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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2182098" data-attributes="member: 4937">1) The more alien the environment, the less able the players are in interacting with it, and the less able they are able to understand and relate to the characters.2) Planar play is almost invariably 12th level or higher.&nbsp; D&amp;D has traditionally had balance issues at high levels, and the vast majority of DM's prefer low level and more intimate play.3) Planar play tends to have the same problems that Sci-Fi play has with the issue of scale.&nbsp; Everything is just too big for a DM to really put any detail in it, and so whole plane(t)s boil down to a few small scale locations where the action takes place.&nbsp;&nbsp; So the real grandeur of the scale of planar settings never really matters, because its impossible for a DM to do enough work to really convey it well.4) There are some real issues of cosmology involved planar adventures.&nbsp; No 'world' is infinite.&nbsp; The games 'world' is finite, with finite populations, and finite resources, and finite threats.&nbsp;&nbsp; But if _each_ plane is infinite, or at least really really huge, then the population of the planes approaches infinity, the resources of the planes approaches infinitiy, and the threats on the planes approach the infinite.&nbsp;&nbsp; All of this leads to a really big problem.&nbsp;&nbsp; If the planes are that much bigger and grander than the 'world', isn't the stuff that happens on the world relatively unimportant?&nbsp;&nbsp; Typically, instead of making things seem more important, and making stories seem more compelling, setting the adventure out in the planes just tends to trivalize what the players do.&nbsp;&nbsp; In fact, the whole campaign 'world' tends to become irrelevant.&nbsp; If lots and lots of beings just 'live' ordinary lives out in the planes with bars, politics, and ordinary squabbles, what does it really matter what people do on a 'world'.&nbsp;&nbsp; To paraphrase a very good movie, &quot;If everyone is special, it's just another way of saying that no one is.&quot;&nbsp; And if there are infinite words, any carefully planned cosmology with a wonderful compelling pantheon of deities becomes rather ho-hum, because the implication is that everything is true somewhere - and hense that nothing is really True.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 2182098, member: 4937"] 1) The more alien the environment, the less able the players are in interacting with it, and the less able they are able to understand and relate to the characters. 2) Planar play is almost invariably 12th level or higher. D&D has traditionally had balance issues at high levels, and the vast majority of DM's prefer low level and more intimate play. 3) Planar play tends to have the same problems that Sci-Fi play has with the issue of scale. Everything is just too big for a DM to really put any detail in it, and so whole plane(t)s boil down to a few small scale locations where the action takes place. So the real grandeur of the scale of planar settings never really matters, because its impossible for a DM to do enough work to really convey it well. 4) There are some real issues of cosmology involved planar adventures. No 'world' is infinite. The games 'world' is finite, with finite populations, and finite resources, and finite threats. But if _each_ plane is infinite, or at least really really huge, then the population of the planes approaches infinity, the resources of the planes approaches infinitiy, and the threats on the planes approach the infinite. All of this leads to a really big problem. If the planes are that much bigger and grander than the 'world', isn't the stuff that happens on the world relatively unimportant? Typically, instead of making things seem more important, and making stories seem more compelling, setting the adventure out in the planes just tends to trivalize what the players do. In fact, the whole campaign 'world' tends to become irrelevant. If lots and lots of beings just 'live' ordinary lives out in the planes with bars, politics, and ordinary squabbles, what does it really matter what people do on a 'world'. To paraphrase a very good movie, "If everyone is special, it's just another way of saying that no one is." And if there are infinite words, any carefully planned cosmology with a wonderful compelling pantheon of deities becomes rather ho-hum, because the implication is that everything is true somewhere - and hense that nothing is really True. [/QUOTE]

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