Here I sit, mentally preparing myself for the next half of our D&D 07-08 season. As I promised my players almost 5 months ago, I’m sending them Plane-hoping in the Great Cosmic Wheel.
I’m done reading Planescape and while I love the setting’s potential, I was rather irritated by the late 90’s “Storytelling is a better way to Roleplay” philosophy that permeates every DMing paragraph of the product and still does in some circles.
Begin Rant:
The original Planescape setting basically tells DMs that using the Setting for interplannar dungeon crawling is a less than ideal way of using the product… many times…. I tell you, so what?
Here’s a suggestion to all game designers (the Silvervine crew included) that wish to have the widest possible audience. Make Storytelling and Narrating an option of your game… not its de-facto philosophy. At the very least, please don’t try to make a point about the relative merits of that style of play over others.
I truly believe that excellent storytelling can happen in any RPG systems where players are engaged by the setting enough to want to interact with it. It just doesn’t need to be repeated ad nauseam in the game’s text, GM hints and adventure design notes.
Imposing Storytelling/Shared Narration as ‘better’ or as ‘necessary” makes me and probably a significant portion of the crunchier market go hostile on the product.
End Rant.
So if I ignore the suggested DMing philosophy, I can totally embrace a setting where beliefs shape reality and organization formed around these beliefs. I have yet to read the 3.5 adaptation over at Planewalker.com which might mend my negative feelings.
I’ve decided to adopt the Planescape world (i.e. the Factions, the beliefs can shape reality idea, the frontier towns, etc) whenever the characters will leave Ptolus on outer-planar missions. I will not focus on one huge aspect of it though… Sigil.
With Ptolus taking a larger part of the player’s fledging story-lines, I don’t wish to introduce a second city with different locales and organizations. Instead, since my Homebrewed world is currently recuperating from a wide-scale alignment-based war, I’ve made Ptolus into a planar nexus and am placing numerous Sigil-like portals throughout it. I’m also adapting various Sigil organizations and NPCs to Ptolus.
As suggested by one reader in our forum, I’ll move the various faction headquarters into the Outland frontier-towns or within the actual planes where the core philosophies originated (and possibly open branches in Ptolus).
Sigil will remain a reality but I’ll probably find a plot-related reason why the Lady of Pain wants to keep the character out of it… (probably something about Cixi’s origins and peculiarities). I mean the parallel between Ptolus’s Spire and the Outland one is just too strong an image to ignore.
I also needed a published Planescape-friendly adventure for level 9 PCs that would take up to the summer break…
Well it just happens that I own the principal Planescape-themed D&D 3.5 adventure… an adventure that I both hate and love at the same time. An adventure written by none-other than my Nemesis!
Yeah, that one…
I would never have considered playing it up to 2 months ago… However, since hacking the Seeds of Sehan Adventures, a rather average, if not downright mediocre series , mechanically speaking, I’ve grown more confident in my capacity to shape an adventure to my tastes.
Sounds like a new DM challenge doesn’t it? Stay tuned for my battle plan!
It is not necessary that a hacker has to be 640-802 as well as 70-649. Novices are hackers today as well. This is true though, that 640-822 and 640-863 do help in pushing towards the right direction.
It just occurred to me while reading this post how awesome it is that Wikipedia has articles on Sigil, the Lady of Pain, etc. And then of course I spent the last hour getting sucked into Wikipedia.
Yeah… it allows me to write for a wider audience without having to spell out what Sigil, Ptolus or the Lady of Pain are.
Wikipedia rocks! (Citation Please)
I think it is better to make story-telling and narrating (and any other playstyle) part of the game’s philosophy, rules and setting. That way the game will probably be better at that thing. To change style of play, change game.
If a designer is really ambitious, he or she should also add rules, setting modifications and additional advice for running the game in different style.
I can see where planescape telling the reader that “using the Setting for interplannar dungeon crawling is a less than ideal way of using the product… many times…. ” would be quite annoying. Once players and Game Masters have the game in their hands, they should be able to do whatever they want with it. They are going to anyways, and I think that is a good ting.
I might be a little biased in that aspect, but I prefer it when their is flexibility in how you use a product. I don’t think this flexibility has to be written into the product (especially with a well detailed setting), but I don’t think attempts should be made to exclude it.
Tommi:
If I read you correctly, you’re saying that Storytelling/ narrating should be the core of a game and be sold as such…. I’m not convinced (as it reduces it’s potential market) but I think I understand where you come from.
I actually believe that you can cram multiple play styles in a game, but as you say it needs an ambitious and talented design & Development team.
I know I’m biased but I feel that Narrating and Storytelling needs very little rules support to happen, but needs an engaging setting and environment to foster it. (I’m trying real hard not to fall back on the Crunch/fluff analogy)
John:
The best storytelling mechanic I’ve seen so far (and I’m not a reference because of my natural resistance to it) is Clinton R. Nixon’s Keys mechanics in Shadow of Yesterday.
Giving generous XP rewards in a d20 game to players who make an effort to advance their character’s story is great.
Having players make choices in line with the key and not necessarily his/her best interest is a novel approach in our group.
As I have often said here, while I live for the crunchy bits of a RPG… my best games have always been the ones where the players actively participated in moving the story forward… between scenes of intense crunchy action!
