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I would have thought WOTC would have wanted to steer well clear of any D&D / M:TG cross-pollination of player communities, is why that PDF supplement comes completely out of left field.
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Apr 28, 2016 23:19
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gradenko_2000 posted:I would have thought WOTC would have wanted to steer well clear of any D&D / M:TG cross-pollination of player communities, is why that PDF supplement comes completely out of left field. That's traditionally been the case, yes. Dunno what changed.
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Apr 28, 2016 23:23
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Terrible Opinions posted:It proves that there isn't any virtue in making something to specifically piss off your established fans. There is only virtue in making a good loving game. Otherwise you go full Age of Sigmar or Windows 8. I agree. Full-screen only solitaire in Windows 8 was garbage
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Apr 28, 2016 23:31
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I actually think that there's a lesson 4E could have taken from GW's release of AoS (assuming that doing so wouldn't have, you know, required time travel). For anyone who doesn't know, GW's release of AoS wasn't just a change to a shittier ruleset in a quest to sell more miniatures. They also blew up their 30-year-old, much-beloved Warhammer Fantasy Battles setting so that they could replace it with a playground for the fascist revenant golems. Literally blew it up, as in, in-universe the world as anyone knew it no longer exists. And when I say that it was "much-beloved," I'm not just talking about the crusty grognards; there are plenty of fine, upstanding goons in the death thread and the old WHFB thread who will wax nostalgic for the universe and what it could have been in the hands of a decent developer. The point is that while AoS obviously didn't benefit from having lovely rules, it could have had the best rules in the universe and it still would have been a huge middle finger to fans of the established property to be told "lol, you have an attachment to the Empire or Tomb Kings? gently caress you, buy our new overpriced Fat C-3P0 miniatures because they're what we're selling you now." From a certain point of view, WOTC did something very similar with the transition from 3.x to 4E, and I don't think you had to be a stereotypical whizzard fantasizing about making the dumb fighter drink from your piss forest in order to feel that way.
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Apr 28, 2016 23:34
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JerryLee posted:I actually think that there's a lesson 4E could have taken from GW's release of AoS (assuming that doing so wouldn't have, you know, required time travel). They didn't really do this though, is the thing. The closest they got was the Spellplague business in the Forgotten Realms but at the same time A). the Spellplague wasn't even comparable in scope to what AoS did to the Old World and B). It's hardly like the Forgotten Realms hasn't been struck with world shaking calamity before so what they did with 4E wasn't even novel. Also Eberron was mostly unchanged and they even reintroduced Dark Sun after a decade of nonexistence. 4E and AoS don't even remotely compare in terms of kicking sand-castles over. Every new edition of a game that changes things "blows up" the old one if you're willing to make that absurdly reductive comparison. I don't know if you were there for the transition from AD&D2E to the brand-fangled new 3E from WotC but I can assure you that it wasn't an endless stream of ticker tape parades with no one vituperatively complaining about how things were changed and different and this was terrible and a slap in the face.
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Apr 29, 2016 00:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:I would have thought WOTC would have wanted to steer well clear of any D&D / M:TG cross-pollination of player communities, is why that PDF supplement comes completely out of left field. Hm. Is it at all possible that this exposes the ugly underbelly of the D&D community? Could WotC manage to swipe that under the carpet should that be the case?
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Apr 29, 2016 00:21
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paradoxGentleman posted:Hm. Is it at all possible that this exposes the ugly underbelly of the D&D community? Could WotC manage to swipe that under the carpet should that be the case? No, and WotC doesn't really care.
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Apr 29, 2016 00:24
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Kai Tave posted:They didn't really do this though, is the thing. The closest they got was the Spellplague business in the Forgotten Realms but at the same time A). the Spellplague wasn't even comparable in scope to what AoS did to the Old World and B). It's hardly like the Forgotten Realms hasn't been struck with world shaking calamity before so what they did with 4E wasn't even novel. Also Eberron was mostly unchanged and they even reintroduced Dark Sun after a decade of nonexistence. 4E and AoS don't even remotely compare in terms of kicking sand-castles over. And then they completely undid basically everything the spellplague did with 5e.
