This is clearly a flaw -- something that would make a game less enjoyable. You have determined that PS has this flaw. When examples are pointed out that call into question that determination, rather than consider them, you simply dismiss them as "not enough." Which leads me to understand that you're not interested in questioning that determination, just in asserting it.
Kamikaze Midget has presented facts as rebuttals to your assertions about the nature of Planescape, instances of change in the setting, types and scope of dramatic weight, etc. and all of your counters have been about how you feel something is or your impressions of the setting as opposed to something tangible.
I think Aldarc is being quite clear in explaining the "status quo" nature of Planescape. I agree with that description, to the extent that I'm familiar with the examples.
The return of a demon lord (I'm assuming we're talkin here about Dead Gods/Orcus) certainy counts. I'm not familiar with the Faction War, but given that I think Aldarc is right about the return of a demon lord I'm inclined to accept the corresponding judgement about the Factions.
I'm not denying that it would be
possible to make the return of a demon lord into a significant change. But Dead Gods doesn't do this.
I don't know about Aldarc, but for me a status quo world can also have dramatic force (of a somewhat Becket-ian or Sartrean nature? The idea seems, at least to me, rather modernist and at least a touch ironic or absurdist). But I don't think Planescape achieves that, either, although maybe a few tweaks here and there might make the difference. Though I suspdct that the RPG medium creates inherent problems for the ironic status quo campaign, because it requires the players to be moved by the failure of their PCs to achieve anything, which I think would be hard to pull off (perhaps you could do this with a certain style of all-tiefling campaign, maybe as the "big reveal" at the conclusion of things).
"It doesn't have the trajectory of history or society..." Just tell me what that means in plain english.
This is a version of [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION]'s point about "status-quo". Planescape has no history. No dynamics. No Ragnarok.
It didn't
begin in any meaningful way (there are the baernoloths, the ancient baatorians, etc, but they don't
stand for anything) and it is not unfolding. The 9 alignments are eternal. Sigil has the Lady of Pain to enforce its status quo. The Blood War never ends. The whole setting is static.
The 4e cosmology is much closer to Glorantha. It has a beginning - creation, which leads to the Dawn War, which leaves consequences embedded in the world (eg the world contains dwarves, giants, the seasons, death, etc) which are unfolding towards a crisis that the PCs will ultimately have to resolve. (Epic tier, in 4e, is like the Hero Wars in Glorantha.)
So where we have a different understanding here is that the motivation behind doing these actions is not to find out whether or not they can be done.
<snip>
The motivation to doing them is the same motivation that a PC in a "standard" D&D setting has for going out from the turnip farm and raiding the local mad wizard's ruin: they're the kind of person who responds to such a call to action (for whatever reason). The conflict comes, in large part, from the fact that the antagonists are doing the same.
This is what I have called above
procedural confict. The conflict consists in finding out whether or not you can succeed againts obstacles that are exeternal (in the fiction) to the protagonists. (If it's a given from the start that the PCs will succeed, then some RPGers have doubts about the point of play.)
I am intending to encompass that within "setting exploration".
I don't dispute that this is a typical way of playing D&D. It's not my preferred way, though.
So internal consistency = a limitation on player authority? Interesting take. I don't know that I'd disagree, but I also don't know that I'd enjoy a game that lacked that limitation (and thus lacked internal consistency).
I've failed to communicate my point. In the play that I prefer, internal consistency is a constraint but not
the (pre-eminent) constraint. To refer back to the "vampyr in the village" example, in my preferred approach it
will be the player's PC's wife who is wooed by the vampyr, without asking or wondering whether she is the most logical target. (You certainly wouldn't roll a d20 on a table of village wives to find out who is targeted, which would be one eminently feasible way of generating the content.)
In past discussions about techniques, often in the context of skill challenge resolution, posters who favour internal consistency as the sole, or pre-eminent, constraint on content generation have suggested that anything else must be Toon. But I think that this is to misunderstand the role of contrivance in dramatic fiction. "Of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." That's a contrivance, but I think it would be absurd to compare Casablanca to Looney Tunes (at least in respect of the nature of the contrivance). Gandalf arrives at Helm's Deep (with Erkenbrand or Eomer, depending on whether you're reading the book or watching the film) just at the nick of time. Obvious contrivance, but not Toon-like.
