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

[Viking Bastard]

See, I've never seen D&D in those terms. Perhaps because I came from different entry point into D&D (by way of video games), but I always saw D&D as defining its own thing.

Like [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]*, I've also always seen D&D in those terms, although I also agree with you that D&D has a pretty distinct flavor. My taste is a little less spartan than Hussar's, I think. I like there to be plenty of little morsels of lore peppered throughout--default fallbacks, so to speak--but I dislike it being overly tied into any kind of big picture, which I like to tie together myself. Rather than a straight toolbox, I see D&D as more of a framework, akin to Ruby on Rails or Django in web programming: opinionated tools which will work a certain way unless told otherwise, but are easily bent (by but a few keystrokes) to work different if one so fancies.

D&D sometimes has problems with that last bit, especially the newer versions (although I don't think TSR D&D's malleability was intentional, more that it's the child of a DIY gaming scene, designed ad-hoc as it went).

Now, for me, though, monster and planar lore (to get this closer to the original topic) isn't a big stress on this, as this is purely the purview of the DM--if a player has a differing opinion or expectation on how the plains or monsters should be, they are merely wrong--too bad for them. My issues much rather come up on the PC-side of things, where I feel less ready to stomp on player expectations.


* Whose opinion I was conflating with those of others, as I suspected--this thread gets pretty confusing to read somewhere in the 40s and it got hard to keep straight who was claiming what, exactly.

 

[Remathilis]

Like Hussar, I've also always seen D&D in those terms, although I also agree with you that D&D has a pretty distinct flavor. My taste is a little less spartan than Hussar's, I think. I like there to be plenty of little morsels of lore peppered throughout--default fallbacks, so to speak--but I dislike it being overly tied into any kind of big picture, which I like to tie together myself. Rather than a straight toolbox, I see D&D as more of a framework, akin to Ruby on Rails or Django in web programming: opinionated tools which will work a certain way unless told otherwise, but are easily bent (by but a few keystrokes) to work different if one so fancies.

I've grown to accept, if not outright love, D&D's quirks. My problem with 4e (from a fluff standpoint) was not the overabundance of fluff, but the fact that they often ignored the older fluff for NuFluff, even if there was no reason to do that. (I'm very unforgiving on what they did to Realms and Eberron in those regards). I've never been the guy who thinks that WotC tightening their brand was bad; I just didn't want it at the expense of the traditions that I grew up with.

That's where I think 5e has gotten it pitch perfect. If there was a perfectly serviceable old story, they used it (or modified it). If their wasn't, they used the 4e story or made one up. There isn't one monster in the MM (though I hadn't read it thoroughly) that I didn't get a cool idea for; something in the amazing 2e MM didn't accomplish. Every monster feels like it has a place, a role or niche it fills. If I want to, I have a cool story for salamanders, kobolds, nothics, twig-blights, or kraken. If I have a better idea, they aren't so married to the fluff that I can't use them without. Its a book I can use as-is if I want to build a functional world or I can make up my own if I so choose. This is true of Planes, Monsters, Classes, and even Deities.

 

[Aldarc]

I have commented before that I've always felt The Great Wheel and more specifically Planescape have a very Moorcockian feel which I think is why I was initially fascinated by it.

