D&D 4e: A Whole New World

Within the core books for the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, a base world is being set up which is intended to give new players and especially new Dungeon Masters a much easier time getting into their first game. The setting is called “Points of Light” and is summed up on their site as:

The Dungeons & Dragons game assumes many things about its setting: The world is populated by a variety of intelligent races, strange monsters lurk on other planes, ancient empires have left ruins across the face of the world, and so on. But one of the new key conceits about the D&D world is simply this: Civilized folk live in small, isolated points of light scattered across a big, dark, dangerous world.

One of the reasons this is such a big deal is that in previous editions of the game there was nothing like a base setting which shipped with the core books, instead there were expansion books for settings such as Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberron, and several others. Each of these worlds provides a different style of play for a game, whether it’s with established characters that have been read about in novels, familiar events and locales, or more general concepts such as the inclusion of elements like the Warforged as a more commonplace feature. These settings provide a framework on which the DM and players can then build their own stories, simultaneously elevated a lot of the tough work in running a game while providing a rich context and consistent themes.

Some people feel that this encourages players to be less creative, and discourages a DM from creating a whole world of his own, instead taking the easy route and just using what is in the book. While we haven’t yet seen what has gone to print, what is much more likely is that the core books provide a simple base on which ideas can be laid with a lot less effort than it would take to generate everything from scratch. Furthermore, this is superior to the existing supplements mentioned above because there is less baggage to worry about. Graham really put it quite well in the comments here recently, so I’ll use his words:

The main reasoning behind the Points of Light standard design (aside from giving new DMs a baseline to start at) is that it’s easy to add fluff and setting material, but much harder to remove it.

So if you take the “bare-bones” style PoL D&D, and want to put it into a world of nation-states, it will be easy to do, as there’s nothing that’s already there to get in your way.

But if the base style for 4e was, say, Greyhawk, there’s a lot of baggage there. Things will need to be altered, stripped, and players will need to be told what is and isn’t there.

With that said, there have been some changes to the non-setting aspects of the game that people may be skeptical about. One of the most obvious changes is the complete change to how the Planes and other worlds function. In the preview book Worlds & Monsters they explain their decisions quite clearly that it does not make much sense to have a handful of outer planes which are virtually impossible to ever inhabit. D&D is a game about adventuring as a character, but if there are entire worlds which characters can’t even EXIST on for more than a few seconds, then it’s really not worth putting any effort into those worlds. What they have created instead is a series of layering worlds which overlap and mirror one-another.

The Material Plane has remained relatively untouched, but now places like the Feywild and the Shadowfell are described as being other worlds which exist “on top of” or concurrently with the physical world. The Elemental Chaos and Astral Plane are described as being one step further out, not exactly having the same structure as the typical world but overlapping from time to time and having influence upon the other planes. Travel has become a bit easier as a mountain in one world may still be a mountain in the Feywild, though altered and different in many ways, this allows for congruences which could transport the lucky or unlucky from one world to another. Concepts such as the Underdark or the Astral Sea remain relatively intact, but the worlds of the Astral Plane and the Elemental Chaos are described much more as landscapes then places which could never support human life. They are definitely still dangerous in their own ways, but it is no longer a struggle for the DM to utilize these locales, instead they are now obstacles for the players to overcome and explore, which is the entire point of the game from the start.

What surprised me the most was that after reading about all of the new World ideas being implemented, I felt a sense of familiarity with the whole thing. Eventually I realized that what Wizards has done is adapt a cosmos very similar to those used in previous editions of White Wolf’s popular Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage settings. There you had the physical world and several varying stages of the spirit world (known as the Umbra, Near Umbra, Digital Web, etc.) which were obviously designed to be traveled through and experienced by the players. A lot of what made White Wolf’s games so fun were the settings, and since they have moved on to different (and in my opinion worse) cosmologies, I think it’s great that there are similarities coming into play with 4th Edition. While I may briefly mourn the loss of ridiculous places such as the Elemental Plane of Fire, or the ability to easily explain the existence of an Elemental Plane of Cheese, I think that these changes align with many of the others in an effort to enhance gameplay and provide Players and DM’s alike with more functional and helpful content right from the start.