What Happens with Planewalker in 4th edition?

[King before battle voice]
THIS IS IT!
This was the last drop!
FROM THIS DAY ON, WE FIGHT!
They think we have no power! They think they can trample on your beloved setting! They think we are endless sources of money! That we will buy anything they spit out!
ARE THEY RIGHT?!
NO!

[/battle speech]

Ok. Does anyone have an idea on how to make this stop?

(You wouldn't listen to a lunatic raving in real life, why should they?)

Okay, we all know that Planescape will keep it's own version of fiends, and we'll gloat about having twice the number of fiendish hotties.

What I want to know is what you canny bashers know about or think of this odd little word "eladrin" I keep seeing thrown about in 4e discussion. The enworld D&D 4e checklist thread has links to some released art, generally of PC portraits. One of them, however, is "Eladrin Wizard." Okay, I thought, so eladrin get some more spotlight. Maybe they'll be remembered like the other celestial races. And maybe the Monster Manual will have a wizard version of one of the eladrin types.

Then I read today's "Playtest Report" article on the D&D site. One of the characters in a first-level party is Heron, an eladrin ranger. What? Eladrin are a PC race that is so standard that it's being used in a playtest? What? Eladrin can be first-level? What? Eladrin is a standard term, without bralani, fierre, etc.? What? A first level ranger can shoot five arrows in one round, two of them not even during his turn? Oh, wait. That last one sounds kind of cool.

The point is, eladrin are in. Either there's a race called "eladrin" which seems very likely to be in the Player's Handbook, or there's a probably-core race which is called "eladrin" but isn't what I'm thinking of (unlikely). How did WotC think they could throw that word into an article and not think it demanded some kind of explanation?

So, as far as I can gather, their typical elves got boring, what with the LotR movies (and Blizzard) stealing 'their' idea and making it even cooler. What is a two-bit story designer to do? They renamed them, of course, and added swanky new art to make it cool. To name them they just reached deep into D&D's 'forgotten' past and took a word they liked, meaning be damned. It's their game world afterall.

The whole "fallen angel" thing, while not *completely* terrible, does have one snag. Part of the whole "we hate Triel" thing that's going on in hell with Mephistopheles and the "old guard" is the fact that he was not a devil, but a fallen angel. What happens to that? Is it suddenly ignored?

What's going on!? Combining succubi and erynies? Who the bloody hell is Richard Baker and why is he messing up my hobby?

EDIT: Okay, so I found the blog. That guy apparently doesn't know (or doesn't care) about the way the planes work or all the work that the people who came before him put into them.

Richard Baker is an old time designer from way back (pre-Planescape) who worked on some of the Planescape material. I believe he was the author of The Eternal Boundary, for instance. Memory says he had something to do with Fires of Dis, but that might be my mind playing tricks on me. He also has credits on at least one of the Planescape Monstruous Manuals. In non-planescape stuff, I think he was one of the main (if not the main) designer of the Birthright setting.

As for why, who knows. The sense of power and a need to change things to make more "sense" (in his mind). I can't say I'm impressed with the whole angel-devil thing, but then again, I really disliked what Chris Pramas did with his Guide to Hell and this is really just a continuation along that same path.

Also, the idea that the forces of chaos can't be humanoid is just.. weak. Oh well. Guess my games will veer even farther out of the orbit of official cannon.

Okay, I'm going to try not to come across as a flamer here in my first post, as I was directed here by a regular and don't want to reflect poorly on him. But, to be blunt: Are you all really shocked that the 4e revision doesn't take into account a setting that WotC hasn't made any money off of in over a decade?

The thing is that we aren't just talking about the Planescape setting here. Planescape was/is just a focus on certain aspects of the core settings shown from a different perspective. The Great Wheel was the core cosmology in all editions of the game, from Q1 "Queen of the Demonweb Pits, through the Fiendish Codices.
While the game has always allowed people to make their settings with the building blocks that are provided, the option has always existed to use those blocks in a set pattern, a setting with depth and history that has existed since nigh on the begining of the game.
Now, they are not only invalidating the mechanics of 3.x (which I think was 3.x's strong suit; I was only buying books that either helped translate PS into 3.x or opened up new avenues of gameplay), but they are completely revamping the setting. If it were alive, it would now be a vestige, leaking into the setting through names taken out of context, and words stripped of their original meaning.

My biggest complaint is really the whole erinyes/succubus issue. The rest is really just fluff that I can easily change or ignore. So the devils are fallen angels. I can ignore that, if I choose and keep the old myths from any edition that I choose. So the gelugons are not devils, but a trapped demonic/'loth race (which has promise, btw). Depending on how it's presented, I can embrace it, ignore it, or alter it to my tastes. So the devils have a more human appearance. I can refer back to the old artwork when describing them. All of that is fluff. But the succubus change is mechanical as well as fluff, and I'd have to completely revamp the MM entry to fix that. And in my opinion, I should never have to make mechanical changes to what is core just so that I can make my campaign's history fit with the new edition (if that makes sense). It might end up that all I have to do to make the succubus a demon again is to change the alignment, immunities/resistances, and special abilities, but without even seeing the mechanics yet, I have no idea how hard that will be.

