Using the SRD3.0/SRD5.0/PRD as a yardstick, we have a minimum of the following planes: Material Plane, 4 transitive planes (ethereal, astral, shadow, dream), 5 elemental planes (air, earth, fire, water, chaos), 2 energy planes (positive, negative), the Feywild?, and 9 outer planes for each of the alignments (not counting the elemental and outer paraplanes and quasiplanes). That's around 22 major planes. Each plane is infinite in size, has a potentially infinite number of layers that are each also infinite in size and an arbitrarily large number of demiplanes each of arbitrarily large size. Most of these planes are also either identical to a given material plane landscape and/or are featureless expanses of empty space or some homogenous substance.
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.
If 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.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;874102Given 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.
There's little to stop you from having only one (the physical world, whether you call it the material plane or not). The few specific planes that are directly implicated by spell effects can be dealt with as just a different state (e.g., ethereal or astral creatures are just in various insubstantial states within the material plane, not in a different plane) or a distant place in the same plane. You might have to throw out a few spells that reference other planes more generally.
What is bad about having 22 major planes that is helped by only having 7 but with more minutiae in each?
FOR ME, it depends on the campaign.
Planescape is my favorite TSR setting, so the large number of planes works great for me because its the places to visit for those campaigns.
I loved the 4e cosmology of the planes bleeding into the world and patches of planes existing in various locations. I had so much fun with that and built several campaigns just on those ideas. HERE the much lower number of planes was a great benefit.
My current on/off 4e campaign that primarily uses the PHB 3 for races and classes and takes place in the Astral Sea on a chunk of Elemental Chaos as it floats inextricably toward a Far Realm rift.
That sort of high fantasy crazy is perfect for 4e, but completely doesn't work for my OD&D campaign that I feel is more Sword & Sorcery. Here, the planes are barely understood by sages and no place for mortals.
You forgot the nine levels of Hell.
In my book, the number's not the issue, it's the structure. The Great Wheel structure locks things into an 'all or nothing' arrangement; you either use every plane or toss it out and build from scratch. I prefer BECMI or 4E's more open-ended system, where you've got a handful of 'core planes' and one or two 'overplanes' that contain any number of unconnected specific planes.
Quote from: Christopher Brady;874128You forgot the nine levels of Hell.
But they have not forgotten him!!!
Bwahaha!!
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 is my point of view as well. If the major planes be few in number then it matters not, for they be infinite in size.
Quote from: rawma;874116There's little to stop you from having only one (the physical world, whether you call it the material plane or not). The few specific planes that are directly implicated by spell effects can be dealt with as just a different state (e.g., ethereal or astral creatures are just in various insubstantial states within the material plane, not in a different plane) or a distant place in the same plane. You might have to throw out a few spells that reference other planes more generally.
What is bad about having 22 major planes that is helped by only having 7 but with more minutiae in each?
It cuts down on having to remember the relations between them. Material, Astral, Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos, Mechanus, Overheaven and Darkunder are much easier to keep straight.
Quote from: Armchair Gamer;874130In my book, the number's not the issue, it's the structure. The Great Wheel structure locks things into an 'all or nothing' arrangement; you either use every plane or toss it out and build from scratch. I prefer BECMI or 4E's more open-ended system, where you've got a handful of 'core planes' and one or two 'overplanes' that contain any number of unconnected specific planes.
I like that, too.
Quote from: The Butcher;874115If anything, there are not nearly enough planes.
I'm sympathetic to this view. I love the old D&D planar structure to death, but it kind of flies in the face of the planes as being an uncharted frontier, which I also think is cool.
Related to that, I've always liked the way that planes are presented in
The Primal Order, wherein conquering a plane is one of the central ways of increasing your divine rank; likewise, conquering multiple planes is the sign of reaching the highest levels of godhood. That's not really something you can do when you have myriad gods spread across two or three dozen planes.
In the Qabalah there's 32 planes. So I'd say if anything, D&D is ten short.
Quote from: RPGPundit;874937In the Qabalah there's 32 planes. So I'd say if anything, D&D is ten short.
I just googled that... you mean the 10 Sephira (not including Da'at) and the 22 "connecting paths"? I remember in another thread you said that according to this occult worldview that the elemental planes would be subsidiary planes to the material plane... which in said worldview is named Assiah (containing only Malkut). The other three worlds of Yetzirah (Yesod, Netzah and Hod), Beri'ah (Gevurah, Chesed and Tif'eret) and Atzilut (Hokhmah, Binah and Keter) are non-physical in nature. You cannot visit them like you may visit the outer planes in D&D (at least in the later editions where the outer planes became physical; whereas in their earliest appearances they were non-physical and required spells and gates to mediate the conversion between flesh and spirit).
