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Just read up on the pantheon for 4th Edition on Wizard's site...
Well, I am still hopeful for the 4th Edition ruleset, but the "default setting" is shaping up to look more and more like Frankenstein's monster. I mean... you take Pelor as the sun god (fine by me), but you go ahead and axe Heironeous and Hextor in favor of who? Bahamut and (FR's) Bane?! I'm really starting to wonder what they are thinking over there...
Design & Development - Pantheon
The family of gods for 4th Edition is a mix of old and new. You'll see familiar faces like Corellon, Moradin, and Pelor, and some new faces as well, like Zehir, Torog, and Bane.
Yes, Bane.
Before I explain what the Forgotten Realms' god of tyranny and war is doing rubbing shoulders with Pelor, let me say a bit about our thinking when we created a pantheon in the first place.
There was a time when the team working on "the world" of D&D thought we could get away with creating general rules useful to clerics regardless of which pantheon existed in the campaign, and then presenting a variety of fictional and historical pantheons for DMs to adopt or adapt as they saw fit. I believe it was Stacy Longstreet, the senior D&D art director, who pointed out that this solution would leave us in a bit of a bind.
When we wanted to put a temple in an adventure, what god would it be dedicated to? We could make Generic Evil Temples™, but that would sap a lot of the flavor out of our adventures, and rob us of specific plot hooks and story lines based on the portfolios and histories of these gods.
When we wanted to illustrate a cleric in one of our books, what holy symbol would the cleric hold? Again, we could rely on a stable of generic symbols (maybe the Zapf Dingbat font?), but at the cost of a lot of flavor.
We ended up creating a new pantheon. At first, we used some of the gods from 3rd Edition as placeholder names -- we thought we'd come up with new names for [Pelor] the sun god and [Moradin] the god of the forge. Ultimately we decided that using some familiar faces was preferable to giving our players a whole new set of names to learn. Besides, if a god looks like an elf and took out the orc-god's eye like a certain well-known elf god, why not call him Corellon?
Corellon: The elf god is a good example of a god who kept his well-earned place in the D&D pantheon. But "the elf god" shouldn't be taken to literally. Sure, he's often depicted as an elf or an eladrin, and many eladrin in particular revere him. But he's equally popular among human wizards, and even dwarves who practice the finer arts are prone to offering him prayers. One of our goals with the new pantheon was to loosen the tight associations between gods and races that has in the past led to the creation of whole pantheons full of elf, dwarf, orc, and goblin deities. Corellon is still associated with elfy things like arcane magic and the Feywild, and he still hates Lolth and the drow. But his appeal is a little broader now.
Bahamut: Here's another example of a familiar, draconic face showing up in a somewhat new light. Maybe it was the Platinum Knight prestige class in Draconomicon that did it, but something convinced me a long time ago that Bahamut was a much cooler god of paladins than Heironeous ever was. Like Corellon, Bahamut's not just for dragons any more. He's the god of justice, protection, and honor, and many paladins of all races worship him. Many metallic dragons revere him as well, thinking of him as the first of their kind. Some legends about Bahamut describe him as literally a shining platinum dragon, while others describe him as a more anthropomorphic deity, who's called the Platinum Dragon as a title of respect. Exhorting his followers to protect the weak, liberate the oppressed, and defend just order, Bahamut stands as the exemplar of the paladin's ideal.
Bane: Here's another god whose placeholder name just stuck, despite some reservations. We wanted an evil war god in the pantheon, and without Heironeous, Hextor didn't make a lot of sense. We wanted the kind of heavily militaristic god whose temples you might find among non-evil societies who have spent long years at war, as well as among hobgoblins. We wanted a god who embodied just the sort of tyrannical dictatorship that Bane stands for in the Forgotten Realms. We started calling him Bane as a placeholder. He went through a number of different, unsatisfying names. Finally, someone said we should just call him Bane. So Bane he remained.
