4e's new cosmology has reduced the great wheel to a simplified core and removed many of the particular rules associated with planar travel.* The stated reason for many of these changes was to increase the accessibility of the planes to PCs and remove outerplanar realms that were rarely visited.
This bothers me on many levels, and not just because I think there should be one great wheel to rule them all. Mainly, it means that many of the ideas associated with the planes as I understood them will not be carried forward into future generations of D&D players. That is, they no longer form a set of core assumptions that can serve as the basis of conversations and shared adventures.
Okay, so that's sad, at least to me. But what about the larger issue? I feel as though the designers of 2e's Planescape (in particular Wolfgang Baur, Monte Cook, and Colin McComb) succeeding in creating an amazing fantasy realm that simply has no modern equal. In its totality, Planescape was beautiful, dangerous and absurd. The complex histories and ecologies of outerplanar beings served as the backdrop for some of D&D's most impressive features, such as the Blood War. (The fiends, in fact, were easily the most fleshed-out creatures in Planescape.)
Is there really a good reason for all of this amazing material to be either redacted or cut completely? Was trashing most of the multiverse (as it was constituted) worth it to "maximize playability"? Maybe I've become a grognard in that I don't think significant chunks of lore should be dropped because they are measurably less convenient during play, especially when they form the backdrop of established creature ecologies (see, for example, baatezu and tanar'ri tactics described in Hellbound: The Blood War).
