Pen and Paper D&D

[proudft]

It annoys me more due to the naming of (some of) the planes than due to the actual setup of it. 4e in general has way too much portmanteau naming. I kind of feel like Plane of Shadow was a fine name, calling it the SHADOWFELL is just fishing for something you can call your IP imo.

For the last time, I am not bringing back the Happy Hunting Grounds.

[Ingmar]

 

[Goumindong]

Man, now I want to play 2e. 4th never quite got the Planes right. They're all weird and dumb now, with the elemental chaos and the astral sea.

So just take the way the planes are in 2e and port it over into 4th? Its not like 4th edition actually has any set rules for what the planes are

[Sheepherder]

It annoys me more due to the naming of (some of) the planes than due to the actual setup of it. 4e in general has way too much portmanteau naming. I kind of feel like Plane of Shadow was a fine name, calling it the SHADOWFELL is just fishing for something you can call your IP imo.

The Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos are obviously analogous to the Outer planes of earlier versions, one being lawful, the other being chaotic, and most of the inner planes having been merged into the Chaotic planes because the Inner Planes were a stupid idea anyways.

The Feywild and Shadowfell are genitive and entropic versions of the Prime Material Plane.

[Ingmar]

Um, yes? What in my quoted section were you actually replying to. 

[Sheepherder]

It's not quite just a GRIMDARK version of the Negative Energy Plane.  There is a difference: it contains things.

[Ingmar]

That would make more sense if I had actually compared it to the Negative Material Plane (hint: the old Plane of Shadow is not the same thing.)

[Ironwood]

NERD FIGHT.

[Ingmar]

This is the one topic I will go full WUA on.

[Slyfeind]

So just take the way the planes are in 2e and port it over into 4th? Its not like 4th edition actually has any set rules for what the planes are

Good idear! :) Now I just have to convince my DM of that....

I don't like any of the renaming either. Even back in 2e, "Outlands" made me wince at first. It was too cyberpunk (which is kinda what they were going for really).

[Samwise]

Wasn't the Plane of Shadow a demiplane that was connected to the Ethereal Plane separately from the elemental planes?

[Ingmar]

Pre-3e, yes. In 3e it graduated to a coterminous plane with the Prime.

[Sheepherder]

I also though I had proudft's little decoder ring in there when I originally typed it up, which makes the Feywild the Ethereal Plane, which isn't really the same thing as the HAPPYLIGHT, unless my memory is not serving me right.  Apparently I didn't, I blame the back and forward buttons on my new mouse, they make it too easy to lose posts, rendering what does get through as gibberish.

[proudft]

Yeah, the Feywild->Ethereal equivalency is wholly pulled out of my ass to make me happy with the current setup.   But the Ethereal was always sort-of connected to the Prime what with ghosts, passing through walls, and the shallow ethereal vs. deep ethereal or whatever they hell those were called in the original MoP.  So it works for me.

[Samwise]

Pre-3e, yes. In 3e it graduated to a coterminous plane with the Prime.

I always consider the 2E Planescape box to be the canonical D&D cosmology.  I thought the 3E treatment lacked soul (even though I generally prefer 3E as a game system) and I haven't even looked at the 4E version because I know it'll make me nerdrage.

[Ingmar]

Yeah I can understand that. Promoting the shadow plane was one thing I feel 3e got right, though. In 4e they also kind of crammed Hades/Grey Wastes and (sort of) Ravenloft in there too, and populated it with humans-with-piercings-and-bad-attitudes (which used the same name as a more interesting 3e shadow fey race sadly) and I think it kind of lost something in the translation.

[Sheepherder]

Also a lot easier to come up with scenarios where you'd end up in another planes and not be immediately dead.

[Samwise]

"Easier on the head" is not a good feature when talking about fictional extradimensional realities IMO.   

[Sheepherder]

Except it provably is.  Dungeons & Dragons does not contain a primer on string theory.

