Planescape Do You Care About Planescape Lore?

[Savage Wombat]

Alzrius, I disagree that I'm being hysterical. Once TSR forced the meta-setting onto every 2e product, players started coming forward all the time wanting to play Race X from Setting Y in Campaign Z. Suddenly I had players clamouring to play Kender in a Greyhawk campaign. Or Krynnish Minotaurs in my homebrew.

And all the way along, TSR is telling them, "Go ahead. Your DM, if he's playing D&D, should allow this. After all, all the planes connect, so, why not yours?" It led to an awful lot of mix and match campaigns that I really think made for bad games.

Aah, now we get to the real issue.

 

[Imaro]

That's the same effect "everything is core" had, IME. Although, I can't say I found the same to be true in the 2e era (outside of Planescape or Spelljammer campaigns). YMMV, obviously...

Pretty much this, I guess I'm still not understanding what Hussar's actual issue is,or more accurately why this stuff bothers him now as we head into 5e, when it seems to all be things 4e did with it's fluff, cosmology and design direction but there was no outrage about it during all that time. I understand if this thread is just about a posters dislike of Planescape material, but if that's it... as opposed to the various reasons that keep getting thrown out, just be transparent about it and say so.

 

[Orius]

Alzrius, I disagree that I'm being hysterical. Once TSR forced the meta-setting onto every 2e product, players started coming forward all the time wanting to play Race X from Setting Y in Campaign Z. Suddenly I had players clamouring to play Kender in a Greyhawk campaign. Or Krynnish Minotaurs in my homebrew.

And all the way along, TSR is telling them, "Go ahead. Your DM, if he's playing D&D, should allow this. After all, all the planes connect, so, why not yours?" It led to an awful lot of mix and match campaigns that I really think made for bad games.

Yet, at the same time, I remember 2e material generally stating that this stuff was optional and subject to DM approval in the first place. Not that it really made a difference, but honestly it was a problem not so much with TSR or the RAW as it was with players ignoring the idea that DMs were supposed to have the final say in matters like this. And it doesn't really seem like things have really changed much sine either, some players just can't get the "Rule 0" concept through their heads.

IIRC, the main PS boxed set itself did this in the player's book. It said something along the lines of how any combination of races and classes from TSR's various published settings was potentially possible, but it was up to individual DMs to decide exactly what was allowed.

 

[RichGreen]

I think this is a taste thing. I thought Spelljammer was at its strongest when it was just trying to be Spelljammer. Illithid nautiloids, neogi with dominated umber hulks, sailing on the phlogiston, the weird intricacies of helms, giff with pistols, giant space hamsters...

I thought it was at its weakest when it was mostly a tool to say, "Now there's tinker gnomes in the Forgotten Realms." If you wanted that sort of experience, we already had planar travel, which covered it adequately. Spelljammer was great because of Spelljamming.

-O

I absolutely agree with this. One of the best supplements for Spelljammer was the penultimate one (I think), the Astromundi Cluster, which finally gave Spelljammer a detailed crystal sphere all of its own and independent of Realmspace, Greyspace etc.

I guess I'm still not understanding what Hussar's actual issue is,or more accurately why this stuff bothers him now as we head into 5e, when it seems to all be things 4e did with it's fluff, cosmology and design direction but there was no outrage about it during all that time. I understand if this thread is just about a posters dislike of Planescape material, but if that's it... as opposed to the various reasons that keep getting thrown out, just be transparent about it and say so.

I think there was a fair bit of consternation at the time, especially beforehand when 4e hadn't come out and WotC were putting out preview articles – a bit like now . In the end, it all died down because the World Axis was pretty cool, and people who liked the Great Wheel could easily carry on using it. Also, many people just didn't like the system itself, a much bigger issue.

Cheers


Rich

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I have to admit that I love the idea of Planescape and Spelljammer. I love the idea that the universe is vast, huge, filled with nearly everything you can think of. I like the feeling that the players are only a small part of something so large that it's inconceivable....but also I like the feeling that everything is connected, even if only at a small level.

I like Dragonlance. I love Forgotten Realms. I love Dark Sun. I love Ravenloft. I like the idea that if I set a game in one of them that it is connected in some way to the rest of them.

Plus, I'm horrible at coming up with ideas of my own. I find most of my creativeness comes from taking other people's ideas and putting them together in interesting ways.

With all the lore of all the campaign settings in my head I find it easy to go "This guy is a powerful Wizard who has a tower somewhere exotic....wait, maybe it's in the elemental plane of fire. Since he plane travels, he is also odd in that he has an assistant from Dragonlance, a Kender. He knows about the other planes so means he has contacts within the factions of Sigil. I can pepper his speech with a couple words of Sigil slang. That way he'll seem exotic and different."

Meanwhile, if left to my own devices I end up with something like "Uhhh...he's a powerful Wizard who...umm....lives in a tower on top of that hill."

Basically, I like lore. I like Planescape because it, at its heart, allows me to use more lore in my game when I want to.

 

[Cyberen]

Actually, while I do like 4e fluff, the nuking of FR it entailed was one of the major reasons part of my group wouldn't switch. Not much ranting about it, but an actual reason to stick to 3.x.
I think 4e would have fared quite better commercially without this abysmal decision of discontinuing support for their flagship setting.