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Apr 29, 2016 00:27
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paradoxGentleman posted:Hm. Is it at all possible that this exposes the ugly underbelly of the D&D community? Could WotC manage to swipe that under the carpet should that be the case? They already shut down both the M:tG and D&D forums, so yes, easily.
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Apr 29, 2016 00:28
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Kurieg posted:And then they completely undid basically everything the spellplague did with 5e. Let's be honest here, if 5E hadn't undone it some other sourcebook or novel would have.
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Apr 29, 2016 00:31
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Kai Tave posted:Every new edition of a game that changes things "blows up" the old one if you're willing to make that absurdly reductive comparison. I don't know if you were there for the transition from AD&D2E to the brand-fangled new 3E from WotC but I can assure you that it wasn't an endless stream of ticker tape parades with no one vituperatively complaining about how things were changed and different and this was terrible and a slap in the face. One of the advertisements for their last 2E adventure path offered it up as a high-test cleaning agent, useful for getting rid of stubborn campaigns, complete with badly photoshopped images of the PHB and poo poo being chopped into coleslaw. After actually reading the quickstart documents for 3E, we realized it was much better for our purposes than 2E had ever been, but that ad always comes to mind when people talk about new editions sneaking into their houses and torching the old ones and rolling Charisma checks to gently caress their dogs.
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Apr 29, 2016 00:41
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The Spellplague really isn't comparable to the changes AoS wrought on the Warhammer world. For all the reasons Kai Tave said, plus, while the Forgotten Realms is a big deal, it's just one campaign setting and doesn't comprise all of the D&D fictional universe. I've managed to play D&D for a long time without ever having to give a poo poo about *~realmslore~*. There were some changes to the overall cosmology (no more Great Wheel) but still not on the scale of AoS. I'm not an expert on the AoS lore, but my understanding is that to be comparable, D&D would have had to say "All the campaign settings blew up. Everyone lives on campaign-setting-themed Spelljammers now." Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 00:41
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm not an expert on the AoS lore, but my understanding is that to be comparable, D&D would have had to say "All the campaign settings blew up. Everyone lives on campaign-setting-themed Spelljammers now." More like "We blew up every D&D setting. Now you're playing RIFTS with D&D rules."
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Apr 29, 2016 00:47
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm not an expert on the AoS lore, but my understanding is that to be comparable, D&D would have had to say "All the campaign settings blew up. Everyone lives on campaign-setting-themed Spelljammers now." Also every time a Fighter makes an attack they have to scream "Wizards are awesome" at the top of their lungs. Then about one year later they'll just stop supporting fighters.
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Apr 29, 2016 00:47
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"Look, we're not Fighters of the Coast."
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Apr 29, 2016 00:58
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paradoxGentleman posted:Hm. Is it at all possible that this exposes the ugly underbelly of the D&D community? Could WotC manage to swipe that under the carpet should that be the case? I'm not sure how this is going to cause people who previously didn't care about Magic to mingle with Magic nerds. But maybe that's because I think Zendikar is phenomenally dull.
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Apr 29, 2016 01:04
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To be fair they did ditch the Great Wheel cosmology for 4E...but they replaced it with a virtually identical cosmology containing all the same high points of interest, so.
