Quote from: Manic Modron;1084395I don't have any experience with Spheres of Power, other than it is well regarded.  I'm sure it will see an update, though.

I don't have any problem with the Great Wheel either and a quick Google  for "5e cosmology" shows pictures that look like the Wheel anyway so...  Eh?  Not really bothered there either.

Paizo might not succeed at their goals, but I'm still looking forward to judging the results.

Reading the DMG, it explicitly states that the cosmology is up to the DM and provides a list of the cosmologies that have been published across the editions, including all the obscure ones, and suggestions for making your own. This is probably the best thing an edition of D&D has ever done.

The problem with the Great Wheel cosmology is that unless you're playing Planescape, the planes are completely irrelevant to your campaign. Planescape is written with the intention that you'll be visiting the planes from level one (and therefore bothers to go into great detail on them) whereas pretty much everything else (including Pathfinder) makes it the purview of high-levels only and barely ever details them. To add insult to injury, the planes are painfully boring most of the time. The whole shtick of the inner planes alone is that they are infinite expanses of a homogeneous substance, a concept that is so obviously stupid that it is ignored by every single video game which includes elemental planes as locations.

Furthermore, there are just too many planes. Far more than anyone actually needs. Most of them are redundant (in addition to boring as I just said). Do we really need eighteen different outer planes? Do we really need three transitive planes? Do we really need the inner planes period?

The amount of attention that Pathfinder spends on the planes is wasted. Most the attention they do give is spent on demons, since that's what most people care to use. Most people aren't going to run planar adventures. Even people that do want to use planes won't necessarily use Pathfinder's default cosmology. So basing the dynamic of the magic system on the structure of the great wheel needlessly shackles the rules to the 3e's horrible history of arbitrary and backwards world building.

The Great Wheel gets a full page spread in the 5E PHB.

After reading over the PF 2E Playtest for a few hours, and spending a few hours reading threads on the Paizo forums; I'm pretty sure that I don't like PF 2E as a whole, better than 1E.  2E is not any more simple than 1E, at its entry point.  It's not going to be fun, trying to teach all that stuff to someone who doesn't already have a grasp of half of it, to begin with.  PF 2E is a Featpalooza.

The new Core Rulebook is going to be 640 pages, because they couldn't meet their maximum target goal of 570 pages.  The new cover art for the 2E books looks great though.

This gives me a greater appreciation for PF 1E.

Quote from: Razor 007;1084546After reading over the PF 2E Playtest for a few hours, and spending a few hours reading threads on the Paizo forums; I'm pretty sure that I don't like PF 2E as a whole, better than 1E.

Fortunately finding out about the final product is risk free come August.  

I'm not sold on the game just yet as I am pretty sick of 3.x as a whole.  However, I'm still going to be watching it to see if it surprises me in the end.  I like a bunch of stuff they are trying to do, but I don't know how well they are going to wind up doing it.

Quote from: Manic Modron;1084551Fortunately finding out about the final product is risk free come August.  

I'm not sold on the game just yet as I am pretty sick of 3.x as a whole.  However, I'm still going to be watching it to see if it surprises me in the end.  I like a bunch of stuff they are trying to do, but I don't know how well they are going to wind up doing it.

This is Paizo's one chance to respond to D&D 5E in the RPG marketplace.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1084522The amount of attention that Pathfinder spends on the planes is wasted. Most the attention they do give is spent on demons, since that's what most people care to use. Most people aren't going to run planar adventures. Even people that do want to use planes won't necessarily use Pathfinder's default cosmology. So basing the dynamic of the magic system on the structure of the great wheel needlessly shackles the rules to the 3e's horrible history of arbitrary and backwards world building.

Any attention that publishers use on things that I dont like is wasted.

But in any case the Pathfinder planes are not the same as the Planescape planes and on the other hand I can see how some people may confuse the two.

Quote from: Shasarak;1084572Any attention that publishers use on things that I dont like is wasted.

But in any case the Pathfinder planes are not the same as the Planescape planes and on the other hand I can see how some people may confuse the two.

As somebody who owns every Planescape supplement, does plane hopping pretty regularly, and likes both the Great Wheel and the Great Beyond, they are close enough for government work.  Saying otherwise to someone who doesn't like them is like telling a vegetarian that a meat lovers pizza and pepperoni & sausage are different.

