Which is the least bad published D&D setting?

[Username17]

The funny part is how it all seems to work in Planescape:Torment. What did they do differently?

First of all: a lot of restrictions on factions are just flat out ignored. Annah never runs the risk of getting the Lady of Pain's STD that she gives to indeps "for the lulz," Vhailor isn't required to stop adventuring so that he can put in a shift at the prison, if you become a Dustman or a Godsman you don't randomly have the game end sometimes because you're just tired of coming back to life, and so on.

Secondly: there are basically no interactions between the factions and no political aspirations available in the game. The fact that the city government is essentially meaningless and also unaffectable because it is the exclusive property of a big penis NPC who doesn't even have stats doesn't make any difference in that game. Because you can't interact with any of it anyway.

Thirdly: the game softballs a lot of the factions and pulls in a bunch more stuff that they treat as coequal to the factions. On playing through the game, would you even guess that the Xaositects (those babbling dudes you run into by the tattoo parlor) are supposed to be an important part of the city government while Pharod's Collectors and the Zombie Empire are not?

Yeah, that... perplexes me. Starting with "why the fuck would he run 4e?" and moving on to "he... wrote material after '83..." and then... ugh. That's dumb.

It's fractally dumb. Every part of it is as dumb as the whole thing. Some of it follows the "logic" of converting Greyhawk into a standard 4e "points of light" setting (not that I know why you'd do that). Some of it follows the "logic" of shoving in 4e races sideways or longhow (not that I know why you'd do that either). No, I don't know why Mearls declares that only Gygax materials up to the Greyhawk box set count, and neither Gygaxian materials after the box set nor any of the post Gygax materials count - I suspect it's really just that he happens to have the old Greyhawk box set and not other things.

-Username17

[zugschef]

The funny part is how it all seems to work in Planescape:Torment. What did they do differently?

First of all: a lot of restrictions on factions are just flat out ignored. Annah never runs the risk of getting the Lady of Pain's STD that she gives to indeps "for the lulz," Vhailor isn't required to stop adventuring so that he can put in a shift at the prison, if you become a Dustman or a Godsman you don't randomly have the game end sometimes because you're just tired of coming back to life, and so on.

Secondly: there are basically no interactions between the factions and no political aspirations available in the game. The fact that the city government is essentially meaningless and also unaffectable because it is the exclusive property of a big penis NPC who doesn't even have stats doesn't make any difference in that game. Because you can't interact with any of it anyway.

Thirdly: the game softballs a lot of the factions and pulls in a bunch more stuff that they treat as coequal to the factions. On playing through the game, would you even guess that the Xaositects (those babbling dudes you run into by the tattoo parlor) are supposed to be an important part of the city government while Pharod's Collectors and the Zombie Empire are not?

-Username17

Well you can sabotage the Gondsmen via solving quests for the Anarchists. And what I learned from the game, the Xaositects and the Dustmen run the Hive. The Harmonium is basically the Mexican police and thus, doesn't care for that part of Sigil.

But yeah, you don't really interact with the government.

[Cyberzombie]

I can see why people would like Planescape in base concept, because it has some ideas that could be cool if they were executed well.

The problem is that regular Planescape didn't have any real reasons to come to the bargaining table. It was a bitch to get from Acheron to Mechanus without portals, and there just wasn't much reason to go there besides either search for treasure or just because you hated whoever lived there and wanted to go on a random killing spree. You couldn't even really be an arms dealer because they had rules where magic items from different planes lose power the further away they got. So the devils can't sell people a bunch of hell-forged magic axes because they'd be pretty much useless once you took them a few planes removed. There really didn't feel like any need to have diplomacy at all, because trade didn't work, and the only reason you'd ever have a war is if they hated your guts so bad they're willing to travel through infinity to fuck your shit up. Besides that, they lived on an infinite plane and all the good resources were on the elemental planes.

The infinite planes just ruin it for me, because it makes cross-planar travel relatively pointless. It would be far more interesting if everything was set up on one world that had various planar regions on it. So you had say an Abyssal nation, a Devil nation, an angel nation, etc. And they had limited territory, so those nations actually had reason to try to come to the bargaining table, form alliances, sign treaties and so on.

