Omegonthesane wrote:The Lady of Pain does not serve the function you describe, she serves the function of absolutely forbidding any change to the setting and crushing any PC attempt to try. She is not a good idea executed badly, she is a bad idea executed exactly to spec.
Why is preventing large-scale changes to the setting a bad idea, exactly?
Every setting has a certain set of cosmological, thematic, tonal, etc. assumptions that distinguish it from other settings and provide a reason to use that setting over other ones. Dragonlance is an epic fantasy setting all about the clash between Good and Evil (mediated by Neutrality), meddling gods and their relationship with mortals, large-scale war (with dragons!) and its effect on the common folk, and so on. Dark Sun is a post-apocalyptic survival setting all about the tyranny of the Sorcerer-Kings, the hostility of everything from environment to monsters to other people, the scarcity of resources and magic, and so on. If you want to run a campaign about the clash between Law and Chaos or resisting an illithid invasion of the PCs' homeworld, Dragonlance isn't the setting for that; if you want to run a campaign about warring pantheons of gods or uplifting a world in a Magi-Industrial Revolution, Dark Sun isn't the setting for that.
In that context, mechanisms to prevent large-scale changes to the setting are a
good thing. The Prism Pentad series was all about making large-scale changes to the Dark Sun setting and pretty much every fan of the setting hated it because it rendered the setting basically-unrecognizable and killed or removed most of the unique aspects of the setting. A player who likes Dark Sun (or Dragonlance, or Eberron, or...) shouldn't have to worry whenever they join a game in that setting that the players and/or DM are going to accidentally or intentionally torpedo the setting.
Planescape isn't just "Sigil and the Great Wheel and outsiders and stuff" (the Great Wheel originated in 1e Greyhawk pre-Planescape and the cosmology is the same in 3e post-Planescape), in the same way that Dark Sun isn't just "D&D, but everyone's a poor psionic PC in the desert." Rather, it's a setting about (among other things) approaching the planes and their inhabitants from a perspective of exploration and "big picture" philosophy rather than viewing the planes as just bigger dungeons and demon princes as just things to be stabbed in the face until they stop moving. For that, having a "home base" in the planes that allows a party to quickly travel lots of places and that's safe from divine or other meddling is necessary, and the Lady of Pain ensures that Sigil is that place and remains that place.
Now, the Lady of Pain didn't have to be a thing in the first place; the setting designers could have just said that Sigil is how Sigil is because reasons to ensure Sigil's inviolable neutrality, and that would have been fine. And perhaps that would have been a better approach, because then you wouldn't see DMs having the Lady interfere directly with the PCs or splatbook writers have her meddle with the Factions, completely misunderstanding her role...but in that case the setting would still resist being changed, so that really has nothing to do with it being an NPC rather than a setting conceit that keeps the status quo.
Of course, if a group
wants to play in a setting but change some of the trappings of the setting or allow the PCs to make large-scale changes, that's certainly possible. You want to play in a Dragonlance game where the War of the Lance went differently? Go for it; there are even alternate setting writeups in several splatbooks to help the DM figure out how things would go. You want to play in a Dark Sun game where gods are a thing? Go for it; there are previous Ages you can play in, or the DM can say that the hints about there once having been gods are true and one of them has been sealed away for a bazillion years. You want to play in a Planescape campaign where the Blood War spills into Sigil and the demons start conquering the multiverse? Go for it; Vecna once found a loophole around the Lady's protections, maybe Asmodeus or Demogorgon did too.
But that's the kind of thing that only makes for a good campaign every once in a while. If every Dark Sun campaign is about overthrowing a Sorcerer-King and every Planescape campaign is about someone trying to invade Sigil then 99% of the setting is thrown away in favor of the same ol' same ol', like if every Dragonlance campaign was just running through the original Dragonlance adventure path for the Nth time, so specific powerful NPCs or other conceits that ensure a good degree of stability at the setting level is a good thing.
You are the only one that has conflated anything in this entire thread. It's been entirely clear that the objection is to NPCs that restrict PC agency and either are absolutely unstoppable, like Caine or the Antediluvians or the Lady of Pain; or are clearly intended to be absolutely unstoppable, like Elminster or the Deathlords. This is not the function of "setting police" that you describe. You are meant to one day defeat the dragon; you are never, ever, in a million years, meant to be able to become strong enough to defeat Elminster.
For all that people complain about Elminster, he's been dunked on multiple times--captured by an archfiend and needed to be rescued, lost duels against other big-name wizards, had important artifacts stolen from him by Sharrans, depowered and/or went insane multiple times, and so on.
He's not a deus ex machina who micromanages and/or killsteals parties of low-level PCs for shits and giggles, as some like to portray him, he's the guy who can narrate a bunch of sourcebooks because he's been everywhere and seen it all. Less Gandalf, more The Doctor.
And while some DMs certainly do misuse him as a DM mouthpiece or Gary Stu self-insert, those DMs can do the same with Szass Tam or the Simbul or Telamont Tanthul or other fuckoff-powerful wizards who have the same kinds of plot-device-level spells and powers at their disposal and much more of a reputation for actively meddling in things, and barely anyone complains about them.
ColorBlindNinja61 wrote:I know Elminster is the most infamous Penis Extension NPC in D&D, but how do Mordenkainen and Raistlin compare? I know Raistlin is laughably built (something like a 10 in CON), but Mordenkainen isn't. They're not nearly as well known (EDIT: Mordenkainen isn't), are they actually worse than Elminster?
Nah, neither has anywhere near the meddlesome tendencies that Elminster does. Mordenkainen is all about preventing any one faction from gaining too much power on Oerth, but if you're not at "flood the entire planet with balors" levels of Evil he basically doesn't care about you. Raistlin eventually wanted to become a god and kill everyone, and actually succeeded at it, but he was eventually persuaded that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be and undid his ascension and during the whole process he didn't really care about any particular mortals whom he didn't know personally.