Is Oerth doomed like Alderan...?

I still don't think that pen and paper 4e will get the "Mass Market (tm)" audience.

Zimzarim wrote:

But obwiously it is targeted at "Mass Market (tm)" audience, becaouse D&D 4e is "cleverly" disguiesed as MMORPG (which it is not):
1.We have extreamly well balanced clsses with cool powers that cooldown over time one.
2. We have statles NPCs (halples lazy shmoes) that only point of existance is to stand in city and give PC quest/revard.
3. We have skilles evil combat oriented monsters who dont need anything in their life except combat powers and they attack PC on sight, live for 6 rouds, die, leave XP and treasure.
4. We have skilles neutral combat oriented monsters who dont need anything in their life except combat powers and they attack PC on sight, live for 6 rouds, die, leave XP and treasure, and only diference betveen them and evil monsters is that they dont attack you if you dont bother them.

Anyways, "Mass Market (tm)" audience plays MMORPGS and they need similar mechanical "interface" so they don't feel lost in new game.
Who knows, maybe 4ed is last desperate atempt to drag those kids from PC monitors.

Naaaawwww.... Only kidding. They are just playing safe with what is popular these days on the gaming market.

I've always hated the masses, Now I hate them even more!

That's true (or he had it torn apart by Tharizdun and the personification of Entropy duking it out at the end of his non-TSR novel Dance of Demons - and that ruled!) but Greyhawk has long outlived that particular apocalypse, still appearing in books, magazines, and the WotC website 20 years later.

Speaking purely for myself, I don't much care what Wizards of the Coast does to Greyhawk, and care substantially less what Gary Gygax does to it. I'm just observing trends; I doubt we'll see much 4e Greyhawk presence at all.

I'd also like to take this space to say that I love the On Hallowed Ground quote. A dying world has so much adventure possibility.

I didn't once like the state of Greyhawk as 3e's core world, because in the core books it wasn't really Greyhawk, it was Greyhawk-lite. Though I never had much attachment to that campaign, probably based on the fact that I actually read those Rose Estes novels, which formed my view of the world before I was really exposed to D&D.

Actually, I think that's unlikely. A Planescape campaign setting that used the same planes of existence as the core rules would be clearly an accessory to the core game and assumed world, rather than something separate in the way the Forgotten Realms and Eberron are separate. That sounds good, since it would make it easier to market, and because it would make Planescape more mainstream.

However, they've stated that they've designed the planes with the idea that the Feywild and Shadowfell is for lower-level games, the Elemental Chaos for mid-level games, and the Astral Sea for high-level games. A sourcebook centered on Sigil and the factions, intended for all levels of play, would upset that hierarchy, since it would have to make low-level games in the Astral Sea plausible. A sourcebook that clearly meshes seamlessly with the core game and subverts the hierarchy they strove to build doesn't sound like something they would do.

Not in the sense I use the word, it doesn't.

Mainstreaming tends to involve "removing content that someone finds objectionable" as well as "removing content that some people may find hard to grasp." It can still result in interesting content, but I tend to find it a lot more boring than the "pre-mainstreamed" version.

Simply more accessible to more gamers than something you can only find in out-of-print boxed sets.

Making something more mainstream involves making it known and accessible to a larger number of people -- IE marketing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Sure existing fans may not all like the changes, but if even more new people become fans because of those changes, is it really a bad thing? Like the rest of you, I worry about Planescape losing its history and uniqueness and becoming just a generic Hack and Slash, there are plenty of ways to make something more mainstream without making the setting worse.

I'll use Planar Cant as my example. I personally have always liked cant. I think it's a nice bit of flavoring, but I also feel that it can make the books harder to read and it intimidates new players. Would I be annoyed if I were told that I could no longer use any cant while DMing? Yes. Would I be annoyed if I were told that they took it out of the books? No. Cant is great, but overuse of it can intimidate new players or even baffle regulars like me -- not all the terms used are defined, you can't always tell from context, and sometimes you seem to just be expected to know the ins and outs of Cockney rhyming slang (unlikely given I grew up in California). Would removing Cant take away from the setting's flavor? Yes, definitely, but I'm not sure what it ads to the setting is worth all the players it alienates.

To what extent this sentiment can be applied to the rest of the setting and what we're willing to lose varies from person to person, but not all changes, not even all changes to the main stream, are bad. I hope none of us are so reactionary that we can't see that.

I don't think there is a need to do that, nor did anyone argue there was.

I think Planescape's flavor can be preserved without banishing it to a ghetto, which is what your "mainstream=bad" equation means to me.

I'm not talking about what Planewalker should do, either (I'm all for preserving the 2e cosmology); I'm merely speculating about what WotC will do.

Given the title of the topic, I can only compare DireLemon's reaction to that of many hardcore Star Wars fans after the "remastering" of their beloved trilogy. Sure, they can still pull out the old VHS and watch the original, but knowing that a whole new generation is being introduced to what they consider an abomination hiding behind the same name... well, it's like a constant thorn in their sides.

So, DL, even though I can't exactly say that I care as much, I do sympathize.