Planescape online

Are you asking about a game or just planescape in general?

Interplay/Black Isle started the development of three PS related computer games. PS:T was the only survivor (see here). The second was a first person game for the Playstation (like “King’s Field”), the third transformed into “Stonekeep 2”.

This discussion reminds me of DarkSun’s MMPORPG spawn, which is remade here. Maybe these got mixed up?

Hmm perhaps he collapsed from exaustion and died and now clutches a simple message in his hands. Hmm we have a mystery to solve gang!

I probably found out what the mysterious Mr. Azadeh is talking about by reading the forums over at DSO.

He is a participant of the DSO (Dark Sun Online) project, which was formed in order to revive the online version of the Dark Sun CRPGs. Now he is suggesting that Planewalker should do the same for Planescape.

They are going to use the program Metaplace to ease the development. Metaplace promises to make the development of virtual environments as easy as building web pages.

I think that the idea is not bad at all.

Elementary my dear Rebenaas. Hoi I've gotta cut back on the Sherlock holmes novels Well I've no idea what dark sun is, but a Planescape online game? I smell a project of epic proportions! And I for one want in!

Be wary of turning your favorite setting into an MMORPG, especially if you are a roleplayer (as I assume most here are). No matter how carefully and lovingly the world is crafted and no matter how faithfully the rules are applied, inevitable bugs and the general public will always make it painful. Take Lord of the Rings Online, for instance. A great game! Well made and faithful to the books in most any way that can be expected given the medium. And yet, even on the unofficial roleplaying server, you will often run into rOfLtArDs and goldspammers. So, before deciding to make Planescape into an MMO, imagine seeing the following:

'Duckluck' wrote:

Great parody and all Iavas, but all I see is tens of thousands of people playing Planescape.

I wish it were a parody, but I guarantee that the above is what you'll see. And the more people that play, the more prevalent it will be. The number of people who will take the setting seriously enough to make any potential multiplayer game interesting is miniscule compared to the number of people who got bored of their 3 level 70's in WoW or heard about that Sijil thing in 4e and wanted to see it for realz in 3d, yo.

Or, you know, maybe I'm just a cynic.

By order of Her Serenity, powers, factions, and n00bs are banned from Sigil. Woe be upon those who oppose Her will.

While we could (and probably will) get an annoying number of people like that (one is one too many), we're all probably overestimating how much people will care. To be honest, I doubt anything we build could compare on basic terms to the more established MMORPGs out there. We certainly won't have a team of highly paid professionals working on the game, so once the dark swarm of WoW players realize that, they'll go off bother some other game with better graphics and more demons to kill and less talk about belief and factions.

And then we'll laugh, because we'll know that Planescape is amazing, and that they'll never see it's brilliance because they'll be too busy killing Level 80 imps in some other MMORPG. And maybe a few of those WoW will understand what makes Planescape so great, and decide to stick around and keep playing. And then they'll want to learn a little more about the Blood War, or Mt. Celestia, or the Sensates, or some other little thing that they noticed. And then they'll come here, and we'll be happy.

I suggest using the Lady of Pain as a spam filter. The first time you say "lol" everyone dives into cover, runs away or starts swearing. The second time, you get mazed.

I don't think anyone stupid enough to consider The Lady a "high level boss" would ever manage to get to high levels. Also, how would mazes work anyway? They would have to be instanced. Would they be procedurally generated?

I’d rather call it *speculative* history “sexual equality”, since Dark Sun is a post apocalyptic scenario. All genders are equally probable to die a nasty death the very next moment. Dark Sun is a (surprise, surprise) dark fantasy scenario for AD&D. The blasted, sandy and totally heartless world Athas is swarmed with huge slave armies, cannibal halflings and a really ugly dragon. In fact, DS was my favourite D&D setting before I found Planescape. There is a sister site to Planewalker devoted to DS. It is called athas.org.

And now to something completely different. It’s a shame that Metaplace is closed down right now for an update of the alpha version. We might have built a dungeon or two, just to see what it’s like

There are many options for online games. Some generate a completely new instance of a terrain for every party, so that adventurers don’t “stand on each other’s toes”. Nevertheless, Sigil always had a large population of clueless, so a bunch of non-serious players would rather add to the realism.

