Why does the Lady of Pain render gamers short in the pants?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Seems to me like a typical Mary Sue character whom the creators are too much of a chicken to give actual stats in fear of someone ruining this thing's aura of smoove.

What baffles me, though, is why this character somehow inspires fear and admiration rather than rampant mockery at this blatant penis-waving. I mean, Elminster got a lot of (well-deserved) shit for his wankery but he's nowhere near as bad as the Lady of Pain. So is this the same kind of kayfabe people use to pretend that the Joker is one of the biggest DCU villains ever, or what?

[Starmaker]

Tthe most important strategic location in the game world, if it should exist and be known, has to stay unconquered by any conflicting forces through the whole history of the game world. With (T = inf) and (N conflicting forces = over 9000), the neutral force controlling it has to be quite impressive.

The Lady of Pain is a force of nature. She might have tits, an impressive crown and a female pronoun, but she is not a character, is not meant to be played and does not have an agenda. She's there to explain why no one else has conquered Sigil yet. The designers could have said would-be conquerors tend to disappear in the city, never to be seen again, devoured by shadows or something. They chose to give that force an image instead, which became the poster girl for Planescape ("This is not a game about conquering the multiverse".)

Now Elminster is an actual character. He has an agenda, he's mortal, super-powerful, an author's self-insert and a dick, the very definition of a Mary Sue. The Lady, on the other hand, is less of a character than Ao (who's also a dick). Of course, the DM always can disregard the setting and roleplay her as a bitch, which is bad for Her Serenity's public image, not that she cares.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The Lady of Pain is a force of nature. She might have tits, an impressive crown and a female pronoun, but she is not a character, is not meant to be played and does not have an agenda.

Nope.

She's there to explain why no one else has conquered Sigil yet. The designers could have said would-be conquerors tend to disappear in the city, never to be seen again, devoured by shadows or something. They chose to give that force an image instead, which became the poster girl for Planescape ("This is not a game about conquering the multiverse".)

Still sounds like penis-waving. 'My city is so awesome that not even ALL THE GODS CAN CONQUER IT MUAHAHA'. If places fundamental to cosmology like Hell and Valhalla don't have game designer penises like the LoP watching over it, then why should Sigil?

[Starmaker]

Nope.
...
Still sounds like penis-waving. 'My city is so awesome that not even ALL THE GODS CAN CONQUER IT MUAHAHA'.

Um... yeah?
The Lady reacts to
1) worshiping her
2) planar war on the streets
3) killing dabus,
and the perpetrators are either v& or b& IRL. This is all quite understandable, because if there is neutral ground by design, it had better be neutral, we don't want dabus being killed left and right, and the designers did not want clerics of LoP in the game (her not being a god is not a problem given that in AD&D one can get cleric spells by praying to longcat).
Otherwise she just floats around. You won't see her often, Sigil being fvcking huge.

If places fundamental to cosmology like Hell and Valhalla don't have game designer penises like the LoP watching over it, then why should Sigil?

Valhalla has gods living there, Hell has gods and archdevils. Tome PCs can't conquer either. So it's not the matter of cockblocking PCs but warding off substantially more powerful NPCs and the setting making sense. We want the Blood War and the Good vs Evil War to be there, so there's nothing to prevent Asmodeus from invading Glorium... except gods, celestials, demon lords and other archdevils.
By design, Sigil is meant to be open to anyone, neutral and relatively peaceful. So it has the LoP. Nexus has the Emissary. Lankhmar has its own gods.

Elminster is there to specifically bug the PCs and steal their kills.

[schpeelah]

Lady of Pain isn't a Mary Sue. She's just The Ultimate Final Guardian of Stasus Quo in Sigil. She will kill you for trying to upset Status Quo and do nithinhg else. Othervise the city just cannot be what it is supposed to be - a neutral home base for the PCs to start adventures in.

[virgil]

If places fundamental to cosmology like Hell and Valhalla don't have game designer penises like the LoP watching over it, then why should Sigil?

Hell and Valhalla do have something watching over them, their infinite size on top of their godly inhabitants. Sigil is finite and doesn't have that as a buffer against being fundamentally changed.

Yes, Sigil could maintain the exact same status quo just by having fundamental principles maintain order (gods can't seem to enter, major public disruption causes disruption of existence, etc); but then people would just apply the Pathetic Fallacy and attribute a personality to it anyway. So you might as well just assume the Pathetic Fallacy did its work, and give Sigil a mascot, the Lady of Pain.

