Planescape Do You Care About Planescape Lore?

[avin]

I mean, look at the criticisms of Angels in 4e. It's not that angels are bad, or boring or poorly written.

We disagree in that. I don't think the 4E Angels are well written, in fact, early 4E MMs were an example of what you should never do with a Monster Manual. That does not prevented me from like and DM 4E, but was like reading a TV manual.

What was wrong with simply calling them "Grey Elves", "High Elves", or even "Sidhe"? Why repackage something at all? Dragonlance managed perfectly fine with Silvanesti/Qualinesti/Kagonesti.

Agreed. People don't want Planescape into core, that's fine, but taking a race important to Planescape and repack it to please people who tend to play more tolkienesque games isn't the way to do it... High Elves would be my choice. 4E "eladrins" are nice, just cjamge their name.

Less is not more; more is more. Or, to put it another way, subtraction is easier than addition when it comes to game material. It's far less work to glance at something, say "nope, not using this" than it is to stare at a blank page and try to fill it.

Agreed. 4E first Monster Manual was heavily criticized even among 4E fans, because of the lack of good fluff on it. Take 4EMM3 and compare... it seems obvious to me that "less is more" is a direction DDN won't be moving...

I love Planescape, but I don't need any Planescape stuff in the "Core" setting.

Neither do I. Inspiring fluff doesn't mean push specific lore into core.

Oh, yeah, fair enough. I realize that I'm in the minority here. So, as usual, I'll just ignore the planar stuff as much as I can.

Do you dislike 4E? I mean, there's much more background pushed into core than previous editions. 3E had a vague tone... in 4E everything was Gods vs Primordials and lots of races had their origins tied to 4E Cosmology and no much space left for creation. Blood War was tied to some creatures in 3E... World Axis world creation and cosmology was everywhere. From Dark Ones, to Formorian...

The problem is, I don't want any of that lore because that lore comes directly tied to a specific setting. If I don't want Planescape specific elements, like the Blood War, for example, then most of the monster lore becomes superfluous.

I've run lots of 4E games ignoring World Axis... and it's more intrusive than PS stuff ever was... the only difference between "Blood War" and "Gods vs Primordials" it's one is specific to PS. Both have the same effect, some people would like and other people hate.

 

[Dausuul]

I've run lots of 4E games ignoring World Axis... and it's more intrusive than PS stuff ever was... the only difference between "Blood War" and "Gods vs Primordials" it's one is specific to PS. Both have the same effect, some people would like and other people hate.

I certainly agree with that. The World Axis pervades 4E material. (Especially the Raven Queen. I don't know why, but it seemed like every time I turned around in 4E, there was the Raven Queen making a deal with somebody or punishing somebody else or squabbling with Orcus or just sort of being there. As death goddesses go, she's okay, but jeez, give it a rest. Some of us like to create our own pantheons.)

I like the World Axis better than the Great Wheel, but I'm not likely to use any cosmology out of the box; I'm always going to want to tweak it to my specifications. Sometimes I want there to be a Feywild, sometimes I don't. Sometimes it makes sense for the Abyss to be part of the Elemental Chaos, other times it really needs to be its own beast. And as far as I'm concerned, the Far Realm can go hang. When the cosmology pops up everywhere, it gets to be a real nuisance adjusting it to fit my vision for the campaign.

My hope is that the 5E Manual of the Planes will present us with a smorgasbord of planes, and leave it up to each DM to decide which ones to use and how they fit together. Give us the building blocks, and if we want to assemble them into the Great Wheel, or the World Axis, or the Eberron cosmology, or something completely custom, that's up to us. Then put in a chapter with prefab cosmologies ready to go, and have a section on Planescape that details the Blood War, Sigil, and so forth.

The best part is, this would make it possible for 5E to break new ground in terms of cosmologies and planes, without interfering with existing lore.

 

[Hussar]

I'm not so sure I agree with you here. If Warforged became core, I would expect them to look like Eberron warforged. If Kender became core, they should look like Dragonlance kender.

