QuietBrowser
First Post
I don't have quite the stake in this some of you folks do, but still, I'd love to see a Sigil Adventurer's Guide or something come out, just to get away from the dang Forgotten Realms for a little. And, as for what I want to see...
I want to see some truly exotic races. Back in AD&D, Planescape gave us Bariaur, Githzerai, Rogue Modrons, Tieflings, Aasima and Genasi. With the planetouched covered - although I wouldn't say no to new subspecies and variants thereof - let's have some of the weird races that fit this sitting so well. Bring us back Gith, from both sides of the line (seriously, I can't believe that every githyanki is really so blind to not realize that Vlaakith has basically had them exchange one form of slavery for another), give us Rogue Modrons, give us Bladelings and Bariaur, Mephits, anything you can think of to let us truly experience the gonzo melting pot that was Sigil in its glory.
I want WoTC to go over the Factions and give them a real rewrite. Maybe dump some that can't be saved for new ones. Honestly, I liked the basic idea of the Factions, but in practice, many of them came off as unplayable. Mercykillers were too hierarchical. The Harmonium, whilst a welcome pss-take on "For the Greater Good!" and how that's not as cheery a thought as many people assume, in practice, was a bit too heavy handed on the cynical "they're obliviously evil" treatment. The Xaositects were abysmal, plain and simple; "I want to play a Xaositect!" was treated with the same disdain as "I want to play a Kender!" and for the exact same very good reason: unless you're that one in a million lucky party, it always ended up with the player using their fluff to be "legitimized" party-disrupting Chaotic Stupid screwheads. Either make them less annoying, or get rid of them, and I honestly don't care which. The Bleakers need to loose the propensity to madness; we're not living in the 80s anymore, we know better that you don't need to believe in some higher purpose to live a happy life.
I do not want Alignment to be essential to the game. It has never worked well, and it has always been one of the biggest flaws of the game, I think, that it's tied itself so heavily to it. Planescape works better when it focuses on belief and philosophy, not so much on the stereotypical "clash of good and evil". That moral ambiguity, that murkiness of what is "right" and "wrong", that's when Planescape shines.
Dumb. Down. The. Blood. War! Gods, I hated the Blood War in AD&D! It damn near ruined the setting for me, simply because I find it so unbelievable. Not so much the demons and devils fighting, I get that, but the clumsy attempt to tie it to Alignment did nothing for me - I preferred the 4e version, which boiled down to a far more elegant battle between conquerors and defilers; Evil vs. Oblivion, something that actually made sense to me. The worst part, however, was how it was not only continually hyped as "the Big Thing!" of the setting - like how everyone complains about Drizzt and Elminster being the spotlight-stealing squad of the Realms - but how it was such a clumsy attempt at 80s/90s esque grimdark. I'm talking, of course, about the portrayal of the Blood War as the one thing that made the infinite Upper Planes, the bastions of goodness and right, as infinite in numbers and equally powerful if not superior to either type of fiend, tremble in their little white darned socks because they knew they'd fall if the Blood War ever stopped and the fiends could assault them.
Really? Seriously? Legions of frothing mad lunatics that can barely coordinate their own thoughts, never mind with their allies (demons) marching alongside selfish nihilists who want to stab everyone else in the back for their own profit and advancement (daemons) marching alongside a brutal tyranny divided near equally between mindless drones, treacherous underlings willing to thwart their own goals to make their immediate bosses/rivals look back, and paranoid tyrants doing their best to get rivals and skilled underlings alike killed off (devils). These are the Enemy. Standing against them, the united forces of Good - you know, the embodiments of cooperation, tolerance, friendship, camaraderie and unity? And, somehow, the united forces of Good, who cooperate with their fellows like it's second nature and who work together for the greater good, are supposed to be doomed to fail in the face of a horde of Evil that probably spends more time fighting amongst itself than fighting them? Pull the other (censored) one!
On the same sort of topic, what I want, more than anything, is for WoTC to tone down the supremacist attitude of the viewpoint characters. I get they wanted to go for the "big cityslicker looking down on the provincial rube" sort of feel, but more than anything else, even the cant, it grated on me and made trying to get into the game a real pain. It didn't help that it felt like far too many Planescape fans took it as holy writ to be elitist snobs about the setting.
I definitely want the planes to get examined in more "up close" detail and with more of an aim towards being actually interesting to play with. This is something I've complained about a lot in my 4e vs 5e fluff thread, and I'll summarize it here: the original Planes felt way too much like they were just made for the sake of ticking off points on a checklist, and that left them with a severe lack of any real "hooks" (particularly for the Upper Planes) to make them fun, in contrast to 4th edition's World Axis, which was built from the ground up to be a place to actually adventure in and not just a mere backstage monster generation pit. I remember some user here insisted I was dismissive of the old elemental planes because I hadn't read their dedicated splatbook. Well, guess what: I went out and found a copy of The Inner Planes just yesterday... and I'm not any more impressed than I was before. So the Plane of Ooze turns from slime, glop and sewerage to tar and mud as you approach Earth, acid as you approach Water, metallic waste as you approach Positive Energy, toxic vapor as you approach Steam, saline sludge as you approach Salt and disease-riddled filth as you approach Dust. Wow. Exciting... not. How are you supposed to run a planewalking campaign when the planes aren't any fun to explore? Setting it in Sigil just makes for an uber-metropolis game with magical portals replacing the docks - you wouldn't even need the planes to run a Sigil-focused campaign, really.
Definitely agree with the users above to junk the complicated book-keeping that went hand-in-hand with plane traveling before and simplify it as much as possible. Interesting quirks are fun. Fiddly ones just bog down the game and waste paper that could be spent on something more interesting.
