D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....

[Imaro]

If planar canon is so important for Planescape, what makes for an acceptable change versus an unacceptable change?

Uhmmm... Whatever suits the player's... DM's or group's play style that are making the changes in their campaign.

 

[Shemeska]

If planar canon is so important for Planescape, what makes for an acceptable change versus an unacceptable change?

The difference between it being your own home game versus the internal coherence and continuity of published canon. If you're getting paid to write it, the latter is vital IMO, regardless of what combination of making sure your writers are well educated on the material or employing a paid continuity editor for the line.

 

[Nivenus]

If planar canon is so important for Planescape, what makes for an acceptable change versus an unacceptable change?

As a general rule, DMs are allowed to change whatever they like. It's their game. Indeed, it's kind of expected that most DMs will tweak things to their or their players' liking (unless they're completely rule/lore-bound). However, official changes which alter the assumed default are far more wide-reaching and much more likely to invoke player (and DM) ire.

To use a somewhat crude comparison, it's the difference between Harry Potter fan fiction that ships Hermione and Malfoy vs. J.K. Rowling coming right out and saying that's canon now.

 

[Hussar]

The difference between it being your own home game versus the internal coherence and continuity of published canon. If you're getting paid to write it, the latter is vital IMO, regardless of what combination of making sure your writers are well educated on the material or employing a paid continuity editor for the line.

Actualy, I think I will agree with this. If you are creating a published setting, canon is very, very important. I earlier said that a setting is largely defined by its canon and I'm going to stand by that. Strip out Harpers, The Sword Coast and Waterdeep from Forgotten Realms and that's a very different Realms. A setting has to be coherent and coherence requires adherence to what came before.

Yes, something like the Manual of the Planes does have some material for building your own planes, but, about 90% of the material is devoted to the setting of The Planes. I'm not really interested in buying supplements for 10% (and that's generous) of the content. I'll have to look into that Beyond Infinite Doors (Countless doors? It's back one page and I'm too lazy right now to look it up). I've heard lots of good things about that.

However, Remalthalis has pointed out to the SRD for a source of resources. I'm not really convinced. The OGL material, particularly Pathfinder isn't really different from The Planes. They present complete settings, not really resources. But, to be entirely fair, I've not looked into it too closely, mostly out of a very strong lack of interest in planar stuff for D&D. :/ Years of The Planes have pretty much soured me on planar stuff in D&D.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I much prefer comparing typical to typical

Well, that's just baking bias into your comparison unless you have hard data. One person's typical is another person's atypical. If all the steak I ever ate was charred, chewy, and hard, my typical steak experience would be pretty negative, but I never actually ate steak made by someone who knew how to make a steak...well, you see the trouble there.

, as any setting at its 'best' only comes in brief glimpses, whereas a setting at its typical provides a more realistic expectation. Wanting to compare a setting at its best seems to result in perpetually moving the goalposts. "Yes, but if you had a better DM/adventure/campaign/etc., then you would have experienced X, Y, and Z."

A good DM fixes all problems, yeah. But more to the point, people who love certain settings love them because they have had really great experiences there. Since that's what we're all trying for, comparing those great experiences gives us useful examples of fun things to do with D&D and how certain settings ennable certain fun things and de-emphasize others. Like, a great PS experience has things that I thinks [MENTION=16760]The Shadow[/MENTION] wouldn't like (like irreverence in the face of majesty), but might get away without the "petty" things that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] wouldn't like (amateur philosophy and annoying slang), so you can see some of the variation of what aesthetic people are looking for when they play the game. They're trying to get a great experience

Now it seems to me that with Planescape, even for all the mutability that people claim exists among the planes, fiends, and automobiles, the planes still remain mostly as they are. So too exists the Lady of Pain. So too exist the Factions. So too exists the City of Doors as it continues to operate as the center of universe. The Blood War persists.

I mean, as far as published stuff goes, PS doesn't have a whole lot of metaplot (in comparison to other settings of the 2e era), but open war broke out in the City of Doors, the Factions were expelled, a Demon Lord was raised from the dead, and entire planar layers were shifted.

That's hardly static!

Years of The Planes have pretty much soured me on planar stuff in D&D.

Another interesting thing I heard about recently: beliefs are made to justify our emotions.

It's been a fun week!

 

[Aldarc]

Well, that's just baking bias into your comparison unless you have hard data. One person's typical is another person's atypical. If all the steak I ever ate was charred, chewy, and hard, my typical steak experience would be pretty negative, but I never actually ate steak made by someone who knew how to make a steak...well, you see the trouble there.

