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gtrmp posted:The Great Wheel is terrible because it's alternately incoherent, repetitive, and completely irrelevant to the actual game. All the Inner Planes and transitive planes are infinitely-empty wastelands of pointless homogeneity (and a third of them immediately kill you upon arrival), there are maybe two big-picture ideas ("a big hole in the ground" and "eternal torment/imprisonment, but literally anyone can use portals to come and go as they please") stretched out across all the Lower Planes, and all the Upper Planes are fundamentally dull by design. It's not a coincidence that the most interesting and memorable parts of Planescape are the parts that are entirely original to Planescape and have little or nothing to do with the Great Wheel cosmology as a whole. What makes the Great Wheel so dumb is how useless it was to the expected gameplay paradigm when it first came out: It's pretty well established at this point that the game circa AD&D was mechanically geared towards "fantasy home invasion" (That is, it supported the players going into dungeons and looting as much poo poo as possible), and the Great Wheel really doesn't fit into that gameplay loop beyond giving the DM a longwinded explanation of where the 12 HD demon at the end of the dungeon came from. It's part of D&D's longstanding problem with providing needlessly detailed and convoluted explanations for things that the players will have pretty much no way of learning or interacting with in-game. It also doesn't help that it's completely driven by an engineer-brain mindset that everything must be quantified and broken down into discrete categories that doesn't really serve the needs of fantasy world-building.
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Aug 19, 2021 15:00
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| # ? May 24, 2024 23:45 |
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There are things I like about the Great Wheel. I like a lot of weird planes. Sometimes having stuff like 9-point alignment works as a prompt. "Oh, we should come up with some Neutral Evil fiends." (Too bad the yuguloths aren't actually very good.) What I hate about the Great Wheel is the same thing I hate about bone and wood weapons in Dark Sun: stupid overcomplicated mechanics for how you get a bonus to this and a penalty to that and blah blah blah when you're in the Quasiplane of Goop. I see no reason not to just assume the Astral Plane is a big ol' sprawling mess like in 4e. That's just FYAD Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Aug 19, 2021 |
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Aug 19, 2021 15:14
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Halloween Jack posted:(Too bad the yuguloths aren't actually very good.) They're not good at all! They're evil
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Aug 19, 2021 15:42
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Esteban is chaotic evil.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:26
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I'd go to bat for the Great Wheel. It's not especially useful in the sense that it's just a big math thing, and obviously a bunch of stacked infinities isn't the best playground, but who ever treats it like that anyway? The Great Wheel is basically 24 or so great dungeon backgrounds. Set a precarious crystalline tower on the border of Salt and Water where the bottom of the tower is eroding away as the waves crash against it, but the top is strung up with giant monsters dessicating in the salty heat, or on the border of Dust and Void where a silt-shrouded floating castle hides a terrifying cult of the void, worshipping the seemingly eternal spiral of dust that the endless blackness pulls away from their tower, which is full of creepy void and dust monsters. Actually dealing with the ecology and local conditions of the plane of crystal or getting involved in various extra-planar blood wars or whatever is doable but dang it's so much more useful to say "You're in a weird tower and hoo boy if you look out the window the stuff going on is nuts."
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Aug 19, 2021 16:35
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*refusing to take eyes off from newspaper* Have you tried as a GM to just not take the official setting 100% at face value and homebrew parts out?
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Aug 19, 2021 16:38
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Plutonis posted:*refusing to take eyes off from newspaper* Have you tried as a GM to just not take the official setting 100% at face value and homebrew parts out? 
