What's the Philosophy behind Planar games?
- Thread starter d20Dwarf
- Start date
Psion
Adventurer
My answer in the Planescape gaming thread wasn't sufficient?
To be honest, outside of Planescape, I don't do much planar gaming. My campaign world is very classical high fantasy with many links to the planes, but most games stay on my game world. (This will change soon though... as you will see if you take a look in the Plots & Places forum, I'll be starting a nautical/planehopping campaign -- See Here)
But when I do do planar travel as part of my normal game, it is mostly to expose the players to a variety of situations that are decidedly different and possibly more fantastic than the norm for the campaign world in a manner that is logical and consistent. As I am sort of a stickler about consistency in my game world, I don't like to run adventures that invoke circumstances that are hard to explain away.
The last planar journey the players took, they got trapped in a demiplane that had a repeating time loop. (See this thread for details.) From there, they traveled too other planes with their old nemesis in tow, and their nemesis eventually was judged for her crimes in the legendary Court of Thunder, and became a servant of the court of thunder. Which means that the party may meet her again.
What I am trying to illustrate her is that it opens the door to events a little more fantastic than a run of the mill campaign. I don't think it would be appropriate to do this all the time or it would wear thin. But then, I guess that is why Sigil is such a big edifice in planescape -- it lets you do a bit more mundane urban gaming to offset all the strangeness going on.
Er, does that answer your question?
Li Shenron
Legend
I generally like the idea of planar adventures, for several reasons (in random order).
- style: outer planes are just wonderful. The idea was always used since very old literature (epic greek, Divine Comedy) as they provide a setting for adventures of really epic proportion and feel, since Heaven and Hell exist outside the mortal universe and outside the mortal timeline. You don't need to make the PCs save the universe: Heracles went to hell and captured Cerberus to please his master's wish, Dante journeyed to find himself, other epic heroes to retrieve the soul of some beloved one who died prematurely...
Also, connection to religious mysteries can provide a creepy aura to your games.
- transitive planes and inner planes are less suitable for adventuring IMHO but can provide an elegant "pseudo-scientific" explanation to many things (how ghosts "work", advanced means of travel through the planes...)
- planar adventures can be adapted to very many settings, from historical to fantasy to modern and even sci-fi.
- planes are easier to handle for a DM compared to the material world, because they are both close and distant at the same time. When I start a new campaign some of the problems I always have are of positioning the characters in the world: the PCs have lived there a long time before the game starts, so they must know a lot already, but the DM can't tell each of them all that he knows (history, geography, politics...). So most of the time you have to force the PCs to be travelling and having adventures in a place they don't know yet, simply to avoid the problem. Planes are close because there is virtually no distance to travel; but they are distant because you can reach them only if you know how: this generally gives me as DM a much easier time, when the PCs simply don't know how to get to other planes (or that they even exist) until you give them the knowledge and that's the start of their adventuring life.
- outsiders are a great addition to the game if you use them as totally alien creatures: they are immortal, with inhumanly high intelligence or wisdom, they "live" a totally different existance. You have to make them think and behave in a way which is completely out of human understanding, otherwise you are risking of trivialize them. If you succeed, you have new opportunities to entertain your players, otherwise they're just more monsters.
- the possibility of introducing new challenges by changing how things work, for example by having a world where time, space, gravity, life, or magic work differently.
There are also things I don't like about how D&D often handles planar stuff...
- too many planes! D&D players and DMs tend to never get enough, so the core cosmology actually has 17 afterlife worlds, planescape had 20 elemental planes IIRC and so on. Too many of them makes them less fascinating and tend to run out of ideas.
- trivialization or making other planes boring copies of the material plane. Thing have to be different in other worlds, otherwise you don't need another world at all. What's the point in having an afterlife world whose inhabitants are again mortals? That's what regularly happens in the MotP: all the outer planes are fully inhabited by dwarves, elves and even undead. Completely spoiled.
- layerization: this is a minor gripe, but I don't understand why every plane must be divided into layers (except maybe the Abyss with its unique numerable infinitness compared to the continuus infiniteness of the others) only to make them work as separate planes. Then instead some entire planes are made connected and it's easy to travel between them as it is to move inside the single plane. Why not simply reconsider the dinstincion between planes?
- I think that writers often tend to follow the logic of material plane when writing stuff about other planes which again makes them less special than they could be. To make everything playable, they want to explain too much.
- style: outer planes are just wonderful. The idea was always used since very old literature (epic greek, Divine Comedy) as they provide a setting for adventures of really epic proportion and feel, since Heaven and Hell exist outside the mortal universe and outside the mortal timeline. You don't need to make the PCs save the universe: Heracles went to hell and captured Cerberus to please his master's wish, Dante journeyed to find himself, other epic heroes to retrieve the soul of some beloved one who died prematurely...
Also, connection to religious mysteries can provide a creepy aura to your games.
- transitive planes and inner planes are less suitable for adventuring IMHO but can provide an elegant "pseudo-scientific" explanation to many things (how ghosts "work", advanced means of travel through the planes...)
- planar adventures can be adapted to very many settings, from historical to fantasy to modern and even sci-fi.
- planes are easier to handle for a DM compared to the material world, because they are both close and distant at the same time. When I start a new campaign some of the problems I always have are of positioning the characters in the world: the PCs have lived there a long time before the game starts, so they must know a lot already, but the DM can't tell each of them all that he knows (history, geography, politics...). So most of the time you have to force the PCs to be travelling and having adventures in a place they don't know yet, simply to avoid the problem. Planes are close because there is virtually no distance to travel; but they are distant because you can reach them only if you know how: this generally gives me as DM a much easier time, when the PCs simply don't know how to get to other planes (or that they even exist) until you give them the knowledge and that's the start of their adventuring life.
- outsiders are a great addition to the game if you use them as totally alien creatures: they are immortal, with inhumanly high intelligence or wisdom, they "live" a totally different existance. You have to make them think and behave in a way which is completely out of human understanding, otherwise you are risking of trivialize them. If you succeed, you have new opportunities to entertain your players, otherwise they're just more monsters.
- the possibility of introducing new challenges by changing how things work, for example by having a world where time, space, gravity, life, or magic work differently.
There are also things I don't like about how D&D often handles planar stuff...
- too many planes! D&D players and DMs tend to never get enough, so the core cosmology actually has 17 afterlife worlds, planescape had 20 elemental planes IIRC and so on. Too many of them makes them less fascinating and tend to run out of ideas.
- trivialization or making other planes boring copies of the material plane. Thing have to be different in other worlds, otherwise you don't need another world at all. What's the point in having an afterlife world whose inhabitants are again mortals? That's what regularly happens in the MotP: all the outer planes are fully inhabited by dwarves, elves and even undead. Completely spoiled.
- layerization: this is a minor gripe, but I don't understand why every plane must be divided into layers (except maybe the Abyss with its unique numerable infinitness compared to the continuus infiniteness of the others) only to make them work as separate planes. Then instead some entire planes are made connected and it's easy to travel between them as it is to move inside the single plane. Why not simply reconsider the dinstincion between planes?
- I think that writers often tend to follow the logic of material plane when writing stuff about other planes which again makes them less special than they could be. To make everything playable, they want to explain too much.