"If it has a face, it must have stats."?

[Judging__Eagle]

I think that most people don't give a shit, because the Lady of Pain will seriously not interfere with whatever you are doing, as long as you aren't trying to bother Sigil.

Seriously, every other character possible could, or would eventually interfere with you.

The gods can give you an order, the powerful characters can push weaker people around and so on down the scale.

However the LoP doesn't actually give a shit if you're raping babies in Sigil, or making them. She's a non-interfering NPC, and only if a creature is actively and visibly destroying Sigil, will she interfere.

Also, the idea of calling her a "she" is probably a misnomer. 'She' has a slender waist, sightly wider hips, and fatty deposits on 'her' pectoral muscles. The LoP could very well be Sigil itself.

It should be noted that the LoP doesn't seem to issue edicts, actually govern the city, or do anything aside from act like the most bad-ass city guard that ever existed.

I think that the last part is why people don't care. She's not the "leader" of the city, she's the manifestation that keeps the city as a neutral place in the D&D cosmology. More of a giant monty python foot that squishes people that start burning the city; than a "mayor" or "queen" of Sigil. It's very hard to hate something that is not only not concerned with governing the city, so much as wanting to keep it free from rampant crime and invasion.

The first time an author ever writes words coming out of her mouth, or ever has her state that she wants something; then the character will become a penis-extension. Right now, the LoP literally want's nothing, and that's partly why people are okay with her being the most powerful 'entity' in the D&D cosmology.

Right now, she's also very inhuman, making it hard for her to act like like a SI character.

If you turn her into a mother hen, and all of the gods and arch-fiends are by 'some' extension tied into her power (and thus some type of children of hers; even ascended mortals), and it's all a giant drama-llama-fest where Mama LoP is trying to keep her bickering offspring from hurting each other (and you know that rascally Asmodeus, he's such a sweet boy when he's playing with his older cousin Heironious and they go around enforcing broken laws, but he just can't help getting into mischief with his other brothers in the lower planes; ah well, boys will be boys); then I would agree that it's a self-inserted character.

... actually, that would be kind of cool. all of the dieties are related, ... maybe that's why they don't actually go and murder each other? Because they are linked in some way, and if one of them dies, then the rest of them will be affected?

[CatharzGodfoot]

According the PS:T:
"There are thousands of stories told about her -- One even tells that she's actually six giant squirrels with a headdress, robe, and a ring of levitation and illusions..."

[Thymos]

Is it me or is the term Mary Sue bandied about a bit too much?

[Starmaker]

it's all a giant drama-llama-fest where Mama LoP is trying to keep her bickering offspring from hurting each other (and you know that rascally Asmodeus, he's such a sweet boy when he's playing with his older cousin Heironious and they go around enforcing broken laws, but he just can't help getting into mischief with his other brothers in the lower planes; ah well, boys will be boys)

...Planescape will never be the same again.

[Roy]

Is it me or is the term Mary Sue bandied about a bit too much?

This forum is rather harsh on any real or perceived wanking, which is commonly used as an adjective.

[Judging__Eagle]

Hmm... and make her symapthetic.

Like, the blades grow out of her, and each visible blade represents a single powerful being, while trillions of much smaller blades (smaller and finer than hairs) represent individual creatures of the D&D cosmology?

The thing is, she wants to have lots of really powerful children, and even if they get killed, they won't necessarily die, unless she also pulls the blade out of her scalp as well. I'd imagine that there might even be a gallery of stone statues somewhere. Each with a single or maybe even a shattered blade-hair at their base, to commemorate the death of the LoPs most powerful children.

Maybe it already is like that, and she doesn't interfere in order to give them free will?

I dunno, does anyone else think that this is interesting?

[virgil]

Meh, I've never been keen on the idea of using the Lady as anything other than a set piece. Attributing goals and origins to the Lady or Sigil brings with it an even greater sense of Sigil's importance, while at the same time destroying the mystery. I like the fact Sigil just is, not serving any goal, not acting as some kind of fulcrum to reality, just an enigma of a burg that somehow manages to maintain neutrality in a polarizing multiverse.

They attempted something like it in the Planescape novels, which left a very bad taste in my mouth. Your idea in and of itself has merit, but as something I'd rather see somewhere else.