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Apr 29, 2016 01:16
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Kai Tave posted:They didn't really do this though, is the thing. The closest they got was the Spellplague business in the Forgotten Realms but at the same time A). the Spellplague wasn't even comparable in scope to what AoS did to the Old World and B). It's hardly like the Forgotten Realms hasn't been struck with world shaking calamity before so what they did with 4E wasn't even novel. Also Eberron was mostly unchanged and they even reintroduced Dark Sun after a decade of nonexistence. 4E and AoS don't even remotely compare in terms of kicking sand-castles over. I don't know what to say if you don't think the cosmology changed significantly between 3E and 4E. I can only assume that you just didn't notice because the ways in which it changed weren't things that was important to you, which is perfectly reasonable, but that's no reason to disparage the idea of its being important to anyone. For the record, I didn't know about the Spellplague or whatever it was (I may have heard of it but that's about it); I'm talking about the core multiverse. It's actually interesting to me that so many people jumped to assuming I was speaking from a FR-centric point of view. I don't mean this in a snide way, I just find it curious that this was the default thing for people to read into my comments about setting. I can't speak from personal experience to the 2E-3E shift, as I wasn't really tuned in at all during that era. I'm sure there were plenty of people who cried up a storm at the mechanical shift, but I'm not defending those folks any more than I'm defending people who lost their poo poo at the fighter being able to do more than make a full attack action in 4E. Was there really a setting shakeup, aside from discontinuing certain settings altogether? (Which was unquestionably a bad thing, and as an aside, I feel like the Dark Sun reappearance actually reinforces my point of view; it's cool that they brought it back eventually but the reason why it was seen as a big positive thing was because it's bad to let cherished fluff wither on the vine and disappear. Unless it's cherished for being horribly sexist or racist.) I guess ultimately I feel like you're the one who's being absurdly reductive by apparently painting people who don't want setting features and source material thrown out with the bathwater with the same brush as people who hate their wizards getting taken down a peg or don't want to be bothered to learn to roll dice in a slightly different way. You're a decent enough poster otherwise that I have to believe you didn't intend to come across this way, but there it is. Namaste. Kai Tave posted:To be fair they did ditch the Great Wheel cosmology for 4E...but they replaced it with a virtually identical cosmology containing all the same high points of interest, so. See, to me this is a little bit like saying that the solar system would be "virtually identical" if you replaced the Keplerian model with a game of marbles between colossal aliens, as long as you still named the marbles "Earth," "Jupiter," "Neptune," etc. 
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Apr 29, 2016 01:27
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JerryLee posted:I don't know what to say if you don't think the cosmology changed significantly between 3E and 4E. I can only assume that you just didn't notice because the ways in which it changed weren't things that was important to you, which is perfectly reasonable, but that's no reason to disparage the idea of its being important to anyone. For the record, I didn't know about the Spellplague or whatever it was (I may have heard of it but that's about it); I'm talking about the core multiverse. It's actually interesting to me that so many people jumped to assuming I was speaking from a FR-centric point of view. I don't mean this in a snide way, I just find it curious that this was the default thing for people to read into my comments about setting. The core complaints about 4E almost always revolved around mechanics rather than cosmology, is the thing. Yes, people complained about the shift from the Great Wheel to whatever the 4E cosmology was called but I promise you that by far more digital ink was spilled complaining about "dissociated mechanics," Warlords, how casting a fireball and swinging a sword were now identical, healing surges, the formatting of monster powers, keywords, and so on. People found the time to complain about everything 4E did up to and including the ommision of gnomes from the PHB1, but the mechanics and underlying design philosophy was far more of an inciting issue than the cosmology. Age of Sigmar isn't on the same level as the D&D edition transition, I'm sorry. What Age of Sigmar did was blow up a decades old setting full of continuity and narrative that had explicitly been designed to get people invested in their multi hundred dollar armies. The Great Wheel is not in the same ballpark as that. Nobody was writing novels about the Elemental Plain of Fire. Really, the only interesting thing that D&D ever did with the Great Wheel was almost entirely down to the Planescape setting, which by the way had a bunch of its factions blown up between 2E and 3E and never really got touched on again for much of 3E except in a vague background sense.
