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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2184456" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.  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.At least that would be a mysterious motivation, but its nonetheless an activity that I can cognitively grasp, so no.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.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.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.And that's precisely why I said it was a bug and not a feature.There are more things in heaven and hell than exist in your philosophies.There is no bloody difference between the two examples.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.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'.</blockquote>

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