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

[Remathilis]

But, this isn'T really an issue. Planescape can do whatever it wants to do. Same as every other setting out there, it is free to interpret, reinterpret and fold, spindle and maul concepts to its heart's content. Fantastic.

But the issue is that those interpretation are then forced back onto every other setting. It's no different than if they declared that all halflings must be Kender or all vampires must reference Ravenloft and the Domains of Dread. There's absolutely no reason that demons need to reference the Blood War in order to be usable in D&D.

By the same token, does that preclude a core book (such as the Monster Manual) from mentioning kender, Ravenloft or the Blood War?

 

[DMZ2112]

I like the way the Planewalker's Handbook put it:
In fact, this pretty much is just the planes according to the Great Road and the "alignment theory." The existence of other planar pathways than the Great Road keeps other ideas in play: the Styx, the Oceanus, Yggdrasil, and Olympus, even the Well of Many Worlds and the Infinite Staircase are other ways to map the multiverse.

I think you're agreeing with me, KM, but to be honest the concept that the planes can be visualized in any conformation has always rung false to me. The planes are always depicted as a ring; the Unity of Rings is a major part of the Planescape setting philosophy; the gate-towns of the Outlands are positioned in a ring; Sigil, at the center of the gatetowns and arguably of the planes themselves, is itself a ring. Even the inner planes are a ring, and that's a conceit that far predates D&D.

The Great Wheel is a ring, and Planescape is in no small part built upon that assumption. Visualizing the planes as something else is an interesting thought experiment, but it has no bearing on the setting. At no time in Planescape does any of the published material take on the (perfectly valid) "what if" of an alternate organization.

And I will take it a step further and argue that according to the AD&D2 source material, the Great Wheel cosmology theory is so prevalent on the planes and off that even if the Great Wheel were /not/ a ring, it would still be a ring for the weight of belief. Isn't that what Planescape is all about, fundamentally?

 

[Hussar]

By the same token, does that preclude a core book (such as the Monster Manual) from mentioning kender, Ravenloft or the Blood War?

It precludes the presumption that every time we talk about halflings, we only reference kender. And, to be honest, I could do without references to kender, Ravenloft or the Blood War in core books. I suppose it's fine to give examples, so long as that's all they are.

IOW, "Here's an example of how you can make this core element interesting in a specific setting - e.g. Kender" is perfectly fine.

"All haltings are kender and live in Kendermore on Ansalon." is not.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think you're agreeing with me, KM, but to be honest the concept that the planes can be visualized in any conformation has always rung false to me. The planes are always depicted as a ring; the Unity of Rings is a major part of the Planescape setting philosophy; the gate-towns of the Outlands are positioned in a ring; Sigil, at the center of the gatetowns and arguably of the planes themselves, is itself a ring. Even the inner planes are a ring, and that's a conceit that far predates D&D.

The Great Wheel is a ring, and Planescape is in no small part built upon that assumption. Visualizing the planes as something else is an interesting thought experiment, but it has no bearing on the setting. At no time in Planescape does any of the published material take on the (perfectly valid) "what if" of an alternate organization.

I think that the major planes that influence the Planescape setting can be conceived of as a ring. And this is a favored concept, thanks in part to the fact that it keeps the Unity of Rings theme. But it is explicitly only one conceptualization, only as useful as those who use it find it to be. The Great Wheel isn't True, it's just one view, explicitly.

They could also be conceived of as islands on an astral sea.

Or plateaus and valleys on a great mountain.

Or landings on an infinite staircase.

Or moons orbiting the material world.

Or whatever.

PS tackles these largely by insisting over and over again that this depiction of the planes as a ring is only a model, only one way some people conceive of them. A lot of people. For a good in-setting reason. But drawing a map is always an exercise in interpretation, and other people draw their maps differently. Thanks to the Center of All concept, there is no truly honest map, only maps that depict the multiverse from a given perspective -- we all see the world as if our experience is the center of it.

PS wasn't in any real hurry to describe or define these other possibilities (because they were infinite in possibility and anyway weren't as resonant with the setting's specific themes as the Ring model...and because 2e was after all an edition of One True Cosmology), but it left plenty of room for that. Like this from the Campaign Setting:

The next question is, "How does the whole multiverse fit together?" Well, that depends on who gets asked. A Bleaker will say there ain't no scheme, while a Godsman will go on about innate celestial glory and the like. None of them will answer the question straight. Maybe the best thing to do is get a Guvner and ask them. (Fact is, their answer's no better than anyone else's, but they like to put things into nicely defined categories, and at least that'll give a clear picture.)