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Aug 19, 2021 16:47
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Maybe they should just write the setting good, since they're the ones getting paid to write it.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:49
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:the answer to "in Gygax's conception, Lawful Good is genocidal tyrants and Chaotic Good is libertarians" is not to simply erase it, but to lean into those factions just being vaguely angelic- and fey-flavored villains. get all Final Fantasy on that poo poo Agreed Megazver posted:Yugoloths are super-redundant, though. There was a neat thread over on RPGnet about overhauling Yugoloths and some of the other lesser demon/devil types to be more unique and interesting, I'll see if I can find it again
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Aug 19, 2021 16:53
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The Deleter posted:Maybe they should just write the setting good, since they're the ones getting paid to write it. that's a relative concept
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Aug 19, 2021 16:54
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drrockso20 posted:There was a neat thread over on RPGnet about overhauling Yugoloths and some of the other lesser demon/devil types to be more unique and interesting, I'll see if I can find it again When I ran 3e I replaced yuguloths with a sort of Cenobite race and called them rakshasa. Didn't really get much mileage out of them; one showed up in an adventure concerning a snake cult.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:57
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yugoloths are cool. they got the sigma grindset of being evil for the sake of themselves, none of the chaos vs law poo poo
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Aug 19, 2021 16:58
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Halloween Jack posted:There are things I like about the Great Wheel. I like a lot of weird planes. Sometimes having stuff like 9-point alignment works as a prompt. "Oh, we should come up with some Neutral Evil fiends." (Too bad the yuguloths aren't actually very good.) Halloween Jack posted:That's just FYAD 
Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Aug 19, 2021 |
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Aug 19, 2021 17:07
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I don't think there's anything super wrong with having factions of Faustian bargain demons, tartatarian jailer/torturer demons, and debacuhed psycho demons all at odds with one another really.
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Aug 19, 2021 17:08
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Halloween Jack posted:That's just FYAD GetDunked posted:Esteban is chaotic evil. In conclusion, Esteban is a land of contrasts.
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Aug 19, 2021 17:17
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Splicer posted:In 4E dark sun wood and bone weapons worked exactly like normal weapons except if you rolled a 1 you could reroll your attack at the cost of breaking it. Bonus : this lets you narrate finding a sword made out of actual metal a big accomplishment that makes the PC feel like they now have a tank. Even though the stats are just a +2 sword or whatever made the math play best with inherent bonuses. (Also 4e Dark Sun gave us inherent bonuses, which gave me my default DTAS math-hack of "everyone is reasonably optimized for things like to hit and damage bonuses and whatever, when you level up just follow the chart and spend your feats on interesting stuff instead.")
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Aug 19, 2021 17:25
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Splicer posted:In 4E dark sun wood and bone weapons worked exactly like normal weapons except if you rolled a 1 you could reroll your attack at the cost of breaking it.
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Aug 19, 2021 17:26
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My only complaint about the Great Wheel is that it's conceptualized as a 3D space instead of stacked infinities it should be. Every realm should touch every other realm, Water to Earth, Pandemonium to Mechanus. The Material plane isn't the center of the universe, it's the points of sufficient congruence to create a world similar enough to our own. Also build on what they did on the Nine Hells and not have a plane be a monocultural monobiome.
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Aug 19, 2021 17:29
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Tibalt posted:My only complaint about the Great Wheel is that it's conceptualized as a 3D space instead of stacked infinities it should be. Every realm should touch every other realm, Water to Earth, Pandemonium to Mechanus. The Material plane isn't the center of the universe, it's the points of sufficient congruence to create a world similar enough to our own. Very good point, but I just want to add that then you should just go hog wild and rather than all the planes being connected, you should make it some kind of n-dimensional space where each plane idiosyncratically interacts in its own way. So like maybe you can pass from the plane of void to any other plane or you can go from water to salt but not salt to water. (Totally bullshit and made up examples to show possible connections ; actual ones chosen by what's most fun and interesting not random stuff that popped into my head quickly.)
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Aug 19, 2021 17:36
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fool of sound posted:I don't think there's anything super wrong with having factions of Faustian bargain demons, tartatarian jailer/torturer demons, and debacuhed psycho demons all at odds with one another really. villain infighting is cool, lends well for both "good" and "evil" campaigns that can take advantage of it
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Aug 19, 2021 17:37
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I definitely think that planar travel should involve traveling through a liminal zone where the reality of one plane gradually gives way to another. And yeah, don't have planes that are too inhospitable to even traverse.