(Btw, I like the idea of procedurally generated mazes as a punishment. Squaff is right: Players of “Elder scrolls: Arena” know that nothing is more frustrating than procedurally generated quests.)

I was thinking and it seems that Sigil is actualy the easiest part of whole thing. Realy complicated stuff would be creating special planar conditions like: maddnes efect and of pandemonium, wasting of the Gray waste (garadualy collor loss ), animal features on PCs and animal companion loss on beastlands, etc...
That would be complex but it would make game memorable.

Eldan wrote:

Then mazes could be used as "bann" option: day, 3 days, week etc...
Those who do not learn their lessons are banned permanently aka recive visit from Lady herself.

Why not. Tehnicaly DM's do that all the time in their campains. And administrators are like DM's, kinda.

Here here Lsdfjkdsf!

Not only do I feel that we should undergo this insanely epic project. (I'm talking Tamriel Rebuilt Insane {well maybe no that insane}) But I strongly feel that it may be the only way, that we can save the most precious and utterly fantastic elements and worlds and lands and people and creature etc from WOTC 4Ed Arsenic. So I say we all make a vote to make a vow to see this project till the end. No matter how many reincarnations of ourselves that it may take. And if the vote passes. Individually take the vow and the get the project off the ground.

I'm ambitious. But thats because I'm a planewalker!

Come on, everyone speaks planar trade anyway :mrgreen:
Hmm. Ok, vow.
How about:
"They swore an oath which none shall break, and none should take, by the name even of the Lady, calling the Mazes upon them if they kept it not... ...vowing to pursue with vengeance and hatred to the ends of the World Power, Demon, Elf or Man as yet unborn or any creature, great or small, good or evil, that time should bring forth unto the end of days, whoso should try to stop their online gaming project."

Exactly.
Regarding the nature: To keep it consistent with the tone of Planescape, as little combat as possible should be used. I mean, the generic hack&slash just wouldn't work. But quest designing without much hack&slash is a lot of work, of course. And it's hard to keep people interested.

:offTopic: sorry but I want to put 2 cents in. Don't take it the wrong way, though, I don't consider you a sexist or anything

Beeing a big fan of DarkSun (2nd favorite setting), I have to disagree here. The birth rate isn't really all that important, since the few verdant areas of civilization are near or over their carrying capacity as it is. I see a flaw in the premise that women would be protected and controlled, though that is our own history on Earth with some cultural exceptions. Not that wouldn't go on in some sub-societies on Athas, and there is also the whole institution of slavery there, but I don't see a male-dominated society as the rule for two setting-specific reasons: Evironment and Psionics. Especially psionics, since they are ubiquitous on Athas. Power does not discriminate, therefore women are as able to protect themselves as men. Control is about power, rape being their ultimate expression, but women carrying loaded machine guns, and women with political power, don't get raped, because they have too much power over a would-be attacker or they have someone else (perhaps all of society) to watch their back 24/7. In the situation on Athas, a woman can have as much power as a man (since there is no stat mod, it could even be assumed they are as physically as powerful sans psionics, really). Absent a societial history of politcal repression of women, which could discuss the origins and history of all day long, there isn't any reason that gender roles might be reversed relative to our own societies. Even then, I see the egalitarian aspect as more likely, since every member of the tribe has to fight for their own survival and that of the whole. Athasians simply don't have the option of keeping their women sequestered. If the girls don't learn to use a spear or hone their psionic talents, it could spell destruction for everyone, and indeed might not even prevent it depending on what horror sweeps out of the waste.

Also, for an example of how a harsh environment might make women more powerful relative to men, read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. Nobody's going to go arround repressing women if they know there are five guys more than willing to throw someone out an airlock (or stab 'em and leave 'em for the kreen, in the case of Athas) for it, in order to get into the womens' good graces themselves.

