, with reinforcements of the 'official' worldview that kills imagination.

So let me see if I understand this correctly. You want to run a campaign that isn't in a D&D world but you want Wizards to tailor the rules to perfectly fit your world so that you don't have to do much work. Did I miss something? The change you mention about Clerics and worshiping God's seems to be an easy change and what did you really expect them to say about Clerics?

 

[Mirtek]

If I drop a Balor, that looks like a Balor

Who says anything about looking like a balor? Looks are purely fluff too (arguably size is mechanical rather than fluff). It's the dreaded Rabbit of Caerbannog. With his smoldering fur (flame aura), the lightning crackling around his rodent teeth (vorpal lightning sword) and overlong burning tail (flame wip) PS: Be careful it's rumored to have further magical powers

 

[Hussar]

Who says anything about looking like a balor? Looks are purely fluff too (arguably size is mechanical rather than fluff). It's the dreaded Rabbit of Caerbannog. With his smoldering fur (flame aura), the lightning crackling around his rodent teeth (vorpal lightning sword) and overlong burning tail (flame wip) PS: Be careful it's rumored to have further magical powers

But, Mirtek, what if I actually want to use a baler?

 

[wingsandsword]

I refer to the Basic rules. But they seem copy-pasted from the Standard rules.

For example, all clerics must worship gods. Therefore all settings must have gods. Per the rules as written.

Personally, I have been playing D&D for years now. Right now I am tired of fake-medieval tropes. My intention was to use the 5e rules for a modern setting, to play around with reinventions of current events and thought experiments concerning recent scientific developments. But the rules as written make this more enjoyable setting impossible.

Likewise the rules referring to the interconnectedness of all settings makes a modern worldview impossible.

So the reason you don't like 5e is that Dungeons and Dragons is too medieval and not set in the modern day, with a modern mindset and the rules don't support exploring cutting edge 21st century scientific developments?

Perhaps you should be looking at something besides D&D to start with. If you want a modern-day game based off of D&D mechanics, there were loads of them produced in the 3.x era, maybe d20 Modern or Spycraft might be more your speed.

Being grumpy that you can't easily use a fantasy RPG like D&D for a modern-day game is like being irate that Vampire: The Masquerade was a poor game to use for Space Opera games or Deadlands wasn't well suited for medieval fantasy.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Being grumpy that you can't easily use a fantasy RPG like D&D for a modern-day game is like being irate that Vampire: The Masquerade was a poor game to use for Space Opera games or Deadlands wasn't well suited for medieval fantasy.

Indeed, you're pretty much always going to have to strip the setting in that kind of situation.

Though FWIW, rules-wise V:tM is actually has decent basic rules design for space opera and indeed I believe even has a space opera-ish setting in one "alternate settings" book (that may be V:tR though)!

Whereas I suspect 5E's basic rules, stripped of setting, would not work well for a modern-day or future game, even with revised classes (certainly d20 Modern was, mechanically, an utter failure on it's own terms - in that it intended to be able to emulate modern TV drama, especially stuff like the X-Files or Buffy, but the mechanics pushed it violently away from such realms).

 

[ResourcefulDungeoner]

Hey guys...

So... according to D&D Planescape and Spelljammer lore, the Prime Material Plane is divided into an infinite number of crystal spheres with different people, lands, etc.

There isn't anything that says a sphere cannot be governed by it's own internal cosmology.

 

[Alzrius]

There isn't anything that says a sphere cannot be governed by it's own internal cosmology.

That's a contradictory statement. The nature of crystal spheres is that the local conditions (e.g. the solar system) contained within them is unique; entire planes of existence (e.g. a cosmology) don't fall under that category - they're external to the sphere.