The role of contrivance in GMing techniques is in my view a very important issue for RPGing, and I think it's a pity that no mainstream GM's guide that I know of discusses it. (Some indie ones do, but even many of those discussions could be better.)
I'm not entirely sure what "real world value/significance" brings to bear on the topic. I see the real-world value being the same real-world value that any game of D&D brings, which is engagement and entertainment. Again, maybe an example of the alternative would be useful for contrast, because I'm not sure I have a clear picture of what other issues of real-world value and signfiicance, aside from pleasure, result from any particular game of RPGs.
<snip>
Looks like I missed that reference, care to encapsulate?
Many things can be entertaining. Watching a cartoon can be entertaining. So can watching Casablanca. So can watching Paths of Glory. But the ways in which they generate entertainment are all quite different. Some people get pleasure from reading imaginary atlases and travel guides (typically marketed as RPG setting supplements) but that is a different way again of gaining entertainment.
I'll repost my comments on Blade Runner; Imaro below is also rerring to some of my comments on The Ring Cycle and the film Hero:
Consider Blade Runner. In a relatively early scene, Harrison Ford meets the replicant Rachael. At that point in the movie, the audience is invited to engage in setting exploration: we discover how realistic replicants can be, learn about the emotional response test for identifying them, etc. The audience knows that the characters within the fiction care about who is a replicant and who is a human. But the audience has no reason of their own to care about this, other than curiosity about the setting.
Then, in the culmination of the movie, we get Rutger Hauer's monologue which suggests that the apparent human-ness of replicants goes deep. This in turn informs our understanding of Rachael and Deckard's elopement. At this point the film is not mostly leading its audience through an exploration of the setting. It is expressing something, or perhaps posing a question, about a topic that does matter to the audience: namely, what is it to be human?
(Blade Runner is pretty classical in its storytelling style. It is possible to subvert the distinction between setting exploration and commenting/posing a question: for instance, American Psycho is superficially an exploration of a murderously insane financier, but the very choice of that subject matter as an object of exploration is itself an invitation to the audience to reflect on topics that matter to them, such as the nature of commercial and consumerist culture. I think only rather avant garde RPGs attempt this, with the possible exception of CoC which you might argue does attempt this without being avant garde - I personally think it mostly fails as anything more than setting exploration, but due to weaknesses in the HPL source material rather than weaknesses in the RPG design.)
And by your criteria, that is different from witnessing the consequences of player actions in the setting? Because it really looks the same from here.
Heavy Setting Exploration:
Player (at some point in play): "To further the beliefs of my Xaositects, I rip a hole in the fabric of the multiverse."
DM (at some other point): "The Guvner looks at you with a mixture of awe and horror, recognizing you as the origin of the breach, as the glistening steel Inevitable strides forth with an earth-shaking INVALID."
Not Really Setting Exploration:
Player (at some point in chargen): "I have a strong connection to my wife in the village."
DM (at some other point): "The vampyr's trail leads right to your doorstep, and you realize, with a sinking sensation, that your wife is sleeping inside..."
Is the above an accurate representation of your case?
Not really, n. Your second example doesn't involve much other than setting exploration (although there is the heightened tension of having to defend
your wife, which for some might be more intuitively compelling that defending yourself against a strangely-motivated vengeance seeker). Because you've left out the seductive nature of vampyrs. Here is where we move from setting exploration to dramatic conflict:
DM (at some other point): "The vampyr's trail leads right to your doorsetp. As you approach your house, you can see faces through the window. With a sinking sensation, you realised that your wife is [kissing, whatever] the vampyr."