The factions needed to be organizations that are attractive to a variety of alignments. Like a political party, they should represent a variety of interests to different people, so there's benefit in joining them.

[Prak]

Yeah, that... perplexes me. Starting with "why the fuck would he run 4e?" and moving on to "he... wrote material after '83..." and then... ugh. That's dumb.

It's fractally dumb. Every part of it is as dumb as the whole thing. Some of it follows the "logic" of converting Greyhawk into a standard 4e "points of light" setting (not that I know why you'd do that). Some of it follows the "logic" of shoving in 4e races sideways or longhow (not that I know why you'd do that either). No, I don't know why Mearls declares that only Gygax materials up to the Greyhawk box set count, and neither Gygaxian materials after the box set nor any of the post Gygax materials count - I suspect it's really just that he happens to have the old Greyhawk box set and not other things.

-Username17

That is probably the case. And he probably was running for WotC employees who might just be contractually obligated to at least put forth the image that they play whatever they're producing at the moment.

I don't really have a problem with fitting new races in. I'm totally going to do that if people want to play different stuff. Hell, I might just find a good place to fit Fearun's Red Wizards and Eberron's warforged in, just because those things are kind of cool and Greyhawk is "Generic D&D world with an atlas." But to say that Tieflings come from a specific place...

[darkmaster]

If you want to make planescape better the best thing to do is say "fuck the lady of pain" and then proclaim that the gods don't meddle in Sigil for the same reason none of them meddle directly in the material plane, every one of them has a vested interest in the city and if any one tried to take it over every other god would pile onto the offending party to protect their interests.

[virgil]

If you want to make planescape better the best thing to do is say "fuck the lady of pain" and then proclaim that the gods don't meddle in Sigil for the same reason none of them meddle directly in the material plane, every one of them has a vested interest in the city and if any one tried to take it over every other god would pile onto the offending party to protect their interests.

And thus not change what happens one iota, but without evocative flavour. But what of taking over, you might ask? You are competing with NPCs who are or equal to pit fiends and solars, which covers a level of power an insignificant minority of campaigns reach; pretty much not gaining anything.

[Chamomile]

So what you're really complaining about is campaigns with a power level that goes higher than level 4 or so.

[Wiseman]

And the Material plane has elder dragons, and beholders, and titans and shit. I tend to consider the frequency of creatures with that kind of power to be about the same across the planes as well, so pit fiends and solars won't be constantly sticking their necks in the plot.

[silva]

As an aside, this post from Rpgnet got me really excited to play Planescape. The tiefling character described looks awesome..

Another vote for HQ2 here. Doing a big list of Faction and species keywords has been on my to-do list for ages now. Here's a character I wrote up ages ago:

A tiefling from the Hive, Atrax the grew up on the streets of Sigil as a pickpocket. His talent for stealth and cunning, and his charm and silver tongue led him to becoming a sellsword and occasional adventurer, and his natural portal-sense makes him a skilled Planeswalker. He’s a member in good standing of the Free League, with a wide ranging network of contacts and informants he uses to find work. When violence threatens, he uses a mixture of dirty tricks, concealed weapons and his prized green-steel broadsword. He values his freedom highly, and is terrified of being constrained.

Tiefling is a racial keyword with various abilities like "Resist Heat and Cold", "Fiendish Nature", "Exotic Appeal" and "Mistrusted". Free League is a keyword too, though I haven't defined it. Sellsword and Planeswalker may also be keywords, depending on the setting. Underlined stuff are abilities.

Faction keywords would include the philosophy of the Faction, relationships with people within the Faction, appropriate skills for members (craft skills for Godsmen, torture for Mercykillers, scholarship for Guvners) and the various magical abilities that Factions grant like the Indep resistance to compulsions.
Last edited by Snoof; 04-15-2013 at 02:21 PM. Reason: Because typoes can change the meaning of a sentence.