I want to see some truly exotic races. Back in AD&D, Planescape gave us Bariaur, Githzerai, Rogue Modrons, Tieflings, Aasima and Genasi. With the planetouched covered - although I wouldn't say no to new subspecies and variants thereof - let's have some of the weird races that fit this sitting so well. Bring us back Gith, from both sides of the line (seriously, I can't believe that every githyanki is really so blind to not realize that Vlaakith has basically had them exchange one form of slavery for another), give us Rogue Modrons, give us Bladelings and Bariaur, Mephits, anything you can think of to let us truly experience the gonzo melting pot that was Sigil in its glory.
I want WoTC to go over the Factions and give them a real rewrite. Maybe dump some that can't be saved for new ones. Honestly, I liked the basic idea of the Factions, but in practice, many of them came off as unplayable. Mercykillers were too hierarchical. The Harmonium, whilst a welcome pss-take on "For the Greater Good!" and how that's not as cheery a thought as many people assume, in practice, was a bit too heavy handed on the cynical "they're obliviously evil" treatment. The Xaositects were abysmal, plain and simple; "I want to play a Xaositect!" was treated with the same disdain as "I want to play a Kender!" and for the exact same very good reason: unless you're that one in a million lucky party, it always ended up with the player using their fluff to be "legitimized" party-disrupting Chaotic Stupid screwheads. Either make them less annoying, or get rid of them, and I honestly don't care which. The Bleakers need to loose the propensity to madness; we're not living in the 80s anymore, we know better that you don't need to believe in some higher purpose to live a happy life.
I do not want Alignment to be essential to the game. It has never worked well, and it has always been one of the biggest flaws of the game, I think, that it's tied itself so heavily to it. Planescape works better when it focuses on belief and philosophy, not so much on the stereotypical "clash of good and evil". That moral ambiguity, that murkiness of what is "right" and "wrong", that's when Planescape shines.
Dumb. Down. The. Blood. War! Gods, I hated the Blood War in AD&D! It damn near ruined the setting for me, simply because I find it so unbelievable. Not so much the demons and devils fighting, I get that, but the clumsy attempt to tie it to Alignment did nothing for me - I preferred the 4e version, which boiled down to a far more elegant battle between conquerors and defilers; Evil vs. Oblivion, something that actually made sense to me. The worst part, however, was how it was not only continually hyped as "the Big Thing!" of the setting - like how everyone complains about Drizzt and Elminster being the spotlight-stealing squad of the Realms - but how it was such a clumsy attempt at 80s/90s esque grimdark. I'm talking, of course, about the portrayal of the Blood War as the one thing that made the infinite Upper Planes, the bastions of goodness and right, as infinite in numbers and equally powerful if not superior to either type of fiend, tremble in their little white darned socks because they knew they'd fall if the Blood War ever stopped and the fiends could assault them.
Really? Seriously? Legions of frothing mad lunatics that can barely coordinate their own thoughts, never mind with their allies (demons) marching alongside selfish nihilists who want to stab everyone else in the back for their own profit and advancement (daemons) marching alongside a brutal tyranny divided near equally between mindless drones, treacherous underlings willing to thwart their own goals to make their immediate bosses/rivals look back, and paranoid tyrants doing their best to get rivals and skilled underlings alike killed off (devils). These are the Enemy. Standing against them, the united forces of Good - you know, the embodiments of cooperation, tolerance, friendship, camaraderie and unity? And, somehow, the united forces of Good, who cooperate with their fellows like it's second nature and who work together for the greater good, are supposed to be doomed to fail in the face of a horde of Evil that probably spends more time fighting amongst itself than fighting them? Pull the other (censored) one!
On the same sort of topic, what I want, more than anything, is for WoTC to tone down the supremacist attitude of the viewpoint characters. I get they wanted to go for the "big cityslicker looking down on the provincial rube" sort of feel, but more than anything else, even the cant, it grated on me and made trying to get into the game a real pain. It didn't help that it felt like far too many Planescape fans took it as holy writ to be elitist snobs about the setting.
I definitely want the planes to get examined in more "up close" detail and with more of an aim towards being actually interesting to play with. This is something I've complained about a lot in my 4e vs 5e fluff thread, and I'll summarize it here: the original Planes felt way too much like they were just made for the sake of ticking off points on a checklist, and that left them with a severe lack of any real "hooks" (particularly for the Upper Planes) to make them fun, in contrast to 4th edition's World Axis, which was built from the ground up to be a place to actually adventure in and not just a mere backstage monster generation pit. I remember some user here insisted I was dismissive of the old elemental planes because I hadn't read their dedicated splatbook. Well, guess what: I went out and found a copy of The Inner Planes just yesterday... and I'm not any more impressed than I was before. So the Plane of Ooze turns from slime, glop and sewerage to tar and mud as you approach Earth, acid as you approach Water, metallic waste as you approach Positive Energy, toxic vapor as you approach Steam, saline sludge as you approach Salt and disease-riddled filth as you approach Dust. Wow. Exciting... not. How are you supposed to run a planewalking campaign when the planes aren't any fun to explore? Setting it in Sigil just makes for an uber-metropolis game with magical portals replacing the docks - you wouldn't even need the planes to run a Sigil-focused campaign, really.
Definitely agree with the users above to junk the complicated book-keeping that went hand-in-hand with plane traveling before and simplify it as much as possible. Interesting quirks are fun. Fiddly ones just bog down the game and waste paper that could be spent on something more interesting.
