Greetings all,
If this is the wrong location for this type of post I apologize in advance....
Back in the 90's I DM'd a PS campaign and recently have got a group back together and I'm eventually going to run them back into the planes. In preparation, I've been going over all the old rulebooks and I've run across a few cases of what seems to be an interpretation problem.
In the setting box set, from "A DM Guide to the Planes", priests lose 1 effective level for each plane between himself and their deity's home plane. So what if a 6th level priest from the Prime, whose deity resides on an Outer plane, moves to the Outlands (or the Astral..)? Does this mean they gain an effective level??
The second case is even more confusing to me.
In the same book, with respect to magical weapons and armor, even the examples given for magical 'plus' loss don't make sense. A sword forged on Gehenna being used on Pandemonium loses 2 pluses, but a sword forged on Limbo loses just one.
Now, the second case makes sense to me ( 1 point loss for the Astral, in between), but the first doesn't. In the first case, they seem to be including the 'currently occupied' plane in the calculation, but in the second they don't....
According to how they calculate the second case, the first case should be just a 1 point loss as well. Very confusing...
Any help would be greatly appreciated...
I had held off speaking as I imagined somone more knowledgable would have chimed in; but just to show the Glaucon that we aren't being stand-offish, I'll say something.
I'm never sure what the "official" stance ended up being as I've seen a number of different positions over the years (I swear I even once saw one piece saying that levels should be subtracted for the layers of a plane - so a 600th level priest would be an effective 1st level PC on layer 599 of the Abyss?!?)
I always felt that if it was taken too far, it was unduly punishing characters with priestly powers; so I settled on this homebrew solution
-The Astral and Etheral were on par with the Prime so no change in level
-On the "home plane" of the deity, +1 level
-On adjacent plane to the "home plane" (e.g. in Bytopia and deity is in Celestia); no change in level
-On diametrically opposed outer plane (e.g. the Abyss); -2 level
-On any other outer plane; -1 level
-I think I had a -1 penalty on the elemental planes (unless the deity is strongly tied to a certain element - e.g. a priest of Posiedon on the Plane of Water gets no penalty)
Similar logic for where things were forged with a few exceptions (e.g. I might subtract a plus from a sword forged on the Astral but taken to the Prime) but I usually tied these to stories about why the item was created where it was and what its purpose is
This system worked for me and kept things from getting too difficult to track