 

[frankthedm]

Bin that WW:Storyteller Wannabe detritus! Instead of a Manual of the Planes book, T$R bloated it into multiple box sets stuffed with in world prattling on. Monster books were padded with needlessly oversized art and quotes floating in enormous areas of blank space.

 

[Piratecat]

Bin that WW:Storyteller Wannabe detritus! Instead of a Manual of the Planes book, T$R bloated it into multiple box sets stuffed with in world prattling on. Monster books were padded with needlessly oversized art and quotes floating in enormous areas of blank space.

I suspect that any argument that relies on "T$R" to bolster its point is rendered immediately specious.

And seriously, Frank, wow, do our points diverge. What you disliked is what I loved about the PS line: really intriguing and unexpected political/belief-based plots and a clean graphic design. For me, the line was eminently readable and really pleasing on the eye. I recently reviewed a bunch of old Planescape material, and was struck once again how much more fun they were to read than more recent rulebooks.

I suspect we're just looking for different things out of our campaign settings.

 

[avin]

Aah, now we get to the real issue.

Yeah... but this is not a Planescape issue, looks like Hussar had a Player vs DM issue.

I never had this kind of problem, and I almost run only homebrews. If a player wants to be a Githyanki in my feet-on-the-ground campaign I won't allow it and that's it. Been there, done that.

And this is not about fluff only, sometimes people showed up with some obscure 3PP overpowered book in 3E and I won't allow it in my games. That was always talked before the campaign start.
[MENTION=11697]Shemeska[/MENTION] suggestion early in this thread is how I think DDN should go. Describe the creature but never set it on a stone... leave space for DMs and suplements. "Some sages say that this race was created by primordials, some tribes in south think different..." is better than "this creature was created by primordials".

 

[Alzrius]

Alzrius, I disagree that I'm being hysterical. Once TSR forced the meta-setting onto every 2e product, players started coming forward all the time wanting to play Race X from Setting Y in Campaign Z. Suddenly I had players clamouring to play Kender in a Greyhawk campaign. Or Krynnish Minotaurs in my homebrew.

And all the way along, TSR is telling them, "Go ahead. Your DM, if he's playing D&D, should allow this. After all, all the planes connect, so, why not yours?" It led to an awful lot of mix and match campaigns that I really think made for bad games.

I disagree with your disagreement; I think that is a pretty hysterical overstatement of the issue...presuming that it could even be considered an issue at all.

First of all, there's no combination of particular races and settings that will lead to intrinsically bad games. You seem to think that there's some sort of combination of "kender, muls, and baurier playing in the Forgotten Realms" that will somehow objectively lead to a bad game for everyone involved. That's nonsense, of course, since the tastes, desires, and role-playing abilities of the players involved will be different every time. You're making an objective value judgment where none is possible.

Moreover, this is (as others have noted) not an issue of setting, but an issue of players vs. GMs. If the GM doesn't want there to be a particular crossover in his campaign, even if by the book such a thing is possible, he just has to say so. If players don't respect the GMs invoking of Rule 0 - at least insofar as the GM is trying to set up a particular campaign - then they're called problem players. That has nothing to do with the canon.

On the flipside of the coin, there's also something to be said for PC exceptionalism. I've read plenty of threads where, when the PCs ask to be a one-in-a-million race, with some intricate backstory for how they got where they are, people agree that it's not necessarily a vice to let the PC be something different/special. The problems come when the GM has a good reason for disallowing that anyway, and the player won't respect that.

In other words, there needs to be some mutual respect between what the players want and what the GMs want, and if there's a conflict then someone should know when to acquiesce (usually, to me, that should be the player).

I mean, if you're playing in a Forgotten Realms (2e) campaign, and the player is high enough level to cast planar travel spells, then, by the book, he should be able to start hopping around different settings.

Again, this isn't a setting-specific complaint. It's just another variation of the old "I can't GM the group anymore once they have magical travel available - they're just teleporting everywhere and ruining my campaign!"

I'd much, much prefer settings to remain distinct, at least in publication. If you want to mix and match your home game? Go right ahead. But, it's harder to start taking your chocolate out of my peanut butter after the fact. Particularly if I want to buy things like supplements and modules, all of which are going to assume a level of mixing that is not applicable to my game.

I don't get why I have to do the work of taking Planescape, or whatever, out of my setting, just so you can have it. You're the one who wants to play Planescape, shouldn't you be the one who has to do the work? Why does my Savage Tide AP end in a giant Planescape setting when it's set in Greyhawk? Shouldn't my Savage Tide AP end in a Greyhawk specfic setting? Sure, it might be in the Abyss, but, what's this Eladrin Court and Gwynharrwyf (sp) doing in there?

The "assumed level of mixing" was always exceptionally marginal. Crossovers were comparatively few - and even the meta-settings had a relatively small amount of direct crossovers.

As for "why should you have to do the work" the answer is...why not? If some people want something, and others don't want it, whichever way it goes down will leave one group unhappy, and they'll have to do the work to change it. So why not you and yours then? After all, there's already a rich history of lore and canon to the game, so it makes more sense to default to that than not to.

That's without saying that this poll, and the poll results that WotC took recently, seem to be a pretty clear indicator that more people want that lore than don't want it (yes, standard disclaimer about how accurate these polls are, but so far they're the best we have to go on).