As opposed to "best" compared to "best"? Is your bias somehow not baked into your comparison then?

A good DM fixes all problems, yeah. But more to the point, people who love certain settings love them because they have had really great experiences there. Since that's what we're all trying for, comparing those great experiences gives us useful examples of fun things to do with D&D and how certain settings ennable certain fun things and de-emphasize others. Like, a great PS experience has things that I thinks [MENTION=16760]The Shadow[/MENTION] wouldn't like (like irreverence in the face of majesty), but might get away without the "petty" things that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] wouldn't like (amateur philosophy and annoying slang), so you can see some of the variation of what aesthetic people are looking for when they play the game. They're trying to get a great experience

Isn't that what we frequently call "nostalgia glasses"?

I mean, as far as published stuff goes, PS doesn't have a whole lot of metaplot (in comparison to other settings of the 2e era), but open war broke out in the City of Doors, the Factions were expelled, a Demon Lord was raised from the dead, and entire planar layers were shifted.

That's hardly static!

From what I recall written by Monte Cook since then, I'm not sure if the expulsion of the Factions was meant to be as ground-breaking as it turned out to be a which was a result of TSR discontinuing. There probably was meant to be some return to the status quo. So its great change was only because the series ended on a cliffhanger that the writers were unable to resolve before cancellation. A Demon Lord getting raised feels kind of minor. Planar layers shift, but the planes still exist. Acheron, for example, will not drop out of the cosmology. Honestly your list reminds me of a Mitchell & Webb sketch from the perspective of Hufflepuff from Harry Potter, where one of the representatives unconvincingly brags about how one of the most noteworthy things that Hufflepuff has done was having a member who died.

 

[pemerton]

Still not sure what "setting exploration" means in practice for you, and I don't understand what about "setting exploration" turns you off.

Exploring the setting means that the players of the game devote their energies, at the table, to learning about the setting.

This might involve reading: the PCs travel to place X, and the GM reads them a description out of the relevant sourcebook.

This might also involve revelation: the GM already knows the truth about X, but the players only get to learn that truth gradually, eg by declaring certain actions for their PCs (such as looking behind the mirror to find the secret diary of the crazed truthteller NPC).

It might also involve authorship: the players declare an action for their PCs (eg "We drain all the chaos out of Limbo") and the GM adjudicates its consequences (perhaps in collaboration with the players). When authorship is part of setting exploration, then the authorship is subject to constraints. What is authored must be consistent with what came before in prior exposition of the setting. Notions of "fidelity" are important. In D&D practice, it is also not uncommon to use random tables and other content-generation procedures.

Travelling around the Astral Sea to recruit divine allies is primarily setting exploration. It's learning what content the setting contains, and adding new content to the setting based on extrapolation from the established fiction, perhaps using random content generation (eg random reaction rolls, which tell whether the setting contains Happy Kord or Agry Kord) to help.

I'm not a big fan of setting exploration. There are mutiple reasons why, some fairly idiosyncratic. Probably the main one is that I find many settings not all that engaging in and of themselves (this is a more civil way of putting [MENTION=21169]Doug McCrae[/MENTION]'s point about gnomish millinery and flindish cuisine). (I also find the Old Forest segment of LotR rather tedious - as does [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], I seem to recall - and find HPL's At the Mountains of Madness almost unreadable.)

I disagree with your conclusions although agree with most of the logic. If all perspectives are equally valid then there is no possible reason for giving up any position

<snip>

This means that the way to choose between positions is who benefits.

I'm not sure how that becomes the way - you'd need some premise about whose welfare counts in order to support such a concusion, and ex hypothesi we're accepting a type of relativism about such premises.

Hence my comment that clinging to any one perspective is arbitrary and, from the point of view of the universe (to borrow Sidgwick's phrase) indefensible.

Faultless disagreement is a tenable feature of some fields (eg preferred flavours of icecream) but I don't think it is tenable in politics, which inevitably involves holding others to account in the name of a perspective they don't share, and which, ex hypothesi, can't be shown to make legitimate demands upon them. (I don't think Simon Blackburn's discussion of this, or the similar remarks by Bertrand Russell and A J Ayer before him, are very satisfactory.)