Like chocolate and peanut butter, we think Bane and Bahamut are two great tastes that taste great together. Does that mean you have to use them in your 4th Edition game? Of course not. But we think that, when you see these gods in action in our core books and adventures, you'll agree that they belong in their new places of honor in the pantheon of the D&D game.
- James Wyatt
I can tell you right now, IF I ever go over to 4th edition, I won't be using their bastardized core pantheon as such. That's just a bit too much of a reimagining of D&D mythic history for my tastes. YMMV.
Bahamut: Here's another example of a familiar, draconic face showing up in a somewhat new light. Maybe it was the Platinum Knight prestige class in Draconomicon that did it, but something convinced me a long time ago that Bahamut was a much cooler god of paladins than Heironeous ever was. Like Corellon, Bahamut's not just for dragons any more. He's the god of justice, protection, and honor, and many paladins of all races worship him. Many metallic dragons revere him as well, thinking of him as the first of their kind. Some legends about Bahamut describe him as literally a shining platinum dragon, while others describe him as a more anthropomorphic deity, who's called the Platinum Dragon as a title of respect. Exhorting his followers to protect the weak, liberate the oppressed, and defend just order, Bahamut stands as the exemplar of the paladin's ideal.
Note: emphasis is mine
Wow, those happen to be the exact same traits I thought Heironeous stood for. This description of Bahamut sounds like Heironeous minus a few traits (since he doesn't seem to represent honorable or righteous warfare). Bahamut is cool, but I always thought he was the god of metallic dragons (but maybe that is a hold over from my friend's Dragonlance campaigns where I first heard the name Bahamut).
Overall I get the a feeling of.....meh.
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A customer said to a gaming company:
"Sir, I spend loads of money on your products!"
"However," replied the gaming company,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
(My apologies to Stephen Crane for what I've done to his poem. But I think of his original work with each new tidbit released from Wizards.)
I think this article on pantheon creation, like so many other aspects of 4E, demonstrates that game design at WotC involves Post-it notes with random ideas stuck all over a wall and someone wearing a blindfold throwing darts.
Excuse me while I hold back the tide of vomit that seeks to escape my esophagus. (Vomit Guy, take us away!) I must share your opinion that these designers and this marketing team have very questionable taste. I'm not an Old Skool Greyhawker by any means, but I was familiar with the gods before 3rd edition. I understood that in their original context, they went together in some way. I feel like, given the fact that each deity received a paragraph in the 3rd edition books, they remained distinctive and cohesive. The racial deities are in both FR and Greyhawk pantheons, so I can understand their inclusion. But what I don't understand is why they kept the deities as-is rather than making their own if they wanted something distinctive.
I'm not a slave to canon and I pull out and plug in various campaign elements in my own game. But something seems really wrong about making this mish-mash pantheon. I mean, at least I change their names. They're deities with existing histories in settings all their own. It's not that terribly difficult to come up with your own concepts for these and I would expect a team of designers would be able to rattle off a traditional but distinctive pantheon after only a few days of brainstorming.
Why keep the racial deities, even? I've never really liked that concept and if they're going to stick with it then STICK with it. Corellon for elves, Moradin for dwarves. Yet Corellon now has a small following of dwarves and I assume Moradin has a small following of elves. Why not just say "God of Culture/Moon" (or something) has a strong following under the elves while "God for the Forge/Mountains" has a strong dwarven following but neither are exclusive? If you're redesigning the whole thing, why invite people that liked things as they were in previous iterations to pick the whole thing apart based on changes to names they recognize?
So why do it? A few possibilities.
1.Still playing for that younger demographic. Take the deities considered the most kewl and colorful, put them into one pantheon and watch the kids buy the t-shirts.
2.Looking for that nostalgia factor by sticking with familiar names rather than filing off the serial numbers or redesigning things for yourself.
