Nisarg said:
What was bad was the Planescape atmosphere, the punk attitude, the cant, the bad drawings, the modrons, the effort to make the planes into just another mundane adventuring zone, or just a silly place in general. Bad art, bad fiction, bad attitude, clockworks and leather all over the place.
Fiction? Are you talking about the rules or the novels? I've never read a novel based on a D&D world and I never intend to. Even if I did, it would remain a separate entity from the game products.
Like so many other people, anything that happened outside of your lifetime appears to also be outside your frame of reference. Spikes, tattoos, weird hairstyles and makeup all existed before the punk craze. Ask some Celts, or some Vikings, or some Maori, or some headhunters, or the Egyptians...
You apparently can't divorce your frame of reference, ie. the punk movement and nineties fashion from the historical reality. Now I'm not suggesting that Planescape is based on reality in any way, shape or form; but people had the same spikes and tattoos comments when 3E came out and it usually seems the result of a lack of imagination/historical perspective. Just because you are familiar with punk doesn't mean that's what PS was meant to emulate. Someone else might see similarities with the tattoo craze among sailors, soldiers and sideshow folk around the turn of the century... Go fig. I suppose you'd have preferred the same vanilla armor for fighters and paladins, leather or pajamas for thieves and bards, and robes for wizards and priests? No thank you.
The art was not bad. Maybe not to your taste, but not bad. Let's face it, arguments about art go nowhere because it's subjective.
However, I've seen bad art, and I've seen art that I didn't like, but at the same time I knew wasn't "bad" per se. TD's art is very good, but not everyone likes it. 'nuff said.
The pictures involving clockwork almost invariably had to do with mechanus, a plain made out of gears. Or is the plane of absolute law supposed to be made of gummy bears?
I'm not a big fan of modrons, but they predate Planescape and I have to say, they were better off after Planescape than they were before it.
The people who worked on Planescape NEVER made an "effort" to turn the planes into "just another mundane adventuring zone". If that is what it did for you, so be it. It obviously takes a better developed imagination to see that there can be more on the planes than just gods, angels and demons without the place turning into just another dungeon crawl.
And for Planescape fans to feel unsatisfied with the current Planar books and demand the return of Planescape books is essentially for Planescape fanboys to be demanding exclusivity, because there's no way WoTC could have two Planes-based lines running at once.
A one-shot campaign book hardly equals exclusivity. But you used the term fanboy so you must right. Superior and absolutely right.
The current line gives some, probably a lot of material that a Planescape fan can use.. yea, it doesn't give them a fix of angst or words like Derk or Grok or whatever being thrown around every two minutes, or bad in-game literature, but it does give them some useful material, and it allows the rest of us to play in a "derk-free" zone.
I think you mean berk. You take away from books what you personally perceive. Obviously you saw angst, and spikes and not much else; I didn't. You could just opt to say that Planescape just didn't spark your imagination like other materials did; instead you prefer to imply that it's stupid and so are the people who like it. Once again though, you used the word fanboy in your post to illigitimize the Planescape-friendly viewpoint, so I must defer to your superiority.
Out of everything that Wizards has produced lately, the Planes material is what I'm most satisfied with. They've been doing an excellent job.
Ah well, if you're satisfied with it, that must mean it's a better product. That is your point, right?