Moorcock was part of my early experience of fantasy reading as a kid. I scoured my father's old collections of fantasy novels that he still had stored at his parents' house. Elric and Moorcock's Eternal Champion universe was a big part of that. But for me, that's where some of my dislike for the Great Wheel comes from. D&D tends to focus more on the moral Good vs. Evil axis as opposed to the mythical Law vs. Chaos axis of Moorcock, which itself feels like the cosmological framing of real world mythologies. I'm not even a fan of having Good vs. Evil, though Law and Chaos often, respectively, carry these moral qualities. Civilization, which is looked upon favorably, is only possible because of Order that is formed out of Chaos, usually by the deities representing order defeating representation of primordial chaos. Even biblical priestly cosmology of Gen 1 is a presented as a stripped down version in which Yahweh creates order out of the primordial chaos, and this chaos - both a moral and metaphysical reality - constantly threatens to undo creation (cf. Gen 6). That's a big part of why I liked the 4E cosmology. The Order vs. Chaos motif was at the forefront, and the Prime became the chief battleground where this metaplot unfolds.
[MENTION=509]Viking Bastard[/MENTION] much earlier referred to Planescape as a "cosmic stalemate," which resonates close with what I meant about Planescape veering towards preserving the status quo. The metaplot just continues, but it feels timeless. Wait, you say, every setting has its metaplot that it preserves. True, but this is again where I would point to the matter of scope, and I think that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] touches upon this as well. 4E cosmology has a starting point and a trajectory, and the Prime is a critical point of this progressing cosmic drama. Eberron's metaplot is the potential outbreak of war again between the Five Nations. How then is Eberron's status quo any different from Planescape's? Probably because there was a clear starting point and there was an end point that was within living memory for living people who were caught in this war. The scope feels, at least for me, far more at a ground level and focused. The stakes feel real and meaningful.

Let's take Star Wars as an example as well. We are thrown in the middle of the Galactic Civil War metaplot between the Empire and Rebel Alliance, but we learn from Obi-Wan Kenobi that it was not always so, and even within his living memory. What does this metaplot mean for the little guys? Luke Skywalker is our everyman on the far edge of the universe. This metaplot got Luke's adoptive parents killed and his lifestyle irrevocably altered. We see jawas killed. An entire planet was destroyed. Luke's mentor was killed. Luke's childhood friend died. But the first movie ends with the hope that the Empire can be defeated. (Arguably one of the flaws of the prequel series is that it moved away from this ground-level to focus more on the larger metaplot of this space opera setting. E.g., does anyone actually die when the droid army invades Naboo? Does anyone even live in the Naboo capital city that's mostly CGI because the city looks bereft of life?, etc.)

In the Planescape materials, the primary focus is on Sigil and its inhabitants, a cosmopolitan city of doors that revels in the co-existence of outsiders and its place as a hotbed of planar activity. But when demon lords are resurrected, planes shift in a manner reminiscent of adjusting decimal points in accounting software, and factions are ejected from Sigil what does that mean for the little guys on the Prime Material plane? The focus of the Planescape materials seems so much on Sigil and the outer planes. For the sort of games that I like to play, having read through the Planescape materials, the setting, however cool and inspiring it is, does not feel like a good fit. The stakes feel too ideological - with the Factions being much like a bunch of philosophy undergraduate guys fapping to the sounds of their own voices - as opposed to real human stakes found in other settings. The stakes of Planescape come across to me as the stakes of people with high privilege.

That does not mean that I do not want planar materials nor that I think that Planescape is a bad setting, but the Great Wheel and Planescape seem too embedded in these metaplots that are unsuitable for my campaigns. If there is a future planar manual, I would not be opposed to descriptions of the Great Wheel planes, but I would like less of it in favor of it being a resource book (and less of a setting book) that was more focused on being a toolkit for running planar campaigns, means of traveling between planes, planes touching the prime, planar hooks for campaigns, and creating your own cosmologies. The Great Wheel setting material would probably be better for a Planescape book that fully embraces all the quirks, inhabitants, and metaplots of the Great Wheel.

As a bit of an afterthought, I'm also confused as to why, if Forgotten Realms is indeed the new default setting of D&D, the Great Wheel would therefore be the default cosmology. Shouldn't it be the World Tree cosmology of Forgotten Realms?

 

[Parmandur]

1.) Forgotten Realms is not the detail setting, per the PHB and MM; they use all the settings as examples

2.) FR is back to using the Great Wheel, anyhow, seems like; or, the Tree is just an alternative conceptual model used by Planes scholars describing the same phenomenon

 

[Elderbrain]

Parmandur, I'm curious... why do you think the Great Wheel and the standard nine alignment system are absurdities? What is supposed to be superior about the metaphysics of 4e? Please explain.

 

[Elderbrain]

Dungeons &. Dragons alignment system, and the Great wheel, are complete metaphysical absurdities. The 4E designers tried to fix that, but by providing coherent metaphysics they trampled all over well-beloved stories. Hence anger.

