Planescape Planescape - what would you like to see?

[DaveyJones]

they don't exist. at least until the party can handle them.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Less emphasis on the Lady? I havn't read everything there is, but did she ever do anything? All she does is floating around as a reminder that nobody can drastically overturn the status quo inside Sigil. Don't try to overthrow the established system of the factions or deliberately cause large scale distruction to the city and you should never run into her.

She does appear in a PS adventure or two -- she annihilates some kind of fiend at the end of Harbinger House, in typical 'the PCs are just here to watch' fashion.

And then of course there's The Module Which Shall Not Be Named. (Except that I already did.)

That said...

I did say "Sigil and the Lady" not just the Lady of Pain by herself. In my experience there is a strong divide between those who are SUPER into Sigil, its factions, its lingo, tales of the Lady, talking about how strong and perfect she is; and those who don't really go there at all. The first group (both in-game and out-of-game) mock those who don't do or know Sigil. I have no problem with supplements catering to this group, but I would like to be able to go into Sigil and run something without having to worry about that group. Okay, so the Lady is all-powerful in her little cage? I don't care, I'm not using her. No you can't summon her by sheer force of will as a gamer. I just find the over-saturation of the Lady annoying. I'm sure she has her uses but yeah. If I want to break the high and mighty rules of the Lady, as DM, I should have that authority. IME over-focus of Sigil makes ruleslawyers (or setting-lawyers) of any gamer and it bugs me.

It sounds like Tovec has simply had one too many run-ins with setting lawyers. I know my vision of Sigil isn't 100% canonical, and I think I'd stat up the Lady as a killable (max level + 10) NPC just to prove to really belligerent players that I run my version of PS.

 

[Shemeska]

Is there a ceasefire I'm not aware of?

The 4e cosmology had the Blood War end.

But the 4e cosmology wasn't Planescape/the Great Wheel so I would think that should have little impact on 5e. It's an awesome concept and I sincerely hope that it's part of 5e.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=40398]Tequila Sunrise[/MENTION]
I remember reading over at the storygames forum that a Planescape character sheet in a non-D&D setting could be distilled down to a few questions: How'd you get to Sigil? What beliefs drive you? What magical stuff do you have/can you do? And maybe 2-3 more I can't recall. There was also a lot of chatter about how belief = alignment = setting = rules = faction = geography. Definitely stuff to ponder.

I've been quietly working on a grand Planescape adventure I'd like to make available someday for 5th edition if the powers that be allow it. It is meant to hook prime PCs & planar PCs right into the action by starting with what 4e MotP dubbed a "planar breach", dealing with the fallout, realizing they've been touched by the breach, and going to investigate leads in Sigil/the Outlands about what or who caused the breach. Actually, now that I look at it written down, it sounds a lot like what I know of Dragon Age: Inquisition!

I appreciate your sentiment that "primes should be the exception" to adventuring parties, but I think the fact of the matter is gaming groups will have a mix of players, some familiar with PS, and others not (or reluctant to get familiar). Mixed prime/planar parties, at least when I've run PS, have been the order of the day. I think it is important to make the setting & adventures accessible to players coming from a more traditional fantasy (read: Prime) standpoint.

 

[Shemeska]

I did say "Sigil and the Lady" not just the Lady of Pain by herself. In my experience there is a strong divide between those who are SUPER into Sigil, its factions, its lingo, tales of the Lady, talking about how strong and perfect she is; and those who don't really go there at all. The first group (both in-game and out-of-game) mock those who don't do or know Sigil. I have no problem with supplements catering to this group, but I would like to be able to go into Sigil and run something without having to worry about that group. Okay, so the Lady is all-powerful in her little cage? I don't care, I'm not using her. No you can't summon her by sheer force of will as a gamer. I just find the over-saturation of the Lady annoying. I'm sure she has her uses but yeah. If I want to break the high and mighty rules of the Lady, as DM, I should have that authority. IME over-focus of Sigil makes ruleslawyers (or setting-lawyers) of any gamer and it bugs me.

