Planescape Planescape IS D&D Says Jeremy Crawford

Planescape is Jeremy Crawford's favourite D&D setting. "It is D&D", he says, as he talks about how in the 2024 core rulebook updates Planescape will be more up front and center as "the setting of settings".

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[Reynard]

Because new players haven't been shown how to homebrew? Probably why they put out an Acq Inc book and like seeing Exandria books - there are plenty of new-gamers who only know D&D through those things.

That doesn't track with my experience at all. People come to D&D wanting to tell THEIR stories, and they figure out how to do so before they even truly grok the rules. At like 10 years old.

 

[Parmandur]

That doesn't track with my experience at all. People come to D&D wanting to tell THEIR stories, and they figure out how to do so before they even truly grok the rules. At like 10 years old.

In your experience, how many people have taken the gonzo Gygaxian cosmology as a framework to get running and tell their own story?

 

[Reynard]

In your experience, how many people have taken the gonzo Gygaxian cosmology as a framework to get running and tell their own story?

You misunderstand my point: D&D doesn't need a default setting because people coming to D&D ignore whatever they want in order to tell their stories. Gygaxian cosmology has literally nothing to do with it.

 

[Stormonu]

While I like Planescape, I also like the fact in 3E that they went to different cosmologies for the different campaign worlds (such as in FR & Eberron) and encouraged creating your own cosmology, and then completely dumped the great wheel for 4E. I don't want to feel like I'm being pushed back into having to have a connection to Sigil, the Outlands and all that. In fact, for the last few campaign worlds I've been creating, I've been drastically playing with the cosmology beyond the material plane.

For example, for the latest one I've been working on has Hell, the Astral and Ethereal for outer planes. No elemental planes, no FeyWild, no ShadowFell and no other outer planes - and Heaven has been destroyed.

 

[Micah Sweet]

While I like Planescape, I also like the fact in 3E that they went to different cosmologies for the different campaign worlds (such as in FR & Eberron) and encouraged creating your own cosmology, and then completely dumped the great wheel for 4E. I don't want to feel like I'm being pushed back into having to have a connection to Sigil, the Outlands and all that. In fact, for the last few campaign worlds I've been creating, I've been drastically playing with the cosmology beyond the material plane.

For example, for the latest one I've been working on has Hell, the Astral and Ethereal for outer planes. No elemental planes, no FeyWild, no ShadowFell and no other outer planes - and Heaven has been destroyed.

There's no need to follow WotC's grand marketing scheme here. You can ignore all of this if it doesn't work for your game, no matter how hard they push it.

 

[teitan]

I'm more worried about the more front and centered part like they said. I do not want Planescape and Sigil to be the default setting. I understand that I can keep or skip as much as I want and I can still make my home games and play in FR if I want without using it, but I do not want to feel like I'm playing wrong if I do not want Space D&D or Visit the Gods D&D.

If anyone makes you feel that way they are the ones not playing D&D because it’s YOUR game.

 

[teitan]

My particular beef with Planescape is that it is the only oversetting. Doesn’t matter where you start from, as soon as you go into the planes, you MUST play Planescape. As @Remalthilis said, everyone meets in that bar in Sigil.

If you don’t actually like the Planescape stuff, DnD is really sparse on the ground for planar adventuring.

But I’ve got Spelljammer, which I can use to do the same thing and not have to worry about incorporating a bunch of lore I happen not to like.

So I guess that’s a win for everyone.

How is it sparse? You make your own. The DMG has guidelines for that.

 

[teitan]

Metaplot is older than that. I used to get Traveller's Journal for Traveller RPG around 1983-86, and that included a metaplot involving the Third Imperium and the Fifth Frontier War.

Dragonlance was Metaplot, FR launched with metaplot as the novels moved the setting forward.

 

[teitan]

The product was probably a Dragon Magazine and the context was probably a Palladium games ad...

It was the PHB and DMG for 1e for me.

 

[teitan]

I'm always a bit torn when the topic of metaplots comes up:

One one hand? I definitely had a shelf of White Wolf books that I genuinely enjoyed reading, and I think back on very fondly. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those books, both reading, cross-referencing, and dreaming about the worlds they described.

On the other hand, my group played D&D 95% of the time, because we really had no idea what to do with all those White Wolf books - the metaplot was really, really hard to translate into a game for us at the table, even laying aside the metaphysical implications of trying to run Mage at the table.

So... eh? I can't discount how much I enjoyed reading those books and thinking about them, but I have to acknowledge that it never helped me and my friends actually play anything.

I feel like your summary of WoD was most WoD fans. I know a lot of collectors but not a lot of players outside of a few sessions that fell apart. Similarly for those who tried to really stick to the FR metaplot but those who hand waved it were far more numerous with FR as it wasn’t all encompassing like Dragonlance. The easiest metaplot to tag along with was Planescape because it was so huge and well done that if the party succeeded at stopping Tenebrous from becoming Orcus it was cool and didn’t affect the overarching story or if they stopped Vecna etc. it only impacted things when WOTC put them in 3.x which was still cool because they are my favorite D&D villains anyway.