I don't know, man. I'm pretty close to the targeted demographic in age and I think it's pretty lame to do something like this. You can take all kinds of great, quality ingredients and throw them all in a pot to simmer but if they don't really fit together and complement each other they won't taste good.
I just can't get off it. Bane, Hextor and The Mockery are all very similar gods: militaristic tyrants of some sort. Yet with the detail that went into them over the course of the time they were in existence they became distinctive. I just struggle with the lack of creativity in this new pantheon design. Just because they own the intellectual properties doesn't mean they have to combine them all into one crazy Frankenstein of an IP.
It's as if WotC R&D sat down and had a meeting where they specifically asked the question "How can we tick that guy off so much that he'll neither buy our new edition nor any third party products that support it?"
Ah well. I'm nearly beyond the point of anger, shock, frustration, and disappointment when it comes to 4E. I doubt anything I hear will surprise or upset me anymore.
3E gave me a lot of faith in WotC's good sense and respect for the game and its traditions. v.3.5 introduced some skepticism, but I was still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. 4E? Sorry, this is a bridge too far. I'm done.
I loved the whole "but something convinced me a long time ago that Bahamut was a much cooler god of paladins than Heironeous ever was".
Like, maybe you read Dragonlance and happened to remember the god Paladin, who was a platinum dragon......
Yeh, when will they learn that cool stories make people like characters, gods, and settings... nothing more, and nothing less. Heck, sedttngs and gods are characters, just like little details like Boccob and Modenkainen and Orcus who have survived in many incarnations.
And people will buy products with cool characters, but not when its a shameless mishmash driven by advice from the Marketing Department.
I'm....confused.
For a company known for wanting my money so badly, they seem determined to make me run away screaming.
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*shrug*
what difference does this make to anyone really?
The vast majority of games are homebrews, using homebrew gods. FR fans will still use FR gods. Greyhawk fans will still use Greyhawk gods. Mystara fans will still use Mystara gods... etc.
Quite honestly this has 0% impact to me at all.
If you guys remember 1st and 2nd Editions didn't really employ specific gods as much into the base rules. 3rd Edition made a much bigger deal of "THESE ARE THE GODS." Which I thought was trashy. I used Mystara and none of those stupid core gods were in Mystara. Pelor? Who is this wannabe god!? Heiron-who? a has been hack. :) the gods section of 3E is as useless a section as any I have ever seen in any RPG. They could have just provided me blank pages to doodle in and it would have seen more use.
So what if the 4E pantheon is just as stupid as 3E's? So we won't see an improvement of the gods. Not like we are seeing the quality of that section decrease.
I'm....confused.
For a company known for wanting my money so badly, they seem determined to make me run away screaming.
I know, it's like they're throwing rocks at me from the studio- yelling; "FECK OFF, WE DON'T NEED YER GROWN UP CASH- WE WANTS YER KIDS W.O.W ALLOWANCE"!!
When we wanted to put a temple in an adventure, what god would it be dedicated to? We could make Generic Evil Temples™, but that would sap a lot of the flavor out of our adventures, and rob us of specific plot hooks and story lines based on the portfolios and histories of these gods.
That´s what gods are all about - flavor. By creating a mishmash of gods drawn at random from various settings, the opposite of flavor is produced. This seems like an attempt to cater to the various tastes of the old fans in taking a piece of some of the most popular settings, but to me, it has the opposite effect.
Ok, the racial gods are used in several settings, so they are a kind of cross-over, but now with Corellion being revered by everyone and their brother? Any self-respecting dwarf would give Corellon a good smack with his trusty hammer, but no reverence, artist or no artist. The racial gods have to me always been a good way to show the difference between the races, and it seems logical to me that they would revere different gods from the rest of the world. Nothing like presenting another race and pointing out the strange place of worship they have.
And some strange gods give the settings unique flavor - for Greyhawk, take St. Cuthbert, who is known to have appeared as a "manure-covered yokel" and has a crumpled hat as one of his symbols. Now, this is somewhat cheesy and probably more of an in-joke of Gary Gygax, but it still serves as a distinction of the setting.
