Why do most groups avoid planar games?

Oryan77: I think your 2:15 post pretty much sums up precisely why I admired Planescape so much but never used it.

Ultimately, the setting tends to make the extraordinary into the mundane. It's the anthromorphic principle taken to its ultimate extreme. It suggests that everything everywhere no matter how different it may be from the ordinary is after the local color is removed completely recognizable and understandable.

To clarify, I - and I think alot of DM's - would consider the following statements to be 'bugs' and not 'features'.

"Don't send PC's to the Gray Waste to fight in the Bloodwar, send them to the Gray Waste to deliver battle plans to a Platoon of fiends."

"just do a typical city adventure but with stranger PC's."

"a low lvl sailing adventure in the Plane of Water..."

"My party is 6th lvl and adventuring in Baator (Hell) right now." (That one is particularly funny)

"They've encoutered almost every type of Baatezu (devil) so far"

"Powerful creatures still need to get things done like the rest of them."

"There's still markets, cities, and taverns on the planes."

"Fiends & Angels like recreation like everyone else."

"...how realistic is that?" (That one in particular irks me for its lack of understanding of the issues being raised.)

"Someone is making cheap army gear for the Bloodwar & building homes in cities on the planes, and I'm sure it's not Pit Fiends and Deva's doing it."
 
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Oryan77 said:
How is a DM providing information about a portal for travel any different than a DM providing information about a ship or caravan available for PC's to hitch a ride on to another city?
It's different because (1) in the Prime Material an adventurer can hire a ship or a wagon and travel in any direction s/he pleases, whereas if I create a system of plane-hopping portals the player characters are channeled only in the direction that I choose for them and (2) for me (and this is entirely personal) it feels more sci fi than fantasy, more Captain Kirk than Conan.
 

Psion said:
AFAIAC, it's not the preferred starting mechanism for planar games.
Understandably so - without some sort of portal system or magic item to substitute for spell casting there is no planar game. That doesn't recommend it to me however.

For the most part I prefer the planes to be much harder to reach than stepping through a shimmering curtain of light - that's not to say that it doesn't happen occasionally before the first spellcaster can cast ethereal jaunt, but overall I prefer experiencing the planes to be a spice in my campaign world, not a vegetable.
 

Henry said:
Ditto, here. I wouldn't be averse to a lower-level planar based game, but it always feels like it's not "getting justice" to me. Having a rich environment is one thing, but 90% of the inhabitants of the Great Wheel Outer Planes could slash mortal low-level adventurers to ribbons in a single fit of pique on their home territories (like the 'loths, Tanar'ri, and Baatezu that Shemeska's description mentions).

You just need to look a little farther back than planescape. TSR has a supplement called Tales of the Outer Planes that did an excellent job of providing planar adventures at all levels of play. All things planar do not need to end at the Blood War.
 

Man-thing said:
You just need to look a little farther back than planescape. TSR has a supplement called Tales of the Outer Planes that did an excellent job of providing planar adventures at all levels of play. All things planar do not need to end at the Blood War.

I used to own Tales of the Outer Planes, and do NOT have a very high opinion of it, having given it away loooong ago. :) In my opinion, it was a very poorly conceived series of adventures where the PCs were looking at the scenery more than making a difference.

I haven't read Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, but someone likened that adventure to that particular book. If Callahan's was really anything like TotOP, I won't ever pick that up, either.
 

The Shaman said:
It's different because (1) in the Prime Material an adventurer can hire a ship or a wagon and travel in any direction s/he pleases, whereas if I create a system of plane-hopping portals the player characters are channeled only in the direction that I choose for them and (2) for me (and this is entirely personal) it feels more sci fi than fantasy, more Captain Kirk than Conan.

I understand how you can think of it that way. But really, it's no different than anything else. It's just a different way to describe doing the exact same thing. Like everyone keeps saying, it's "weird". Planar games are really no different than other games. You're still accomplishing the same goals, just in a more colorful way. If you want your players to go from city A to city B, you're going to provide them with transportation to get there somehow or another. Same with providing them with a portal. You want to get them to destination B, the only difference is the method of travel. If you want to provide them with a ship & let them make the decision where they want to end up, they have to first know the direction & 'how' to get there. Planewalkers do the same thing. They can decide where they want to go, all they have to do is find out 'how' to get there. Instead of finding a cartographer with maps of the seas/lands, they find a portal specialist to find out what portal to take and what key opens it.

If you say, "well part of travelling on the road is the encounters". If I want to have travelling encounters, the party might need to take several portals. Take portal #1 to plane #1 in order to take portal #2 that will lead them to their destination. And I can throw travelling encounters at them while they are on plane #1 heading to portal #2.

It's not really anymore sci-fi than standard settings. It's just magical travel & magical environments.

I'll agree though, players don't learn as many intricate details about regions in a planar game. But I would get bored playing in the same land around the same city session after session. Those details bore me. I play D&D for new fun adventures and character growth, not to learn about the politics a DM created for his city or the climate changes throughout the year in the land he created. If I'm given enough info so I can visualize the environment and understand the natives, that's all I need.

I think people just complain about planar games because they prefer standard fantasy...nothing more. The 2 games are really no different as far as gameplay goes unless you make it different. It's just different environments, just like different kingdoms on a prime world. Planar games are just more extreme, which can be too much. Some people like vanilla settings and some like chocolate settings...in the end, it's still just ice cream.
 

