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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2186565" data-attributes="member: 4937">If I hear this one more time, I'm going to go into outright flame mode.[RANT]Have you ever thought that maybe you do like planar games because your perception of them is limited?[/RANT]The reason I don't do planar campaigning isn't that my perception of the planes is limited; rather, the reason I don't do planar campaigning is that in my opinion a mortal's perception of them should by definition be limited, and in my opinion if you make the planes limited enough that normal joes live in normal communities within them then you have betrayed what makes 'the planes' have a unique character and in fact they are not longer 'the planes'.  In other words, I don't consider that the claim that you have 'portals to universes in which dwell incarnate beings and ideas shape reality' to be a true statement if those universes have the same essential character of the normal universe.   Or put even more simply, I don't consider what you do to be true 'planar campaigning' at all.   What you are doing is colorful and probably fun, and I'm sure you get alot of milage out of convienent metaphors, but its no more 'planar campaigning' than Forgotten Realms is 'medieval campaigning'.  To take another example, if you have a 'demon' that's not utterly evil, then however conveinent of a metaphor you may find the word 'demon', you don't actually have a demon because they thing you have violates the implicit and explicit definition of a demon.  Demons are incarnated evil.   A demon has less capacity to do good (even in its own interest) than a Paladin has to commit evil in the service of good.   A demon that's just a litte bit evil and a little bit good is basically a person, and the tag you've labeled it with is just a conveinent tag for evoking all the mythic baggage of the word without having to do the heavy lifting of creating that content for yourself.   You haven't been 'nuanced', you've reduced the concept down to the level of the juvenile - and the best you can probably manage is to make 'demons' a semi-ridiculous metaphor for the trials of growing up alla 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.  Again, because you are still not getting it despite all the times I've tried to make this clear, I think a 'Planescape' campaign is impossible to run and stay true to the source material because every real DM is 'clueless' and doesn't know the 'dark' of it by definition.  It's a beautiful stylish idea filled with well executed color, and I found alot of its stuff very intriguing, but I don't think its an idea that can be executed on a practical level without violating the idea.   I'm a glad that you enjoy it.   I think its swell that you are having alot of fun, because I'm sure that that is what the writer's intended.   But, again, in the same way that I became very disenchanted with Vampire: The Masquerade because in practice on the whole it ended up being a Supers game with different costumes rather than the intriguing but nearly unexecutable idea held within the original text.   In fact, I'd go so far as to say that latter supplements abandoned the original idea and gave the player community what they really wanted (but dared not think to themselves that they wanted it) - more of a combat oriented supers game in which the players were increasingly allowed to not think about the philosophical issues raised by the original text.And I'm not just picking on Planescape.  I think that the basic problem would remain true of every campaign that tried to go into the planes on a regular basis.   I love the H.P. Lovecraft 'Dreamlands', but I'd never run a campaign there because it would violate alot of what I think makes a Cthullu game cool to have player's romping around in the 'Planes' delving into the secrets of the universe.</blockquote>

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