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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6131148" data-attributes="member: 27160">What, Specifically, I Liked About PlanescapeWell, there seems to be a whole slew of reasons folks dislike Planescape - some of which I see as good reasons, others seem to be picking on PS as a symptom of wider issues and others still seem to me to be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So, I thought I would explain a couple of angles which contribute to why I liked Planescape. It's not that I don't think it had flaws - and I have already said that I think the old "nine point" alignment system and the associated "Great Wheel" cosmology was unneccessary and even unhelpful for it - but I think it got a few important things right.1) The "Economy of Souls"Much as I like the 4E World Axis cosmology, it introduced one feature that I really dislike; that the majority of the souls of dead folks just "disappear". One of the great things, for me, in Planescape was the idea that all dead folks' essences go to the plane of the core of their belief. The reason is simple.If every dead soul is another pair of hands for the core of their own belief, then just killing folk will never win the ultimate conflict - that between ideals. If the dead just "go", then "just kill them all" becomes a viable strategy; attrition is the logical way to fight the war of beliefs.One of my favourite storylines in the PS I ran concerned a powerful devil. This was actually the result of a random encounter in the upper layer of the Nine Hells when the PCs were quite low level. I thought it was a TPK, for sure, until I realised that the devil had, literally, nothing to gain by killing the PCs. If the PCs died, they would go to the homes of their respective gods' domains and swell the armies of good there - a net loss for the devil! If, on the other hand, the devil could somehow trick or suborn the PCs - corrupt them or have them help in some evil plan - result!2) The Battle of BeliefsThe Factions' beliefs and the Sigillians' outlook, whether you want it to be "the Truth (TM)" or not, makes sense from the perspective of a neutral demi-plane with links to all "outer" planes. None of them - given D&D's "facts" - were demonstrably false. That makes for interesting conflicts - and interesting conflicts are the core of roleplaying, in my view.Take the the Guv'nors and Athar, for example. They raise questions that are actually interesting. Is there a schema or "set of rules" that act as the "physics" that explains how all the planes work? What is it that makes the gods more than just "very powerful monsters"?3) The Blood WarHaving lots of nasty, powerful demons and devils is fun for a D&D-type game. They make great foes and represent something primal in the human psyche. But I wondered for a long time why they didn't make the cosmos a grim and hopeless place throughout.If you have actual planes of existence full of demonic hordes, it follows that every non-demonic creature has to become a grim, hard warrior, ready at any time to fight the demon foe or simply face extinguishment. "Parallel planes" actually means that they are everywhere. Always. You just can't interact with them. Yet.Unless something else distracts them. And that's where the Blood War comes in. It makes sense of a universe with hordes of powerful creatures bent on conquest/destruction with no restraining features that is not either overrun or in perpetual war.It also contributes another interesting conflict. By that I mean that, if a setting is to have a war as a feature, having the war one of evil vs. evil (or of good vs. good) is far more interesting than having it be good vs. evil.To the question "what do heroes do about the situation?", in the latter case the answers are already writ: "help the white hats and kill the black hats" (for whatever your own definition of hat colour might be).In a war between two sides for whom you have roughly equal revulsion (or sympathy), however, the question is much more interesting!Finally - The NotTo round off - what are not the reasons I like Planescape?First - the names. Look at the real world around you. We might like to keep neat labels and clear definitions, but it just doesn't happen "out there"."The Outlands" is just what the folks in Sigil call the "Plane of Concordant Opposition" because they have a model in their heads with some mad scheme of Sigil being atop a big mountain in the "middle" (now there's a BS concept for an infinite plane!!) of the plane. They are the "outlands" because they are "outside Sigil". A daft notion, to be sure, but even the most cursory glance at the "real world" will show you that being daft is hardly a bar to a concept having common currency! Eladrin, Archons - whatever - I don't really care what stuff is called in the rules texts. Different folk in my imaginary worlds will call stuff by different names anyway. In the meantime, if you go to Paris looking for the Eiffel Tower and some guy in a ten gallon hat looks at you funny - tell him Ms. Hilton sent you.Second - the arrangement of "the planes". The idea that three-dimensional concepts like "above", "below" and "distance between" can be applied to infinite planes of existence is just plain barmy (and, no - that's not "cant" - it's good old English!).Third - the "cant". I can't say that it bothers me that much - it's almost entirely cockney rhyming slang, and even though it's highly anomalous at least it represents recognition that world separated by "dimensions" would very likely develop different habits of speech. I find it mildly entertaining (at best), but it's not really a "feature" that attracts me. I guess my neutrality might possibly be because I understand it perfectly well at first reading - maybe if my native habits of speech were further apart from it it would bug me more? I don't know.</blockquote>

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