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Aug 19, 2021 17:44
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Xiahou Dun posted:Very good point, but I just want to add that then you should just go hog wild and rather than all the planes being connected, you should make it some kind of n-dimensional space where each plane idiosyncratically interacts in its own way. So like maybe you can pass from the plane of void to any other plane or you can go from water to salt but not salt to water. (Totally bullshit and made up examples to show possible connections ; actual ones chosen by what's most fun and interesting not random stuff that popped into my head quickly.) I think it's also a better cosmological framework to just leave open the idea of what cosmological forces have planes of reality associated with them, rather than starting with this limited, ordered structure. Like, rather than limiting the outer planes to the alignment chart or the classical elements, any major ideal or cosmic force has a plane of reality associated with it. So you have things like the Plane of Sadness, Conquest, Anger, Peace, Radiation, Dungeons, Greed, etc. Another alternative is The Elder Scrolls model, where planes are the domains of powerful entities and deities and their nature is shaped in their creator's image. Hermaeus Mora's plane is an endless library floating in a mass of tentacles and black goop, Hircine's is a perpetually twilit forest whose inhabitants are all either hunting or being hunted, Molag Bal's is a frozen, lifeless mirror of the mortal world covered in blood and gore, etc. Also I think the best direction to take Yuggoloths is to just lean into the idea that they're the ones constantly stoking the Blood War between devils and demons. Not for any reason of personal profit or anything, but because everyone always being at war with everyone else is a state of affairs that just creates more misery and suffering and that's the Yuggoloth's cosmological jam.
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Aug 19, 2021 17:49
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Xiahou Dun posted:Very good point, but I just want to add that then you should just go hog wild and rather than all the planes being connected, you should make it some kind of n-dimensional space where each plane idiosyncratically interacts in its own way. So like maybe you can pass from the plane of void to any other plane or you can go from water to salt but not salt to water. (Totally bullshit and made up examples to show possible connections ; actual ones chosen by what's most fun and interesting not random stuff that popped into my head quickly.)
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Aug 19, 2021 17:54
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^^^ loving A that's good. Might want to adapt the specific mechanic to fit the tone of the game a bit, but that's a banging idea.KingKalamari posted:I think it's also a better cosmological framework to just leave open the idea of what cosmological forces have planes of reality associated with them, rather than starting with this limited, ordered structure. Like, rather than limiting the outer planes to the alignment chart or the classical elements, any major ideal or cosmic force has a plane of reality associated with it. So you have things like the Plane of Sadness, Conquest, Anger, Peace, Radiation, Dungeons, Greed, etc. Yeah, this is really good. Especially because 1) why yes hello infinite canvas to paint on (if you want it), don't mind if I do and 2) it naturally leads to the open space for exploration of if/when there isn't a plane for a given concept : if the players give even a third of a drat, after sessions of bopping around between the planes of salt and hangovers and water and eggplant parm, they're gonna be really, really curious why there categorically 100% isn't a plane of earth.
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Aug 19, 2021 17:57
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This is the plane of glim. It doesn't intersect with the prime material plane so/because you guys don't have glim. Which explains a lot about you guys if I'm being honest.
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Aug 19, 2021 18:01
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I've generally preferred to have a lot of ambiguity and unresolved questions when it comes to the cosmology of the fantasy worlds I want to play in. I don't believe even the GM actually needs a comprehensive, authoritative map of the multiverse in order to prepare adventures and campaigns; sure, having campaign material for specific places and even specific zones is potentially useful when you're out of ideas or don't have much prep time... but I still want the players to be able to ask three different experts the same question about the universe, and get three different answers, and not be able to be certain which is correct. That makes for a world that feels more viscerally mysterious to me. Yes, in theory players should try to divorce their out-of-game knowledge (of having stared at the map in the front of the Manual of Planes or whatever) from their in-character knowledge: but having the OOC knowledge literally not exist pushes players to accept internally that any possibility presented to them in-game is at least potentially true and may bear investigation (or avoidance). Where a Manual of the Planes can give me value is by providing a bunch of ideas, any of which I can use or reject; lacking a map connecting them all might help to reinforce that notion, rather than suggesting that any GM ought to even try to include every entry in the book into one single cosmos (which no party of adventurers will ever visit at least 98% of, and now I think about it, this is my general caution about making big comprehensive campaign setting maps either...). If you want to sell me a detailed setting guide to Dissolve, the City on the Edge of the Plains of Salt and Water, OK. Cool! Yes, this means if I use it, we've established these two planes intersect in some way. But if I don't use it, the players can't presume either of those planes even exist, much less intersect. e. and four or five great posts while I was typing made this point first lol