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Apr 29, 2016 01:47
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Kai Tave posted:To be fair they did ditch the Great Wheel cosmology for 4E...but they replaced it with a virtually identical cosmology containing all the same high points of interest, so. But but but my 10+ year campaign was completely destroyed by the lack of different bonuses and penalties for being on the the planes of neutral good chaotic, chaotic good, and chaotic neutral good. Like, Planescape is still my very favorite setting, but there's nothing at all in the 4th ed cosmos that prevents you doing exactly the same things, unless you decide to be a complete nutcase about there being no sourcebook for the semidemihemiquasipseudoelemental plane of belly button lint or not being able to look up exactly what the little plane that exists exists at the 3 way intersection between between the planes of mud, slime, and dirt is actually called. e: Or I guess you're one of those people who tracked the number of planes between a magic item's origin plane and the plane it's currently on in order to reduce the number of plusses. e2: I know a guy who's still salty about the Plane Of Concordant Opposition being renamed The Outlands for Planescape. Don't be that guy. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 01:48
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JerryLee posted:I don't know what to say if you don't think the cosmology changed significantly between 3E and 4E. I can only assume that you just didn't notice because the ways in which it changed weren't things that was important to you, which is perfectly reasonable, but that's no reason to disparage the idea of its being important to anyone. For the record, I didn't know about the Spellplague or whatever it was (I may have heard of it but that's about it); I'm talking about the core multiverse. It's actually interesting to me that so many people jumped to assuming I was speaking from a FR-centric point of view. I don't mean this in a snide way, I just find it curious that this was the default thing for people to read into my comments about setting. so you don't like that 4e rearranged where all the demons and angels lived rather than following what 3e did and copy/pasting the great wheel from Planescape? because they're really not that different. The big locations are still there with room to add the planes you miss 4e  vs 3e  Th 4e Manual of the Planes even advises how to convert the Great Wheel to 4e:  What's stopping you from following that, other than it not being the default anymore?
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Apr 29, 2016 02:04
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D&D's cosmology could also be chalked up to some in-game reasoning like changes to the common understanding of things. It's like saying that in 2e Science, our Sun orbited the Earth (but we know better now.) Plus, they're cosmic planes - it's OK if they're not understood completely, that's the business of gods. It's an ephemeral change that generally only bothered people who were already Bothered about 4e Dungeons & Dragons. This was much like most of the "setting wrecking" changes that pissed on Gary's corpse and their childhoods and whatever. Molehills that were made mountains by people who really needed mountains. Mountains justified the displaced anger they felt at the no longer being D&D's target demographic. The "New D&D crowd" was cool 20-somethings at PAX, people who hadn't been playing the same crusty edition for the last 15 years. There was a high-profile, high visibility campaign of new players who looked and acted nothing like the nerd pit in the back room of your LGS. Boo hoo. But this is standard practice for GW. GW cultivates a new generation of customer turnover every 2 - 6 years. There's a new edition every four years (and a new codex a little less often) but the mechanics and story were always fairly static. Some whales hang on longer, and a lot of them accumulated in WHFB because 1) it was the more "adult" of the two games, and 2) it represented a much greater time / money investment primarily because of the model count. They essentially did the same thing as 4e - took a game beloved by older players and re-calibrated it at a younger audience. Except where WotC targed the younger adult crowd, GW went for children. Age of Sigmar went straight for happy meal toys: bright colors, simplistic rules, and no limit to how many toys you could buy or play with. The entirety of the fluff (a 30-year game of Exquisite Corpse / wannabe-Silmarillion) was replaced with "Good Gold Guys vs Bad Blood Bros." Similarly, they replaced a 300+ page game with a 4 page pamphlet. So while 4e and AoS were both superficially the same "slap in the face," AoS was completely unrecognizable as a derivative of its predecessor.