Perhaps the better example is draconians/dragonborn. Dragonborn could have easily been called draconians. They're basically the same thing: humanoid dragon men. Except then we'd expect the differentiation by dragon species type and the death effect that is part of DL draconians. So WotC simply made something similar and gave it a new name.

That should be the model. Don't "repurpose" monsters, because then you are taking something away from the people who liked the previous version.

Warforged are core in 4e. And, the 4e description of warforged mentions absolutely nothing about Eberron. Not a single shred of connection. About the only thing you could connect is that they do mention creation forges in the warforged description.

THAT'S what I want for core monsters.

 

[Hussar]

/snip



I've run lots of 4E games ignoring World Axis... and it's more intrusive than PS stuff ever was... the only difference between "Blood War" and "Gods vs Primordials" it's one is specific to PS. Both have the same effect, some people would like and other people hate.

I don't buy books, so, I really don't see a lot of the lore to be honest. Outside of my DDI sub, the only books I bought are the 3 core. And the 3 core don't actually have much of the whole Gods vs Primordials in it. It's there, sure, but, pretty far in the background.

So, I can't really comment on later stuff. I simply didn't see it.

Which is largely how I played 3e as well. Bought the core, bought a few books here and there, but, totally ignored the planar stuff.

Maybe if I played higher level D&D, it might come in. I don't know. I know that my own campaigns would feature things like the Githyanki and the Astral Sea, but, beyond that, very little of any of the 4e cosmology setting elements. Raven Queen? Other than a couple of feats, I never saw her.

 

[Manbearcat]

There is a large difference, in play, between a game set in a low-resolution setting and a game set in a high-resolution setting. Most of this is from the players' side. These are my observations and the information I've collected as I've never actually been on the players' side of this issue.

Since the Grey Box, I've run 4 long-term campaigns set in FR and I've also run an extended game in Planescape. I'm extremely familiar with the source material of both, down to a fine, granular level. However, through the course of these games, only one player was ever in the same vicinity of my acumen (as a surprise to no one, he was also a GM). Throughout the course of this period (of running established source material), I've evolved in my handling of the setting material along the resolution spectrum. When before, I was on the high variety (the per-game loadout of established material was intensive), I am now very much on the low variety.
Saturation of high-resolution, established source material creates a table dynamic of:

1 - Players who solely wish to be reactive with respect to setting and interact with the established material (whether they are familiar with it or not), will be happy.

2 - Players who want to be proactive, yet are unfamiliar with the source material, may feel overwhelmed with respect to what they have to engage with and are expected to know. In many cases, rather than feeling empowered to interject their own ideas or generate content, they may be paralyzed in their interactions with the setting content for fear of their behavior being dissonant with respect to the continuity or coherency of the established source material; in these cases (which can be many), if "violation" of the high-resolution material happens enough, they will become conditioned to look to you for their queue or the information loadout which they will then regurgitate. This will turn them into player 1, when they would rather be pro-active.

3 - Players who are very familiar with the source material love it. They love engaging with it on a deep level. It immerses them into the setting and legitimizes their large effort in digesting the vastness of the material. They need very few queues. However, this can sometimes lead to OMGSETTINGWARS whereby, due to their deep investment in setting, they presentation of established continuity and coherency may be as, or more, important than playing the game.

Conversely, the use of low-resolution, with concordant low expectations of setting digestion, source material creates a table dynamic of:

1 - Players that wish to generally just be reactive to setting material may be overwhelmed by the responsibility to be pro-active with respect to content generation. However, what also may happen is, if nurtured properly, they may (slowly) develop confidence in their craft and develop into player 2; enjoying turning a low-resolution setting into a high-resolution setting through their own pro-active, assertive content generation.

