Why do most groups avoid planar games?

[Geoff Watson]

What you have to do is not think of it the way a mortal is familiar with it, or it will seem silly. Fiends don't sit around getting drunk at the bar in their city and act like fools by hitting on barmaids.

One of the problems with Planescape (particularly Sigil) is that it portrayed the outsiders as just regular joes. Each bar in Sigil had a Balor, a Pit Fiend, and a Solar partying together, which the DM thought was really cool, though the players thought it was silly.

The main problem with Planescape was the stupid slang. Every creature, on every outer plane used the same slang. The PS books even wrote rules in it.

Geoff.

 

[Shemeska]

One of the problems with Planescape (particularly Sigil) is that it portrayed the outsiders as just regular joes. Each bar in Sigil had a Balor, a Pit Fiend, and a Solar partying together, which the DM thought was really cool, though the players thought it was silly.

Hardly. And that's something that gets pointed at as a bad point for PS far too often when that wasn't truly the case.

You might find them in the same city, and they might deal with one another if they had to do so. But at best 99% of the time you just had a frigid coexistance between celestials and fiends and even between the various opposite aligned fiends. The only reason the various outsider races didn't openly war over Sigil was because it would be ended swiftly and brutally by Her Serenity...

There were specific burroughs and ghettos in Sigil that had more or less of various types of fiends or types of celestials. And even with the celestials it was only 'life is good' superficially. They were just as ideologically divided as the fiends, but they didn't commit genocide over it all. An archon and an eladrin won't agree on how to go about doing good the best way, or even what the proper role of good in the multiverse is.

The Styx Oarsman for instance was primarily a Tanar'ri bar, but it admitted yugoloths and the occasional Slaadi. Baatezu weren't allowed past the door, and they'd be insane to want to go inside. No Solar working the stereo system while Asmodeus turned on the bubble machine. Things were complicated.

The main problem with Planescape was the stupid slang. Every creature, on every outer plane used the same slang. The PS books even wrote rules in it.

That is one of the things that people either loved or hated I'll grant you. However the slang was really only heavily prevalent in Sigil itself, and to a lesser extent certain gatetowns in the outlands.

 

[Oryan77]

most of these adventures can take place on the prime, anyway. You can even have your portals there .

I think that's kind of the point we're making. It's just a setting. Which is why it's odd when people bad mouth it like they do. As if the planes exist for one purpose....epic level life. The campaign settings existance proves that you don't need to be epic level to survive on the planes. PS made low level adventures for the planes, I've run them and didn't need a high level party to survive it. Thinking that you do seems pretty uncreative to me.

I think of PS as a setting that can be used however you want. If you like traditional fantasy, you can run it in PS. If you like harsh environments like Darksun, you can play it in PS. If you like Ravenloft, you can simulate it in PS. If you like the Underdark, you can run something similiar in PS. Found some cool monster you'd like to "easily" throw at the party? PS is great for that. It provides you with as much or little as you like. You aren't restricted to any one campaign idea, region, or way of life. I'm not restricted to just FR books as if I was running a FR campaign. I get to pull cool stuff from all sorts of settings & use it in my game and it'll make perfect sense.

Using the planes as an epic level adventure is understandable to spice up your own world with some craziness, but it actually cheapens the existance of the planes...you'll end up running the planes pretty narrow minded. Which is also understandable though because YOUR world is the focus & priority of your campaign; not the planes. It doesn't make the planes any less special though when you're adventuring on them at low levels.

It just makes me think of the old PS saying that Primes think their world is the center of the multiverse, that's why they're called clueless. Only "their" world can have weak beings and robust cities & regions right?

I should throw in an epic lvl prime party as NPC's in my PS game. Let them cross paths with my 6th lvl planar party. Boy would those primes feel stupid when they realize this whole time they could have crossed Avernus without needing to have a Holy Avenger in hand.

 

[primemover003]

The main problem with Planescape was the stupid slang. Every creature, on every outer plane used the same slang. The PS books even wrote rules in it.

Why was it that so many people HATED the cant? I just don't get it. Sure it was different, but that's the point...

Oh and it's also what points to Sigil having a medieval LONDON flavor, not New York. Tony D's art just screamed Brian Froud when I first saw it...

 

[Oryan77]

One of the problems with Planescape (particularly Sigil) is that it portrayed the outsiders as just regular joes. Each bar in Sigil had a Balor, a Pit Fiend, and a Solar partying together, which the DM thought was really cool, though the players thought it was silly.