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Apr 29, 2016 02:54
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Kai Tave posted:Age of Sigmar isn't on the same level as the D&D edition transition, I'm sorry. It depends what you mean by level, I guess? I'll certainly agree with you if you say that GW's mismanagement of product shifts is (at least) one or two SSJ levels above anything that WOTC has managed to do so far, but I don't think I ever claimed they were exactly equal. What I said was that they had a similar effect on some people (I think I said "very similar," which if you think that was overstating it, I'll lop off the 'very' in the interest of finding common ground). Narrowly focusing on Planescape/Great Wheel is somewhat of a red herring. It's one of the first examples to come to mind for me, yeah, but the fact is that my brother and I had a giant stack of 3.x source material that was abruptly deprecated and for which there was no timely replacement to be had even if I'd wanted to pay for it. It was that whole experience that, probably more than anything else, jolted me out of my cycle of happily consuming new D&D publications and made me think that maybe there was a better way to do things. This alienation is similar to what I've seen some people report as they jump ship from GW to any of the other, better miniature games, which is the sort of reason why I bring that comparison up; I'm obviously not saying that WOTC actually fractured Faerun into reality balls and made adventurers roll endless buckets of 3+/4+ dice to kill goblins. You people aren't wrong when you say "you can port/homebrew whatever you want!"; it will always be possible to port any setting to just about anything else with enough time investment. But the fewer books I have to re-buy and the less time I have to wait to re-buy them, the less likely I am to grow disenchanted with your game altogether and drift around for several years and discover Dungeon World. Which is the point upon which I was trying to make this relevant to the TG Industry thread and the WOTC-GW-Blizzard web of comparisons, rather than just being another edition disagreement, which is what seems like it's turned into. Incidentally, I never came back to Diablo 3, either. Even though I have no reason to disbelieve my friends who tell me it's a great game now, I still have plenty of other games to play, and they just sort of missed their chance to sink that hook into me. C'est la vie.
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Apr 29, 2016 02:55
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I don't get how it deprecated anything. Not only the whole "you can still play with the great wheel in your homebrew and they even gave you guidance how", but also the fact that none of it makes any difference at all to 99% of the published material and adventures. Was there a single published adventure that wouldn't make sense if you were still playing with the great wheel? If it doesn't affect homebrew and it doesn't affect published material, then what the heck does it affect?
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Apr 29, 2016 03:08
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3e spent a LOT of time making GBS threads on 2e in it's lead up. The main difference is, 2e was dead. There just weren't a lot of 2e fans to piss off at that point. I mean, it kinda helps hammer in how many 3e fans are hypocrites to add to their already lengthy list of character flaws, but that's about it.
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Apr 29, 2016 03:13
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Jimbozig posted:I don't get how it deprecated anything. Not only the whole "you can still play with the great wheel in your homebrew and they even gave you guidance how", but also the fact that none of it makes any difference at all to 99% of the published material and adventures. Was there a single published adventure that wouldn't make sense if you were still playing with the great wheel?
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Apr 29, 2016 03:17
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Jimbozig posted:I don't get how it deprecated anything. Not only the whole "you can still play with the great wheel in your homebrew and they even gave you guidance how", but also the fact that none of it makes any difference at all to 99% of the published material and adventures. Was there a single published adventure that wouldn't make sense if you were still playing with the great wheel? What it can depricate are the "network externalities" for lack of a less buzzwordy term. People slowly trickle away from games that aren't "supported," whether that means new books being churned out or official play or even simply having shelf presence. New players will gravitate towards whatever's newest and most publicly visible, which is frequently the latest edition. Errata stops coming out, articles stop getting written. I believe that there IS actually something to be said for the idea that "you can just keep playing with the books you have" isn't actually as evergreen a solution as it's made out to be. That all said, nothing about the 3E to 4E transition is any different in that regard than the transition from 2E to 3E was in either severity or impact of network externalities, or the oWoD to the nWoD. It happens every time a game undergoes a revision or edition change like this. 4E isn't uniquely deranged in the same way that Age of Sigmar's squatting of a decades old IP for an abrupt about-face into reality ball ville is.
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Apr 29, 2016 03:28
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Double posting to say in regard to Warhammer you still had edition turnover and stuff even before AoS, there's a history of some folks sticking with one edition over another or griping about new edition changes. Age of Sigmar is way beyond any of that.