Soft Bread, Crunchy bacon, Soft bread… That’s my perfect RPG I think… Looking forward to read and discuss more of Silvervine John.
Uh oh, rant coming on:
I’m a big believer in game design of having your target audience in mind. The theme and mechanics (in RPG parlance, fluff and crunch) should work together towards providing what that audience wants to do.
I agree with Phil about it being annoying in the Planescape book because there’s a disconnect with the audience. The D&D mechanics are geared towards running around in dungeons and killing monsters. So when a D&D book tells us that the fluff does not encourage that style of play, there’s a bad disconnect. There’s lots of stuff in Planescape that’s awesome for that style of play (something the 4e designers are working to bring into core.) Even the Faction rules, which are part of this storytelling style, give powers that are useful in combat!
On the flipside, a lot of the “story rpgs”/”indie rpgs” whatever you want to call them are super-focused on an audience. The rules and setting are almost always heavily tied together. In those cases, I think it’s OK to say to exclude certain styles. At that point, it’s probably better for a player who wants to adopt it to play something else.
All that said, Planescape is far and away my favorite D&D setting. Then again, I once ran a Spelljammer game, so my opinion may not count.
The key system is kind of nifty, The thing that I don’t like about it is that it rewards player’s for playing ONLY to a specific type. I might be misunderstanding the way it works, but if you only get 1 key at a time, then your entire style of play would change in an effort to advance your character towards fulfilling that key, or if you switched keys. This is fairly standard in gaming, I.e. if you play a fighter it is because you want to be good at combat, but I hate being locked into stereotypes like that.
“I know I’m biased but I feel that Narrating and Storytelling needs very little rules support to happen,” I think that is true as well. That depends on the group that is playing the game though. One 2nd ed DND game I played had all but two of the players agape at the action scene going on between one player and the game master. The other players literally didn’t want to interrupt what was going on, they just wanted to watch. That was great narrative and storytelling, and it happened in a crunch heavy system.
I forget the exact details but you get more keys as you level up. Clinton suggested using them to replace ‘XPs for murder’ in d20… I adapted it to still allow combat XPs and gaining up to 50% of a PC’s leveling up XPs per session using keys…
Let me dig my blog’s posts on this:
http://chattydm.net/2007/10/17/save-keys-to-open-doors/
and
http://chattydm.blogspot.com/2007/09/lets-sweeten-all-that-crunch-with-some.html
Right now Players have one each but I’ll add more as they become more comfortable using them.
I got the inspiration reading an excellent Ptolus Campaign log here:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=312458
So you see I’m not hostile to Storytelling… Just hostile to ‘storytelling is better’
Just to clarify, in The Shadow of Yesterday a character may start with two keys (I think), and can max out at three keys (this bit I’m sure of).
The complete text of the rulebook is available under a Creative Commons License, and Clinton and the TSoY community have typed it up in the form of a wiki, so check it out. I highly recommend it.
CDM,
IMO, any game should have some core and be advertised accordingly. The core may or may not include storytelling, but whatever it does include, it should do well. A game which helps create great stories about dungeoncrawling heroes sounds pretty good to me, for example. A game optimised for dungeoncrawling or story creation used to combine them is likely to benefit from houseruling and setting changes and such.
Also, I think that setting and rules do basically the same things and should or do influence each other and the gameplay as a whole in approximately equal manner.
BTW, if you are ever lacking in post ideas, how about a brief summary of the house rules you use for those who have not read everything you have ever posted?
Good points Tommi…
What, you honestly think some people haven’t read my 182 posts? I’m shocked! 🙂
Great idea Tommi. While I’m not lacking in posting ideas (just time it seems), a House Rule post just made it near the top of the pile.
Thanks!
Hum, thinking back to when it was being supported by the company, Planescape was very much an attempt to broaden their market. TSR was in the middle of a massive rush of product dilution, and this was their attempt at pushing the D&D pool at narrativist gamers.
I think the constant belaboring of the narrativist thread in the PS books was because they realized that a lot of their players/DMs were going to be coming from the standard D&D model, and might need the occasional/frequent reminder that it doesn’t work well with this setting.
A dungeon crawl Planescape campaign is more TPK-trophic than a Darksun campaign with standard core characters. The basic assumption of 2nd and 3rd edition D&D is “Here’s a fight. We can win this. Kill it and take the treasure.” A party that does that in a PS campaign is quite likely to be making new characters several times per session, and if that is what the players like, then that’s cool, but 2-3 TPKs a day isn’t my favorite thing.
At the time PS came out, there were active 2nd edition publications in:
Greyhawk
Krynn
Faerun, Al Quidim, and the Kur Taur setting on the same world
Athas
Mystara and The Red Steel subsetting
Birthright’s world
Spell Jammer
Ravenloft
Planescape
2 or 3 different SF settings in their Alternity world
A Victorian Earth Horror setting (Masque of the Red Death)
Plus a lot of core books.
They weren’t particularly worried about diluting their market place, though events shortly thereafter show that they should have been. A lot of those settings weren’t particularly friendly to the core player base. Planescape, Ravenloft, Spell Jammer, Alternity, Masque of the Red Death, Kur Taur, and Al Quidim all pushed play styles that deviated strongly from the D&D core.