No, these generalized gods don´t appeal to me - I want my settings without foreign gods encroaching them.
Stefan
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I can tell you right now, IF I ever go over to 4th edition, I won't be using their bastardized core pantheon as such. That's just a bit too much of a reimagining of D&D mythic history for my tastes.
Agreed !!
I think this article on pantheon creation, like so many other aspects of 4E, demonstrates that game design at WotC involves Post-it notes with random ideas stuck all over a wall and someone wearing a blindfold throwing darts.
I think you give them a bit more credit than i do.
I think this article on pantheon creation, like so many other aspects of 4E, demonstrates that game design at WotC involves Post-it notes with random ideas stuck all over a wall and someone wearing a blindfold throwing darts.
I think you give them a bit more credit than i do.
Of course! Now this starts to make sense. They simply got the "create new Pantheon" Post-it(TM) confused with the "take out garbage" and "recycle bottles" notes! The fog lifts...
What's this? Recycle Pantheon with Garbage? Hmm, well...ok...
Too lazy to make a Generic pantheon. Take a little from here, a little from there....
For me, just wasted pages in whatever product they sell me. I don't use the pregen characters in Pathfinder either, so.... Whatever.
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Yet another fluff facet of 4e (after the whole succubi debacle, the devil/angel or demon/elemental bad joke, or elf/eladrin sillyness) that I don't like.
My first impression of someone else's homebrew canonized as the 4e is getting even stronger. So we don't have something truly new, truly canon or truly innovative of established traditions.
Epic fail.
Mr.Roboto is the Warforged God!
It's curious that Paizo can come up with a new campaign world, a completely fresh pantheon, new prestige classes, new regional feats, new monsters, re-visioned monsters, new magic items and iconics in the space of a year.
And WOTC with all its muscle and a heck of a lot more time... can't.
Maybe they're going to smilingly reveal that of course they haven't stuck together a pantheon with duct tape - that was just a bit of fun.
Maybe they're going to smilingly reveal that of course they haven't put half the PHB races into the Monster Manual in a cynical attempt to ensure that every player will have to buy the MM as well in order to play the game.
Maybe they're going to smilingly reveal that of course they haven't messed with Castle Greyhawk and wrecked Faerun to fit into their new game environment.
Or maybe... they have. In which case they're going to have New Coke.
In which case they're in big trouble.
Kind of makes you wonder if the good people on these boards shouldn't just set up a series of threads and come up with ideas for a 'shadow' 4th edition here...
There is such a disconnect whenever I read an article like this.....
Come on! Either make something up (see pathfinder gods) but don't mix everything up and call it the next big thing, sjeez!
I am now in the "MEH" camp.
At least they're consistent....
...consistently bad, but consistent.
Excuse me while I hold back the tide of vomit that seeks to escape my esophagus. (Vomit Guy, take us away!)
Blaaarrgghhh! Blooorrrrrggggghhhhh! Bluuuuggghhhhh! Bleeeegggghhhh!
This pantheon is exactly the kind of thing that sends the wrong signals to the old school players. It's one thing to outright change certain flavor or fluff aspects of the game; in some cases, that can be justified (even for reasons consonant with D&D tradition). But this pantheon reveals either a complete and utter lack of knowledge of or interest in distinctions between campaign settings or (worse yet) the belief that campaign settings are nothing more than a treasure house of names and concepts to be looted and reworked as desired rather than having some kind of internal logic of their own. Whether it was the intention or not, it comes across as cynical and lazy: "Hey, guys, look. We respect D&D tradition -- we've got Pelor and Bane and Bahamut all in one pantheon together. Isn't that cool?!"
Ah well.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Oh, for crying out loud.
Most of the people contributing to Wizards' re-visioning of 4th Edition are either (a) the same people who have written some of the best DUNGEON adventures, or (b) close friends of the Pathfinder team.
