personally i find its less to meany planes and more dnds cosmology in general some thing like cutting the alignment plains in general is a good start in my mind add the 9 hells add a heaven of some sort leave the elemental plains astral dream and shadow to taste

I've always found just the prime material plane to suffice for all my D&D needs. Never bothered to read about the others. Is someone making you use them? Or why does it make a difference whether there are 7, 22, or 96 1/2?

Quote from: RPGPundit;876102Having visited most of these planes, I can tell you for sure that those Hebrews are wrong about this, and the Hermetic Qabalists (as well as other Hebrew Qabalists) are right.

Hilarious.

Part of me reads this unsympathetically as, "This is simply too much fertile ground for the imagination. Less please!"

Which is a very different argument than incoherence, where debates about dreamscapes and anachronisms usually hinge.

Fascinating. This is an appeal to have less colors available, instead of just using less colors for your own work. Compared with issues where these colors clash painfully and irredeemably, and your palette choice makes no sense.

I am still exploring my inner space for where my sympathetic side resides on this.

Quote from: CRKrueger;876424Overheaven and Darkunder? Jesus Wept.

  It was the mid-70s, and while Jeff Grubb's a talented writer and designer, he's never been the greatest with nomenclature.

  (Those names came from his home campaign, which wound up providing the gods of Krynn, the name of the world of Toril, and other bits of D&D lore. See The Matter of Theology for documentation.)

Quote from: Opaopajr;876847Part of me reads this unsympathetically as, "This is simply too much fertile ground for the imagination. Less please!"

Which is a very different argument than incoherence, where debates about dreamscapes and anachronisms usually hinge.

Fascinating. This is an appeal to have less colors available, instead of just using less colors for your own work. Compared with issues where these colors clash painfully and irredeemably, and your palette choice makes no sense.

I am still exploring my inner space for where my sympathetic side resides on this.

Most of the planes are, to put it bluntly, featureless expanses of nothing interesting and nothing of value is lost by cutting them. Furthermore, every plane is infinite and thus contains an infinite variety of environments. Why have several dozen infinite expanses of pointlessness when you could have a half-dozen (or even one) that provide every imaginable adventuring locale?

Quote from: The Butcher;874115If anything, there are not nearly enough planes. I admit to not being crazy about D&D's classic cosmology and preferring a more open-ended Multiverse.

This. Locking the planes down by drawing a cute little symmetrical diagram was one of Gygax's biggest mistakes.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;876852Most of the planes are, to put it bluntly, featureless expanses of nothing interesting and nothing of value is lost by cutting them. Furthermore, every plane is infinite and thus contains an infinite variety of environments. Why have several dozen infinite expanses of pointlessness when you could have a half-dozen (or even one) that provide every imaginable adventuring locale?

And the same could not be said about setting landmasses and planets because? You're the GM, boo-boo, it's your fertile ground to seed what you like. It's just like those gaps between city dots on prime material maps.

And as for having even just "one infinite expanse of pointlessness" that "provides every imaginable adventuring locale," Golarion already exists over that way by Paizo.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;874102SNIP

Given that little note about layers, do we really need 22 or more major planes? In my estimation you could condense it to 7 and leave the minutiae to environments within those.

Ah, its a matter of taste. A gonzo campaign using all kinds of parallel  worlds and many planes is very D&D. There was a pocket world adventure in Queen of the Demon Web Pits on top of the trip to Lloths tidy little corner of the abyss
 
Using Monte Cook's Beyond Countless Doorways including the   "thought only" world and the others or a more limited Planescape can be fun

I prefer something more akin to 4th with a few planes (I typically like 3, Heaven Hell and Faerie/Nature) and overlaps myself.

"Are there too many planes?"

No.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;876867This. Locking the planes down by drawing a cute little symmetrical diagram was one of Gygax's biggest mistakes.

I thought the 3.0 Manual of the Planes did a good job of opening that up, with Shadow connecting a host of variant cosmologies, like FR's being different from Greyhawk's (aka Classic Planes).

Quote from: Opaopajr;876879And the same could not be said about setting landmasses and planets because? You're the GM, boo-boo, it's your fertile ground to seed what you like. It's just like those gaps between city dots on prime material maps.

And as for having even just "one infinite expanse of pointlessness" that "provides every imaginable adventuring locale," Golarion already exists over that way by Paizo.

The planes are all to often described as vast expanses of emptiness that exist for trivial reasons. The ethereal is empty clouds that contain ghosts and demiplanes. The astral is empty silver sky that serves as a highway. The elemental planes are vast expanses of their element for elementals to call home: air is interchangeable with any material sky, water is interchangeable with any material ocean, fire is interchangeable with the inside of any sun, and earth is interchangeable with the underdark.

What little I liked about 4e's cosmology was that it tried to make the planes interesting places to visit. What made it stand out from Planescape was that parties didn't need to be high level and wearing environmental suits to start with. That's the sort of attitude I want to apply to all of the planes. Dark Dungeons had a truly refreshing take on the elemental planes that I will never forget.

Reducing the absolute number a la 4e or MotP's omniverse model (which is my go to) isn't a big change if the only difference is that all the previous planes are just squashed together. Ethereal Sea is the combined astral and ethereal, Elemental Chaos is the elemental and chaos planes, Shadowfell is the shadow and negative energy planes, Infernos is the evil planes and their bickering fiendish courts, etc. I like it because it makes the resulting locales more cosmopolitan.

But as always I suppose your mileage may vary.

In my games, I use as much of the Great Wheel as I feel like, but then have no problem with jumping into other stuff or changing stuff around at my leisure.

I have always viewed the Great Wheel as an in-setting philosophical/religious map of the planes that is not literal geography, but is more like the medieval maps that puts Jerusalem in the center.  The Americas do not exist on a medieval T-O map, same as anything a DM may want to do with the Great Wheel.

For starters, if you presume infinite prime material planes, you've pretty much got more than you could ever possibly use in any campaign right there.