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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6381154" data-attributes="member: 2067">I think a big chunk of the document aesthetics, while a little superficial, can be pretty important for "feel." The vedigris-and-gold color scheme. Exocet font. The floating box quotes. The use of in-world banter to explain things to players. The painterly, sketchy, watercolor aesthetic of the art. Images of impossible things. If you have these visual elements, your document will likely be recognized as fitting into Planescape, regardless of the information actually therein. But I'm not necessarily a great layout designer -- I kind of know what a good page looks like, but it's not really my strength. So I tend to focus on something I'm better at: game elements.2e PS had a few major game elements unique to it. First, factions -- the idea of subscribing to a philosophy that is also an organization and gaining the benefits and drawbacks from adhering to it is uniquely PS. Signing up to a philosophy is literal there and should influence the actions a PC takes on adventures (and what adventures they take). Faction powers give you new things to do in the name of your belief.Another element was portals. PS was not about the big, epic journey with panning cameras, it was about already being where you needed to be (or at least cutting to the interesting conflict in getting there). Travel in PS is direct, accessible, and nearly instantaneous. Survival wasn't about how long you could endure, but a more binary "can you breathe earth?" kind of quality. A third element, more in the DM's hands, was that the players shaped the cosmos with the power of their ideas. The important bit of this is not that they have the power to kill dragons (because things like gods and demon lords in PS are beyond a direct assault), but that they have the power to change minds and influence beliefs. That, and that the planes actually changed after the PC's were done with them. The setting does not remain the same, it gets shaped by the PC's as they progress through it. These changed the play experience of PS to make it distinct from playing other settings. They gave you a heroic archetype linked to a philosophy, which gave you an instant antagonist group, focused on action over exploration, and directly empowered ideas to literally change the fabric of reality. So I think if you are going for "iconic," you should include those things. Or at least, the principles behind those things. The adventure path changes the planes, the journey is not more interesting than the destination, and the characters are linked to organizations that fuel them with unique belief-ennabled abilities. Certainly a game about a long journey of an isolated group that recedes quietly into the sunset wouldn't be very good at capitalizing on the unique PS style, gameplay-wise, though you might stick it in enough visual iconography that it appeals to the PS fan regardless.</blockquote>

Verification