Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
They shouldn't be associated, but people have been mistakenly conflating Positive Energy with Good because it's bright and shiny and Negative Energy with Evil because it's dark and draining for decades, which is why we got "mindless undead default to evil" and "healing is Conjuration because Necromancy is evil" in 3e. So when the 5e devs expand the Positive and Negative Energy Planes to "encompass everything" and draw the new Wheel with the PEP arcing over the Upper Planes and the NEP arcing below the Lower Planes, it's going to further encourage that misconception and it's a pretty good sign at least some of the designers probably labor under it themselves.



The entire structure of the Great Wheel is, in-game, due to the fact that the multiverse coalesced during (or at least around the time of) the War of Law and Chaos in which the forces of "reality should exist and have rules" fought against the forces of "reality should do whatever I want at the moment" and won, so the Wheel was shaped by people (for a given value of "people") who felt that symmetry, order, cycles, and so forth were important, hence why the "Chaotic" planes still feel orderly and the classification system of cosmic principles known as alignment is a big deal.

I feel quite the opposite about the Wheel: every attempt I've seen to "improve" the Wheel by replacing it with a different cosmology basically boils down to taking all the elemental planes and either (A) throwing them into a big mishmash because "single-element planes are boring and hard to adventure in" despite the fact that turning the Plane of Earth or Plane of Water into Limbo makes it harder to adventure in or (B) folding them into other planes and ignoring the implications if your Fire plane is also your Hell plane or if one of the four isn't represented, then having either (A) one or two "good afterlife with harps and halos" planes and one or two "bad afterlife with fire and/or darkness" planes in a setup derivative of every real-world mythology ever or (B) an arbitrary number of Outer Planes so the DM can pull out the Plane of the Week at a whim and players don't know what to expect, and calling it a day.

The 3e MotP did that for its one-page example of a dead-simple cosmology, 4e did it because its cosmology designers didn't have an ounce of creativity between them, homebrewers do it all the time. Say what you will about the Great Wheel, it's one of the more stand-out setting cosmologies out there and it gives a DM a ton of hooks to work with.
I've never been a big fan of extraplanar content in general. There's plenty enough to get excited about on the material plane without needing a plane comprised entirely of fire (which was mostly nonsense anyway).

In my mind, the only planes you really need are 1 good aligned heaven (for the angels), 1 evil aligned hell (for the demons), and the planes adjacent to the material (astral, ethereal, and shadow). Mechanus and limbo are optional, as their significance depends largely on the campaign's theme. Nothing else is needed.

I mean, you call it derivative, but nothing in the game is truly original anyway. I don't see any problem with copying the solution here as well. Just a boring cosmology? Better a boring one than a needlessly complex one.