NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5659782" data-attributes="member: 42582">It has setting, yes. As Shemeska pointed out upthread, most of this setting is not primarily for exploration. It's for "killing things" - or, more charitably for 4e play, it's for situation. The setting is a backdrop.The fact that Shemeska - the biggest Planescape advocate on these boards - can see the difference between the role of setting in Planescape and the role of setting in 4e doesn't make me inclined to change my mind!I've done my best to explain my reasoning. With regard to the maps in the DMG, for example, I've tried to explain how they provide a background but - as the game is presented - seem not to be presented as a basis for exploratory play - because the PHB locates the PCs in situations of conflict in which the Nentir Vale and Fallcrest play no part. The place on the DMG map are relevant to PCs built out of the PHB only because they contain story elements that do engage those PCs - elves, goblins, giants, undead, forests, steadings on the edges of civilisation, etc.Of course, I guess any group could ignore the PHB stuff, and make Nentir Vale and Fallcrest the focus of play. In which case they'd be exploring a boring setting using a ruleset that isn't well suited to it. Why not play RQ in Glorantha instead, or AD&D or 3E in Greyhawk?Anyway, I see plenty of people on these boards posting about narrativist approaches to 4e - Neonchameleon, Pentius, ardoughter, LostSoul, and others. I don't see anyone talking about narrativist play in Planescape. And when I look at Planescape material, I think I can see why. To my eye, it's written to support the sorts of posts I read about it - participating in the Great Modron March, exploring the intricacies of the alignment system, grappling with the backstory of the yugoloths and the Blood War, being dazzled by the Lady of Pain as a story element.I'll take seriously the suggestion that 3.5 and Planescape are as well suited to narrativist play as is 4e when I start to see the actual accounts of narrativist play using that system and that setting. Or even theoretical accounts of how they might be drifted in that direction. But I'm not expecting too, because all the stuff in 4e that makes those who dislike it dislike it - the "player entitlement", the focus on the encounter as the unit of play, healing surges and other metagame mechanics, skill challenges, the lack of setting detail, the changes to the alignment and the cosmology, etc, etc - is precisely what enables it to support narrativist play better than other editions of D&D.</blockquote>

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