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Aug 19, 2021 18:06
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Drakyn posted:I seem to recall the guy who wrote the Clowns mod for Dominions 5 may actually have an account somewhere on SA, but I could be out of my mind. Either way I think that sort of undercurrent (communicating entirely through 'reflexive systems of acausal meta-irony', JESUS) is deliberate. It's a mod? I'm severely disappointed, I had been under the wonderful impression that for some reason the writer of this incredibly serious high fantasy setting had snapped at the last minute and filled the world with clowns and by the time anyone noticed the CD was already being duplicated. Halloween Jack posted:I definitely think that planar travel should involve traveling through a liminal zone where the reality of one plane gradually gives way to another. And yeah, don't have planes that are too inhospitable to even traverse. There was a Planescape-like cosmology I never got round to running a game in where the premise was that the elemental planes that the City of Doors linked to got more and more 'pure' as you got closer and closer to the centre. What we call the Plane of Fire is really the home of a platonic concept so pure and alien that mortals have no hope of even comprehending it. The ideology at the heart of the plane encompasses things such as passion, the spark of inspiration, upheaval, destruction of the old to make way for the new; fire is just like the ectoplasm it leaves when that raw spiritual power interacts with physical matter. Because permanent portals have been around so long, the material realm has spilled into the elemental realms they link to -- so the area on the other side is the kind of place that people can inhabit and make a living, if they don't mind the laws of reality sometimes being a bit wonky. Wizards like it when this happens because they can run in, steal a bunch of magical reagents, and run out again before they get eaten. The inhabitants of elemental planes like it too, because they can take advantage of the cool things you only find natively on the material plane, like physical matter and this interesting "free will" thing that so many mortals take for granted.
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Aug 19, 2021 18:10
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neonchameleon posted:Did you mean to write "try checking out 4e where they came from"? The best 5e lore is legit just watered down 4e content. Meanwhile e.g. 2e brings us things like the Great Wheel with an Afterlife For Every Half-Alignment while the good parts of the cosmological lore that are places that you can visit and aren't tied to the alignment (Feywild/Shadowfell/Elemental Chaos) are straight from 4e. Depends what you consider "best" but there's a germ of those in 2e Planescape. 4e absolutely refined them into their own thing, which (of course) 5e traced and got credit for.
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Aug 19, 2021 18:11
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There's always the Amber method of just saying "oh, there's a shadow for everything". Then "how do I get there?" is a question of "slowly build up the features of that world and remove the ones of this world". You can have Amber and Chaos as kind of antipodes for this meta-cosmology if you want.
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Aug 19, 2021 18:21
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Exactly. I wanna hellride.
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Aug 19, 2021 18:22
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Drakyn posted:I seem to recall the guy who wrote the Clowns mod for Dominions 5 may actually have an account somewhere on SA, but I could be out of my mind. Either way I think that sort of undercurrent (communicating entirely through 'reflexive systems of acausal meta-irony', JESUS) is deliberate. The clown mod was originally made for Dominions 4 by forums poster Mu, but I don't know if they had anything to do with porting it to Dominions 5. Either way the mod is a treasure.
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Aug 19, 2021 18:49
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FMguru posted:My favorite thing about The Great Wheel is how so many official D&D campaign settings either actively ignore it and have their own planar overstructures (Eberron and its orrey, Forgotten Realms and its tree, Dragonlance and the Abyss) or else exist in weird edge-case special states (Ravenloft, Dark Sun) that actively refuse to engage with The Great Wheel. FR's tree, which isn't really mentioned prior to the back of the 3E campaign book, is just another way to envision the wheel. Dragonlance's Abyss is a layer of the Great Wheel's Abyss. Ravenloft existed in the Ethereal plane. One of Dark Sun's mega-adventures is about Githyanki invading from the Astra Plane. TSR put a lot of effort into explaining how their multiverse was connected in the 2E era. They would've connected Eberron to the Great Wheel as well had it existed. Plutonis posted:yugoloths are cool. they got the sigma grindset of being evil for the sake of themselves, none of the chaos vs law poo poo Can't have an interdimensional forever war without interdimensional forever mercenaries.