So, it's really not like "Ug. Paizo's the good guys and Wizards are the bad guys." Some of the re-visioning changes are fluff I think is cool (such as elves being lost fey, and, to be honest, the new cosmology).
Some people have suggested that this is homebrew stuff, passed around the office and declared canonical.
Well, so was the Forgotten Realms. So was Eberron. And Greyhawk. Maybe even Golarion. And almost every other world setting, for D&D and most every other game.
I wasn't paying close attention to internet scuttlebut when 3rd Edition came out, but, dudes, that edition change really screwed with the Forgotten Realms, too. (And I'm sure some people wrote upset posts complaining that a subset of the Greyhawk deities were simplificated and tweaked around and made "core" without their rich backstories...) As for 2nd Edition, there's a reason that transition was called the "Time of Troubles".
I'm personally not going to purchase 4th Edition, because I'm happy with the game mechanics we have now.
But I don't see the 4th Edition campaign world as any (stranger, weirder, less fun, worse) than Eberron, Athas, or Golarion.
This all seems like much ado about nothing. I agree with a previous poster who said that those who use a homebrew game, or Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms will use the pantheon that they want.
How many people out there actually stuck to only those deities that appeared in the PHB 3.x? I certainly didn't. I run a Greyhawk campaign, and I have the RPGA download and the LGG. The PHB is just a handy reference for those in the book, but it is only one source.
They've created a mishmash, yes. But I don't see how this will affect anyone's game except for those who are new to the game and never heard of GH or FR, or whatever.
Greg
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Y'know, I wonder if we really need to worry about this too much. Two things strike me as quite significant, parallel but linked possible developments:
1. They wanted to make an entirely generic system at first, but then needed "example" gods for illustrative purposes.
2. They are talking about bringing out setting-specific core books.
I don't think the new pantheon is a serious attempt to rewrite the settings as such - it is simply what it looks like, a grab-bag of deities. Example deities that can be plugged into a game if the DM can't be bothered to create his own.
If they really are bringing out these further core books for each setting, this will all be superceded anyway. The FR, Eberron and (maybe) Greyhawk deities will be set out there, for those who like those settings. This might actually link together, but as we don't have the full picture we can't actually see it yet. Maybe there is a plan. Maybe there isn't, but at any rate the article has had its intended effect - to make us talk about 4E, anticipating (for better or worse) what it might bring. Viral marketing.
I think all the bile, vomit, and offended attitudes over this are ill placed.
First off, as I know has been said before on other threads, it's not like WotC is purposely targetting any one person, or any group of people, to piss them off on a personal level.
Also, I don't get the reaction to them plucking various gods they think are cool, and placing them in their 'core setting', whatever it is. It's not like the 'new campaign, familiar faces' thing hasn't been done before; and not just by people using homebrew worlds. Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Eberron, Mystara, etc... Every single one of these worlds has taken familiar faces - the PC races, classes, monsters of all kinds - and may or may not have put a new spin on them.
[sarcasm]
Heaven forbid they mix and match some of their favorite gods for a new pantheon. It's never been done before. Why, it's just sacrilege!
[/sarcasm]
I'd be willing to bet money that if they came up an entirely new pantheon with all new names, folks still wouldn't be happy. Instead they'd be complaining about the old deities being abandoned, how it was a kick in the face to gamers everywhere, and how the new god of tyrrany - Harknor - should've just been called Bane.
'scuse me while I strap on my flame-retardant boots.
I think this is a great idea.
I'm currently running the SCAP in Faerun. The fact that there is not one useful god in the FR pantheon that matches exactly to the core pantheon sucks. No, Pelor is not Lathander. No, Pelor is not Llira. They are wildly different gods. No, the Ebon Triad are not Cyric/Bane/Mask. They are wildly different. I had to come up with a mishmash of backstory and uncompleted reasoning to justify the changes I made to the module and the campaign world that make the changes mentioned in the article on the WOTC site look trivial in comparison, and that's just for one campaign.