Also, though they are metaphysically ridiculous as categories, the nine-point alignment set-up works well as a quick short-hand for helping a player get "in character", which is the direction 5E is taking alignment.

4E = good metaphysics

Traditional alignment = good acting tool

(I mean to quote you above, so here it is... this is what I was referring to.)

 

[Elderbrain]

The bolded part is exactly what I want.

Why is it confusing? That's precisely how D&D presents the Prime Material Plane. The 3e DMG had extensive guidelines for building a campaign world, from demographics to political/alignment implications, to geography and everything in between. The 4e DMG presented largely the same material as well. My memory is too faded to claim the same for 2e or 1e, but, I'm pretty sure that they did so. They presented baselines at most and then encouraged DM's to build whatever they wanted using those baselines as a starting point.

So, if my Prime Material game world is a dessert world over run with giant sand worms, fantastic - here's the baselines for a quasi-medieval Tolkienesque world, and deviating from those baselines will have X, Y and Z impacts.

The Prime Material monster are not presented with hard and fast canon by and large. Other than living underground, where do Kobolds live? Who is the ruler of the Beholders? What is the political structure of the Minotaur court? Do Minotaurs even have courts? What is a Grell's goal in life? What is a medusa's? On and on and on.

In The Planes, all those questions are answered. It's right there in black and white, Asmodeus rules Hell. Hell is a bureaucracy dedicated to harvesting souls. Ice Demons live on the 7th layer of Hell and their ruler is Mr. Mixilplict. (ok, I made that last bit up. ) On and on and on.

And, as you said, changes done to that canon are met with instant and loud condemnation. Eladrin as elves aren't a problem because eladrin are mechanically flawed or don't make sense or can't be fit into a D&D world. You almost never hear any criticisms like that. The worst criticism you get for Tieflings is that their horns are too big. No, the big, loud, and never ending criticisms are that Eladrin aren't what was established in The Planes Setting. Tieflings are not what was established in The Planes setting. So on and so forth. I've almost never heard any criticisms of the 4e cosmology that are directly related to the actual cosmology. The criticisms are almost universally based on the fact that 4e isn't using the same default The Planes setting as earlier editions.

To be honest, I'm not thrilled about 4e's cosmology either. Again they were trying to build IP and create something to sell. They don't treat the planes as a toolbox for DM's to go out and build. They treat the planes as The Planes - a distinct setting that they can keep selling setting books for. it doesn't matter if it's the Great Wheel or 4e's cosmology. It's the same thing. The only reason I rarely bitch about 4e's cosmology is that I almost never see anyone complaining that 5e isn't using 4e's cosmology or that 5e's changes are somehow "disrespectful" to canon. If people were jumping on that horse, then I'd complain about that just as much.

But Hussar, if the setting is inconsistent, how are players and dms supposed to game an ongoing planar campaign that may continue from one edition and into the next? They can't, if planes, places and creatures they encountered in one edition get the axe or are radically changed from one edition (or book within an edition) to the next. There needs to be some kind of stability. ("Plane of Fire? Sorry, can't go there - it doesn't exist anymore. City of Brass? Gone.")

 

[Elderbrain]

Do you really think that if they had called Eladrin (4e) Sidhe, there would have been any major complaints about their inclusion? Or, heck, just called them Grey Elves?

EXACTLY... so, why DIDN'T they, instead of giving them a name already in use by something else? If you want to invent a new sport that only vaguely resembles baseball, you don't call it "baseball" just to get the name recognition. You think up a name that's not already in use...

 

[Aldarc]

EXACTLY... so, why DIDN'T they, instead of giving them a name already in use by something else? If you want to invent a new sport that only vaguely resembles baseball, you don't call it "baseball" just to get the name recognition. You think up a name that's not already in use...

'Football' in all of its variations says hello.

 

[Nivenus]

'Football' in all of its variations says hello.

That's sort of a historical accident though rather than a deliberate choice. Both sports originated out of medieval ball games that were played throughout England, with loads of variations (since there was no such thing as national leagues at the time). It's largely by accident that 19th century America and 19th century Britain ended up favoring different evolutions of the same (loosely-defined) sport.