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Apr 29, 2016 03:40
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JerryLee posted:You people aren't wrong when you say "you can port/homebrew whatever you want!"; it will always be possible to port any setting to just about anything else with enough time investment. But the fewer books I have to re-buy and the less time I have to wait to re-buy them, the less likely I am to grow disenchanted with your game altogether and drift around for several years and discover Dungeon World. Which is the point upon which I was trying to make this relevant to the TG Industry thread and the WOTC-GW-Blizzard web of comparisons, rather than just being another edition disagreement, which is what seems like it's turned into. Do you port the stuff you like from the 3e cosmology to your Dungeon World games? because I don't see how that's any less labor-intensive than using the Great Wheel in place of the 4e cosmology. outside of pulling up Masterplan and a copy of the Monster Vault to retool whatever planar monsters you want to the level and fluff you want, that is, but that's a flaw of crunchy games in general
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Apr 29, 2016 03:44
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WTF is this poo poo? Seriously. Who ever used this? Who's gonna get mad about this going away?  I started with 3e and never has this poo poo come up. I remember seeing this in the rulebook and it was just a neat observation. "Oh, this must be how the wizards do astronomy." That's it.
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Apr 29, 2016 04:17
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Chill la Chill posted:WTF is this poo poo? Seriously. Who ever used this? Who's gonna get mad about this going away? You have to admire the useless/confusing lenses though. I admit it, I'm a sucker for the barely-usable collection of death traps in the 1e Manual of the Planes.
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Apr 29, 2016 04:39
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Chill la Chill posted:WTF is this poo poo? Seriously. Who ever used this? Who's gonna get mad about this going away? It gets more complex as those outer planes can have tons of additional layers, each one potentially having different environs, natives, rulers, etc. here's another diagram that gives a sample of that:  full size edit- and I mean to be fair I really enjoyed reading the info on these planes in the 3e Manual of the Planes when I was younger, but the detail involved really deserves its own setting, otherwise you'll never get a good reason to use all of it Which is why it was designed for Planescape, the setting where you can use all these settings Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 05:05
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Don't forget that, like, half of them are literally pointless. The plane of air is literally just air. There's nothing else there. It's just neverending air with no land or water or anything else. Sounds like a great place to do some adventuring, right? Or you can head over to the plane of positive energy, which is just nothingness, and then you explode from cancer. Or hey, you can go to the Neutral Evil plane of Hades which is in fact a featureless grey flat land that goes on forever. Don't get it confused with the Neutral (Lawful) Evil plane of Gehenna, which is just a few volcanos floating in space, or the Neutral (Chaotic) Evil plane of Carceri, which is just a bunch of random layers of bad times stuck together. You see, that's different from the Lawful Evil plane of Baator, which is just a bunch of random layers of bad times stuck together, in that Baator has more layers. At a certain point those planes weren't invented for D&D the game, they were invented for D&D the shitter thought exercise, and then eventually crept up and actually interfered with D&D the game. You can guess which most 3e fans thought was more important.
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Apr 29, 2016 05:06
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ProfessorCirno posted:At a certain point those planes weren't invented for D&D the game, they were invented for D&D the shitter thought exercise, and then eventually crept up and actually interfered with D&D the game. You can guess which most 3e fans thought was more important.
