I find it unlikely that the Pundit has ever cracked a single Planescape setting book open.

Planescape does a pretty good job of showing just how powerful and versatile D&D can be. There's more than a tincture of 1990s White Wolfesque pretension to it, which is probably what rankles Pundejo so much, but like the White Wolf games it vaguely tries to ape, it's a fun game. I also get a whiff of China Miéville, but I'm not particularly well-read on Miéville so I can't really elaborate beyond a vague impression.

Nevertheless it can lead to some fun gaming that's not better or worse than the usual D&D premise, just different. It develops the Great Wheel cosmology into something coherent enough to serve as a springboard for what I've long perceived to be D&D's focal point -- exploration.

Some of the élan may be lost if you try a bait-and-switch with your group, but really. People playing Planescape should know what to expect. Pundejo's concern about "banalizing the planes", like his critique of White Wolf, sounds like armchair gaming to me.

Quote from: The Butcher;709324I find it unlikely that the Pundit has ever cracked a single Planescape setting book open.

Planescape does a pretty good job of showing just how powerful and versatile D&D can be. There's more than a tincture of 1990s White Wolfesque pretension to it, which is probably what rankles Pundejo so much, but like the White Wolf games it vaguely tries to ape, it's a fun game. I also get a whiff of China Miéville, but I'm not particularly well-read on Miéville so I can't really elaborate beyond a vague impression.

Nevertheless it can lead to some fun gaming that's not better or worse than the usual D&D premise, just different. It develops the Great Wheel cosmology into something coherent enough to serve as a springboard for what I've long perceived to be D&D's focal point -- exploration.

Some of the élan may be lost if you try a bait-and-switch with your group, but really. People playing Planescape should know what to expect. Pundejo's concern about "banalizing the planes", like his critique of White Wolf, sounds like armchair gaming to me.

Yep.

Quote from: The ButcherThere's more than a tincture of 1990s White Wolfesque pretension to it...

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that old Lorraine Williams told the designers to write something that captured the feel of White Wolf's Vampire clans and the beleaguered designers rolled with the punches, hence the Factions.  All things considered I think they turned out reasonably well.  Some of them (Dustmen, Signers, Sensates, Doomguard, Ciphers) are better than others (the Free League are pretty boring, and the Harmonium end up just functioning as Sigil's cops).

Quote from: The ButcherI also get a whiff of China Miéville, but I'm not particularly well-read on Miéville so I can't really elaborate beyond a vague impression.

Planescape was published well before Miéville started writing, but Miéville is a huge gaming nerd and writes a lot of urban fantasy, so the comparison is very apt.  I've read some interviews with him where he talks about the "city as dungeon" phenomenon and I know he's a collector of gaming bestiaries, and D&D specifically was a big influence on his stuff, especially the Bas-Lag stuff.  New Crobuzon and Sigil have several similarities - both are quasi-Victorian metropolises full of arcane conspiracies, crime, urban decay, and weird monsters.

Quote from: Machinegun Blue;709319What's with the should be crap? D&D is for adventuring. The Manual of the Planes was boring. A retirement home for adventurers maybe?

Its a toolkit that lets you make the Planes awesome, rather than a second-rate White Wolf clone.

Quote from: RPGPundit;709589Its a toolkit that lets you make the Planes awesome, rather than a second-rate White Wolf clone.

Okay, relatively certain at this point you never read Planescape.

The Old World of Darkness and Planescape are interesting to compare.  I disagree that Planescape is a "White Wolf clone" by any stretch of the imagination, but there are certain parallels: the urban fantasy feeling, the punk sensibility, the internicine political landscape.  It's not nearly as uniformly dark, though, nor is it a horror setting by any means, but I do think that White Wolf had a definite influence on some aspects of Planescape.

I think what may put some off is the overall irreverence of the setting, the way it upends a lot of standard D&D tropes.  Even though the Great Wheel bursts with Gods and spirits, many of those depicted in the setting are sardonic, cynical types who regard deities with suspicion and even disdain (most notably the Athar, but to a lesser extent the Bleak Cabal).  Planescape subverts the cosmological/religious assumptions that D&D usually makes.  Gods in D&D are usually either adored or feared; in Planescape their righteousness, their motives, and even their divinity itself are thrown into question.  The Planes in vanilla D&D are usually mysterious, nigh-inaccesible realms that stand out against the mundane, quasi-medieval setting; in Planescape they're a place where people and creatures live and build cities and politick, and their very borders and boundaries and nature are malleable.  Rather than the struggle between Good and Evil forming the crux of the conflict, as more mundane D&D settings frequently assume, Planescape is more interested in the clash between different epistemic and ontological points of view.