Quote from: Manic Modron;1084575As somebody who owns every Planescape supplement, does plane hopping pretty regularly, and likes both the Great Wheel and the Great Beyond, they are close enough for government work.  Saying otherwise to someone who doesn't like them is like telling a vegetarian that a meat lovers pizza and pepperoni & sausage are different.

Exactly.  There is no point trying to convince a vegetarian about the benefits of bacon.

Quote from: Razor 007;1084537The Great Wheel gets a full page spread in the 5E PHB.

That doesn't contradict anything I said. The rulebooks state at multiple different points that the cosmology will vary by DM fiat. The DMG has a whole chapter explaining how to make your own cosmology and the MM states that different planes won't exist in different settings. The books only provide the most basic detail on the planes, hardly sufficient to actually run adventures there.

Quote from: Shasarak;1084572Any attention that publishers use on things that I dont like is wasted.

But in any case the Pathfinder planes are not the same as the Planescape planes and on the other hand I can see how some people may confuse the two.

I understand they aren't the same, but Paizo has clearly been trying to copy Planescape as much as legally permissible. They doubled down on the incoherence factor. There are a bazillion demon races and psychopomp races with arbitrary and hairsplitting distinctions.

There are five or six different canonical flavors of the personification of Death alone. You have Charon as the Horseman of Death, Zyphus as the Grim Harvestman, anywhere from one to nine or more grim reapers, and innumerable lesser deaths, minor reapers and thanadaemons. In addition, you have the psychopomp race, the psychopomp lords, the valkyries, the shinigami, the maruts, etc. And Pharasma as the neutral (not lawful) judge-goddess of the dead.

Paizo does a similarly convoluted formula for absolutely everything. It's stupid. Real mythologies get complicated, sure, but nowhere near this level. In fact, real mythologies will typically combine figures that fulfill the same role rather than keep them distinct.

If I was charge, then I'd do something smart like combining all those. The Horseman of Death, the Grim Harvestman and the Judge-God of the Dead become the same figure, and will be Lawful (I'm not going into the good/evil distinction because I think it's silly). The grim reapers, lesser deaths, minor reapers, thanadaemons, psychopomps, valkyries, shinigami, maruts, etc would all be merged into a singular race of psychopomps. They reap souls, ferry souls, judge souls, kill people, hunt down those who live too long, etc. Wash, rinse, repeat for every aspect of the cosmology.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1084680That doesn't contradict anything I said. The rulebooks state at multiple different points that the cosmology will vary by DM fiat. The DMG has a whole chapter explaining how to make your own cosmology and the MM states that different planes won't exist in different settings. The books only provide the most basic detail on the planes, hardly sufficient to actually run adventures there.

I understand they aren't the same, but Paizo has clearly been trying to copy Planescape as much as legally permissible. They doubled down on the incoherence factor. There are a bazillion demon races and psychopomp races with arbitrary and hairsplitting distinctions.

There are five or six different canonical flavors of the personification of Death alone. You have Charon as the Horseman of Death, Zyphus as the Grim Harvestman, anywhere from one to nine or more grim reapers, and innumerable lesser deaths, minor reapers and thanadaemons. In addition, you have the psychopomp race, the psychopomp lords, the valkyries, the shinigami, the maruts, etc. And Pharasma as the neutral (not lawful) judge-goddess of the dead.

Paizo does a similarly convoluted formula for absolutely everything. It's stupid. Real mythologies get complicated, sure, but nowhere near this level. In fact, real mythologies will typically combine figures that fulfill the same role rather than keep them distinct.

If I was charge, then I'd do something smart like combining all those. The Horseman of Death, the Grim Harvestman and the Judge-God of the Dead become the same figure, and will be Lawful (I'm not going into the good/evil distinction because I think it's silly). The grim reapers, lesser deaths, minor reapers, thanadaemons, psychopomps, valkyries, shinigami, maruts, etc would all be merged into a singular race of psychopomps. They reap souls, ferry souls, judge souls, kill people, hunt down those who live too long, etc. Wash, rinse, repeat for every aspect of the cosmology.

And; in D&D 4E, didn't the Sorrowsworn hunt down those who had cheated death?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1084680I understand they aren't the same, but Paizo has clearly been trying to copy Planescape as much as legally permissible. They doubled down on the incoherence factor. There are a bazillion demon races and psychopomp races with arbitrary and hairsplitting distinctions.

Well yeah of course they did.  The whole game is built on top of over 30 years of DnD history of course it is incoherent.

The problem that I see is that the only time when WotC sat down and said "This is an incoherent mess so lets tidy it up" was the only time in history that DnD was beaten by another version of DnD that specifically did not and, in your own words, doubled down on the incoherence.

