Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5661398" data-attributes="member: 27160">Since this is a separate, dedicated thread I thought I would chime in with 2d worth...I ran a few sojourns in PlaneScape some while ago - I love the PS setting; it and Birthright actually drew me into running some 2E, even though I was way down on the D&D systems at that time.  I also ran some PS in 3.5, but the system, even then, did not really give the setting what I thought it deserved.We were approaching the setting mainly from a Simulationist angle, but enough tugs came up towards what could have developed into some functional Narrativism (if the campaign had persisted) to make me think that PS could work well as a "Simulationist with support for Narrativist if developed" setting.  Looking back now, I am more than ever convinced that is so.It's true that the setting has no obvious, simple, non-prescribed conflicts from the get-go, but when you start to delve into the ramifications of some of the rules of the planar setting (the initial "Sim" angle), the potential starts to pop out at you.  I'll try to explain with examples.The most memorable event that caused me to realise this was a random encounter.  The low level (1st or 2nd?) PCs met a party of devils.  Well, they did venture into Ba'ator... Anyway, I found myself trying to rationalise why said devils didn't just kill the PCs - but then I realised I didn't need to!  Consider: a devil kills a good/neutral aligned creature many levels lower than itself.  What happens?  The creature's spirit goes straight to the plane of their deity/belief and joins the forces there.  Being a low level creature, the devil doesn't even learn anything (i.e. get experience) from the encounter, either.  The devils simply have no reason to kill the PCs - in fact, they actually lose by doing so.This opens the door for some much more interesting motivations, and also sheds an intriguing light on the much vaunted "Blood War".  What the demons and devils really want to do with characters of non-evil alignment is tempt them.  Convert them.  What better an intro for that than recruiting them to fight evil?  Especially if they have some (other) burning "cause" that they want to pursue...Obviously, this doesn't help with the players generating "issues" that they want to address - but it does give options when setting obstacles/challenges for them that relate to those issues.Now, those "Factions".  I know pemerton baulked at the "philosophers with clubs" line, and that is only reasonable.  But that's a confusion of what the factions are, I think.  At the time I ran PS I viewed them as essentially like political parties.  As I look back I think this is a more profound analogy than I imagined at the time; the PS setting, as a whole, postulates a sort of "democracy of belief".  The more 'votes' you can get for your desired state, the closer the local reality will be to it.  With that in mind, the factions are very much like political parties in a democratic state.  As such, the majority of the "rank and file" are in it basically for the "what's in it for me?"  These are the guys the 'traitor seeking' and 'party discipline' stuff is for.  Only a minority in the party actually have a well developed model of what the beliefs espoused actually mean and what implications they hold.  Not so much "philosophers with clubs" as "philosophers and guys with clubs".  The point of getting the "low level" recruits, for the cognoscenti who actually have a coherent belief model and who set the "agenda" for the faction, is to keep them away from competing factions and gain the chance to "educate" (-cum-brainwash) them into the factions' beliefs.Following up the "democracy of belief", again, brings us to the planes, and 'planar alignment'.  The planes, logically, in such a scheme, do not have an "alignment", per se - they simply reflect the belief "votes" of those who live there.  The dwellers on Mount Celestia aren't LG because they live on Mount Celestia - Mount Celestia is LG because LG beings live there.  Even then, this does not define what LG "is" - it is defined by what these inhabitants believe, and what they believe LG is.  If a character were to think their conception of LG fundamentally wrong, whammo - real conflict!Finally, consider alignments and factions together.  The beliefs of the factions are an essentially arbitrary set of beliefs - it is made clear that others have existed, and the current 'set' is subject to change - that are not directly linked to alignment*.  This means that we have, potentially, a multi-layered weave of conflict!  Not only are there the obvious conflicts between alignments and between factions, there are also (lower key) conflicts along alignment lines within factions ("is brainwashing the rank and file really the best way to pursue faction beliefs?") and faction based conflicts within alignments ("we are all fighting for Law and Good, here, but your 'gods' getting primacy over others "just because" is not acceptable!  They are powerful, to be sure, but that doesn't make them special!").In the end, PlaneScape might not have the obvious 'handles' sometimes seen on Narrativist supporting games, but scratch the surface and I think there is oodles there to go at, for the right group.* Maybe the "alignments" were once "factions" that got planes of their own - but I digress...</blockquote>

Verification