D&D Settings but not D&D

[lin_fusan]

For the OP, another resource would be the hardcover book, Beyond Countless Doorways. It's a planar book with a Planescape feel written by the people who made Planescape.

And Southern Oracle, your article convinced me to send in mine! Thanks!

 

[S'mon]

That means your GM needs to unlearn what they have learned . As a GM, making too many high toughness / Wild Cards gets this result (grindy). I've seen that happen a number of times (self included) from former D&D GMs. Too bad that was your experience with the system.

I ran some zombie action in both Ravenloft and in Pinnacle's Wild Hunt. I added a bit of spice like when you hit a zombie that would just result in a Shaken fun stuff would happen -- split open their guts and intestines start to grapple you, noxious gas emits from the body, cut their legs off but they still keep coming, etc. That's the kind of stuff that creeped my players out without making the zombies "tough" or super hard to kill. Horror is not about making things hard, it about making them unsettling and scary.

That sounds great. I'm pretty sure my GM was using the zombie stats from "War of the Dead" as written; they needed head shots to kill which meant AIR an '8' rather than the usual '4'. Although he was very liberal on penalties too, he kept using the 'full darkness' to-hit penalty whenever the light was dim, and we'd need I think a '12' just to hit the buggers.

Usually we would end up retreating/running away from them - not because we were scared so much as because we were bored, and worried about wasting all our ammunition!

Edit: Actually the more I think about it, there was a lot of sucky GMing. I do have a strong temptation to do a SW mini-campaign some time, and see if I can make it work better.

 

[Spatula]

The way I see this is that D&D offers a lot of material that is true to Planescape. The other guy pointed out that Planechase is all about the factions and the cosmology, neither of which is specific to D&D according to him. I disagree with the latter, though: it's *the* D&D cosmology. It's a world in which anything D&D can come together in surprising combinations. Why would I disregard all that specific material simply because it requires book-keeping?

While Planescape's cosmology originated with D&D, nothing is stopping one from moving that cosmology to a different system. I think your friend is right as far as that goes - the stuff that makes PS (or most other settings) interesting isn't found in the rules, it's found in the setting material. And the setting's themes may not be fully realized by a system that was designed for dungeon crawls and wilderness exploration.

A lot of the more "out there" D&D settings were only written for D&D, IMO, because they are artifacts of the time when D&D was all things to all RPGers. There are so many other options out there these days, catering to all sorts of genres and sub-genres, that fitting square pegs into round holes like that is no longer necessary.

I would love to see Eberron done for a more cinematic ruleset; I truly love the setting. But it is probably the most difficult to convert because so much of it is tied into the 3e mechanics. So much so that when moved to 4e, some aspects of it did not translate so well (like dragonmarks).