Of course you can have your PCs topple the Lady, roll initiative versus her, anything you want really. It's your game and you're the DM, go right ahead. But on some level I think going that route misses the intended point of the Lady in the setting to an extent. She isn't an NPC so much as myth and atmosphere for Sigil, with it being an open question if Her Serenity is even real or just a manifestation of Sigil, an illusion of the dabus, a prisoner more than a protector, etc. She isn't really there to be fought or even meaningfully interacted with directly - that destroys the mystery - and I don't think that was the intent of having her there. The setting as a whole moved very much away from earlier approaches to using the planes that tended to treat them as high level dungeon crawls with stronger, stranger monsters. It's the same sort of approach that had a quote in the box set that said something along the lines of 'if your players are low level and in Gehenna with yugoloths howling for their blood, something has gone wrong'. It intended a different approach to interacting with the planes, and the Lady as not exactly an NPC is one of those conceits.

The Lady doesn't need to be a focus of a campaign set in Sigil itself, or even necessarily something that needs to even show up. In five or six years, over the course of two campaigns, both of which spent around half the time in Sigil and heavily involved politics within the city during that time, I had the Lady of Pain show up all of twice. Never interacted with the PCs. Never said a word. Atmosphere and background.

But again, you don't have to use this in your own games. Break it, bend it, treat it however you want. Lord knows I went crazy in some directions with the setting in my home games. But a 5e Planescape I think should preserve the approach intended by the original design team in the 2e materials (supplemented by added material from 3e, and potentially 4e material on Sigil where it doesn't contradict the previous sources given the forced adherence in 4e to a radically different cosmology).

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

The 4e cosmology had the Blood War end.

But the 4e cosmology wasn't Planescape/the Great Wheel so I would think that should have little impact on 5e. It's an awesome concept and I sincerely hope that it's part of 5e.

Holy cow, I had no idea! I guess that's what I get for homebrewing instead of reading the implied setting. Do you happen to know which 4e book ends the BW?

Anyhow, I like the Blood War too, though I never understood the angst it can generate either way. I remember being rather stupefied the first time I saw it come up as a controversial topic in a forum discussion. I mean if ya don't like it, ignore it. Done.

I appreciate your sentiment that "primes should be the exception" to adventuring parties, but I think the fact of the matter is gaming groups will have a mix of players, some familiar with PS, and others not (or reluctant to get familiar). Mixed prime/planar parties, at least when I've run PS, have been the order of the day. I think it is important to make the setting & adventures accessible to players coming from a more traditional fantasy (read: Prime) standpoint.

I think you mis-mentioned me, but I do agree that PS stuff should be accessible to prime characters. Players who know anything at all about PS are the exception IME, and I think that prime characters create a great entry point for players who just aren't interested in doing setting 'homework' before starting a new campaign.

I know I myself couldn't be bothered to read up on Waterdeep, Tyr, or wherever if I were going to play a character there. I want to discover the setting details through play!

 

[Quickleaf]

Holy cow, I had no idea! I guess that's what I get for homebrewing instead of reading the implied setting. Do you happen to know which 4e book ends the BW?

Saying the Blood War ended in 4e is a bit disingenuous. Manual of the Planes outright says the war has lulls and peaks in the fighting and simply describes the current situation as a cold war rather than an all-out multi-battlefront armed conflict. Devils and demons in 4e still regard each other with hostility and intense rivalry, they just focus that on competing for influence in the mortal world. For the moment, demon lords feud among themselves and don't have enough of a unified front to fight the Nine Hells, and Asmodeus is waiting to make a decisive blow to renew the war (he doesn't want to unite the demon lords in opposition to him). As great as Hellnound was and as much as I like the Blood War, the 4e version has tons of possibility for gaming goodness!

I think you mis-mentioned me, but I do agree that PS stuff should be accessible to prime characters. Players who know anything at all about PS are the exception IME, and I think that prime characters create a great entry point for players who just aren't interested in doing setting 'homework' before starting a new campaign.

I know I myself couldn't be bothered to read up on Waterdeep, Tyr, or wherever if I were going to play a character there. I want to discover the setting details through play!

Indeed I did! Apologies! That was intended for [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]. I agree that any sort of planar products going forward need to accomodate both prime PCs (for the average D&D player) and planar PCs (for the Planescape fans who enjoy reading setting material).

 

[Olfan]

All I want is weird art, tons of slang, and more of the kookiness in every page. Pretty much just more of the exact same. Planescape is amazing to me in every way.

 

[I'm A Banana]

My take -- and this is ultimately a judgement call, because it's fair to go the other way -- is that if you want to just have planar adventures with your normal D&D characters, that's not Planescape, or at least not leveraging what makes the setting unique.