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Aug 19, 2021 18:53
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I also, while we're talking about it, find it decreasingly plausible that the whole multiverse is stuck in quasi-medieval technology for countless millennia the more you add additional planes and worlds and populations. Thematically, to me a multiverse type situation demands more of a RIFTS-like mishmash of hyper-tech and swords than a D&D-style mishmash of high magic doohickies, scrolls of Wish, and swords. But if we just have quasi-medieval Regular D&D Land and then an uncertain larger cosmos that maybe you can go to places in, sometimes, but without any sort of long-term reliability or continuity that would permit centuries of technological and cultural exchange, then it feels more viscerally plausible to me. I realize you can handwave away all that with just being necessities of your setting and its themes, so this is just personal preference and not really an actual "problem" with having a fixed map of the planes.
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Aug 19, 2021 19:10
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Did we ever find out where that Barrier Peaks UFO came from?
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Aug 19, 2021 19:24
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I totally agree, Leperflesh, but if you start letting that stuff in then the whole bullshit pseudo-medieval setting false apart. Which is cool and good as far as I'm concerned because it's made-up and silly, but a lot of people like the medieval pastiche settings as is and don't really care that it's based off of nothing but Gary Gygax's tummyfeels and fall apart if you think about them at all ever. Which is great for them and I wish them all the joy even if I don't get the appeal.
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Aug 19, 2021 19:25
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4E Dark Sun owned so much.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:11
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Xiahou Dun posted:I totally agree, Leperflesh, but if you start letting that stuff in then the whole bullshit pseudo-medieval setting false apart. Which is cool and good as far as I'm concerned because it's made-up and silly, but a lot of people like the medieval pastiche settings as is and don't really care that it's based off of nothing but Gary Gygax's tummyfeels and fall apart if you think about them at all ever. Which is great for them and I wish them all the joy even if I don't get the appeal. Come to think of it, the traditional fantasy purist mindset in D&D makes less and less sense the more you learn about the game's roots and influences: The earliest supported campaign settings (Blackmoor, Greyhawk, The Wilderlands* and Mystara/The Known World) all had fairly prominent science fiction elements embedded in them somewhere, the game itself was developed in an era when the distinction between sci fi and fantasy was particularly blurred and pretty much all of the source material in appendix n is genre-blurring new wave fantasy and weird fiction. In short: Generic fantasy is dead, long live the weird! * - Before anyone says anything, I know The Wilderlands aren't a first party product, but they were officially licensed and predate pretty much every other officially-supported campaign setting.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:16
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I would argue that the "pseudo medieval" kingdoms in something like D&D or Pathfinder are superficially medieval, but actually have most of the trappings of a modern centralized nation state. Centralized bureaucracies, professional standing armies, and other developments made possible by advances in food production and communications technology. Which is completely logical when you factor in how widely available magic lets you duplicate the technological innovations that make those things possible. They keep the gloss of feudalism, with kings and dukes and networks of social obligation, similar to how real life nation states kept the trappings of medieval society long after their actual function had been replaced by other forms of social organization. You also see incursions from more technologically advanced civilizations, in the form of Mind Flayer raids and other superpowered beings joyriding in the prime material plane. And that technology left behind by the visitors does filter out into broader society, it's just hard for the locals to duplicate, in the same way a guy on the Sentinel islands would have a hard time reverse engineering a guided missile. You could hypothetically accelerate the rate of diffusion across the realms by making planar travel cheaper, but I don't think I've ever seen a setting where anyone made an organized effort to do that.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:17
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Plus Empire of the Petal Throne, which was 100% a science-fictional premise to begin with!mellonbread posted:I would argue that the "pseudo medieval" kingdoms in something like D&D or Pathfinder are superficially medieval, but actually have most of the trappings of a modern centralized nation state. Centralized bureaucracies, professional standing armies, and other developments made possible by advances in food production and communications technology.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:21
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I may have posted this before, but one of my favorite Pathfinder Society moments was realizing that the eponymous Pathfinder Society wasn't a disinterested guild of archaeologists and treasure hunters, but a mercenary army and counterintelligence agency masquerading as a disinterested guild of archaeologists and treasure hunters. It was some mission to Cheliax, where the venture captain gave us some cover story about plundering a tomb, but also strongly implied that if we killed a local dignitary who had been blocking the society's expansion, there would be bonus XP in our paycheck for the adventure. There was even a Cruelty Squad style mechanic where if you died, they would resurrect you for a fee, provided you were generating enough income for the Society.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:30
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