WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

By that logic shouldn't they remove violence from the game as well?

Violence can be used for good. It's not always evil. Rape is always evil.

 

[Bohandas]

WotC needs an Elon Musk, I know I'll get dumped on for saying it, but when 50% roughly that the D&D studio works on gets tossed in the trash and the rest tends to be shades of poorly done when the D&D studio doesn't have adult supervision (freelancers Keith, Matt, or George for examples of adult supervision).

So... you're saying thet they need someone who can sell all these poorly made products to rich idiots?

 

[Faolyn]

By that logic shouldn't they remove violence from the game as well?

I'm sure there must be plenty of potential players who have suffered regular assault or been a witness to assault or murder

Pretty sure no real-life players have ever been attacked by a dragon before.

 

[Zardnaar]

Is it my imagination, or is this thread ever-so-slowly working its way to concluding that Elon Musk is the Great Wheel?

Great tool. He's a great tool.

 

[Incenjucar]

By that logic shouldn't they remove violence from the game as well?

I'm sure there must be plenty of potential players who have suffered regular assault or been a witness to assault or murder

It's Dungeons and Dragons, not Dungeons and Creepers. There's no reason to assume the game is going to involve all possible topics, and the text in modern books reminds DMs to talk to players before introducing sensitive topics.

 

[Lanefan]

Lightning is an electrical discharge of short duration and high voltage. It can be either between a cloud and "the ground" or within a cloud.

Both cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning requires clouds...which - unless your setting is very un-Earth-like in terms of its physics - are made up of water vapour (or ice crystals) suspended in the air.

Magically-generated lightning doesn't require clouds but otherwise works pretty much the same.

Nothing states it must pass through a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide to be considered lightning.

It needs something to conduct it. Can't happen in space.

Also, lightning damage is just electricity. They just gave it a fancier name.

True. The original question, however, was whether lightning could exist without causing thunder*, to which I still posit it cannot.

* - even a simple static spark, which is miniature lightning, still gives off a crackle sound.

 

[Nikosandros]

It needs something to conduct it. Can't happen in space.

A lightning is not a current. There is no conduction, it's an electrostatic discharge.

 

[Aldarc]

Different strokes. To me, the Great Wheel looks much more like something mortal sages would have come up with to explain the universe.

Different strokes indeed. To me, the Great Wheel looks like modern artificial, inorganic grid-filling that is way worse than the sort of grid-filling that people accused of 4e rather than something organic that mortal sages have produced or speculated about as part of human mythos. This is one reason why cosmologies like 4e's World Axis, Forgotten Realms's World Tree,* or RuneQuest do a better job, IMHO, of scratching my itch when it comes to cosmologies. Though for a lot of my other games, I usually opt for a far simpler setup.

* Which given my dislike of the Realms is saying something.

I've always seen the Great Wheel's structure as representative of an organized mortal's attempt to make sense of the infinite cosmos. It may not actually look like that in reality. After all, planes are infinite, and it's not like you can look at it all from outside.

IME, the Great Wheel is what people grew up with as part of their D&D for a big chunk of their lives so that's why they like it rather than any inherit qualities of the cosmological model. A lot of is nostalgia with post hoc reasoning trying to validate it, which is fine, but it is what it is.

 

[glass]

3e Deities and Demigods had sections on the cosmologies for each of their pantheons as well.

Thank you for reminding me about that. I was looking for cosmologies a while back and I did not think to check D&Dg.

Yes. If it felt artificial to me, then I would have said "this feels artificial". Instead I said "this doesn't feel artificial." That's how ideas work. If they weren't true, I'd be lying when I said them.

But at least one person had said that it did not feel artificial to them. So by asserting that it did not feel artificial without qualifier, you were at best being rather rude to them.

For the record, nether the World Axis nor the Great Wheel feel artificial to me, but I can accept that either or both of them can feel that way to other people.

A lightning is not a current. There is no conduction, it's an electrostatic discharge.

I am pretty sure there is plenty of current involved in a lightning strike!

 

[Chaosmancer]

The Great Wheel, at least in Planescape, is not a canonical fact, it is a canonical hypothesis by fallible characters in the setting.

Right, that's the excuse isn't it? It isn't "true" it is just what people think is true... and is the major version presented to DMs not from the perspective of scholars, but from the perspective of the game designers.

So, for example, the 23rd layer of the Abyss (The Iron Wastes) isn't REALLY the 23rd layer of the Abyss. Of course, if you talk to someone they will call it the 23rd layer of the Abyss, and if you look to official sources it is referred to as the 23rd layer of the Abyss, and if you had to find an artifact and it said it would take you to the 23rd layer of the Abyss then you would likely expect it to take you The Iron Wastes... but other than being called that, referred to as that in meta-game resources, and being listed in that order, it isn't really the 23rd layer.

But... what is the difference?

Also, while maybe it isn't shaped like a wheel, none of the places listed as part of the Great Wheel don't exist. Bytopia exists, and the ancient oak Whisperleaf still grows in Shurrock in Bytopia. These are all true things. It isn't like Whisperleaf is secretly in Valhalla instead. So it isn't just "a canonical hypothesis" it is as good as fact because even the DM is not presented with a different set of things. Without removing Bytopia as a place that exists, there is no model that says "actually, the plane of Bytopia is really X"

The people who came up with the model are fallible. They are the game designers of Dungeons and Dragons and only human after all, but you can't present a "complete cosmology that accounts for everything" and then expect to be able to hide behind "well, this is only the best guess of mortals who can never truly know" because this is also the model we are given for the DM to run Demon Lords and Gods, who would have a far better understanding if there was something else that was true. And if it was an incomplete model, it would have pieces that were incomplete or didn't fit. Just like real-world "unified theories of everything"

Edit: Next post I was going to respond to from @Micah Sweet covers the exact same point. It doesn't matter if you can't look at them from the outside, If the planes were all really the scales on the back of a cosmic serpent then the books need to tell us that for it to be true. But no game resource comes in and says "here is why the Great Wheel is wrong" It is always portrayed as true, except when it isn't in use.