Quote from: Old One Eye;935558I recently pulled out the old Planescape stuff from my basement and gave it a read.  Good grief is that horrible drivel.

If you'd like to get rid of that horrible drivel, I'd gladly pay to take it off your hands.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;934924So people can only play when 'Sauron' has died, so nothing they do can actually affect the game world in a grand scope?  Some people don't want that.

Kind of like Lord of the Rings was all meaningless, because people were only fighting Sauron, who was only ever just the henchmen of the actual Big Bad of the setting?

:rolleyes:

Quote from: Tristram Evans;936609If you'd like to get rid of that horrible drivel, I'd gladly pay to take it off your hands.

Wait! Me too! Share and share alike!

Quote from: Old One Eye;935558I recently pulled out the old Planescape stuff from my basement and gave it a read.  Good grief is that horrible drivel.

I was never enchanted with Planescape to begin with. It totally neutered the outer planes of the sense of "Realm of the gods" and "The afterlife" and just made it into London and a bunch of wacky alien worlds with wacky aliens doing wacky alien things. Or just another themed town to visit that could have been dropped into the realms and no one would have noticed.

Quote from: Omega;936724I was never enchanted with Planescape to begin with. It totally neutered the outer planes of the sense of "Realm of the gods" and "The afterlife" and just made it into London and a bunch of wacky alien worlds with wacky aliens doing wacky alien things. Or just another themed town to visit that could have been dropped into the realms and no one would have noticed.

Sure did. It was one of the worst examples of an intellectually-bankrupt TSR trying to rip off concepts from White Wolf.

For me:

1. Dragonlance, for many of the reasons already cited.
2. Harn, mostly because of just enough strange made-up jargon to annoy.  I don't know what the fuck a "Serela" is, is that a bishop? A vicar? An abbot? It's just close enough to real-world stuff to pique my interest but that shit takes me right out of it.
3. Planescape, because of the factions and the Lady of Pain.  Don't want gods in Sigil? Say they full-stop can't enter and priestly powers don't work.  Done.  The factions were just goddamned silly, they would have made more sense if they had been political parties vying for position in a satirical Parliament.
4. Ebberon, because 3.5 D&D is no place for the pulps.  It just doesn't work, and plus there was no sense that this was an actual industrial society.  It just had some of the trappings like a Ren-fest style Victoriana Faire.

Quote from: RPGPundit;938208Sure did. It was one of the worst examples of an intellectually-bankrupt TSR trying to rip off concepts from White Wolf.

Not quite. Its just cleaving to the alignment wheel with factions that at times seem unrelated to what they are aligned to. (and some might say the rip off was the other way around.) The main problem with Planescape is that it simply should have been a separate campaign world instead of touted as the outer planes. 2e Ravenloft. was drifting that way too as they added more domains.

More a sign that TSR was just bankrupt as they were at the time repurposing various old submissions for other games. The Star Frontiers cyborg rules dropped into a Gamma World module for example.

Eh, such is.

Quote from: ThatChrisGuy;938387For me:

2. Harn, mostly because of just enough strange made-up jargon to annoy.  I don't know what the fuck a "Serela" is, is that a bishop? A vicar? An abbot? It's just close enough to real-world stuff to pique my interest but that shit takes me right out of it.

Totally agree about the lingo-jargon of Harn. You can't cast magic, you have to know SheK-Pvar. oooh.

 I love the earthy-ness of Harnworld, but the phony language integrated into both the game system and the world kills it for me.  I know other gameworlds and fantasy authors do this, but the funny-talk from out of left field just doesn't fit with the realistic medieval tone of Harn. Place names and personal names would be one thing, but Harn goes a step too far in trying to get us to talk in a made up language.

Part of why I dislike 4th ed Gamma World. They tried to turn the early naming conventions into a language.

d20 GW had some rules for language drift. But kept it optional and not intrusive.

Quote from: Omega;938424Not quite. Its just cleaving to the alignment wheel with factions that at times seem unrelated to what they are aligned to. (and some might say the rip off was the other way around.) The main problem with Planescape is that it simply should have been a separate campaign world instead of touted as the outer planes. 2e Ravenloft. was drifting that way too as they added more domains.

I fail to see how making Planescape a prime material world would help anything.  

The main problem with Planescape is that the factions loom extremely large and are clearly the main organizations with which to interact.  But, they are all so damn steeped in junior high angst pseudo-philosophy that there are no goals or motivations the DM can use.  

This group believes everything will erode to entropy in the end so why bother.  That group believes in doing fish-malk chaos all the time.  This group thinks you should spend all your time just sensing things.  

It is might near the perfect example of how not to create factions.  To bash any of them into an organization in the milieu that is useful, I have to normalize them into having relatable motivations and goals on my own.  The setting cares about faction flavor, but at the table I need faction utility.

Quote from: Old One Eye;938624I fail to see how making Planescape a prime material world would help anything.  

Because that is what it essentially is allready. Its just another rime material plane setting. Demons? Angels? They might as well be new alien races. Gods and the afterlife? Where? An afterthought at best. Nigh totally unused otherwise till near the end 2e.

Quote from: Madprofessor;938546Totally agree about the lingo-jargon of Harn. You can't cast magic, you have to know SheK-Pvar. oooh.

 I love the earthy-ness of Harnworld, but the phony language integrated into both the game system and the world kills it for me.  I know other gameworlds and fantasy authors do this, but the funny-talk from out of left field just doesn't fit with the realistic medieval tone of Harn. Place names and personal names would be one thing, but Harn goes a step too far in trying to get us to talk in a made up language.

Harn and Harnworld got so close to an amazing product but choked on this one point. The amount of love and effort that have gone in that setting is incredible, and the products (maps, detailed manors, etc.) can be kind of jaw dropping. And then you sit down to play and have to contend with all the dreck that resulted from them renaming every fucking thing in medieval europe. It's like Steve Martin's complaint about the french language: 'they have a different word for EVERYTHING!'

I kinda agree about Harn. And yet it doesn't bother me with EPT (note: I have never really gotten the opportunity to play more than a few sessions of EPT, so I am talking just about reading the books), which clearly has a lot of its' own language.

Perhaps the difference between Harn and EPT is that Harn is clearly medieval europe, whereas EPT is its own thing. So when you present me with a medieval english town and a catholic church, but insist on calling the town 'vlarglaglistan' and the church 'eeeeeeeepglick!!!!!!', if feels like you are just being an idiot. But if you use those words in an other-worldly setting I don't really recognize, I'll go along with it.

Dragonlance. My friends thought it was cool as hell, but aside from the maps I thought it was useless. No, worse than useless. They got me to play the song (a module with sheet music? oh fuck me to tears!) on the piano. Not only was it a pile of shit (and not just because I suck as a musician) but the girl I was dating saw what I was doing and I couldn't have looked like a bigger dork if I had been playing Rush. Jesus Tittyfucking Christ!