[Surgo]

While I never saw the Lady of Pain as an example of a designer waving their dick around, I did see her as an example of complete designer fail.

First, why does Sigil even need to exist? Seriously.

Second, if you can't make this city that for some reason has to exist, but without having some arbitrary monster that keeps it from getting taken over, you're probably doing something wrong. I couldn't tell you what it is, but I'm sure there's another way to do it without throwing in the more nonsensical sort of arbitrarium. And the Lady of Pain really is a bunch of unbelievable nonsense.

[Cielingcat]

From what I have seen, the Lady of Pain is a designer and DM penis extension one hundred percent. It may be because of where I've read about her-namely the WotC message boards when I went there-but all I've seen of her is "lol you get flayed/mazed" "lol no u can't do dat LoP iz dere!" and other such things.

But overall I have to say that A) the Lady of Pain is an unnecessary addition to the cosmology that only exists to make people wet over the prospect of an omnipotent being and B) she isn't even a particularly interesting addition. I mean seriously, she has no meaningful interactions with anything besides randomly killing people and stuff-what the fuck is the point of her other than to make DMs feel big in the pants?

[Psychic Robot]

Lady of Pain sounds like the guards in Ultima Online. I wouldn't say she was a penis extender because she isn't a self-insert character like fucking Elminster (who gets ALL THE PUSSY).

[Avoraciopoctules]

First, why does Sigil even need to exist? Seriously.

Presumably because the designers wanted someplace that served as neutral ground so effective that the vast majority of arbitrarium-infused powers couldn't directly touch it. I can see a number of reasons such a location would valuable in creating interesting stories in a fantasy setting.

[Username17]

Because logistically any game revolving around infinite armies representing opposing philosophies has to be more about talking than fighting. So the planar setting game needed a place where angels and demons could and would sit down and have a beer while discussing philosophy.

Without that, it's just Space Invaders.

-Username17

[Ganbare Gincun]

The fact that the LoP exists isn't the issue. The main issue is that you have DMs running around out there that think it's perfectly reasonable to either impose their own Mary Sue tendencies on her or just use her like a blunt object to savagely beat down PCs. She's not innately a vile character like Elminster, but she can quickly be brought down to his level in the hands of the wrong DM.

[Thymos]

I don't know, the Elminster seems pretty innately vile.






(I couldn't tell if you meant that she, like the elminster is not innately vile, or that unlike the elminster she isn't innately vile)

[Avoraciopoctules]

I don't know, the Elminster seems pretty innately vile.

I bought Elminster: The Making of a Mage for a few laughs a couple years ago. I felt that it was tolerable, though it did not exceed my expectations. At one point, I imagine the character wasn't all that bad. The "powerful wizard/sage who leads an active faction and influences things" archetype isn't inherently bad.

[Koumei]

I hate that all the author-characters somehow survived the event that killed half the gods in the edition change. They could at least have let Elminster and Drizzt die.

Is it me or is the term Mary Sue bandied about a bit too much?

Not just here. All over the Internet, people throw the term around haphazardly. It now means "something I don't like". Similar to Weeaboo, really. It now just means "something I don't like".

[RandomCasualty2]

Because logistically any game revolving around infinite armies representing opposing philosophies has to be more about talking than fighting. So the planar setting game needed a place where angels and demons could and would sit down and have a beer while discussing philosophy.

Honestly I always found the whole discussion aspect of Planescape kind of dumb. I mean while you may get NEs who turn to LE or CE who go NE, you're not going to get massive alignment shifts like angels suddenly deciding to turn to demons or devils, just because of a philosophical conversation. I mean as immortal beings they've heard all the bullshit arguments either way.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Honestly I always found the whole discussion aspect of Planescape kind of dumb. I mean while you may get NEs who turn to LE or CE who go NE, you're not going to get massive alignment shifts like angels suddenly deciding to turn to demons or devils, just because of a philosophical conversation. I mean as immortal beings they've heard all the bullshit arguments either way.

Hey, some people have fantasies about fighting dragons, others have fantasies about winning important arguments. Planescape is nice for the latter since winning arguments with talk is often fundamentally and mystically-arbitrarily more valuable to the cause than using more pugilistic methods. Going by the flavor, if you argue enough people into thinking that demons should be more reasonable, demons probably will become more reasonable.

[Koumei]

Yeah, it actually CAN work in Planescape. If only it had an interesting system/mini-game for these debates and arguments (see: my example on social combat).