Why do most groups avoid planar games?
- Thread starter philreed
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Steel_Wind
Legend
First, to address the main point: I like grim and gritty pseudo medieval campaigns. That's my goal.
No plane hopping adventure is consistent with that stated goal; accordingly, picnics to the lower planes is, to me, anethema to the campaign feel I want to run or play in.
Second, there is an inherent bias in the question, as follows:
"Why do most groups avoid DragonLance?"
<insert recent spew of invective over railroading and sterotypical kender>
"Why do most groups avoid Eberron?"
<insert less recent spew over lighting rails and warforged nonsense>
"Why do most groups avoid Greyhawk?"
<insert debate over old greyhawk, new greyhwak and whether most home brews are essentially Greyhwak in all but name, so that, in fact, we don't avoid it at all. Meh>
"Why do most groups avoid Frogrotten Realms?"
<insert debate over whether that is in fact true. Grudgingly admit it may be so, but that's its still hugely popular all the same and screw you if you don't like it.>
"Why do most groups avoid Darksun, Spelljammer, etc etc etc et al."
<insert etc.>
My point is: we can say with a straight face and with a plausible streak of sincerity that most groups avoid everything.
The RPG community is so fractured, there is no sense of normalcy or "default" style, no matter the example you choose or the campaign name or style you wish to insert in the question.
To those who took offence at the Planescape digs, *shrug*. It's just your turn this week. Next week it will be somebody else's
No plane hopping adventure is consistent with that stated goal; accordingly, picnics to the lower planes is, to me, anethema to the campaign feel I want to run or play in.
Second, there is an inherent bias in the question, as follows:
"Why do most groups avoid DragonLance?"
<insert recent spew of invective over railroading and sterotypical kender>
"Why do most groups avoid Eberron?"
<insert less recent spew over lighting rails and warforged nonsense>
"Why do most groups avoid Greyhawk?"
<insert debate over old greyhawk, new greyhwak and whether most home brews are essentially Greyhwak in all but name, so that, in fact, we don't avoid it at all. Meh>
"Why do most groups avoid Frogrotten Realms?"
<insert debate over whether that is in fact true. Grudgingly admit it may be so, but that's its still hugely popular all the same and screw you if you don't like it.>
"Why do most groups avoid Darksun, Spelljammer, etc etc etc et al."
<insert etc.>
My point is: we can say with a straight face and with a plausible streak of sincerity that most groups avoid everything.
The RPG community is so fractured, there is no sense of normalcy or "default" style, no matter the example you choose or the campaign name or style you wish to insert in the question.
To those who took offence at the Planescape digs, *shrug*. It's just your turn this week. Next week it will be somebody else's
Torm said:Me either - I enjoy a good strategy or puzzle session as well. But through observation I have come to the conclusion that most people play for "kill or break stuff and get treasure and xp" with a tiny bit of shopping and tavern-diving thrown in.Neat settings are always a bonus, but if they become the game, oh boy.
Hmmm...I can't relate to that experience. I've been running Planescape since 1997, and have had easily 10-20 players at various times in the game, and haven't run into that complaint at all.
I find that 3E encourages the "blow stuff up" type of play far more than 2nd Ed. did, but a session where nothing gets killed can be awesome...just investigating a mystery, negotiating with weird planar agents, etc.
Banshee
Mercule said:
I can't imagine running a regular multi-pantheon open-cosmos fantasy game like D&D's standard set-up without using 'beliefs define reality'. The only alternative would be a closed cosmos setup as in Tolkien or Midnight. Of course in reality I hate moral relativism and arguments that there is no absolute empirically ascertainable truth - but unless I'm running a hard-sf or real-world-modern game there needs to be room for "weird made-up stuff"; and belief-defines-reality is to me the only reasonable justification for that.
What I find distasteful is the insistence in D&D texts on Alignment that "Good is not a philosophical concept, it's an absolute force - and here's the definition of Good you are to use in your game" - much worse in 3e than 1e, the 1e definitions were so muddy they were practically meaningless, which left a lot more scope. The text definitions change hugely over time, and often conradict each other - eg they'll both say that Lawful Good is (1) "Human Rights/Creature Rights" and that Lawful Good is (2) "Greatest Good of the Greatest Number" - but Kantian absolute individual human rights (1) is wholly incompatible with Benthamite Utilitarianism (2).
Utilitarianism is (I think) a good definition of Neutral Good in D&D terms - an attempt to achieve highst good without deferring to other factors. Rights-based approaches don't easily fit into Alignment at all, it really depends what 'absolute' Rights you think trump other 'absolute' Rights. My 1981 Moldvay Basic D&D set even says that emphasising Individual Human Rights is Chaotic (and Chaotic = Evil!).
Celebrim said:
This is actually a statement regarding D&D in general. With all of these wizards, prcs, spells floating around, it begins to feel, not so fantastic...
I love planar settings, for many of the reasons that many people here have said they hated them. For all the cosmic power some of these beings and places wield, they somehow have that all too mortal quality deep down.
Try all you want to portray "gods" in your world, but you really have no frame of reference...Trying to find the answers is far more meaningful than actually finding them.
jasper
Rotten DM
…why are you criticizing my examples of how the planes 'can' be run? You're making stuff up on your own (which is fine)...but you think your material is more legit than….
Boy ain’t you sensitive. Ain’t criticizing you.
Since you have the most posts and are the most pro vocal and the whole pt of the thread is why people seem to dislike planar campaigns, I using you as example and cherry picking the “bad” out. Also it seems when most gamers I have met start using Planescape or Manual of Planes I was a heretic for not buying the book or wanting something different about the planes than what was written in their sacred text.
Boy ain’t you sensitive. Ain’t criticizing you.
Since you have the most posts and are the most pro vocal and the whole pt of the thread is why people seem to dislike planar campaigns, I using you as example and cherry picking the “bad” out. Also it seems when most gamers I have met start using Planescape or Manual of Planes I was a heretic for not buying the book or wanting something different about the planes than what was written in their sacred text.
Wild Gazebo said:
Overexposure either destroys the mystery or the curiosity/motive. Either the players gain information, and thus the mystery is revealed, or they don't get information, and become frustrated and lose motivation.
So, therein are some major problems - mystery and strangeness is a "one trick pony". If you're really good, you can string it along for a campaign. But you have to be a master of dramatic timing, and if you're doing it right the material isn't very re-useable (at least, not if you're workign with the same players). And creating really good mystery isn't easy.
Steel_Wind said:
Insofar as no one campaign setting seems to have an actual majority of the D&D players using it, this is true.
This, I'm not so sure of. It is more a question of whether in order to define a class that most people don't avoid, the class becomes so broad as to become useless. I'm not sure it is useless, if in so doing you realize why that broad class has the characteristics it does...
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