The main problem with Planescape was the stupid slang. Every creature, on every outer plane used the same slang. The PS books even wrote rules in it.

Geoff.

It is silly if you go overboard with it. It's not common that every bar is run or occupied by some powerful outsider race. In my game, I still use the typical mortal races or weaker outsiders as bartenders and merchants unless I'm wanting to spice up the scenario, then I'll throw in some big fiend or something. I never use stuff as powerful as a Pit Fiend or Balor working as a bartender or merchant...they have better things to do and bigger opportunities. It doesn't mean they don't own a bar behind the scenes though. But I will describe powerful outsiders as patrons in a tavern on occasion, only to spice up the scenario again...but it's not a common site.

As for planar slang, I've gone through a dozen players and all of them liked hearing it. Again, if you go overboard with it, it's silly. I usually only used it for NPC's in cities, again, mostly from the standard races. My fiends or celestials don't use it unless it makes sense for that NPC to speak with slang. You're not going to hear Kobolds in Kurtalmaks realm using slang and you won't hear Gnomes in villages on Bytopia using slang...it's a city thing.

 

[Oryan77]

Oh and it's also what points to Sigil having a medieval LONDON flavor, not New York. Tony D's art just screamed Brian Froud when I first saw it...

Yeah, probably 95% of the slang actually IS British slang. I believe all of it is european slang. I don't think the creators made any of that up themselves. If they did, not much of it was original.

 

[Mercule]

Planescape and planar adventuring in general is NO different than running adventures in a Prime Material setting, in terms of Dungeoncraft. You have characters, you have events, mix them together and play.

So... Sigil/Concordant Opposition is just another Prime, then. Oddly, that makes it somewhat more palatable.

The big "setting flavor" is that some of the "big guns" walking around have bat wings and eat souls. I guess it's fair to say a campaign setting where demons walk the streets would not be what I'd typically drool over (unless it's a horror/apocalyptic game).

 

[ThirdWizard]

As a side note, in my current PS campaign, the PCs havn't actually been to Sigil yet, sticking motly to the Outlands and the Beastlands. They're 6-7th level right now. And, I ran a campaign centered around Ysgard and Carceri without the PCs ever going to Sigil in their 1-20 level jaunt. Conversely, I ran a Sigilian campaign where the PCs mostly stayed in Sigil through their careers (3-13 or something) except for a few excursions into the planes, which mostly centered around intrigue and roleplay.

One of the difficult things about the setting is its hard to say "This is what Planescape is like" because it can easily change from campaign to campaign, as from game to game. Of course, this means you arn't going to like it if you don't love world-building, as most of my time spent in prep time for the next session is inevitably just that.

 

[Celebrim]

As I said before, I'm not saying that playing a planar game the way anyone plays it is bad. I only set out to answer the question of why many DM's did not want to run planar games. I was immediately answered with, 'Well, you and those DM's are just wrong. Planar games don't have to be like that. That is just a sterotype. My games are nothing like that.', I feel it somewhat a sign of hypocracy on the part of some here that I'm repeatedly having to say I wasn't say you were playing the game wrong.

Yeah but what do you think these weird & freaky planar beings do all day?

Honestly, I think that they do and are concerned with things that mortal minds can't comprehend. If you show me some planar beings and I can understand thier motivation, then I feel that you've overly anthromorphized them.

Sit on a rock waiting to be summoned by primes?

At least that would be a mysterious motivation, but its nonetheless an activity that I can cognitively grasp, so no.

They have homes just like primes do.

Maybe in your world, but in my world, no they most emphatically do not. And even when they have something that looks like a home, mostly its an object of little significance to them that they maintain in order to give the occassional prime visitor something he can relate to.

They have cultures and beliefs just like primes do.

No, they don't. They don't have cultures and beliefs, they ARE cultures and beliefs. They are incarnations of ideas. Frustration doesn't have a culture or belief. It's a walking emotion. Death doesn't have a culture or a belief. It's a walking manifestation. The 14th of June doesn't have a culture or a belief. It's a walking incarnation. And the main thing wrong with that description is that they probably aren't doing anything so understandable as walking except in order to be comprehensible to a mortal observer.

They have desires & families just like primes.