I have no credible explanations to point to, but my first impression would be that they're creating a lot of playable race tables that won't take up much room (just a quick explanation, the table, and an explanation of the abilities on that table).

It's plausible, though, because--let's keep in mind--they are remaking the whole celestial/fiendish pantheon. I mean, just to look at what they're doing with devils and demons--the Blood War is probably no longer core (the devils wouldn't be able to leave their pit to wage it without mortal intervention).

Question:

Given that Rich Baker seems intent on completely butchering everything that we Planars know about the Multiverse, is the PSCS bound to follow what he does?

Planescape dates back to at least 2e and was the official cosmology of every official 2e setting I can think of, whether the setting's Primes actively acknowledged it or not. As far as I've been aware, the PSCS here on Planewalker has mostly worked from material presented there, even as many other settings have abandoned (Forgotten Realms) or denied (Eberron) the cosmology presented by 2e Planescape. Planescape as we know it is no longer the canon cosmology for D&D.

That being said, is the crap Wizards puts out anymore meant to be canon Planescape? It really takes away from the spirit of what Planescape is founded on, in my opinion. I don't know of any legal matters that force Planewalker to abide by what Wizards says about the planes and planars. That being said, it seems like we're already considerably deviating from their "canon" cosmology. We have para- and quasi-elemental planes. Wizards dropped those completely. We're already established as a separate entity from the nonsensical babble of Wizards.

So, as arbiter of balance, I have to reiterate and ask. Is the PSCS bound by the nonsense Wizards releases? Or can the PSCS continue development in the spirit of Planescape and keep our setting the way we all know and love?

EDIT: It also seems that Hippo has sort of beaten me to my question while I was writing it

Not if they don't want to revive Planescape, and I doubt that they'll do. So far, I think was Planewalker.com says is canon more or less as long as the Wizards don't come back in remorse.

The most important parts of Planescape are the factions and the concept of a set of planes made of belief mingling with elemental and material planes via portals, and Sigil as a place where all of those things meet. Everything else can be negotiated. The quirky menagerie of fiends and celestials that we inherited from the 1st edition Monster Manuals could be replaced with a different quirky menagerie without changing anything fundamental.

The changes they're suggesting aren't Planescape-specific. The distinction between erinyes and succubi has existed since the original Monster Manual in 1977. The origin of Asmodeus was never really discussed in Planescape - the origin of the baatezu suggested by Baker is silly, but not impossible to reconcile.

My concern about the 4th edition writing team's ideas isn't that they'd destroy Planescape, but that they're bad, uncreative, destructive ideas that will make for an inferior D&D game, for all the reasons mentioned earlier in this thread.

Planescape is trickier to convert than Ravenloft because the factions add an extra layer of complexity. 3.5 finally got a mechanic that would potentially work really well for them - affiliations - but it remains to be seen what 4th edition will have, if anything. And how soon before a new Manual of the Planes gives us the 4th edition rules on planar travel?

What gives me the most hope in 4e is that the Planar Handbook was really a missed opportunity. It sorta half-heartedly brought the factions back, but not all of them, and not in a way that was particularly appealing to the uninitiated. By not presenting them in the context of "this is a series of quarreling groups that dominate the setting, and which you can at your option choose to ally your character with," they just look like a bunch of weird, random prestige classes that don't seem to have much to do with the ostensible theme of the book, the planes. And the Planar Handbook's existence closed the door for anything like a Planescape revival in 3e, since it would've overlapped that book's material too much. 4e, though, has the opportunity to start over again and do things right. I don't trust the current crop of staff writers to do this well, not for a moment, but if some talented freelancers got a hold of things, it could be really cool.

Rhys, I didn't see where your question about the eladrin was completely answered. Though Duckluck did hit on it. From what I read, eladrins are cousins to the elves. I'm not sure if that was the case back in earlier editions or not.

My source

Statistics do help make a living, breathing world, however. At the risk of hijacking the thread, I'm going to bring up the GNS model of RPGs. This model shows that just about everything related to RPGs falls into one of three philosophies or agendas: Gamism (overcoming challenges is top priority), Narrativism (story is king), and Simulationism (Verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief are paramount so that the player can momentarily forget about the real world and live in the shared reality of the game world). For more information on this, visit indie-rpgs.com. I bring this up because many people see the conflict between Gamism and Narrativism, but Simulationism is rarely even acknowledged as existing.

D&D has undeniably Gamist roots. It came from wargaming. Early D&D products were mostly modules that were dungeon crawls amounting to PCs invading caves and temples, killing the inhabitants, and taking their stuff. There was Sim thrown in, as well as Narrativism, but the focus was clearly Gamist.