QuoteThere are five or six different canonical flavors of the personification of Death alone. You have Charon as the Horseman of Death, Zyphus as the Grim Harvestman, anywhere from one to nine or more grim reapers, and innumerable lesser deaths, minor reapers and thanadaemons. In addition, you have the psychopomp race, the psychopomp lords, the valkyries, the shinigami, the maruts, etc. And Pharasma as the neutral (not lawful) judge-goddess of the dead.

Paizo does a similarly convoluted formula for absolutely everything. It's stupid. Real mythologies get complicated, sure, but nowhere near this level. In fact, real mythologies will typically combine figures that fulfill the same role rather than keep them distinct.

Real mythologies and religions do have a couple of advantages over roleplaying canon.  Firstly they can essentially kill off all of those people that dont at least pretend to believe the official story and secondly because they are the only ones actually written down the competing beliefs will die off naturally as old people die and the young people get taught the official story.

I mean there is evidence that the Jesus story is essentially a rip off of Persian, Egyptian and Roman stories.  So the mythology is not even something new it is just building on top of the most popular things that came before.

Another factor to consider is that there may be no single unifying coherent story.  I can see the attraction of having something that answers all the questions once and for all like the one line of Physics equation that solves the Universe.  But what happens if there really is Charon and Zyphus and Pharasma?  The multiverse is a big place and there is room for multiple Deaths.  Now I have no problem with you limiting yourself to a single Death but thats not my bag.

QuoteIf I was charge, then I'd do something smart like combining all those. The Horseman of Death, the Grim Harvestman and the Judge-God of the Dead become the same figure, and will be Lawful (I'm not going into the good/evil distinction because I think it's silly). The grim reapers, lesser deaths, minor reapers, thanadaemons, psychopomps, valkyries, shinigami, maruts, etc would all be merged into a singular race of psychopomps. They reap souls, ferry souls, judge souls, kill people, hunt down those who live too long, etc. Wash, rinse, repeat for every aspect of the cosmology.

I see no reason why you could not be smart and do exactly what you say for your own home campaign.  World building is great who knows what you will come up with.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1084680Paizo does a similarly convoluted formula for absolutely everything. It's stupid. Real mythologies get complicated, sure, but nowhere near this level. In fact, real mythologies will typically combine figures that fulfill the same role rather than keep them distinct.

I definitely find it works best to use a lot of syncretism in polytheistic settings. Works much better in-world and gives rise to interesting effects. Eg turns out my son's Dragonborn Bbn-20 Shieldbiter is supposedly demigod son of the gold dragon goddess Aura, who is identified with Athena. He works for the Kingdom of Nerath who identify their patron goddess Erathis with Athena too. So that gives Shieldbiter a lot of prestige within Nerath even though he's a different species from the human Nerathi.

Quote from: S'mon;1084742I definitely find it works best to use a lot of syncretism in polytheistic settings. Works much better in-world and gives rise to interesting effects. Eg turns out my son's Dragonborn Bbn-20 Shieldbiter is supposedly demigod son of the gold dragon goddess Aura, who is identified with Athena. He works for the Kingdom of Nerath who identify their patron goddess Erathis with Athena too. So that gives Shieldbiter a lot of prestige within Nerath even though he's a different species from the human Nerathi.

Greetings!

You know, I admit, while part of me rolls my eyes at "Dragonborn"--you know why, my friend!:D Having Dragonborn be savage and powerful barbarians is very cool. I think having them be savage barbarians actually creates a legitimate "space" for them to exist in a campaign. I like that as well, S'mon!

I think the syncretism thing for religion also works nicely. I tend to do a lot of that in my World of Thandor. I don't necessarily even make rules for it; the players just know that sages believe the Goddess She-Rah is very similar to the War Goddess Xena, and there also overlap in customs, such as sacred temple prostitutes, like what the cult of the goddess Kambi Kardesha supports. Especially in larger cities of the civilized lands, where there are huge temples, specialized markets and festivals, with lots of festivities and such going on. Such temples also augment their vast profit streams by developing and operating special market shops that sell a variety of styles of clothing, as well as cosmetics, perfumes, and body oils.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Bard with occult spells, like having Ozzy or any number of other metal band dudes in your group.

Quote from: Chainsaw;1084757Bard with occult spells, like having Ozzy or any number of other metal band dudes in your group.

"Generals gather in their masses..... Just like witches at black masses!!!"