Yeah there's some obvious WW influence, which I outlined earlier in the thread I think (probably 2 weeks ago now); the use of "cliques" to quickly establish social standings and relations, the use of a unique lexicon to aid in characterization, etc. All optional role-playing aids for new characters. Even a bit of existential angst to appeal to Gen X.

Calling Planescape a WW clone is either ignorant or disingenuous hyperbole though.

Quote from: Steerpike;709336I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that old Lorraine Williams told the designers to write something that captured the feel of White Wolf's Vampire clans and the beleaguered designers rolled with the punches, hence the Factions.  All things considered I think they turned out reasonably well.  Some of them (Dustmen, Signers, Sensates, Doomguard, Ciphers) are better than others (the Free League are pretty boring, and the Harmonium end up just functioning as Sigil's cops).

Honestly the plansecape factions were all pretty stupid (faction that does real charity work is Chaotic Evil no fooling) but D&D moral philosophy has always been pretty stupid, so I'd like to belive the more stupid things were self-parody

Anyway some good definitely did come from Planescape because a lot of that stuff got folded back into the 3e DMG, and it was pretty cool.

Quote from: gamerGoyfHonestly the plansecape factions were all pretty stupid... but D&D moral philosophy has always been pretty stupid, so I'd like to belive the more stupid things were self-parody

It depends on how you play them, how the DM and players interpret them.  The philosophical sophistication of the Factions isn't so complex as to make the setting opaque.  It's quite possible to play them in such a way that they come off as little more than caricatures of their respective positions, cartoonish representations of the philosophies they represent, and there's certainly canon material that presents them in this broad light, but there are other sections that don't reduce them to parody.  One thing that's sort of weird about Planescape is the interaction between the crudeness of the D&D Alignment system and the relative complexity of the Factions, though, and navigating that can be tricky.

Quote from: gamerGoyf(faction that does real charity work is Chaotic Evil no fooling)

Your info is actually incorrect here.  None of the Factions have any single Alignment associated with them in any sort of consistent way.  Even the Harmonium, who are supposed to represent Lawful Good in a lot of ways, end up sliding into Lawful Neutral territory sometimes - so much so they send a whole layer of Arcadia into Mechanus as a result of their indoctrination camps.  The Chaosmen have Chaotic members, but they can be Chaotic Good, Neutral, or Evil.  Likewise with the Lawful Guvners.   The Mercykillers seem like classic Lawful Evil, but even they have some Paladin members.  The Faction you're reffering to are the Bleak Cabal (I think they're the ones you're thinking of - they're the ones who do most of Sigil's charity work, certainly, setting up soup kitchens in the Hive and taking in orphans, vagrants, and the mentally ill), and they are by no means an "All Chaotic Evil" Faction by any stretch of the imagination.  Their Factol is Chaotic Neutral, and they have members of most other Alignments except Lawful (as the existentialist faction, they find Law too obssessed with intrinsic meaning).

While we're on the subject of Planescape, has anyone ever run a campaign in Acheron for any length of time? The place fascinates me as a mini-setting in its own right.

Quote from: Steerpike;709609It depends on how you play them, how the DM and players interpret them.  The philosophical sophistication of the Factions isn't so complex as to make the setting opaque.  It's quite possible to play them in such a way that they come off as little more than caricatures of their respective positions, cartoonish representations of the philosophies they represent, and there's certainly canon material that presents them in this broad light, but there are other sections that don't reduce them to parody.  One thing that's sort of weird about Planescape is the interaction between the crudeness of the D&D Alignment system and the relative complexity of the Factions, though, and navigating that can be tricky.



Your info is actually incorrect here.  None of the Factions have any single Alignment associated with them in any sort of consistent way.  Even the Harmonium, who are supposed to represent Lawful Good in a lot of ways, end up sliding into Lawful Neutral territory sometimes - so much so they send a whole layer of Arcadia into Mechanus as a result of their indoctrination camps.  The Chaosmen have Chaotic members, but they can be Chaotic Good, Neutral, or Evil.  Likewise with the Lawful Guvners.   The Mercykillers seem like classic Lawful Evil, but even they have some Paladin members.  The Faction you're reffering to are the Bleak Cabal (I think they're the ones you're thinking of - they're the ones who do most of Sigil's charity work, certainly, setting up soup kitchens in the Hive and taking in orphans, vagrants, and the mentally ill), and they are by no means an "All Chaotic Evil" Faction by any stretch of the imagination.  Their Factol is Chaotic Neutral, and they have members of most other Alignments except Lawful (as the existentialist faction, they find Law too obssessed with intrinsic meaning).

