D&D 5E Setting Playoffs Finals (round 5)

[hawkeyefan]

I don't really think Planescape is as good as people remember. Maybe it was just my group back in the 90's, but it was a great example of a set that I *really* wanted to love (and did, on paper), but didn't really translate well to actual games. At least not for normal long-term games.

Planescape, to me, was like Ravenloft. It was a place you could bring into your existing setting for a good end-game or side quest type adventure, but neither really really great settings on their whole.

I actually find it to be much better than I remember it. My enjoyment of the Planescape setting really only came about during 3E when I started to incorporate elements of it into my campaign. Sigil is a great location, and that alone makes Planescape compelling. But it also made the planes more accesible, while simultaneously more mysterious and strange.

Neither I nor my gaming group really appreciated it back when it was released and we first played it. A big part of that is likely the fact that the person who was the primary DM for our Planescape campaign wasn't that strong of a DM, and the rest of us relied on him to kind of reveal the setting to us.

But over the years I picked up a lot of the old supplements about the planes, and the more I picked up, the more I found the material to be really strong. Especially the later stuff by the likes of Monte Cook and Wolfgang Baur.

 

[DeanP]

Voter suppression! The votes from Arizona were still coming in! I demand a recount! Absentee ballots! Military coup if I must!

 

[Ancalagon]

It was pretty tight!

I think that planescape was better... but that greyhawk has a much greater appeal. Not everyone wants a planar/philosophical campaign, after all.

 

[Cristian Andreu]

Greyhawk is the clay. Planescape is the sculpture.

That's deep, man.

 

[hawkeyefan]

That's deep, man.

Not really...it was just a quick summary of my feelings. I love Greyhawk because it was what I was introduced to and it was what the game was created with. But it was a hodgepodge of fantasy tropes and concepts lifted from a variety of sources. It wasn't really original in and of itself. All it really did was mash many different ideas together.

Planescape took many of the core concepts of Greyhawk and D&D in general and created a setting that was more unique and had a specific feeling of its own.

 

[Ristamar]

I was never a fan of Planescape, though Torment is one of my all-time favorite CRPGs.