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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6380574" data-attributes="member: 2067">See, different preferences. The tone of PS is not one of a world on fire in desperate need of heroes, it is one of an ongoing war of competing ideologies, where heroism depends on what one thinks of the flag you're waving, where no hero is pure and no villain is monolithic, where the players enact change throughout reality and where the ideas they champion become more legendary than their own names. It is totally fair to prefer a more heroic light-vs.-darkness / civilization-vs.-chaos kind of vibe for your D&D game, and you should be able to have a cosmology that supports that first and foremost rather than having to cleave to the Great Wheel or anything.Well, in the first place, it isn't perfectly fine for a lot of people, those people are just perhaps less numerous than PS fans. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> But mostly because it's like taking Lord Soth and describing him as some sort of misunderstood antihero who had a talking badger animal companion that cracked wise about Takhisis. Or like taking Drizz'zt and describing him as a heartless guerilla revolutionary who burns orphanages and raises schools in his effort of leading a revolution. Or like taking Iggwiliv and imagining her as a comically idiotic character who succeeds despite her own incomptence.In other words, it's inauthentic. Regardless of if the new story is good or not, it's not true to the stories that people love about the critter.But all this can be avoided if the core books just imagine that yugoloths and succubi and whatever aren't The Definitive X, but rather that the story one tells about them is just one story. 5e doesn't seem to be following this track, but they do seem to be taking a light touch. Most of the story info in 5e is easy to ignore. Your Intellect Devourers don't have to be creations of the mind flayers, and it doesn't change much about 'em. Your succubi can be devils and it'll be fine. I think it'd be a mistake to conflate PS with the Great Wheel. These things are not the same things. The development that PS gave the Great Wheel might be welcome sometimes, but other times it might not be, because the setting has its own tone and style it brings into the game. Right now, for instance, I'd say that 5e has the Great Wheel, but it's not very PS-y. It is bound to concepts like alignments though, and presents them as equal rather than having a clear hierarchy as in 4e, which might mean it's harder to run a 4e style "heroes of ordered light against the roiling destructive chaos" style game in core 5e. Or an Eberron-style "Xoriat is waxing and chaos is rising!" kind of game. Which is kind of a shame. My case is more that I think there should be no truly default cosmology. That way, someone who develops a shinto-esque setting, or someone who develops, say, a setting based on the path of the Sun like Egyptian myth, isn't someone who has to climb uphill against the default assumptions. Maybe Grazz'zt isn't a demon in the abyss, maybe he's an oni from the decadent south. Maybe he's a force of darkness in service to Set who seeks to stop the sun from rising.Clearly, the devs didn't really want to explicitly support that assumption of "no assumptions" for PC's. And it doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to change, which is good. But I bet in most games, Grazz'zt is gonna be a demon from the Abyss on the Great Wheel, just 'cuz that's what the game already says about him. Which is less awesome than it could have been.</blockquote>

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