Anything you actually LIKE about 4E?

Not all hip-hop is of the same. Just because you don't like Ludacris doesn't mean you won't like N.W.A. They sound completely different. If you give up on an entire genre after discovering you dislike a single song, then I question your ability to accurately judge your own preferences. Just as you can't decide you won't like "Stairway to Heaven" because you disliked "Hooked on a Feeling" and you don't know you hate Steve Earle just because you didn't enjoy Patsy Cline.

It's a similar situation here. If you don't like a single paragraph in the Planescape Campaign Setting, this isn't a reliable way of discovering whether or not you would like a chapter on the subject, written by different authors several years later with an accompanying monster book. The Inner Planes wasn't the best Planescape book - it should have been much longer, for one thing - but it's a decent foundation to start with.

The Elemental Chaos, as it happens, isn't something I think makes the 4e cosmology inferior to the Great Wheel. It's different, but not better or worse. I do think the 18-plane model of the Inner Planes has qualities that are interesting in their own right beyond their deadliness - I don't think the fact that the Plane of Ash is deadly is what makes it interesting. It is deadly because it would logically follow that a plane made out of fire and negative energy would be deadly, but it's interesting because it's full of interesting races and locales tied together by a consistent theme, and this would remain true whether it was inhospitable or not. So I think you're missing the whole point of the quasielemental and paraelemental planes - they're not about being harsh environments, but about being coherent and exotic campaign settings.

Before I recommended The Inner Planes, I would point you over to mimir.net to see some of the fancy negative quasielemental stuff they have over there. Or ask Mechalich to share some of his wonderful stuff.

Again, you specifically mentioned traveling through an infinite, empty puddle. Last I checked that suggests the Plane of Water, one of the Big Four.

The specific reason suggested is that they are incredibly empty places which is untrue. I merely pointed out the fallacy.

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Don't make me pull this thread over.
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On topic, what do I like about 4e. A lot actually, in fact its really their fallacious advertising I have a problem with - the latest being Evil gods didn't have servant races....someone missed all those Spawn of Tiamat entries. :roll:

But good things. Shadowfell and Feywild are interesting places which allow for low level plane hopping that eases people into the Multiverse. As copies of Changeling and Wraith, I can get mileage from those old settings too. The Raven Queen is another gem in the bleh, provided great story potential for a whole campaign.

The Elemental Chaos provides for an interesting nexus of the Elemental Planes, perhaps where treaties are brokered or certain nature gods live (might make more sense than the Outlands for some) At its core such a nexus might be gestating the Elemental Plane of Wood. Again, using Scion and Exalted I can add to the EC where what was shown in Worlds and Monsters looks to fall flat.

The Astral Sea opens up the possibility of more planes and removes the sense of constraint people might feel by the Great Wheel. Anything that adds potential stories is good, and this is likely among the few decisions that doesn't feel like someone chucking their homebrew down my throat.