I think having a couple gods in the pantheon from each of the main campaign settings is absolutely brilliant; it might not make it seamless & simple to streamline a module published for core rules into a FR campaign, or vice verse, but at least there will be a couple points you can match up and say, "okay, this is Bane. He's the same in FR as he is in Greyhawk and Ravenloft and Krynn, so his motivations are as-written. I only need to change..." and your job is easier.
Plus, remember how people got up in arms about how they were going to prune 100 or so of the gods out of the FR Pantheon? High freaking time. This is what it's going to look like. Good. Riddance.
I don't think it's a bad idea to have a generic pantheon in the core rulebooks. What I don't understand is why they mix deities from several different settings, some of which will be reprinted in later 4ed supplements. They say in the article that deities like Heironeous and Hextor have no flavor, but that's only because there's no backstory for them in the core books. If they use Bane as a generic deity he will lose his flavor as well, since any new players will be unaware of his story, unless they purchase the FR setting.
To get the flavor they are looking for without having to publish a history for their generic pantheon they should instead use deities from real world beliefs. I mean, there are plenty of gods to choose from in Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Norse, Celtic, Slavic, Sumerian, and Hindu mythology. And the bonus is that they come with all the flavor they want...
I think all the bile, vomit, and offended attitudes over this are ill placed.
Me to. Blaaarrrggghhhh!
I'm a bit surprised, but this is one set of changes I don't mind. If you look at any pantheon, there are gods you instantly recognize and understand. Others, not so much. For example, I barely remember Nerull when I think about the Greyhawk pantheon. I remember Wee Jas and Hextor first, then I'm on to Iuz, Vecna, and Incabulos. Nerull? Who's that? I'll wait to see the whole pantheon, but pulling in a few well-known and popular gods that readers might recognize from different pantheons might not be a bad plan. When I've thought of a god of tyrants, I've always thought of Bane, Realms fan or no. Bahamut is a figure I've recognized forever, so adding him into the pantheon more securely suits me. The rest of the gods, of course, will have to wait.
C'mon guys, it's fluff. This graven insult can easily be fixed with a Biro and the willingness to line out the names you don't like.
For mine own part, I appreciate that they're stacking their book with interesting gods (heck, the single line about the disagreement about whether "dragon" is truth or rumor for Bahamut is acres more flavorful than what came before). In fact, the biggest hurdle in my eyes is wondering how they'll incorporate all those interesting backgrounds together.
How many people out there actually stuck to only those deities that appeared in the PHB 3.x?
Several times, when I was wanting to run a 'quick' game but couldn't be bothered working up all the details of a setting, I just used the default pantheon from the PHB. While those deities were all from Greyhawk, this worked really well. However, drop just one FR deity in there, and I can't do that - my FR-phile player will insist on commenting, the admixture becomes jarring, and the whole thing becomes a distraction to the game. Therefore, it forces me to homebrew.
I don't like this change - I would have preferred them to adopt the FR deities en masse rather than do this.
Still, it's a pretty minor issue.
They've created a mishmash, yes. But I don't see how this will affect anyone's game except for those who are new to the game and never heard of GH or FR, or whatever.Greg
Well, if it will affect no ones game anyway, then why bother? If you make it new, then make it "real" new. If you keep the old, keep ´em that way. Either invent a shiny new setting, or take one of the old ones as default.
But this mix´n´match style does not appeal to me, and some others as well.In the end, this is one more element of 4e that I don´t like even now, half a year before the game is even published.
It surely won´t affect my game. The probability that I will play 4e next year goes against zero, and the latest ideas I hear don´t change the direction.
Stefan
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Crunch serves the Fluff.
(for those who say fluff is irrelevant I say fine. Your crunch serves nothing.)
