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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6322974" data-attributes="member: 2067">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.)</blockquote>

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