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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6397954" data-attributes="member: 42582">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'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.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.)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.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).)</blockquote>

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