Now for Bram Stoker's audience that was probalby enough, but we live in a pretty libertine age, so maybe its "yeah, whatever, I kill the vampyr and release my wife from his spell." In that case, the GM needs to push a bit harder:
"As you draw your sword to srike down the vampyr, your wife calls out "No!". You realise that, even now that she is no longer mesmerised by his gaze, your wife is in love with the vampyr"
Depending on GM and player mood and expectations, replace love with pity. Or perhaps prior context suggests a role reversal: up until now your wife has been a model of peace and piety, a contrast with the awful realities of adventuring; but she is the one calling for the vampyr to be slain (for a bit more lowbrow viscerality, she could lap up blood from the vampyr's wounds); or, the vampyr is slain, but your wife has become lusty and sexuaised in a way that previously she wasn't (again, this one may work better for Bram Stoker's audience than a contemporary one).
The key is putting real values into conflict, or otherwise making the choice enage with matters of real world significance. (That's why, in Luke Crane's example, the target of the vampyr is the PCs' wife and not, say, the PC's brother or mentor, either of whom might also be a completely typical BW relationship. Being a wife carries meaning with it, although what that meaning is changes with time and place.)
So [Wotan] is willing to sacrifice everything he has to get what he wants... that sounds like what are you willing to do to get what you want... not seeing the difference you were trying to convey here.
Yes. Wotan has to
sacrifice. He gives up things of value. He doesn't reshape the world in such a way as to prove that they were really valueless, and hence not a real sacrifice.
Ah Hero... one of my top 10 movies and a pretty good example of a person's beliefs shaping the world around them. Replace the importance of Chinese Unification with say the MercyKillers belief in justice and retribution at the expense of all else and you can easily have a story where a character has to allow himself to be executed because an NPC, or even a "monster"is able to make him acknowledge that he has perpetrated an injustice on it, and that's just one example.
Where in your example is the analogue to
throwing oneself onto the sword of one's true love to prove one's sincerity to them?
There are other difficulties with this scenario in D&D, too, such as
how you achieve the requisite persuasion. And what you do with the game once the PC is dead.
In my own GMing experience, I have GMed two sequences that come at all close to this.
The first was in Bastion of Broken Souls. There is a banished deity, trapped in a demi-plane. The gate to the demiplane is an angel - only if she is killed will the doorway open. The PCs wanted to speak to the banished deity, and hence wanted to open the gate, and hence needed to kill the angel. (I can't remember her name in the module - I was running it in an Oriental Adventures game using RM mechanics, and she was called Eko.)
As written, the module mandates that the PCs will have to fight and kill Eko if they want to open the gate. Just one example of the terrible GMing advice in that module that undermines what could otherwise be one of the better things that WotC has pubished. In my game the PCs conversed with Eko, explaining the reason why they needed to speak to the banished god. The PCs themselves, in doing so, were in revolt against the edicts of Heaven, but (as they saw it) pursuing a good that Heaven could not acknowldege or pursue because it was bound by ancient pacts - including the banishment of this banished god - which were now forcing it to sit idly by while evil was inflicted upon the mortal world.
One of the PCs - the warrior-mage - made the case to Eko that the best way she could honour the obligation whereby she had become a living gate to the demiplane, and fulfill her duty to Heaven, was to let herself die so the gate could open. The speech was quite impassioned by the standards of our table, the persuasion dice were rolled (I can't remember what the skill was - probably Leadership or Public Speaking), and the player was successful. So Eko let herself be killed.
Eko had a fellow angel companion (I can't remember his name) who had not been persuaded. The PCs then (somewhat tragically) had to fight him off after killing Eko - I can't remember exactly what they did but my vague recollection is that they may have disabled rather than killed him, as they saw that he was not really in the wrong.
The other sequence I have in mind is described in detail
here. The shorter version goes like this. The PCs had taken a prisoner. They were all in agreement that she deserved to die for her crimes. The party "paladin" (fighter/cleric of Moradin) was upstairs securing the area against invasion by teleporting wizards while the party "neutrals" (sorcerer, invoker/wizard, and paladin of the Raven Queen) were downstairs interrogating the prisoner.
The interrogation was being resolved as a skill challenge, which means that the players have to make skill checks, which means that they have to frame action declarations within the context of the evolving fictional situation. The prisoner was asking to be spared from execution in return for speaking. With a combination of Diplomacy and Bluff checks, the interrogating PCs gave her the impression that they had agreed, in the name of the absent PC ("Lord Derrik") to spare her, while in fact retaining the intention to kill her.