[shadzar]

now why do i not do this with Planscape, Spelljammer, eBerron?

i leave all of them out of everything because I don't like anything about them. D&D in Space, no thanks, and the Rock of Braal isnt much to adventure on for very long, might as well just have a homebrew world. Planescape...same thing not much really there when th concepts of everything about the planes is a deterrent. eBerron, just has nothing interesting to even bother using for play. none of them really fit what i want from the game, so i use what i want from them to play with, nothing; and leave out the parts of them i do not want, everything else (everything).

use the world, the peoples, the locations, but ignore any novel based NPC you want to with any setting, especially FR. Drizzt never existed on your world, unless you say he did.

I actually do rather like aspects of Eberron/Planescape/Spelljammer.

I like the warforged concept and the execution was not terrible. Shifters are cool in concept, but terrible in execution. Changelings could have been a lot more interesting if the concept had been handled better (why the fuck are you going to give a shapeshifter race "true" genders rather than making them agendered or combining masculine and feminine aspects as a baseline with gendered changelings being unusual?)
I also genuinely like the magepunk feel they were trying to go for with Eberron and might try to work some of that into whatever setting I go with.

While the factions of Planescape were poorly conceived, there are interesting stories one can tell in that setting, interesting locales that are made possible, and, like with the Suel legacy that pops up in 3.5, the Planescape legacy in 3.5 gives some interesting classes (which probably need redesigns, but still).

Spelljammer... I remember first reading about Spelljammer in Polyhedron--once it had been absorbed into Dungeon magazine and was the inverted back half of Dungeon mainly used for introducing new games using the d20 system--back in High School. Mind Flayer nautoloid and drow spider ships and elven space boats that looked like birds and dwarves from barren desert worlds were all really cool. It was fantasy with some of the things I like about sci-fi, like a logical extension of Eberron, but way before Eberron's time. Sure, there are some races which are weird/dumb, but the idea is genuinely really cool to me. Plus, as much as I hated High School, there's still a nostalgia factor for the gaming memories from that time.

they all do have neat concepts, but the problem is when you remove those concepts from their own world where they fit and try to shove them into EVERY other world like 4th and its warforged. there is no eBerron gods and whatever to make them in "core" D&D, they would just be another golem. it would be like they removed halfling from D&D to get away from Tolkien and replaced it with kender, and made all thieves handlers as per kender rules.

for a one shot NO setting is bad, but for continued use, you need something that fits the group, and those 3 just don't fit when i think D&D. it would be like saying Rifts is D&D and it isn't nor is it even close in experiences.

[Prak]

Warforged were made by humans with an artifact. You're right in that they're effectively golems, but more importantly, they are sapient, human sized golems which are not notably more powerful thanan orc or elf which were massed produced for war and only recently was the construction outlawed.

There is a metric ton of roleplaying material there. As a warforged you were, in recent memory, effectively a slave warrior treated more like an autonomous sword than a person, who has neither a culture nor family to call his own, but every reason to seek one. Some of your fellows willingly turn themselves into little more than clanking monsters, while others seek not just to be people, but to betray their nature and become flesh and blood. Others are bitter towards the living creatures who gave them minds and souls and used them as only weapons of war. But regardless of what you want, first you have to figure out what it means to be sapient and constructed, what it means to be a person, and whether you want that, whether you should use your intellect and craft a culture or civilization, or you should use the skills you were given for war and carve one out of the heart of living civilization.

[shadzar]

Well the problem is it doesn't really make sense outside of eBerron. Should we have a race for The Luggage just because it is sapient? If we want crazy just for material to play with, why couldn't they have been rock-elves?