2E's depth of setting material helped both Simulationist and Narrativist play, but the lack of clear rules for adjudicating certain character actions and horribly limiting options for character creation and advancement make it bad for Simulationism (I'm not sure how good it was for Narrativeism, seeing as how I'm obviously most concerned with Simulationism, but expect that the character bits hurt that)

3E finally had rules that tried to be consistent and believable. This was a great step forward for Sim. Character generation/advancement finally gave power to the players to make characters the that they want. This actually helped all three agendas in different ways at first, although it wasn't perfect. However, because the product line focused on player options and rules over setting (the idea being that most people wanted to homebrew if they cared at all), Narrativeists got little that they wanted (unless playing in FR or Eberron) and plenty that they didn't want (because Narrativists generally want less rules), Gamists got all sorts of great character options, but too many rules, and Simulationists got a ton of great stuff to build worlds, but few options for published worlds (I think that Simulationists like me frequently prefer published settings, because they tend to be made by people that are able to make money by being creative, have the time to do it right, and have more than one person to get ideas from and to scrap the bad ones). However, 3E (without a tremendous amount of houserules) relies on maintaining the four traditional party roles, and taking on four combat encounters per day, each reducing the party's resources by ~1/4, and combat as the sole source of character advancement. This is horribly Gamist.

Now with 4E, it seems like they are bringing the game back towards Gamism in most ways, with some Narrativism thrown in, and Simulationism is left in the dust. I'm less than thrilled.

Well, some of the campaign settings have been rather Simulationist. Ptolus, and Eberron went with the idea of 'what if the rules we play under were how the world actually worked?' and ran with it. So they enhanced Simulationism by making it so that the suspension of disbelief was a little easier to accomplish. Others have done so as well, but perhaps not those as much.

Granted, the world they simulate is a world bound by the rules that the game operates under, but that's not a bad way of going about things. Planescape though is definitely strongly Narrativist. I was once told Narrativism is about making moral choices.. I disagree with that assertion, but whatever.. however, no one can say Planescape doesn't take the 'PCs make moral choices which affect the gameworld' and run with it like a world-class sprinter... and even if it's just about telling a story in general, the nature of the world is rather prone to be a story-telling device.

Yes, I've always seen Planescape as a story-telling device--which may be why it doesn't fit so well into D&D core. When a matter of game-mechanics comes into conflict with story-telling devices (or simple Simulationism--why does alignment work the way it does?), D&D automatically defaults to balancing the game mechanic.

I see what you mean (Narfi) about Simulationism and Narrativism conspircing together in the Planescape mythos. I also know precisely what you mean about internal logic (I cannot tell you how many times I have nearly exploded into a seething ball of hate at someone saying "There are elves! You can throw fireballs! It's not supposed to be realistic!" in response to a problem of internal consistency).

So I think the biggest question that we as Planescape players have to ask ourselves is--should Planescape evolve with D&D's new pattern of behavior, or stick purely with 2nd edition? If the new Devils kill the Baatezu and take all their stuff, should we still operate under the premise of Baatezu, or should we adapt the new Devils into our Planescape mythology?

Ripvanwormer pointed out how Planescape survives so long as you've got the core base--the portals, Sigil, the factions, the basic structure of the Great Wheel--everything else can be traded out. So this begs the question--should Planescape evolve with 4th edition? Or should we just stick with what we've got going here?

I'm for sticking with 2nd edition's mythology (converted over to 4th edition's rules, of course), for no other reason than there's all ready so much written about it and so much hinging on it. But I wouldn't mind adapting some of the new stuff in here, too (like the new type of Devils)--or rewriting/tweaking it so it all fits together.

I don't expect Baker's (or any of these guys, for that part) writing to be that exceptional--I'm still trudging through Book of 9 Swords, and though it's interesting, the writing and flavor is generic as all hell--but that doesn't mean we can't smash it against a wall and scavenge the pieces to build something cooler.

Hippo, my vote is for sticking with 2e mythos. Not because I'm particularly attached to them or believe they can't change, but because I believe that the changes brought about through 4e will be so drastic that they will put the comparatively mild and innocent 3e/3.5e retcons to shame. In other words, new devils will not simply invade Baator and drive out the Baatezu, there will be some lame story about how the new devils were there all along after they fell from heaven. The old canon will be utterly ignored. Eladrins a type of elf now!? Succubi and Eyrinies as one? There is no way to explain those changes and still retain the internal consistency. It is simply a different creature, and Planescape cannot evolve into it. Just because they both have fur... or elves, if you're not liking the creature metaphor, does not mean that they can be connected.

As for adopting the 4e rules, that could still be up in the air. After all, much of what was done with the 3.5e conversion involved giving class levels to previously unlevelable NPC's (eg Shemeska, who now has sorcerer levels). Will this be possible in 4e, or will we have to 'unconvert' the converted? Also, how will we handle the lack of certain NPC's, such as erynies? Will we have to convert them ourselves? Will it be worth it? All important questions to consider. I just say stick with what we have and improve upon it. It will save time for projects actually focusing on the Planescape mythos.