Again, explicitly stating that however one draws the planes, it reflects more on the presenter than it does on the actual relationship of things. Infinite space is impossible to map, and on a functional level, it's not like getting from Arborea to Ysgard is really any easier in a game session than getting from Arborea to the Quasiplane of Ash. So draw the planes however makes sense to you. The Great Wheel makes sense to a lot of people, but it explicitly is not eternal and inviolable gospel Truth beyond reproach. It's only a model.

 

[pemerton]

The concept of symmetry in philosophy is primarily an eastern derived one

I think this is a little simplistic. For instance, Manichaeism and other dualistic religions contain ideas along these lines.

And to quote Bertrand Russell on Kant (History of Western Philosophy, p 679):

Like everybody else at that time, he wrote a treatise on the sublime and the beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful; the sea is sublime, the land is beautiful; man is sublime, woman is beautiful; and so on.​

We could even point to the fact that (at least as it is written) "To everything there is a season . . ."

Buddhism meanwhile basically says evil is the world's default, not good. Life is suffering and all pleasure is basically the (temporary) absence of suffering, rather than an independent experience. The goal of life then is to reduce suffering (but not to eliminate it) by recognizing the impermanence of all things, detaching oneself from the material world, and denying the ego which is (in Buddhist philosophy) an illusory concept with no bearing on the fundamental metaphysics of reality. The core ethos of Buddhist is actually kind of annihilationist in nature

Like most religions and other lived traditions, Buddhism has many schools and variants.

But I think it is pretty mainstream to uphold the doctrine that an enlightened person dwells in the "four divine abodes": equanimity, compassion, loving kindness and sympathetic joy. That is not a doctrine of mere annihilationism.

This is also brought out in the Lesser Discourse on the Stems of Anguish. The Jains say to the Buddha, "Friend Gotama, pleasure is not to be gained through pleasure; pleasure is to be gained through pain. For were pleasure to be gained through pleasure, then King Seniya Bimbisāra of Magadha would gain pleasure, since he abides in greater pleasure than the venerable Gotama." The Buddha replies that, unlike the king, he is able to abide, without moving a muscle, for days and nights of meditation, experiencing pleasure - whereas the implication is that the king's pleasure is more fleeting and unstable, depending upon the presence or absence of external, worldly things.

There are interesting discussions to be had - probably not on these boards - about the psychological plausibility of the Buddha's claim about meditation and pleasure. But it seems clear to me that he is insisting that a person who is enlightened (in the Buddhist sense) and therefore steps off the wheel of suffering is not stepping off the wheel into annihilation, but is stepping off the wheel into a state of pleasure. I'm sure there is a reading of this consistent with [MENTION=16760]The Shadow[/MENTION]'s claim that evil (in this case, suffering) is a privation of good (in this case, pleasure) rather than self-subsistent.

Evil is not merely the absence of good, nor it it less real than good. If it were, it couldn't hurt us... it'd be illusionary.

its impossible to make "good/evil for its own sake" something unless their is an objective Good or Evil.

There are limitations on this board, and this thread, as a forum for discussing the metaphysics of morals. But at the risk of being simplistic, neither of these claims is easily defended.

For the first: "evil" is most naturally regarded as a property of things. Whether that property is a self-subsisting one, or whether it is simply an absence (of good) is something that was very important to the scholastics (given their theories of substance and attributes) but is one that I am happy to sidestep. But whatever the nature of evil as a property, it is not evil that harms people. It is individual acts, involving individual objects, that cause harm. Evil is a property of (some of) those things. (Some harm is caused by innocent acts and innocent things. Some may even be caused by good acts and good things.) It may even be that the very same thing that makes those things harmful makes them evil (eg many people, I think, regard nuclear weapons as evil because of their tremendous capacity to cause harm; many people regard the consequences an action has as an important determiner of whether or not it is evil).

But it is not evil, itself, which causes harm in these cases. "Evil", like other properties, is an abstract object; and one of the principal characteristics of any abstract object is its inability to participate in causal relations.