[Goumindong]

That isn't his point. His point is that it isn't supposed to make much sense, the more convoluted and confusing it is the more it makes sense.

It is supposed to kinda feel like Geocentrism and the associated built models that were actually consistent with the movements of the solar system E.G.

In fact, if you go here and look about half way down of the first article and ignore the rest of the crazy, there are some seriously great models of the Ptolemaic system that were created as the ability to see that things were wrong got so much better

The same thing happened with the "Humors" (Medieval medicine was as scientific as current medicine, even including demonic possession) at some point looking into the body became good enough we could tell that the old way was wrong and abandoned it.

This is kinda what its supposed to feel like, the budding observations of possibly crazy alchemists and wizards ever probing into a strange ebbing and flowing cosmos.  Generating ever more complicated models on top of theories of how it all fits together. The prescriptions you get from the most recent idea probably works, but won't ever really make sense, because the model is so complicated you would have to study your entire life to make sense of it.

[Sheepherder]

Except more convoluted, confusing, and arcane would lead one to... string theory.

Out of the darkness leaps 1d6 Schrodinger's Cats (Small Undead(?) Beast).

EDIT: If they had wanted the heliocentric model with epicycles, just for the sake of obtuseness, they would have used it.  Really, their cosmology is "where would we like to fight" with the unifying bits tossed in to make it not totally schizophrenic and seemingly out of place.

[Ratman_tf]

GET YO PHYSICS OUTTA MY DEE AND DEE!



IT'S MAGIC HERE!

[Sand]

It annoys me more due to the naming of (some of) the planes than due to the actual setup of it. 4e in general has way too much portmanteau naming. I kind of feel like Plane of Shadow was a fine name, calling it the SHADOWFELL is just fishing for something you can call your IP imo.

I havent read the 4e FR campaign setting but from looking stuff up due to references to Shadowfell in the new Salvatore books, didnt the Plane of Shadows collapse or turn into or something the Shadowfell during the Spell Plaque or Time of Troubles in FR?

So what happened to all the elemental planes?

And even though Im an old schooler, I never got or understood the Ethereal Plane in the early campaign settings. We ignored it.

I always consider the 2E Planescape box to be the canonical D&D cosmology. 

I always considered Deities and Demigods to be the canon. I dont think I ever bought the Planescape box.

[Strazos]

Never used the planes really. Old campaigns in AD&D were low-magic, because we were young and magic just complicated things. It just never came up in 3e or 4e.

[Slyfeind]

I always consider the 2E Planescape box to be the canonical D&D cosmology. 

I always considered Deities and Demigods to be the canon. I dont think I ever bought the Planescape box.

The basic ideas were the same. Planescape just put cities and factions into the mess.

Man. Gonna go looking for Planescape on eBay and Amazon now....

[Rendakor]

We only really ever used the elemental and aligned planes (Abyss, hells, heavens, etc.), and never bothered with any astral travel nonsense via the astral plane; we just used the plane shift spell.

[Bzalthek]

If I remember correctly, the Githyanki are Astral Plane denizens.  I remember our party having to face invasions from them, and backtracking through astral mazes and other Prime worlds they invaded until we reached their home.  One of my favorite campaigns, actually.

[RhyssaFireheart]

The basic ideas were the same. Planescape just put cities and factions into the mess.

Man. Gonna go looking for Planescape on eBay and Amazon now....

/hugs her Planescape box set...

I rather liked the Planescape setting and it was the only campaign I actually ran for my old gaming group.  I loved the cant they used for the residents and the different factions because it added that whole political aspect to the game rather then just plain "good guys go fight ugly monsters" which is the usual D&D flavor.

[Malakili]

I never 'get' these online paper-RPG games.  If I wanted to play a game on the computer, I'd play a computer game, is how I've always felt.  It seems so slow and clunky and impersonal.

