I think that D&D 2e/3.X/5e, Pathfinder, and Draw Steel's cosmologies all have major issues with scale and in-game practicality. Setting authors tend to get weird about scale whenever extra worlds are involved, and these are no exception.These games' settings want to fulfill multiple conflicting desires:• #1: One or more "flagship" fantasy worlds: the Realms/Greyhawk/Dragonlance trio in 2e, mostly just the Realms in 5e, Golarion in Pathfinder, Orden in Draw Steel.• #2: A vast universe full of so many other worlds, so that GMs can feel cool about their own homebrew worlds somehow sharing the same universe.• #3: Otherworldly planes full of celestials, demons, devils, fairies, and the like.• #4: These planes are so vast that they influence many worlds simultaneously! We have heard since 2e about how the Blood War has spilled into and ruined many worlds. Pathfinder's Hell has "countless malebranche," each specifically tasked with conquering a whole world for Hell.• #5: The adventures that take place on a "flagship" fantasy world are of super-great import. Their stakes and consequences ripple throughout even otherworldly planes.• #6: The planes and their cities and hierarchies should be approachable in-game and understandable, not totally mind-boggling.(Continued.)
These lead to some weird contrivances, such as:• Virtually everything important in the cosmos centers around the "flagship" worlds, like Earth in Marvel or DC. In 5e, the Abyss and the Nine Hells suffer upheavals in leadership based on events in the Sword Coast. In Draw Steel's Crack the Sun mega-adventure, all of the cosmos lives or dies based on an adventure that unfolds starting in Orden.• Non-flagship worlds are immaterial in the grand scheme of things.• Populations are odd. In 3.5, Sigil, the city at the center of the cosmos, has a population of 250,000. In Pathfinder, Dis, 1/9th of Hell, has a population of 9.5 million, only 5.7 million of which are devils. (Pathfinder's Hell is supposed to be threatening "countless" worlds.) In Draw Steel, Matt Colville says that Orden's largest city has a population of ~1.5 million ("The vast majority of Capital’s citizens live a life basically the same as your average Londoner in Shakespeare’s time"), and this is supposedly the largest city in all the cosmos... even though other worlds have outright space opera levels of technology.I do not know. It makes the stakes of adventures feel so bizarre, artificial, and inauthentic whenever they get raised to a cosmic level.I am a much greater fan of, for example, Keith Baker's approach to cosmology in Eberron. (Note that I say Keith Baker's approach, not WotC's. The two are very different.) That is, Eberron is a self-contained world. Its cosmology is specifically tailored to and calibrated for that world, rather than saying, "These planes touch and influence all worlds!" The mortal world is the crux and fulcrum of the cosmos because it simply is, and there are no other worlds around to get sidelined.What do you think?
>>97227489Edna, I don't know what to tell you. Good worldbuilding is better than bad worldbuilding? People should get that a universe is a big fucking place and nothing that happens on one planet means a goddamn thing to someone 5 parsecs away?Personally, I don't do big, universe-spanning stories with cosmic stakes, or when I do, it's way more about the people and what they're doing on a personal scale than what happens to the world around them, which is really its own kind of bleakness but sometimes that's kind of the point.
>>97227489>>97227492It's also a problem with numbers. 3e onwards can scale and level infinitely, but there's a point where that +1 to hit, or even +5, or +10 becomes naught but a rounding error. The Immortals Handbook books tried to create cosmic-scale D&D and had some really cool ideas, but the balance and number inflation resulted in it being hot garbage.One big issue is that the games are designed with the idea that +21 is only a slightly better than +20 which is already in the realm of epic heroes, rather than "You're not a guy with +21 to the roll, you're one of the ten guys in the world with +21 to the roll, and there's five with +22, and one with +23, the guy with +25 is the weakest member of the Great 10 and..."Another big problem is the d20, the bigger the core roll, the harder it is for a modifier to mean something. Though cosmic adventures are possible, the simple fact is that numbers break down at a certain point, and you end up having to do things like "My infinity is bigger than yours" or "Only paragon-tier and higher heroes can inflict damage on this monster".
>>97227489Fantasy is the last place there should be multiverse slop, all you need is one main terrestrial setting, a divine/heavenly realm, and a netherworld
>>97227634>"Only paragon-tier and higher heroes can inflict damage on this monster".This is the norm in some settings.
Multiverses and parallel timelines are the worst thing that can happen in any story for multiple reasons. Scale just happens to be one of them. These are concepts that appeal to literal retards that find the whole idea that there is more than one of a thing the most mind-blowing shit ever and genuinely believe that that makes them smarter.