Because the player of Derrik got bored, he had his PC come back down into the interrogation. At which point the NPC made clear what promises she understood to have been made in his name, namely that, having given over information, she would be spared from execution. He was then forced to choose between honour (keeping a promise given by his companions in his name) and justice (inflicting the punishment that he believed she deserved). He chose honour, and so the prisoner lived, even though - as a cleric of Torog - the PCs knew that she would have little trouble manipulating her jailers and escaping should she want to, and hence that imprisonment rather than execution was no real punishment at all.
Both the episodes that I have described involve trading on the PC/NPC distinction in traditional RPGs (NPCs are subject to social mechanics but PCs are not). But they involve choices by the PCs that require sacrifice. In the first scenario, the PC who persuades Eko to do the right thing has made her someone
not deserving of death (because doing the right thing) but then has to kill her. And then decide how to deal with the just rage of her companion. In the second scenario, the "paladin" PC has to choose between honour and justice. He can't satisfy both vaues.
In your mercy-killer example, I'm not seeing the trade-off, unless you count self-interest as a value. The PC's values oblige him/her to submit to punisment? OK, so s/he should do so.
Can a conflict between values be introduced that will give the scenario dramatic weight? In my view, not easily. Each of the factions is rather mono-maniacal. The whole setting is built around alignment concepts, which tend not to encompass value pluralism very easily. Plus the whole setting is built around the idea that what you believe is what is true, which means that wishful thinking, so far from being a vice, is a universal solvent for all apparent value conflicts.
As I said quite a way upthread, I'm sure work can be done to work around these issues. But personally I am not interested in doing that work. For it to be worthwhile I would have to be smitten by the surface tropes of Planescape - cant, Sigil, portas, angels and devils drinking together in bars, etc. And as I've already indicated I'm not that taken by those tropes.
Conversely, 4e already has the value-conflicts built in. The primordials made creation, and life possible, but want to destroy and remake it. To support them is to affirm life by destroying it. To oppose them is to deny creation and transformation and opt for stasis. That's a genuine conflict right there on the ground floor, which the game makes the players choose between. Through in a few extra twists - the dwarven conflict with giants, the elven coflict with orcs in combination with the fact that the gods really need Gruumsh's mucsles on their side to win the next war, etc - and it seems to me the fantasy drama practically writes itself!
Could you define "real"values, because I think some, maybe even all, of the factions are based around the things human beings think about and care about in the real world every day.
Some are, yes. But as I already mentioned above, they are mono-maniacs about value. Which means that they don't experience conflicts of value, only conflicts of expedience. Which, in RPG terms, tends to push back towards the exploratory play I was describing upthread: "We are committed to goal X, to achieve that within the context of this campaign setting and these mechanics we will need tools ABC, OK let's get going."
...and if one of the PC's is a Xaositects, their antagonists will include Guvners or Mercykillers. And if one of the PC's is a Guvner, their antagonists will include some Xaositects or Bleakers...
So, like, Harmonium (loyalty) vs. Fated (freedom), Mercykiller (vengeance) vs. Guvner (efficiency), Signer (what price to avoid the end of your world?), and, well, any game where a party of 5 is going to each individually have a stake in transforming reality?
What I don't see is why the member of one faction would have any reason, other than perhaps expedeince or prudence, to listen to the demans made by another. So I don't see how the conflict is anything but external and procedural.
Linking this to your example, upthread, of Guvnor vengaeance against the fabric-ripper - part of what makes that, in my view, less compelling than defending one's wife against a vampyr (even if there is nothing more to the situation than that) is that from the point of view of the PC, the Guvnor's vengeance is quite unwarranted. So the PC feels no pang in defending him-/herself. Contrast the PCs in my game who had to deal with Eko's companion after killing Eko - they recognise that they've genuiney wronged him (by killing Eko, his companion) and hence while they defend themselves, they acknowledge that the situation has a tragic dimension. For me, that is a very signficant contrast.
