Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I don't know if that a good or bad thing to you, but it's a great thing to me!
WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk
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Zardnaar
Legend
I like the Great Wheel but I'm not a purist in terms of insisting every setting use it.
The classic ones should (GH, FR, DL) but I would prefer Mystara, Eberron, Athas, PoL etc do not.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Sure. Everybody can use their own, and none of the ones you mention were designed with the Great Wheel in mind, so that's fine.
Zardnaar
Legend
Basically each setting should probably use the original cosmology it was designed with.
Generally I hate retcons.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Me too, if they change the established history. I'm more ok with new information about the past that doesn't invalidate what already happened.
Vaalingrade
Legend
Except FR, which should be forced to use the GW if it's going to pretend to be default D&D.
That'll learn 'em.
Zardnaar
Legend
Yeah I'm in similar bist. New is fine even if it's something I don't like.
Rewriting something I do like not so much although toning down elements is fine.
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Faolyn
(she/her)
To me, the Wheel is fine and I think it works great in Planescape. My only "problem" with it is that the game focuses on the Abyss, Nine Hells, the Blood War, and demons and devils, and I find those on the boring side. I really like Pandemonium, Gehenna, the Gray Wastes, and Carceri, but D&D rarely touches on those places outside of the PS books.
Now, I don't use the Wheel in my own non-Ravenloft games, but that's more because it doesn't really fit. Should my players ever travel there, though, I will be gleefully stealing sites from Planescape to put there.
Vaalingrade
Legend
I just want Planescape to be its own setting and the other settings get to do something else.
adamantyr
Hero
I re-played Planescape: Torment recently, and it made me realize that the setting should not return, at least not in it's past form.
The first problem is what Planescape was made for, which was to counter White Wolf's clan approach with Vampire: The Masquerade. That's why there are factions in Planescape. It was also supposed to be "hip and cool", and turn everything players thought they knew about the planes on its head. And also take the well-written but somewhat laconic "Manual of the Planes" and make it more interesting.
Like a LOT of things made for 2nd Edition AD&D, there's a lot of "squeezing that square peg and forcing it into the round hole" going on. The setting would have benefited from having its own rules set, but TSR was out of the business of producing different rules for different games at that point. Pages upon pages of rules on how spells work and don't work on the planes, and then they threw in spell keys as a means to just evade it all.
The biggest issue, though, is the Great Wheel doesn't work anymore. It was a product of it's time, and things have moved on since then. Alignment means even less now than it did then. And there's no concept of time anywhere in the multiverse, except as another raw element. Kids and fans have now had the whole multiverse concept explained to them by the MCU, and it's absent.
Finally, don't forget that Benjamin Riggs showed that to everyone's surprise, the setting sold really poorly. So what was done then didn't sell. That means to make it work now, you'd have to change it, and likely that's just going to make people angrier than Spelljammer did.
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