You might as well just play a modron, and how many people used modrons for PCs prior to Hellcow creating eBerroin? By the reasoning for warforged really, then you animate a stone golem made from galeb-dur parts, and it too is a self-aware creature. or does a coffee table created from sapient pearwood also count as a PC race?

just because something was made by an artifact, or could be given a mind of its own doesn't mean it makes for a good PC race. why aren't mimics used as a PC race, getting back to The Luggage? why not G-cube PCs?

you can't just take any old monster and make it work as a PC race, that is what S&P and CBoHumanoids showed. it reminds me of what the 4th Doctor said in the original D&D movie:

You use magic, we are a part of it.

warforged should be able to be dispelled with a low level spell and that is it. it is basically the same argument i had in regards to residuum for 4th, where i mentioned a disenchant could possibly reduce a magic monster to some money-dust. already the "magic" powered monsters strain credulity because dispel magic exists as a spell. you would have to work some god into it, and outside of the things going on in eBerron, well Spellplague didn't work for 4th, so that should explain why trying to shoehorn warforged into other settings and general D&D isn't a good idea.

now, IF i were to read D&D novels anymore beyond the CYOA and DL books i have, then eBerron might be a good place for stories, but some of the D&D settings are just that, better for novels, and less good for play. this is where people like Frank have so many problems with FR, because they think they must follow the canon. when you get too much story, the players forget that you can play in CBE (centuries before Elminster)

i am not against anyone pulling the marks or warforged from their source and putting them into their home games, but anything used outside will wreck havoc like a kender outside of Krynn. it takes a LOT of skill on all players parts to do it, and that should not be what a setting is for. if you want to play eBerron, then play it. if you want to play with tinker gnomes, leave them on Krynn. if you want Neogi Mindspiders, then go float around the spheres.

for me it is like psionics, it just doesn't fit. i can see it thematically, but EVERY attempt from MTHACO ro PSPs to make them work, just makes something seem wrong, and other attempts just turn them into another type of wizard like the existing wizard, warlock, sorcerer....

simple as that, warforged, bards, psionicists, jsut don't fit with my idea of D&D. fantasy novels where i do NOT have to make them or the story work can be ok, but as a player or DM of a game, it just breaks SoD too often, same with the planes.

warforged also seem like they belong more in a REH Conan story, which is really beyond the cope of D&D. wonder how they would work using the Conan RPG system?

[Prak]

Well, I took the time to explain where I felt you were mistaken on warforged. If you wish to be obstinate, that's on you.

[shadzar]

except i am NOT mistaken, because what i think and feel about them is up to me, NOT you.

you can do whatever you want with them, and i can do without them. again, as i said, you would have to consider what if The Luggage, became a playable PC race, how would that go over?

[Koumei]

If you wish to be obstinate,

Shazadalazarenssar has proven by now that he very much does wish to be obstinate.

[fectin]

Hey now, this one had appropriate sentance and paragraph breaks, and the words added up to a coherent argument. There was even some capitalization.

Further, his points were fair: "I don't like warforged, because they don't fit with my expectations for a fantasy setting" is a perfectly reasonable argument.

[Prak]

Yeah, Shad was actually being helpful in this discussion. I may disagree on the "it doesn't need special stats" thing (I think that's his stance), and I dislike people saying that [x] doesn't have a place in their games, but that's just me, and their games are up to them.

Shadzar, am I correct in my understanding that if a player came to you saying they wanted to play a warforged as I explained them above (they want to play a constructed sapient character with the roleplaying hooks mentioned) you would tell them to roll up a normal elf/dwarf/human/whatever and leave the whole "artificial sapient" thing to backstory and roleplaying?

[shadzar]

I don't know if you are reading in a mirror or some other convoluted method to get things backwards, but The Luggage, and some sort of construct DOES NOT FIT as something that would be a PC race in ANY game i played.

i don't care what other people do, but it should NOT be something shoehorned into the core of the game. this is the reason for the half-orc origins. why would they exist? not because magic did it, but because... they were bred in an unpleasant manner.

NO, The Luggage, would not be able to be a PC race, period. I have said it over and over, the idea would jsut be silly. so how you keep getting it backwards i have no idea.

YOU, may do that if you want, but i want nothing to do with a game that is that stupid. warforged IS that stupid.

you seem ridiculously hellbent on trying to find some way to say something false, but the fact is NO, i would not allow warforged or any other non-breeding creature as a PC race. the eBerron stuff can work there and STAY THERE. it's presence in 4th gave me ZERO reason to look at the system as anything but a joke. warforged are a joke, no matter how you want to try to "skin" them.