The implications of relativism for politics is a subject matter beyond the scope of these boards, I think. But Planescape doesn't tackle the isssue, and I don't think it provides the resources to do so. It doesn't even do as well as Blackburn, Russell and Ayer: their defence of non-concessive politics as consistent with a non-objective metaphysics of morals turns upon the (correct) claim that the persepctive to which I have unmediated access is my own. But Planescape presents a universal perspective to which everyone has access, namely, the alignment system as expressed via the Great Wheel. So, for instance, everyone can see that the beliefs of those in the Abyss are, from the point of view of the universe, as meaningful as the wishes of those in the Heavens. To me, this tends to reinforce the sense of arbitrariness.

whoever can impose their beliefs upon others establishes what the "valid "beliefs" of the multiverse are... IMO, the major questions aren't whether your belief is valid or not... we know how to resolve that in game through play... it instead changes focus to how important are your beliefs being valid and what are you willing to do to make sure your beliefs (as opposed to someone else's ) become tangible and valid across the mutliverse?

I don't feel that What are you willing to do to make sure your beliefs become tangible and valid across the multiverse, on its own, makes for dramatic conflict. Especially if success is its own validation, then the problems become essentially procedural - eg how do I get more people to side with my team than with that other team?

Which is pretty similar, at least in broad outline, to KM's suggested scenario of recruting divine assistance to fight primordials. Procedural play - if I pull this lever what can I achieve? what levers do I need to pull to get from A to B? - is mostly setting exploration.

Contrast Wotan at the end of the Ring Cycle - in order to overcome the bonds in which he ensared himself he has had to relinquish those he most loved (the Volsungs), so that when he meets Siegfried his grandson doesn't know who he is and smashes his spear. And the upshot of Siegfried's endeavours is his own death, and the destruction of the world. So Wotan only gets what he wants by sacrificing everything that he has.

Another example would be the climax of the film Hero: Tony Leung's character, to prove his sincere recognition of the importance of Chinese unification, has to let his beloved kill him.

Not all dramatic conflict has to be so overwrought, although personally I think it makes for good romantic fantasy! But I think dramatic confict does depend upon real values being in at least apparent conflict. (If the appearance of confict is too transparent, or its resolution too simple, then we get stories that are very weak, or sentimental, or otherwise a little inferior. I think 4e tends more in this direction than (for instance) some of the more "serious" indie games, even a fantasy one like Burning Wheel.) For me that is part of what is missing from Planescape, because its whole framework eschews real values, and in many ways the conflict is merely apparent, even obviously so (there is a place for everyone as long as everyone keeps in their place - look at the deva and demon playing darts in Sigil, or the Blood War going on for ever, so the demons and devils never have to question their raison d'etre).

Even looked at through an ethics of self-realisation, I think Planescape emphasises the procedures of self-creation rather than the prior question of how shoud I choose? It doesn't have the trajectory of history or society to lend content to the options for self-creation. (I'm currently reading an account of the Camus-Sartre breakup that has helped me formulate this thought.)

If anything the fact that belief is a powerful force for shaping the universe seems to make the decisions people make all the more important.

The point is not just that it's a creative force; it's also a determinant of value. Another way of putting my thought, following on from my reference to Sartre, is that Planescape involves being-for-itself divorced from being-for-others. Whereas I think that it is being-for-others - ie being beholden, in some fashion, to external demands or expectations - that tends to be the driving force in dramatic conflict. Even if the conflict consists in a Nietzschean overcoming of such constraints, the situation has to begin with the (apparent) constraints in place.

It's really weird to me. As someone who has been playing Planescape since '94, reading [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s preferred method of play without hearing about the dislike of Planescape, my general response would have been "Boy do I have the campaign setting that is absolutely perfect for that!" So, color me incredibly confused.

I've had another go at it above.

Another way of putting it might be this: to me, Planescape as a setting seems to substitute aesthetics for politics. (Which is different from a drama - RPG, literary, whatever - in which a protagonist chooses on aesthetic grounds. Planescape seems to build in such an orientation on the ground floor, as opposed to permitting it as one choice that might be made (thereby excluding other choices).)

 

[pemerton]

Villains and heroes could each be "neutral" instead of lawful or chaotic (indeed orcs were as likely to chaotic or neutral) while certain creatures of "law" were pretty unconcerned with good (treants, for example, read more like an example of lawful neutral than lawful good).

In 4e villains and heroes can be Unaligned.

Treants are "lawful" because the Ents in LotR are a force for good (in 4e they are unaligned). In Moldvay Basic, orcs have firmed up as chaotic (and in 4e are CE).

I'll grant you that the addition of good and evil as another axis distinguished law and chaos as a separate conflict more clearly, but it seems to me the idea was there from the beginning.

I think I caused confusion. L/C conflict was there from the beginning, but you can't just superimpose a G/E axis and then assume that a L/C conflict will still continue to have the same force it had, or indeed any force at all.