P.S. Romanizing Hebrew letters is hard.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;875922I just googled that... you mean the 10 Sephira (not including Da'at) and the 22 "connecting paths"? I remember in another thread you said that according to this occult worldview that the elemental planes would be subsidiary planes to the material plane... which in said worldview is named Assiah (containing only Malkut). The other three worlds of Yetzirah (Yesod, Netzah and Hod), Beri'ah (Gevurah, Chesed and Tif'eret) and Atzilut (Hokhmah, Binah and Keter) are non-physical in nature. You cannot visit them like you may visit the outer planes in D&D (at least in the later editions where the outer planes became physical; whereas in their earliest appearances they were non-physical and required spells and gates to mediate the conversion between flesh and spirit).
P.S. Romanizing Hebrew letters is hard.
That is an interpretation of certain schools of Hebrew Qabalism.
Having 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.
In the Hermetic Qabalah, all four of the worlds you mentioned: Assiah, Yetzirah, Briah, and Atziluth contain an entire Tree of Life, each sphere of which contains an entire tree of its own within it as well. Though at this point you're getting into "angels dancing on the head of a pin" territory. Or something like how every city has a Chinatown. Take your pick.
Roll away the Great Wheel and you can have as many or as few planes/or demiplanes) as you need, as needed. Because the multiverse is infinite and ultmately unknowable.
I really enjoyed the details they provided on the planes in the 1e Manual of the Planes. There's a lot of ideas one could run with in designing planes/layers of one's own.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;874387This is my point of view as well. If the major planes be few in number then it matters not, for they be infinite in size.
It cuts down on having to remember the relations between them. Material, Astral, Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos, Mechanus, Overheaven and Darkunder are much easier to keep straight.
I like that, too.
Overheaven and Darkunder? Jesus Wept.
Spoiler
(https://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/494733791_vSJvi/0/1050x10000/494733791_vSJvi-1050x10000.jpg)
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 (http://www.afdl.org/grubb/) 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.
Too many planes? Are you sure you aren't thinking of In Harm's Way: Wild Blue?
:D
-clash
Quote from: RPGPundit;878456For 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.
The homebrew I have been playing with the past decade or so is only about 500 miles X 500 miles. Plenty for multiple campaigns, and only about half the places have even been touched.
Quote from: CRKrueger;876424Spoiler
(https://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/494733791_vSJvi/0/1050x10000/494733791_vSJvi-1050x10000.jpg)
For some reason "Double Hell" really amuses me.
As far as "too many planes" goes:
No, there aren't too many planes. Most campaigns I've played in never stray from the Prime Material. I really enjoyed the Manual of the Planes when I was a youngster, the descriptions of the different planes and their layers were fertile ground for imagination, even if I never did get to campaign in them.
Quote from: Old One Eye;878497The homebrew I have been playing with the past decade or so is only about 500 miles X 500 miles. Plenty for multiple campaigns, and only about half the places have even been touched.
Well yeah, it all depends how local you want the scope of your campaign to be. You could run a whole campaign on a 12 mile hex if you were a mind to.
Quote from: RPGPundit;879021Well yeah, it all depends how local you want the scope of your campaign to be. You could run a whole campaign on a 12 mile hex if you were a mind to.
Correct. Which is why the question of whether there are too many planes is kind of silly to ask. It completely depends upon the needs of the campaign.
Quote from: Old One Eye;879086Correct. Which is why the question of whether there are too many planes is kind of silly to ask. It completely depends upon the needs of the campaign.
I can't argue with that. For some games the D&D 'great wheel' would be far more planes than necessary, for others it would be far too few.
There was an article in Dragon that turned the elemental planes into a tesseract arrangement that was really neet and had all sorts of potential.
I tried something simmilar with the outer alignment based planes by placing a cube around the elemental tesseract. It made Planescape alot more crazy!
The 3e Forgotten Realms book had a totally different planar structure from the great wheel. Never caught on much though, it seems.
I keep saying...
There is only ONE plane...
(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/dd/d0/89/ddd0894d257a1d7bca924e3a77626c46.jpg)