I think that may be the problem and what Pundit is keying on.
The Planescape Factions serve no thematic purpose in a dimension of defined alignment sectors. Each is too alignment ambiguous to actually represent an alignment sector. Depending on how you view or play them or the descriptions.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;709628While we're on the subject of Planescape, has anyone ever run a campaign in Acheron for any length of time? The place fascinates me as a mini-setting in its own right.

That and the Blood Wars sounded like wargames waiting to happen. Blood Wars got its CCG. but eh. Acheron would have made an interesting wargame setting.

Quote from: Omega;709636I think that may be the problem and what Pundit is keying on.
The Planescape Factions serve no thematic purpose in a dimension of defined alignment sectors. Each is too alignment ambiguous to actually represent an alignment sector. Depending on how you view or play them or the descriptions.

The Factions served an entirely different purpose, from my PoV, namely to assist instant player identification and a starting point for their PC's motivations. I didn't see them as pursuing a thematic purpose, except insofar as that phrase could be applied to "the theme of the character one is creating".

Compare/Contrast to the use of Feats to "distinguish characters", from a system perspective rather than a setting perspective.

OTOH, in a game like Warhammer, Factions would be more comparable to choosing a guild for a character.

Within the setting itself, I saw Factions as "coping mechanisms" that characters chose to deal with the psychological and philosophical effects of living on/near the Planes.

Quote from: Shipyard LockedWhile we're on the subject of Planescape, has anyone ever run a campaign in Acheron for any length of time? The place fascinates me as a mini-setting in its own right.

I haven't run an extended game there but I did have a couple of sessions awhile back that were all on Acheron.  One particularly memorable segment involved a Goblinoid settlement built on a series of small cubes connected by scrap-fashioned bridges.  The strange nature of gravity on the Plane made this a very fun place to explore, requiring a lot of illustrations to give the players an idea of where they were (what face of which cube they were on and how the cubes were interconnected).  There were also crude flying machines and giant birds and insects involved, and a lot of running around blowing up bridges while massed Hobgoblin archers rained arrows down on them.  The whole thing eventually culminated in the PCs fleeing the Plane along a root of Yggdrasil with Goblin bat-riders in pursuit and Nidhogg the World-Serpent trying to catch them for a quick snack.

Quote from: OmegaThe Planescape Factions serve no thematic purpose in a dimension of defined alignment sectors.  Each is too alignment ambiguous to actually represent an alignment sector. Depending on how you view or play them or the descriptions.

Yeah, it really plays with and sometimes problematizes Alignment, even while some Factions like the Guvners and Chaosmen are still associated with at least one axis of the Alignment spectrum.  Frequently creatures of the same Alignment will find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict, though, and this to me is one of the joys of the setting.  It's quite possible to have, say, a Lawful Neutral Doomguard, Dustman, Mercykiller, and Cipher who all have differing ideas about how reality behaves and how we should act in that reality, or to see Chaotic Good and Chaotic Evil characters working together to further some goal of their Faction, like two Anarchists both out to tear down the system, but with different moral inflections.  At it's best Planescape is like some mad mashup of the Moorcockian Cosmic Balance and something like Dungeons and Discourse in this regard.

Quote from: The Butcher;709324I find it unlikely that the Pundit has ever cracked a single Planescape setting book open.

I owned the original boxed set when it came out, having been impressed with the design/look along with just about everyone else.  I have also looked at some of the sourcebooks for it.

Its dreck.  That isn't the HIGHER REALMS its not the place of the Gods, its just reduced to another greyhawk or FR. The fact that its not happening on a prime material plane is just circumstance.

That's the problem.  When you're told "You are going to HELL", or alternately "You will ascend into Olympus!", you do not want it to be places that are mundane (by mundane, read "as mundane as some funky places you can find on a D&D material plane").  There's literally NO point in going to the higher planes anymore that makes it different or more special than going to, say, Waterdeep.

At least Spelljammer, which was not a great product, still managed to make their game about Space.  
Planescape, on the other hand, turned the realms of the Gods, demons, and angels into just another Greyhawk.

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