[Prak]

So you completely reject the idea of artificial sapients in your fantasy?

Fair enough.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So you completely reject the idea of artificial sapients in your fantasy?

Fair enough.

Ahem.

[Lago PARANOIA]

And thus not change what happens one iota, but without evocative flavour. But what of taking over, you might ask? You are competing with NPCs who are or equal to pit fiends and solars, which covers a level of power an insignificant minority of campaigns reach; pretty much not gaining anything.

Yeah, and? Tiny minority of campaigns =/= zero.

Moreover, as anyone who has played Shadowrun can tell you, even if the chance of you being in the driver's seat is zero you can still make big changes as long as the person in the driver's seat isn't omnipotent. You can discredit other factions, gain the loyalty or enmity of certain factions, get favors done for your service, set into motion events that will change the city like causing a riot or disseminating propaganda, so on.

Hell, most campaign arcs in games that move you from loser to leader (especially those in which you gain a huge amount of personal power) posit such a progression. First you end up doing favors for some small-time police chief or crook, then you get a big break base of operations and some fame, then you muscle out competing factions and build allies, then you make a power play for Big Cheese.

It's okay if the game ends before that kind of ladder climbing really starts to bear fruit. However, it's not okay if players are told ahead of time that the journey was, will be, and is pointless and that they'll get the Lady of Pain's leprous twatshat genitals rubbed into their face no matter what they do.

[virgil]

It's okay if the game ends before that kind of ladder climbing really starts to bear fruit. However, it's not okay if players are told ahead of time that the journey was, will be, and is pointless and that they'll get the Lady of Pain's leprous twatshat genitals rubbed into their face no matter what they do.

Why should you care that hard? The Lady is explicitly a backdrop element, unlike Elminster, only acting when you attempt to do something like destroy the city/her. You can journey and become important and direct the fate of entire planar layers or take over the City of Brass to initiate an economic competition with Sigil; but to kvitch over not being able to have your crown say Sigil on top makes you look like a whiny, petulant version of Jafar.

[shadzar]

So you completely reject the idea of artificial sapients in your fantasy?

in D&D The Luggage is NOT a playable PC race, but an abomination. idgaf what eBerron does with its novels. i wont be reading them. Keith Baker could be sucking Monte Cook cock in them for 200+ pages for all i care.

[Prak]

The Luggage, though made from sapient pearwood it may be, is not a sapient construct. It is animate luggage, nothing more. There is a rich tradition in fantasy of people who were made by other people through a method which does not involve mashing together sexy bits. Warforged are people, though they may be made from stone and wood and metal. More Data from Star Trek, less Luggage.

You're correct that the Luggage is not suitable for a player, but you seem to either be missing the reason, or mistaken that there is no difference between the Luggage and the Warforged.

The Luggage is sentient, it has some ability to sense, feel and perceive with subjectivity. It is not sapient, ie, does not have any ability to act with judgement.

Warforged were made to be soldiers. They are both sentient and sapient. They can sense, feel, and perceive with subjectivity, as well as act with judgement.

The Luggage is more akin to a very clever dog. Warforged are Data, or Terminator, but with magic. And before you say "Data and the Terminator have no place in fantasy, I'll reiterate--Galatea, Pinocchio, Adam, Blodeuwedd, Vance's T'sais and T'sait.

You are free to do whatever you want in your games, even fantasize about Keith Baker sucking Monte Cook's dick (though I'll note that neither is an unattractive man...). But I want to make sure that I've done what I can to ensure we are all discussing things on the same level.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Why should you care that hard? The Lady is explicitly a backdrop element, unlike Elminster, only acting when you attempt to do something like destroy the city/her.

Sorry, bro, but that's not even close to accurate.

'Destroy' is such an equivocation, too. It can mean anything from leveling the city with a magical nuke to undermining the command staff by encouraging non-violent resistance to edicts. And everything I've heard about this nickel-plated Babby's First Mary Sue points to the latter.