The idea, for instance, that elves would side with ogres against dwaves and hobgoblins in a war of Law vs Chaos is, to my mind, amost too absurd for words. Elves can have some conception of their primeval freedoms, that chafe at the hierarchical order of both dwarves and hobgoblins; but how they can make common cause with ogres who (as CE) are driven by nothing but voracious self-regard?

 

[pemerton]

So is Greyhawk canon to generic D&D or isn't it? Because you seem to be going back and forth on this one. If it is, then setting material does encroach on "core" D&D (and vice versa). If it isn't then this point seems irrelevant as my key point was that the MotP was considered "canon" in regards to 1e D&D's "assumed" ideas about the planes, rather than to Greyhawk specifically.

I don't think there is such a things as "canon" for AD&D 1st ed. Greyhawk canon appears in various "generic" books (eg MM2) but is not thereby becoming "official". Official, in 1st ed AD&D, is about mechanics elements, and the mechanical aspects of story elements (eg there are official mechanics for beholders), but not about the setting aspects of story elements.

For instance, a Greyhawk GM who uses the Quiver of Ehlonna but doesn't have Ehlonna as a deity in his/her gameworld is not departing from a default setting. The game doesn't ship with a default.

I think the MotP has to be understood in this context.

the Greyhawk deities were clearly placed among the Outer Planes of the Great Wheel in the original Dragon articles featuring them. Heironeous is set in the Seven Heavens, Hextor in Acheron, St. Cuthbert in Arcadia, etc. Greyhawk's made use of the Great Wheel since 1st edition.

I noted this upthread, when I flagged the only appearence of the outer planes in the GH boxed set as being the homes of the deities.

This is simply a consequence of following the DDG format for gods. Nothing turns on these planar details - a GM who ignored them would lose nothing from the Greyhawk experience. (Contrast, say, a GM who ignores Iuz as a presence on Oerth - that would be to lose something from the Greyhawk experience.)

As to whether a change garners "disrespect", I can bring up a non-gaming example to show you what I mean. In Doctor Who,

<snip Cybermen example>

The amount of BETRAYAL! many people felt about the ignoring the 40+ year old origin and mythology of the Cybermen to create a new (and arguably, well done) creation point though was palpable. Nobody likes being told "remember that thing you loved? Forget it, here's thing 2.0 thats better because we said it is"

<snip>

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Go to a Star Trek convention and mention how you like Abram's movies more than the OS. (Here's a hint; run quickly).

I'm aware of the phenomenon. My view is that, for a medium like RPGs which is about authorship rather than reading others' work, it is a problem. (I think it's a weird feature of commercial serial fiction, too, to be honest, but I think it has obviously less place in an RPG.)

 

[I'm A Banana]

As opposed to "best" compared to "best"? Is your bias somehow not baked into your comparison then?

Right, because we're comparing two things that people like, rather than something that one person likes and another person doesn't like because they've had different experience.

Isn't that what we frequently call "nostalgia glasses"?

Feelings aren't something that are debatable. If someone thinks they liked something, then they liked it. They can't be "wrong."

From what I recall written by Monte Cook since then, I'm not sure if the expulsion of the Factions was meant to be as ground-breaking as it turned out to be a which was a result of TSR discontinuing.
There probably was meant to be some return to the status quo. So its great change was only because the series ended on a cliffhanger that the writers were unable to resolve before cancellation.

In absence of some actual product, I think judging the setting on some hypothetical future possibility is reaching a bit for excuses to dislike it. And hell, even if the factions came back, the other stuff still happened.

A Demon Lord getting raised feels kind of minor. Planar layers shift, but the planes still exist. Acheron, for example, will not drop out of the cosmology. Honestly your list reminds me of a Mitchell & Webb sketch from the perspective of Hufflepuff from Harry Potter, where one of the representatives unconvincingly brags about how one of the most noteworthy things that Hufflepuff has done was having a member who died.

I dunno, man, shifting infinities and raising dead demon lords feels pretty effin' big to me. Far-reaching, epic campaigns have certainly been built on smaller. Dragonlance only involved saving one world. Dark Sun's big transformation was only one city. You sound kind of like someone who hears about how Harry Potter had a war in his wizarding school and sniffs that it's really pretty insignificant because all it is is one little school in one little secret wizard enclave and it's not like anything of NOTE happened.