No, they are desires, and their 'families' don't necessarily have anything to do with mortal families and they sure don't relate to them in a paternal/fraternal/maternal way. In fact, many of them are probably asexual unless they are incarnations of something with sexual conentations. In some cases they can freely change sexes like changing clothes, and in other cases they can manifest 'offspring' without the need for sex or acquire relatives which they were previously not related to and so forth.

That's what Planescape introduces to us.

And that's precisely why I said it was a bug and not a feature.

These planar beings aren't just creatures roaming a plane looking for food or sitting in a crazy citadel waiting for adventurers to explore it.

There are more things in heaven and hell than exist in your philosophies.

Fiends don't sit around getting drunk at the bar in their city and act like fools by hitting on barmaids. But they will drink dwarf blood in a bar in their city while throwing sharp objects at a near-death mortal nailed to the wall as their version of darts.

There is no bloody difference between the two examples.

They gotta pass the time somehow.

No they don't. They don't even have to experience time subjectively.

One of the few times I had a planar excursion, the players went to a courtroom in which they saw a series of trials take place in which, after the evidence was presented in the face of unspecified charges, the prosecutor was found guilty and beheaded. Then a new prosecutor was found in the audience and the sequence repeated itself. What does it mean? Who knows. It might not even be happening, It could be merely the only way the process of something necessary to keep balance in the universe is comprehended by thier mere mortal minds. It would be like if gravity was incarnated and you were forced to watch a process which represented the sum of all gravitations in the universe pulling at each other. What would that look like? Whatever it looked like, the interpretation that it was recreation or whatever would be _wrong_ (and dangerously wrong). Maybe that was what the landscape continually being buried under avalanches of falling trash represented (another planar setting). Or maybe not. Roll your Knowledge(Planes) to try to make sense of it all.

Everyone says planar games should be for high level only, but why would you reduce a planar beings community to nothing but a Dire Rat nest waiting to be cleaned out?

Err... This only shows that you haven't a clue about what I'm talking about. What makes you think these are the only options? Didn't I earlier explain that I thought that the planes had two primary uses; first, to serve as an 'anti-setting' in which things which could not possibly occur on the prime could take place, and second, to serve as a plot device for safely storing away things that couldn't roam in the same universe as 1st level commoners?

So you make use of them in other ways. Great. But in doing so you have by the general admission of everyone here started doing things in the planar session that are more or less nothing but things that could happen in the prime with different window dressings. If I were to do so in my campaign, I'd fear that I'd not only wreck the value of my setting, but I'd demystify the 'other world' that as Lovecraft put it, 'lies beyond the Gates of Sleep'.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Well, I didn't read all of the threads here...sorry. So, I'm just going to ramble a bit about my introduction and perception of Planescape.

First off, I don't think of it as a campaign setting...that would be far too difficult for me to concieve. Secondly, I feel Planescape is just a reintroduction of an old idea from a new perspective.

I have always treated the planes (since the 1st ed Manual of Planes...I really didn't GET them before that) as a type of 'what's beneath the surface' menatility to understanding phantasy worlds. So, any world or campaign is actually a part of the planes--regardless of the knowledge of the fact. My idea of the planes are fairly passive yet all encompassing (I know, a fairly common tactic). But, this allows me to use them without any significant judgement...no hard fast rules, no limitaions of power or structure...ect. This laidback attitude has allowed me to enjoy several aspects of playing in the planes including low-level adventures to abstract powerful planes were the forces of good and evil are in permanent conflict.

I remember when planescape came out a large group of my friends were quite angry...even indignant towards the release. 'Cause, it stepped on a few toes. It took years of concisely written material of tough powerful creatures spawned from powerful unknowns to a type of pedestrian acceptance of said powers. Planescape introduced itself from the local laymans perspective of the planes. A type of "yeah, I'm nobody...living in an infinite multiverse...under the thumb of an infinite number of powers...so what? A berk's gotta live" attitude. They desided to turn god into a bum...metaphorically speaking. So they created these little lowman pockets of likeminded creatures who weren't superpowers and dotted them throughout the planes...sort of like 'metaphysical union breaks'. I mean, what of all the underlings, transfered souls, and day to day bustles that are inherent toward any powerstuctures. Throw in some clueless primes and you have the making of some fun wonderous adventures.. But that is just my take.

So I think the transfer from mystery to pedantry really affected some people deeply. Other than that, I can only see differences in playstyles really affecting peoples perceptions of the planes. I vary my playstyles so much that this has never really been a problem...but again that is just my take on the situation.

I think I'll go read some more of these posts now.