It's clear that with 4E its all crunch, all the time. The fluff is an afterthought. Heck, the article states this explicitly:"
There was a time when the team working on "the world" of D&D thought we could get away with creating general rules useful to clerics regardless of which pantheon existed in the campaign, and then presenting a variety of fictional and historical pantheons for DMs to adopt or adapt as they saw fit. I believe it was Stacy Longstreet, the senior D&D art director, who pointed out that this solution would leave us in a bit of a bind.When we wanted to put a temple in an adventure, what god would it be dedicated to? We could make Generic Evil Temples™, but that would sap a lot of the flavor out of our adventures, and rob us of specific plot hooks and story lines based on the portfolios and histories of these gods.
So they realized they needed fluff. Generic, fluffless crunch is bland. So they are grabbing parts of fluff and throwing it in the mix.
The tradition of D&D may not have started with an explicit campaign setting, but the crunch was created to serve fluff. Gygax was inspired by Jack Vance, and Tolkien. The era was awash in Sword and Sorcery and the game reflected that. The rules were created to evoke that feel.
If WoTC wants to take D&D into the anime, super-fantasy (or whatever the hell you want to call it) direction, then do it. Its this half-assed crap that is lame.
Personally, I think a generic crunch would serve WoTC and 4E a lot better. I don't like fluffless crunch, but at least it would be a Tabula Rasa that I could write on. The names have Bagagge. I don't care if its homebrew, microbrew, or mass brew, if looks like Bane, sounds like bane, acts like bane, then it is bane, with all the FR fluff baggage attached to it. I can't just throw out 10+ years of gaming and all the crap my players (and myself as a player) have suffered in the realms from Banes machinations without it bleeding into any new setting.
Make up my own pantheon? Sure. No problem. But a game that from the get go requires a lot of "redesign" is crap. So I'll repeat. WoTC would do a lot better to just leave it generic and nameless and publish fluff separately. Or better yet (because crunch serves fluff) create a new "default" setting that the crunch can be designed to serve. Case in point: Teiflings as core. If the setting (fluff) doesn't require it, why is it there?
Speaking of changes I think Pelor should be a N god of the sun with his portfolio being death, healing, fire and travel. So suck on that!
C'mon guys, it's fluff. This graven insult can easily be fixed with a Biro
A whowhatnow? Are you British or something? ;) We call 'em "ink-guns" 'round these parts, hombre.
The standard defence of "you can always remove it from your game" always begs the question: Then why would I buy the books in the first place? And it's never easy to extract things you don't like when those things become the baseline for spells, magic items, adventures, politics and everything else. Fluff becomes very difficult to separate out from crunch after a certain point.
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn...
I don't like pantheons being part of the rule books--I am quite content with the (current) rule that you can just pick two domains w/o declaring allegience to any particular "diety" (2.0 and before did not even set a 'baseline' pantheon for the game). I have never played with anyone who identified a specific 'god' for their cleric or paladin, and the game ran just fine. Pantheons, if they are 'necessary', ought to be in the world-specific products only or in a 'divine'-type supplement. As far as the core rulebooks are concerned, 'separation of church and state' is the way to go.
At first I was very upset about what Wizards is doing to the Cosmology and now Pantheon of D&D, not to mention some of the races and monsters. However, I had an epiphany of sorts in regards to this new D&D that makes it a little easier to swallow. Wizards isn't redisigning D&D they are recreating D&D. Wizards is taking D&D and setting it on a general all purpose world. The cosmology is not a reworking of the Great Wheel it is a completely new cosmology and the Pantheon is not the old Greyhawk Core but a group of all new Deities. If we (the fans of old) see names and likenesses that are familiar this is pure coinsidence and we should not associate them with the Gods, Cosmologies, Races, Monsters, etc. from other named campaign settings. Do the old campaign settings exsist? Yes. Will some of the new material conflict with the older material? Yes. Will we the players have to do some in house adaptations of the new 4e material to make it flow with previous named Campaign settings? Yes, but alot of us have already been doing that for years.