'Azure' wrote:

:offTopic: sorry but I want to put 2 cents in. Don't take it the wrong way, though, I don't consider you a sexist or anything

Beeing a big fan of DarkSun (2nd favorite setting), I have to disagree here. The birth rate isn't really all that important, since the few verdant areas of civilization are near or over their carrying capacity as it is. I see a flaw in the premise that women would be protected and controlled, though that is our own history on Earth with some cultural exceptions. Not that wouldn't go on in some sub-societies on Athas, and there is also the whole institution of slavery there, but I don't see a male-dominated society as the rule for two setting-specific reasons: Evironment and Psionics. Especially psionics, since they are ubiquitous on Athas. Power does not discriminate, therefore women are as able to protect themselves as men. Control is about power, rape being their ultimate expression, but women carrying loaded machine guns, and women with political power, don't get raped, because they have too much power over a would-be attacker or they have someone else (perhaps all of society) to watch their back 24/7. In the situation on Athas, a woman can have as much power as a man (since there is no stat mod, it could even be assumed they are as physically as powerful sans psionics, really). Absent a societial history of politcal repression of women, which could discuss the origins and history of all day long, there isn't any reason that gender roles might be reversed relative to our own societies. Even then, I see the egalitarian aspect as more likely, since every member of the tribe has to fight for their own survival and that of the whole. Athasians simply don't have the option of keeping their women sequestered. If the girls don't learn to use a spear or hone their psionic talents, it could spell destruction for everyone, and indeed might not even prevent it depending on what horror sweeps out of the waste.

Also, for an example of how a harsh environment might make women more powerful relative to men, read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. Nobody's going to go arround repressing women if they know there are five guys more than willing to throw someone out an airlock (or stab 'em and leave 'em for the kreen, in the case of Athas) for it, in order to get into the womens' good graces themselves.

The whole physically identical sexes thing in D&D is just a misguided anachronistic concession to modern feminism. The game would likely be called sexist if it tried to differentiate between the abilities of men and women. Men and women should be equal, but they are no more identical than cocks and hens. I don't mean that women would be repressed, but in a world as harsh as Dark Sun seems to be it is simple common sense that women not do anything risky unless they have to. Then again, maybe I've gotten the wrong idea about the death rate in this world and it's somehow not any higher than that of any other setting.

We should make D&D more realistic! Infact, I think female characters should get a -4 strength penalty, because that would be realistic. And I don't want any of you whiny PC liberals crying about how all it accomplishes is limiting what characters one can roll, if you want to roll a female character for any reason, you're gay. Especially if that female character is a fighter type, because realistic fighter chicks would be buff, and if you like fighter chicks, it means you like muscle chicks, which means you're secretly gay. Which is why we need a -4 str penalty, so gay people won't make them. And also because no matter how cool or unique she is, a fighter chick that wields a big-ass battle axe is unrealistic and should be avoided so as to not make D&D into some stinkin' liberal PC wank fest.

And yes, I know that there are girls who play D&D and they might want to roll some musclebound fighter chick instead of some stereotypical staff chick. Well screw them. D&D is a MAN's game, and as a man's game, it's full of logic that girls simply can't grasp, and if they don't like, they should go back to playing Candyland or whatever stupid game that girls play. Speaking of logic female characters should also get a -2 penalty to int and wis since women are irrational and emotional, but we'll give them a +3 cha bonus to compensate.

Why? Because it's realistic, and D&D needs more realism, not PC nonsense! Oh, and I'm not sexist btw.

Well, my DM is calling me. We're about to start a new campaign and I rolled this bitchin' wizard who can teleport around and turn bat poop into explosive fireballs with a 35 meter radius. And he can also summon demons from the deepest pits of Hell! It's totally awesome!

Wow, you went through the trouble to make an account just to make a single flame bait post?

What were you going to say, Kobold Avenger?

It probably can't. That's why they leave out a lot in so called "medieval" settings. Europe was pretty cruel back then.

Oh, nearly forgot to mention. They don't have a completely working engine yet, but they managed to get into Metaplace's alpha testing program.

Maybe we should -ehm- most humbly suggest certain synergetic effects to our Athasian brothers and sisters. :mrgreen:

I agree that text most definately helps a description. But I reckon we should try and avoid a total MUD I think we should at least try and flesh out some kind of environment.
P.S I'm glad we've got some techies on board. Brings me much relief.