When you play Dark Sun, you don't play characters from a normal world thrust into Athas. When you play Forgotten Realms, you're not Greyhawk characters that took a wrong turn. Dragonlance isn't about taking characters from Ravenloft and tossing them into Krynn. Arguably, even Ravenloft itself, as a campaign setting (as opposed to an adventure setting, which it also has been) is primarily about people native to the Mists, not people dragged in. When you play a campaign setting, you play characters native to that setting, not characters from some other setting pulled into it.

There's a distinction to be made between adventures-on-the-planes and Planescape as a setting, IMO. You can have adventures on the planes in any setting. Greyhawk characters can wander the great wheel and Nentir Vale characters can sail the astral sea and you can leap between the moons in Eberron's orrey But these are primarily Greyhawk games, Nentir Vale games, Eberron games....simply going to explore Olympus in a Greek-flavored setting doesn't make it a Planescape game.

Planescape as a setting is about planar characters, about the concerns of those who live and adventure in the infinite reaches of reality. Some of those characters are characters from other D&D worlds, but the Clueless archetype is a particular character type in Planescape -- one confronting their neophyte biases and beliefs, or confronting the stereotype that they must have those beliefs -- not a baseline.

Practically speaking, a new group should be able to plunge into Planescape, playing planar characters, without any pre-packaged knowledge of what that means. In the same way that the example characters from the 5e Starter Set can dive in to FR without knowing one bit of information about that setting, because their character options come from and speak to the setting. In the same way that you make Dark Sun characters who are natives of Dark Sun from scratch and can understand what that means. The idea that new folks to the setting should play Prime characters is a bit of an unnecessary hurdle. There should be no reason that someone new to the setting -- new to D&D itself -- shouldn't be able to understand what it means to play githzerai a member of the Bleak Cabal who hails from Arcadia in the same way that they can understand what it means to play a sun elf evocation specialist wizard who trained as an acolyte of Oghma.

So a Planescape game -- with PLANAR characters -- should be accessible to folks new to the setting. And planar characters should be the emphasis of a Planescape game, because this is what makes it different from any random D&D game where you go to the Nine Hells or Limbo.

(This is also part of why I like the idea of factions controlling access to certain abilities -- it makes sure that having, say, Second Wind actually means something in the context of the setting, because that ability in Planescape isn't just about being tough, it's, say, about self-sufficiency if the Fated teach it, or about recovering from a failed test of the multiverse if the Believers teach it, or about not needing divine aid to survive if the Athar teach it...so when you use that ability in Planescape, it's not just about being tough, it's about your belief that this is how the universe works. Though there might be a more middle-ground solution.)

 

[Quickleaf]

All I want is weird art, tons of slang, and more of the kookiness in every page. Pretty much just more of the exact same. Planescape is amazing to me in every way.

I do hear people who love the setting as reading material criticize it as being difficult to DM or to grok as a player. How playable do you feel PS is?

[MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]
IIRC you are an advocate for classes customized to the campaign / campaign setting, right? So your perspective entirely makes sense. At the same time it assumes you have a group of players who are:

(A) Willing to invest minimal of energy to grasp the feel of the setting before play (for Planescape it is cynical worldliness), and able to incorporate that into their character creation and roleplaying.

(B) Interested in going outside classic fantasy tropes of "drunk dwarf" or "kleptomaniac halfling thief." The classics are classic for a reason, even if not particularly imaginative.

It might sound like I'm being hard on players, but the fact of the matter is there are DMs who just don't understand Planescape either. I think the difference in our perspectives might be you see Planescape as another setting just like Ravenloft or Dark Sun, whereas I see it as something radically different in that it can bridge multiple worlds. Even in the original box there were options for getting a party of prime PCs to the planes and, in Planewalkers Handbook, for running mixed prime/planar campaign.

We both agree that Planescape (much like other settings) needs to be experienced thru play; actually I would say especially Planescape! Because of its strangeness. Even players who come in with well conceived PCs still are finding their character's identity/voice/beliefs during those first few levels. Does it really matter if they're prime, planar, or even excepional petitioners? For me Planescape's themes are found in the adventures which I would argue are where emphasis should be placed. Personally "Umbra" (Dungeon 55) is one of the best PS adventures written and I could see that largely working for any sort of PCs.

Btw I enjoyed your thoughts on interpreting Second Wind thru the faction lens!