I was getting frustrated thinking of how horribly Wizards was destroying D&D while I was under the impression that they were attempting to tweak or modify the Pantheon, cosmology, etc. However I realize now that they are creating all new and not just adjusting the old. Why Wizards has not flat out told the D&D community this is beyond me. Instead they are allowing people to become dreadful of, annoyed at, or angered by what they think is being done to their old cosmology, gods, and monsters. When what is really happening is Wizards is setting aside the old sacred cows so that they might raise a new calf. And if this new calf has some features in common with the old sacred cows it is simply because they are both cows.
I hope this will calm some of the fears and anger people are having about 4e.
Wizards isn't redisigning D&D they are recreating D&D.
You have a point there. But it looks more and more that I don´t like D&D4: The Recreated game. D&D is for me very much a nostalgia show, and while some modernization is ok and necessary, a whole recreation ends up for me as "This is no D&D" or at least "This is not the D&D I like."
If you have it right there (and some indicators point in that direction), then I guess 4e might be first D&D I don´t buy.
Stefan
I was getting frustrated thinking of how horribly Wizards was destroying D&D while I was under the impression that they were attempting to tweak or modify the Pantheon, cosmology, etc. However I realize now that they are creating all new and not just adjusting the old. Why Wizards has not flat out told the D&D community this is beyond me. Instead they are allowing people to become dreadful of, annoyed at, or angered by what they think is being done to their old cosmology, gods, and monsters. When what is really happening is Wizards is setting aside the old sacred cows so that they might raise a new calf. And if this new calf has some features in common with the old sacred cows it is simply because they are both cows.
I hope this will calm some of the fears and anger people are having about 4e.
emphasis mine.
It doesn't help. They are gamers... they should understand that what they're doing is upsetting us grognards, and that grognards are, for the most part, what has been keeping D&D going. If they wanted to start from the ground up, why don't they do it? Why get us upset by using the names we know and love. Why risk, or, more accurately, dare us to tell Wizards "hell, no, kiss my ass, I ain't going there"
I love D&D... I've been playing since I was six years old. So far, this thing they've slapped the D&D name on... it isn't it.
- Ashavan
Mr.Roboto is the Warforged God!And here I thought it was R2-D2.
Common its C3PO, he is already worshipped by Ewoks, and he's gold. GOLD!!!
*shrug*
....So what if the 4E pantheon is just as stupid as 3E's? So we won't see an improvement of the gods. Not like we are seeing the quality of that section decrease.
The whole article just makes me Yawwn.
You have a point there. But it looks more and more that I don´t like D&D4: The Recreated game. D&D is for me very much a nostalgia show, and while some modernization is ok and necessary, a whole recreation ends up for me as "This is no D&D" or at least "This is not the D&D I like."
I think it's fair to say that, while 3E was probably a more drastic mechanical change to D&D over earlier editions than 4E will be to 3E (though I could still be wrong on this), 4E is vastly greater "cultural" change to the game. By this I mean that the way the game presents itself, the influences it draws on, and its very approach to what D&D is and how it should be played isn't the same as we saw in previous editions. It's basically Dungeons & Dragons 2.0.
That may be good or bad, depending on what one wants out of the game. For me, it's bad and I'm having no part of it, but I'm a cantankerous old guy and, despite all the money I happily spent on 3E, I'm not whom WotC is targeting with the new edition.
So I also have to say "bah" the the new pantheon. It shows lots of disrespect to the campaign worlds of the Realms, Flanaess, etc. to just mix their deities into one "core pantheon." Either don't be lazy and make up an all new pantheon, or pick one. I liked the 3.0 pantheon fine, but sure, swap it for FR or Eberron or something, but not some from each.
As they have said before there are no sacred cows. And I guess no settings either there is just different "continents" on world D&D.