Celebrim said:
Psion: I don't think anyone here is saying that you are wrong to play the way that you do. They are merely pointing out the likely reasons most DM's avoid planar games.

You'll notice I'm not taking trouble to contradict most people in this thread. Just those who are trying to generalize their opinions. There are as many different ways to game as there are gamers.

You can argue however you like that with this modification or other the standard cosmology can be changed to better suit campaigning 'out there', but that doesn't alter the fact that the cosmology as it is usually present isn't conducive to campaigning.

And that's just the sort of thing I am talking about. Having run and run in several campaigns and never had the issue come up one, the assertion that it's not conducive to campaigning seems a little less than universally true.

How many times has the issue of scale come up in this thread already? Think of it as the Star Wars problem. You've got a whole galaxy of interesting planetary cultures each of which is as complex and diverse as the real Earth. But since this is far more work than any one DM can manage, the whole of a planet ends up getting represented as the interior of a particular bar or a particular space dock or a few acres of swamp (or whatever).

And I used to be right there with you in this feel. But I eventually I came to realize -- and many other GMs realize -- that only the places you visit in your campaign matter. You don't need whole worlds with painstaking mappings of their economies and sociologies to have enjoyable sessions in the setting. Well, you may need it, as in it may be your personal preference, but in general, it's not a requirement for a GM to run a meaningful game.

Most DM's only grab the planes as a device when they need an 'anti-setting' and the device of the otherworldly portal conveys to the character 'Don't expect everything to work just like it does in the regular setting that I've been carefully constructing'. Either that or they need a place to safely store a being of extreme danger.

I think that those GMs who do like planar gaming come to appreciate that there are far more than one variation in qualities of a plane that makes for interesting substrate of a game than hells populated with savage demons.

I mean, as great and original as the Planescape setting was, it got freaking dropped. Ditto Ravenloft. If that was really the standard fare, it would have been more popular.

I'm not sure what your point here is. "Standard fare" is four adventurers hacking apart monsters in a dungeon. Variations of this sell less well. I'm not arguing at any point that planar adventuring is so common to be the norm. Merely that your perception of what the norm is within that subset of gaming does not match with reality. How big that subset is, and hence its marketability, has no bearing on that.
 

Henry said:
Sigil, while a cool concept, basically placed Modern-Day New York in the middle of the 1800's Louisiana Purchase, and it grates against my feeling of what the planes should be. ... I want it to be skin-of-their teeth, and necessary, rather than the setting for a politically-oriented adventure. There may be occasional outposts of safety, but none that are easy to come by.

Who says Modern Day New York is a safe place?
[I don't necessarily like Planescape very much, just saying.]
 
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The Shaman said:
It's different because (1) in the Prime Material an adventurer can hire a ship or a wagon and travel in any direction s/he pleases, whereas if I create a system of plane-hopping portals the player characters are channeled only in the direction that I choose for them

That strikes me as a bit of an artificial comparison.

I mean you as the DM probably drew the map, and put the nations there. That's still you controlling the directions they can go. And you are further limited by (usually) 2 dimension. A nearby huge influential empire limits what else you could put in that direction and it's enimies.

While I would not deny the fact that portals gives you more control is a matter of great appeal to me, there is also a great deal of room to give the players more latitude. That said, as a practical matter, it seems to me that the GM realistically needs to restrain or cajole the players motion anyways.

I'm just saying... portals can be either more or less flexible than a standard fantasy world on the issue. Which is the good thing. Flexibility.

The Shaman said:
For the most part I prefer the planes to be much harder to reach than stepping through a shimmering curtain of light

And if that's your preference, there is really not that much I can say about it. If you don't like portals, you don't like portals.

However, I would hasten emphasize that it need not be that simple. Even in PS it wasn't -- you needed portal keys. Phil's planar gate PDFs also provide some great examples of intriguing gates with great flavor and story potential. Getting through a portal can be an excercise for the party to pursue their goals. (Not only can it, I would go so far as to say occasionally, it should be, to keep portals from becoming, well, pedestrian.)
 
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Oryan77 said:
If you want your players to go from city A to city B, you're going to provide them with transportation to get there somehow or another. Same with providing them with a portal. You want to get them to destination B, the only difference is the method of travel.
No, I don't want them to go anywhere - I want the adventurers to decide where they want to go and how to get there. I don't lead them by their noses - my game-world and my storylines simply aren't structured that way.
Oryan77 said:
If you want to provide them with a ship & let them make the decision where they want to end up, they have to first know the direction & 'how' to get there. Planewalkers do the same thing. They can decide where they want to go, all they have to do is find out 'how' to get there. Instead of finding a cartographer with maps of the seas/lands, they find a portal specialist to find out what portal to take and what key opens it.
All of this is postulated on the idea that any of these things exist in the game-world I created - fact is, there are no planewalkers, no portal specialists, no keys.

While I respect the right of anyone to play the game however they like, what you just described sounds silly to me - that's just not what the planes are in my cosmology, nor do I have any desire to make them so to facilitate a style of play that I don't enjoy.
Oryan77 said:
It's not really anymore sci-fi than standard settings.
Perhaps to you that's true, but it is to me - I mean, forgive me for being abrupt, but you're really in no position whatsoever to tell me what I like and don't like, or the way something feels or doesn't feel to me.
 

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