2 - These players love low-resolution setting as they want to pro-actively generate content to in-fill the blanks and move the setting from low to high resolution. They want the authority to create backstory for their own characters in play and for the physical world, its cosmological, geological and sociological chronology on the fly with little to no establishment constraints. They don't want PC or GM constraint via ardent canon adherence. They want their GM to have the freedom to generate content that specifically challenges and focuses on them with setting being a peripheral element that engages the PCs' stories (merely context, backdrop, color) rather than the PCs engaging the setting's canon story.

3 - These guys can cut both ways but I've found the majority to be very invested in the high-resolution aspects of the setting. Canon-adherence is huge for them and any deviation makes them twitch. They don't want players or GMs ret conning, in play our out, the established material that they expect to be observed in as close to an orthodox fashion as possible. The hardcore 3s don't work with 2 and have a pretty adversarial relationship (and it is mutual).

My players are all former 1s who are now 2s or have been 2s for the duration of our play together. As such, our play is of the low-resolution variety with respect to the greater setting. It works well for us and I would reccomend it to anyone who has a lot of 2s in their group (and few or no 3s).

 

[Ratskinner]

Personally I don't see the problem. And I don't want as much detail as possible. For me, a big part of RPGing is (together with my players) creating my own fiction, rather than immersing myself in fiction that someone else already created. Monster details that are suggestive of trope and theme are good; monster details that answer all the questions before play even starts, less so.

hmm...see that's funny. To me, that doesn't mesh with the things you've said about 4e's cosmology and its influence over game features. For me, the pervasiveness of 4e's lore was quite a hamstring.

This is a big part of why I think the lore/fluff for everything should be minimalist (at least in core). I totally disagree with the notion that "subtraction is easier than addition". Player's, even newbie's, generate fluff easily and naturally. OTOH, many players become attached to the official fluff, the seem very reticent to let go of it, even resenting "reskinned" monsters.

 

[SkidAce]

For me, that lore is new, it's at odds with my game, and it's not really something that I care for. The fact that it doesn't contradict anything in my old books is neither here nor there for me; it contradicts what I was doing with those books.

This won't stop happening [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], imagine how I feel about what they did to my cthulhu mythos from the 1e Legends and Lore.

In my campaigns it was a "plot twist" and backdrop to the cosmos. I had a new player accuse me of "copying" the Far Realm the other day. /sigh.

The point...stuff is always going to come along and "contradict what I was doing with the books".

It's mildly irritating, but we press on.

 

[GX.Sigma]

Agreed. People don't want Planescape into core, that's fine, but taking a race important to Planescape and repack it to please people who tend to play more tolkienesque games isn't the way to do it... High Elves would be my choice. 4E "eladrins" are nice, just cjamge their name.

I think a Wandering Monsters column has discussed the possibility of saying that they actually are a lesser type of Eladrin. The lore already had the idea that Eladrins traveled to the Prime Material Plane, so it isn't hard to imagine a "Least Eladrin" that has become native to the Prime and doesn't need to go in disguise. This seems like a good solution to me, since the Fey Step ability has become so iconic. There's a similar idea for the 4e Deva.

 

[Siberys]

I disliked the setting. Not that I begrudge anyone their choice of setting, but I've had a player that always wanted to go to Sigil, regardless of setting. I really am not a fan of "crossover" games, and that player always tried to make it like that. Really soured the setting for me. If I'm running Eberron, it's /Eberron/ - no Faerunian cameos or faction-obsessed Sigil natives; if I'm running Dark Sun, the Gith are aliens, not from beyond Athas' crystal sphere. Et cetera. I want thematic games focused on the setting, and unless I'm /running/ PS, I don't want it /at all/.

So, as relates to this discussion, no, I don't care about PS lore, and I'd prefer for there to be no such thing as a default cosmology. That's a per-setting, per-campaign thing.

 

[Shemeska]

if I'm running Dark Sun, the Gith are aliens, not from beyond Athas' crystal sphere.

Well, within Dark Sun setting material itself, the gith weren't aliens, they were from the Astral plane beyond Athas's crystal sphere (which with slender exception was largely cut off from the outer planes).