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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6397139" data-attributes="member: 42582">But that's just marketing speak. Read any GH material - you'll see that the deities whose planer hangouts are described in MotP are not part of Greyhawk.The MM2 incorpoated Greyhawk references (eg in the Valley Elf description) but that doesn't mean that the Valley of the Mage was "canonical" in 1st ed AD&D. I really think the whole notion of "canonical" lore for 1st ed AD&D - as opposed to, say, certain settings pubished during the 1st ed era - is problematic.In that framework, "chaotic" equated roughy to CE and "lawful" roughly to LG. Moldvay even comes out and says it: lawful is usually good, chaotic usually evil. You can see it in the magazine discussion of the time, too: clerics use healing spells and raise dead, while anti-clerics use harming spells and finger of death (the precursor to slay living); lawful characters rescue villagers, chaotic ones murder them and sacrifice them to dark gods.The 4e alignment framework is very much a harking back to this sort of single-axis alignment, only it inserts a couple of extra gradations on the axis.I'm not 100% sure what the puzzle is. Do you mean "How do you play D&D with an emphasis on conflict that isn't simply meaningful within the fiction but is meaningful to those who read and engage with the fiction" - or, as   [MENTION=21169]Doug McCrae[/MENTION] put it, turns upon stuff that real people care about?I'll try and give an examples drawn from a different medium, then bring it back to D&D.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.)In an RPG, moving the focus away from setting exploration, and onto subject matter that people care about for reasons other than mere curiosity, is no harder than in a movie. And in someways easier, because if an RPG is working right than the players (due to author participation) will have a higher level of immediate buy-in than the typical movie audience, and therefore more tolerant of what would otherwise be rather banal storytelling. (I think it was earlier in this thread, but perhaps in a recent post in a different thread, that I compared RPGing to jamming with friends. At least in my case, the music I might produce when jamming with friends is really very poor, but is nevertheless pleasing and enjoyable precisely because of the identity of creators and audience.)For instance, in the case of law/gods vs chaos/primordials, what people care about (or, at least, my players) is fairly classic stuff like creativity vs order, change vs comfortable conservatism, hope for the future vs the weight of the past, etc. Because several of the players in my game are playing devotees of the Raven Queen, the issue of hope vs the past is also focused through a particular prism that carries its own thematic and value weight, namely, the significance of mortality and the nature of death. And it is also easy to bring into play related issues like free (self-)expression vs loyalty (to others)/honour (which can be seen as a type of loyalty to onself).All you then have to do is frame the PCs into situations where some of these issues are in play and they probably can't get everything they want. Here is a link to an <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340383-PCs-kill-Ometh-leading-to-open-season-on-the-Raven-Queen-s-name" target="_blank">actual play report</a> that shows the sort of thing I have in mind: the setting elements (Ometh, the Raven Queen's name, etc) aren't simply objects of curiosity. The confrontation with them matters to the players (via their PCs) because of the sorts of connections I have described: loyalty, the past vs the future, madness vs civilisation, the orientation towards death.(Also, in case it needs saying: it's abolutely key to this that the players get to choose whether their PCs try to defeat Ometh in battle, or negotiate with him, or trick him into some sort of concession, or whatever. If there is a "right answer" pre-determined by the GM, then the players aren't getting to respond in a way that expresses their own conception of what matters in the situation. They're back to exploration, this time of the GM's conception of what matters in the situation. The analogue for a film would be substituting the reading of someone else's criticism of Blade Runner for reading Blade Runner itself.)It's not especially high brow! (I leave that to Vincent Baker and Paul Czege in games like DitV or My Life with Master.) But it's something I find 4e is better suited to than Planescape - the sorts of conficts I have described above (law/chaos, and everything that can hang from that) have an inherent significance for most people that, at least it seems to me, issues like the history of the Spawning Stone and the Ancient Baatorians (two plot points I remember from Tales of the Infinite Staircase) do not. The latter topics are much more about setting exploration.</blockquote>

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