I've tried it a bit. The only purpose I can see for it is that if you are absolutely dead set on playing "tabletop" with a group of people that now lives far apart.  To me, the idea of being able to get 5 of my old friends together to play "pen and paper" online once a week would be a lot of fun, but it isn't the same if we say, played WoW together.  If you have a group available to play with that meets in person regularly and you are happy with it, online pen and paper seems pretty much useless.

[Lantyssa]

1st Edition Manual of the Planes is my definitive cosmology.  Planescape didn't really change much, and what it added was great.  There really aren't that many changes with 3rd Ed either.  There weren't wholesale shifts as with 4th.  (Demons are now elementals, what?)

All the planar diagrams are fantasy human understanding applied to a metaphysical concept though.  The 'reality' can be as complex and bizarre as a DM wants, and conflicting views can all be correct.  That's part of the fun of the planes.

[Ghambit]

Anyone fooled with a Spelljammer 4e conversion?  I thought about tackling it, but seriously... who has the time for this shit?
My 1st 4e campaign was essentially going to be spelljammer-esque.  Planar in nature via playable skyship travel, complete with interdimensional phlogiston politics.  The ships themselves of course would be living entities that the players could play or use as a controllable minion imprinted onto a particular player.

The more I grok it the more I realize it's probably just easier to Freestyle the whole thing with an assload of randomizers, rather than try to forcefeed some existing IP.

[Miguel]

My old group used strictly 1st edition stuff (I still have all of the books like the players handbook, Unearthed Arcana), they must be from the early 80's.  I never really got the attraction of the later editions (especially the move to miniatures), but that is the crotchedy-old nerd gamer in me I guess. 

[Reg]

First edition is the best. I still get together and play three or four times a year with the same group I started playing with in 1978 back in university.

[Ghambit]

"1st edition" is not even the original Arnesonian model for D&D, it's the quasi-Gygaxian version.  If you want TRUE original (crotchety old-gamer) D&D you'll have to sift around for some old play reports and/or DL "Dragons at Dawn."   And any Gygax influenced D&D is always going to defer to using minis, since the whole point of his system from the get-go was fantasy wargaming from the "1st person" perspective.

To that end, 4e is actually more a testament to the original Gygaxian D&D than anything else.  i.e. an even tighter, more refined AD&D.  Anything in between has been the real departure from the "norm."

As for those folks still playing 1st ed.  That's fine, but imo there are better systems out there that do what it intended much better and are more supported.  Those people play the white box out of nostalgia more than any other reason.  (shrug)  Or it really just has to do with what you're comfortable with.

[proudft]

By-the-book First Edition combat is pretty awful.  For reference: http://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=FE&fileid=263&watchfile=0

It's full of contradictions, doesn't work well with minis, and is generally an awful mess.  We gave it a try last year just for the hell of it, when I realized, hey we never really used the rules as written back in high school and earlier.   I'm still not sure where our 'rules' back then came from.  Group osmosis, I guess. 

It's funny, though, that everyone everywhere sort of settled on the same Basic/1st edition mishmash that jettisoned much of the AD&D awfulness.  But stuff like interrupting spells and how you move your minis are things that every group basically had to invent for themselves, since the rules are virtually useless.

I am not entirely happy with the speed of 4th edition combat, but two things are improving that.  One is the realization that a lot of the speed is up to the DM and what one puts in the encounters.   Making a far heavier use of minions speeds things up tremendously, for example.  I seem to have settled in on a max of about eight combats per game session, so now that I know that, I can pace things to fit it.  Secondly, as time has passed, WOTC has started lowering monster hp and increasing their damage, which helps a fair bit (and, I suppose, proves it wasn't just me).

There is, though, still some charm to the 'ha ha you surprised the orcs, charge, roll 4 hits, they die, woo the party won'.  But the flip side of that is 'you open the door and (roll initiative) the dragon wins initiative, he breathes, who survives... whoops no one'.  Which I had happen once.