But, look, this isn't a wang-dangle, I'm not trying to prove that the size of this change is somehow "big enough" to pass some arbitrary bar you're setting. You said it was static, I cave a few canonical examples of pretty dang significant change in the campaign, and your only reaction was to dismiss them as not significant enough (which is moving the goalposts if I've ever seen it). If you don't want to like PS, I'm not really trying to convince you -- your feelings aren't wrong. I'm not one to sell bacon to an imam. But I do LOVE bacon, and no matter how much that imam tries to insist that pigs are inherently dirty animals, I am going to continue to love it!

Exploring the setting means that the players of the game devote their energies, at the table, to learning about the setting.

The first part I don't really understand is what you mean by "learning about the setting." You go on to describe three actions that fall under that umbrella for you, the DM reading a description out loud, the players taking some action to provoke the DM to read a description out loud, and the players declaring an action with the GM adjudicating the results. All of these things just sound like playing any RPG to me. The DM describes the approaching orcs, the players say they charge the orcs and the DM describes what happens, and the players declare that they're attacking orcs, and the DM adjudciates the results of their attacks. That counts as "setting exploration?"

You also mention that it is "learning what content the setting contains," which is a little confusing to me since I can't imagine what the alternative would look like. Being ignorant of the content the setting contains? But then how are you pretending to be an elf wizard in a standard D&D campaign, since that is learning that the setting contains elves and wizards (and the ways in which they are different from other creatures)? How are you going into dungeons in a standard D&D campaign, since that is learning that the setting contains dungeons (and what lurks in them)? How are you interacting with NPC's, since learning what the barkeep is going to say involves learning that the setting contains barkeeps who talk to you about stuff?

Perhaps it is more about "devoting energies" to that as a goal, and it's more a matter of emphasis? But then clearly, goals like breaching a plane, sharing divine energy with people, and gathering a personal cult don't emphasize gaining knowledge about the setting any more than beatin' up some orcs does, and you said those three things fall into the camp of "setting exploration." There's not a lot of energies at the table devoted to just learning about the setting for the sake of learning about the setting, there's some clear intents that are explicitly expressed there that demand to be satisfied primarily.

You also mention "constraints on authorship" and "fidelity" as factors in having PC's declare actions and having DMs resolve them, but as [MENTION=11697]Shemeska[/MENTION] mentioned, there's no goal of setting purity in play, no requirement to remain faithful to some canon, and the PS books are even explicitly written from an "in-universe" perspective to encourage individual groups to vary from the source material where appropriate.

So I guess I still don't really understand why you imagine that PS play falls into setting exploration, or what, really, functionally, setting exploration is for you. Perhaps some contrast would be useful -- what is the opposite of setting exploration? What does a game with zero setting exploration (or a "de-emphasis") look like?

Faultless disagreement is a tenable feature of some fields (eg preferred flavours of icecream) but I don't think it is tenable in politics, which inevitably involves holding others to account in the name of a perspective they don't share,
....
But Planescape doesn't tackle the isssue, and I don't think it provides the resources to do so. It doesn't even do as well as Blackburn, Russell and Ayer: their defence of non-concessive politics as consistent with a non-objective metaphysics of morals turns upon the (correct) claim that the persepctive to which I have unmediated access is my own. But Planescape presents a universal perspective to which everyone has access, namely, the alignment system as expressed via the Great Wheel.

It's worth noting that the "belief defines reality" aspect of PS means that NPC's come to share the perspectives of the PC over the course of a campaign. If your character believes in the fundamental incoherence of the multiverse, as they gain power and influence, the multiverse actually becomes less coherent, that fundamental truth that they believe in being expressed through reality, so that people who may have disagreed or doubted them no longer disagree or doubt, because the evidence is mounting and more obvious. It becomes more true, because their power and influence has made it true, thanks to the setting's rather unique take on how reality is created.

I don't necessarily follow all the obfuscating jargon-speak (life choices reinforced today: I would have made a horrible academic), but PS presents an existing universal perspective to which everyone has access, but notes that this perspective is actually only something of an aggregate of the perspectives of the people within that universe. That's how belief engineers change in the setting: by changing the views of the people that make up that aggregate, you change the universal perspective to align more with your personal perspective.

The Great Wheel is objective reality determined subjectively, and is only true because most of the campaign's NPCs accept it to be true. Part of what the PC's do is change what the campaign's NPC's accept to be true, thus transforming or even eradicating the Great Wheel. Certainly our character who believes in the fundamental incoherence of the multiverse might end the campaign having erased the Great Wheel, leaving a bubbling, frothing, multicosmic chaos in their wake, because that is now what most people accept to be true. And they'll face great opposition from those who believe that the multiverse is fundamentally ordered, or from those who believe that the multiverse is a creation of their own minds.