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Apr 29, 2016 05:09
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^^^^^ I guess I shouldn't have made a cup of tea in the middle of posting. ProfessorCirno posted:Don't forget that, like, half of them are literally pointless. The plane of air is literally just air. There's nothing else there. It's just neverending air with no land or water or anything else. Sounds like a great place to do some adventuring, right? Or you can head over to the plane of positive energy, which is just nothingness, and then you explode from cancer. Or hey, you can go to the Neutral Evil plane of Hades which is in fact a featureless grey flat land that goes on forever. Don't get it confused with the Neutral (Lawful) Evil plane of Gehenna, which is just a few volcanos floating in space, or the Neutral (Chaotic) Evil plane of Carceri, which is just a bunch of random layers of bad times stuck together. You see, that's different from the Lawful Evil plane of Baator, which is just a bunch of random layers of bad times stuck together, in that Baator has more layers. Planescape's problem was drawing a grid and filling it in even if what they were filling it with was crap. So obviously you need a page about how dusty the elemental plane of dust is and how it's inhabited with various cookie cutter monsters with "dust" tacked on to the front of their names. The setting's great. Focusing on the interesting parts instead of giving the poo poo parts equal time would have made it even better. I can't think of another setting where the boring bits are so boring compared to the good bits, either. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 05:18
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ProfessorCirno posted:Don't forget that, like, half of them are literally pointless. The plane of air is literally just air. There's nothing else there. It's just neverending air with no land or water or anything else. Sounds like a great place to do some adventuring, right? Or you can head over to the plane of positive energy, which is just nothingness, and then you explode from cancer. Or hey, you can go to the Neutral Evil plane of Hades which is in fact a featureless grey flat land that goes on forever. Don't get it confused with the Neutral (Lawful) Evil plane of Gehenna, which is just a few volcanos floating in space, or the Neutral (Chaotic) Evil plane of Carceri, which is just a bunch of random layers of bad times stuck together. You see, that's different from the Lawful Evil plane of Baator, which is just a bunch of random layers of bad times stuck together, in that Baator has more layers. The elemental (and paraelemental and quasi-elemental) planes would have bits of other elements drifting around in them or the random wizard castle, but for the most part, yeah, they were deadly and fairly samey for any kind of extended adventure. They're the sort of thing that's typically crops up as some life-or-death quest in a larger adventure. So maybe you need to parachute into the plane of fire and steal a legendary artifact from some djinn lord or find the exact spot in the plane of earth where an otherwise nonexistent metal still rests that can be forged into a weapon to kill a god. You don't come back and build a house there when you retire.
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Apr 29, 2016 05:22
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The best way I know planar travel used is when it's a handy "Wizard did it" explanation. The police in Payday come from the Elemental Plane of Cops. My quiver is a portal to the Elemental Plane of Sharp Pointy Objects. Here's a pot that pours out a stream directly from the Elemental Plane of Gravy.
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Apr 29, 2016 05:25
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The paraelemental planes were fun when you wanted to kill someone in style. Yes, you've really pissed me off today, enough that i'm going to murder you with a swarm of bears made out of Lava.
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Apr 29, 2016 05:29
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At least in 3e, each of the elemental planes have extrusions from the other elemental planes, so you have balls of Earth that genies can set up magnificent palaces on and poo poo. There's a lot of room for adventure out there. The idea that 4E somehow turned up at your house and burned the Great Wheel and Faerun out of D&D is ridiculous. Both were actively acknowledged in the new edition, including advice for integrating the old material into the new settings. The reactionary bullshit in regards to 4E was utter nonsense, especially since Pathfinder is a thing.
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Apr 29, 2016 05:33
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AlphaDog posted:^^^^^ I guess I shouldn't have made a cup of tea in the middle of posting. I might be off base since I'm not a full fledged D&D historian, but wasn't Planescape basically created because someone said "hey, maybe we should make a reason for people to care about all these planes and alignments" and the setting basically grew up around that idea (also they wanted to make a D&D setting that involved a lot of ideological politicking and philosophizing because Vampire: the Masquerade had been published three years prior and TSR wanted something they could point to to try and court that same sort of clique-y political roleplaying)? I'm not sure how integral the Great Wheel was to D&D players' experiences prior to that but my understanding is that Planescape is the first real thing D&D did that made people care about all that stuff, and that it made enough of an impact to really stick in peoples' minds even though it hadn't really been that big of a deal before.
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Apr 29, 2016 05:33
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