Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
I apologize for missing the obvious joke here. His daughter? SUCH a bwimbo.
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Planescape Do You Care About Planescape Lore?
- Thread starter Hussar
- Start date
1) So, you object to having to remove Planescape lore, but PS fans should to be okay with having to remove new lore?
2) Not always the case in Forgotten Realms.
And when you say you feel the 4th Ed added more lore than it took way, in what way do you feel that way?
If that's the test, then a sentence in the core MM about yugoloths sometimes serving evil gods, or even typically serving evil gods, is not objectionable at all. A game containing that sentence very easily facilitates a Planescape game, because that sentence is so easily ignored that it puts no barrier at all in the way of running Planescape.
But I thought that you would object to such a sentence being in the core MM. So either you've misstated your test, or I've misinterpreted it.
My point is that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Any lore creates the risk that someone won't want it in their game and hence will have to remove it. Planescape is not in any special category as far as this is concerned.
Given the general risk, I think there are two approaches that are sensible from the point of view of design: minimal lore; or good lore. Early D&D tended to go the first way. 4e attempted the second way.
This is a third way, but as far as I can say is not motivated by considerations of design at all. It is motivated by commercial considerations.
If WotC have totted up the numbers and worked out that there's more money in Planescape lore than 4e lore, good luck to them. But that is not the argument that I take Kamikaze Midget to be running.
The claim made upthread (post 59) was that "4e lore was largely a SUBTRACTIVE endeavor. It TOOK things away rather than giving things like plane scape did."
Did 4e add more than it took away? That depends what your metric is. If your metric is written words of fiction, then I imagine that 4e invalidated more fiction than it added. But that's not my personal metric - I would rather a few good words than many pointless words, and for me at least much of the 2nd ed era fiction is pointless, in the sense that it serve no point for my game.
My metric for RPG lore is material that will support me in running a game without turning the game into simply a journey through someone else's creative endeavour. RPG material can fall short of my requirement in (at least) two ways:
- It can produce the output of soemone else's play as input for my play (I think that the AD&D and 3E details on the fireball spell fit this description - Gygax et al ajdudicated borderline uses of and questions around fireball in their games, and instead of giving later players techniques for making similar adjudications, they simply wrote their own resolutions into the game; some highly detailed campagin settings also fit this description in far more elaborate ways);
- It can lead to play in which the bulk of the play experience is not the players creating their own fiction at the table, but rather the players exploring someone else's prewritten fiction (the typical railroad module fits this description pretty clearly).
4e lore (core books, Worlds & Monsters, plus most of the planar expansions scores high on my metric because it doesn't fall into either of the above categories. (Some vignettish parts of Open Grave, Plane Below, and Plane Above, including many of the latter's Astral islands are exceptions to this - they seem aimed at play which is primarily exploration of someone else's fiction.)
4e lore presents a mythic history in which many (not all) of the game's races and classes have a stake, but what the resolution of that history will be, and hence what the significance of that stake, is left undecided. At its core it's a law/chaos conflict, but there are a lot of nuances within and around that - the character and fate of empires; the nature and prupose of death; questions about loyalty, and ownership, and corruption, etc.
And while it would be going too far to say that the game forces the players to make a choice - it's not Burning Wheel, and the PCs might all be halfling ranger of Avandra against whom the GM sends as opposition only ankhegs and kruthiks - but the game makes it very easy for the GM to force the players to choose, because so many of the creatures in the game are hooked into these basic but unresolved conflicts at the core of the game.
The 4e Blood War, for instance, isn't a yugolothic conspiracy that, in game terms, plays the function of explaining why demons (and perhaps devils) don't conquer the planes. It's a conflict between the heavens and the Abyss over the ownership of a corrupting source of power. From the point of view of the players, it's not primarily a mystery to be solved; it's a decision to be made.
I know that [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION], at least, has run Planescape in something like the way that I am presenting 4e. But from the Planescape material I am familiar with I personally don't get the sort of feel that, in the case of 4e, just leaps off the page at me.
Aldarc
Legend
Adding the ethereal plane would hardly be challenging. Just treat it as the "space between planes."
Well, that would obviously be from your biased point of view, I do not feel 4th Ed's lore was that good (and many others agree), a bit too trite and derivative (a Greek ripoff, Titans and Gods, blah, blah) for me, and a tad Disney.
At this point, your agenda is extremely transparent, this will go in circles.
Didn't the latter day 4th Ed product Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporium mention the Ethereal Plane (mine's packed away)?
Aldarc
Legend
I'm ignorant on the details of many 4E supplemental books. There's a lot that I appreciated and enjoyed about 4E and its lore, but 4E was ultimately not the game for me.
There are also many others who liked the lore changes that 4E made. You say that it's too derivative? Fine. I say that it felt flexible and organically mythological while harkening to the pervading theme of Law vs. Chaos that lies at the very beginning of Gary Gygax's alignment system. I loved the Great Axis's simplicity.
From what I can tell, a similar criticism can likely be made about most people in this thread, so I don't see how this really adds much to the discussion apart from attacking his character by accusing him of operating with an agenda. (As if somehow the people criticizing his position lack agendas of their own.)
Whether or not you think they succeeded, I think it's fairly obvious what they attempted.
I have an agenda which I think is transparent. Namely, I don't think that Planescape is "neutral" or "generic" lore. It is a particular gloss on the basic AD&D planar framework, with its own idiosyncracies that have no greater claim on being generalised than any other lore or setting.
Shemeska
Adventurer
I think being an evolution from 1e's planar lore, and then being the standard for two editions of the game in 2e and 3e, and being semi-regularly mined for material even in 4e gives it a bit of a claim to being a standard for baseline D&D (though openly allowing for campaign settings to deviate from that).
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