For the second: Simon Blackburn is probably the best known contemporary defender, in English-language philosophy, of anti-objectivism about morality and other values. But he would regard it as perfectly feasible for someone to pursue good for its own sake. That simply means that the person is motivated to pursue certain ends and actions, which have the property of being good, precisely because they are good; just as someone might collect Picasso sketches for their own sake, collecting them precisely because they have the property of having been drawn by Picasso and regardless of any other property (such as eg whether they are aesthetically pleasing).

The fact that the property of being good is not an objective property doesn't make pursuing good things because they are good any less feasible.

Here is my best argument for the canonical status of Planescape and the reason references to the Blood War and such in the Fiend entries in the monster manual would not be unwarranted.

<snip history of various D&D texts>

The fact that some people don't like some of the additions, such as the Blood War and Yugoloths being master schemers, no more makes it uncanonical than a person disliking Vader being Luke's father makes "The Empire Strikes Back" uncanonical.

Many people who play D&D don't regard it primarily as a story - a collection of canonical background events, history, etc. They regard it as a (loose) collection of tropes whose expression occurs via a mixture of flavour text and game mechanics.

For those people, the fact that some authors of those tropes also went on to write stories using those tropes, and attaching them to more detailed background events, history, etc, is not relevant to what they conceive of as D&D, nor what they are looking for from it.

Of course, this is a matter of degree, because every bit of flavour text has a tendency to import some background: eg the existence of ice devils suggests the existence of a lower plane that is icy; elves having a +1 to hit with bows suggests that bows exist in the world; etc. Plus there are the named spells that have been part of the game for a long time.

But it seems to me to be quite reasonable for someone to be happy with ice devils - a feature of the game present in multiple core Monster Manuals over the game's various editions - but not want the core material of the game to include every element of ice devil elaboration ever presented by some TSR or WotC author in some supplementary volume. That sort of stuff can safely be left for later products intended for enthusiasts.

 

[pemerton]

pemerton is right in that there is a fatalism to Planescape. No part of it is a story of change. It might be better as a story of change, and the World Axis might be the place to tell that story, but as written it's more about doom by status quo than any other setting with the possible exception of Dark Sun.

You may not be surprised that I agree strongly with what you say here.

I will add: my personal preferences in RPGing mean that I think a setting which tends to weigh against change is a problem; because it creates an obstacle to player protagonism via their PCs.

This is also why, though I like many of the tropes of Dark Sun and admire the way that the 4e mechanics are put into service to make the setting work, I am not sure that I actually want to use it for roleplaying.

 

[Steely Dan]

This is also why, though I like many of the tropes of Dark Sun and admire the way that the 4e mechanics are put into service to make the setting work

How so (and what do 4th Ed mechanics have to do with it)?

 

[pemerton]

How so (and what do 4th Ed mechanics have to do with it)?

I'm not sure what you mean by "how so"? (Especially because you cut some of my text, so what you quote is not a sentence.)

Are you asking what I meant when I referred to "the way that the 4e mechanics are put into service to make the setting work"?

If you are, then here are some answers: the use of the "leader" mechanics, inspirational/non-magical healing, and power sources to smoothly eliminate PCs who draw power from the gods; the use of inherent bonuses to handle the relative absence of bonuses from magical items; the introduction of themes - in effect, expanding the paragon path and epic destiny mechanic into the heroic tier - to handle background, including psionic wild talents, as something separate from class.

Are you asking why I am not sure that I actually want to use Dark Sun for roleplaying? If you are, the answer is the one I gave in the post you quoted: I don't see how Dark Sun easily incorporates the sort of player protagonism that I enjoy in RPGing and that I think 4e's mechanics are oriented towards. As [MENTION=78752]DMZ2112[/MENTION] said, it's about "doom by status quo".

 

[Steely Dan]

Are you asking what I meant when I referred to "the way that the 4e mechanics are put into service to make the setting work"?

If you are, then here are some answers:

1) the use of the "leader" mechanics, inspirational/non-magical healing, and power sources to smoothly eliminate PCs who draw power from the gods;

2) the use of inherent bonuses to handle the relative absence of bonuses from magical items;

3) the introduction of themes

1) 2nd Ed Dark Sun has clerics.

2) No need for magic items in 2nd Ed Dark Sun.

3) 2nd Ed Dark Sun has Kits.

 

[pemerton]

1) 2nd Ed Dark Sun has clerics.

2) No need for magic items in 2nd Ed Dark Sun.

3) 2nd Ed Dark Sun has Kits.

I don't really understand how pointing to 2nd ed AD&D mechanical devices is relevant to what I posted.