Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[MRY]

It's an actual giant mountain that people "confuse with Mount Olympus" (in in-setting lore) in a Tolkien-pastiche atop which dwarf and Hindu gods arm-wrestle and as you do a pilgrim's progress up its side, it removes status ailments.

It's not that it's "unsophisticated" -- I think the friend I quote above has it right, it's reasonably (i.e., college freshman taking humanities courses) sophisticated, but it's stupid. Like, goofy, ridiculous, not an effort to execute something thoughtful and interwoven. It might be fun for questing, and as sorinmask suggests, a way to have a kind of Dante comedy within an AD&D campaign (I assume it would be consistent to run into Sam and Frodo making their way up it, only to portal back to Shelob's lair when they go through a particular cavern entrance, etc.). "Stupid" isn't meant purely as pejorative here. If you look at the quotes I pasted, my friend's point was that it was the lack of such stupidity that doomed the Numenera setting -- the aspiration to grandiosity rather than "lol, what if there's a cave on Mount Celestia where Socrates is trying to persuade people to stop watching the shadows but then you have to actually fight the shadows unless you listen to Nietzche who is warning you not to gaze too long into them, but them a beholder comes out and is like, 'please, fam, i gaze into everything' and then Kali jumps out and enters Mahakali form and she's all, 'I've got 10 arms and you've got 10 eyestalks' and she grabs one in each hand and..." (College freshman DM tokes, fails saving throw). Very smart and well-educated people might create and enjoy such a setting, but the enjoyment is patently stupid.

 

[Oreshnik Missile]

The chad stupidity versus the vigin intelligence

 

[Popiel]

What actually is stupid about Mt. Celestia? Sometimes snarky wheezing of wannabe intellectuals is inane beyond redemption. Planescape is a simple setting that oscillates around one, equally simple rule, that belief is real within very broad limits (one cannot unbelief Law or Evil as cosmic axioms for example). All gods are true in such a setting and yes, there will be arm-wrestling between Rama and Thor. Is that stupid? Not at all. I didn’t know that intellectuals are such a special snowflakes, are some religious feelings perhaps involved? Oh my. What a tragedy.

Difference between Numanuma and Planescape is in fact the exact opposite. Planescape is smart and interesting, Numenera is idiotic and boring.

EDIT: Wannabe intellectuals will now give me funny buttons. At your leisure m'sirs.

 

[MRY]

Planescape is a simple setting that oscillates around one, equally simple rule, that belief is real within very broad limits (one cannot unbelief Law or Evil as cosmic axioms for example).
All gods are true in such a setting and yes, there will be arm-wrestling between Rama and Thor.

Sometimes snarky wheezing of wannabe intellectuals is inane beyond redemption.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I mean, if you really want to debate it.... Planescape deliberately breaks the fourth wall to create goofy scenarios. You have a whole race of robots that correspond to the dice you use in AD&D. Mt. Celestia features a number of deities from our world. Why? To break the fourth wall and create goofy scenarios. Hollyphants live on Mt. Celestia. Some levels are inexplicably based on Roman god names (Jovar, Mecuria, Venya), but then inexplicably Saturn shows up in the quasi-Greek Chronias, but of course he's not an Olympian deity in either account, and none of these layers are tied to the Greco-Roman gods they're named after. Again, "stupid" isn't a pure pejorative here. Feel free to substitute "successful silly middlebrow fun." The knock on Numenera is that its "unsuccessful preachy pseudo-highbrow tedium." I'm not sure that's fair, but that was the distinction that my friend (herself a radical lefty, so it's not a political point) was trying to make.

 

[2house2fly]

Is that stupid? Not at all.

Yes it is.

 

[Fairfax]

Planescape was not a perfect setting -- a lot of it is idiotic, like Mount Celestia as a concept seems horribly stupid

Mount Celestia/The Seven Heavens was not a Planescape creation. The concept was introduced in Dragon #8 (1977), and expanded in multiple 1E books long before Planescape was created. Planes of Law just adapted that content, introduced a few things, and gave it a better map.

 

[MRY]

I wasn't blaming any creator, just talking about the content of the setting, that's all. A lot of what's goofy about Planescape may be carryovers from existing AD&D goofiness. Hollyphants predated Planescape too, I think.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

One of my biggest grievances with the Numenera setting is that while the books suggest that setting it as future Earth is meant to allow the GM to include stuff like communism (I think that's an actual example!)

you guys had an opportunity to throw communists out of helicopters and didn't take it
honestly, I'm pretty disappointed.

 

[Fairfax]

I wasn't blaming any creator, just talking about the content of the setting, that's all.

I understand. I just wanted to clarify it so that people don't assume Planescape introduced some of these concepts (for better or worse).

A lot of what's goofy about Planescape may be carryovers from existing AD&D goofiness.

Yes, the whole point was that the setting should be compatible with most of the original Manual of the Planes and pre-existing AD&D cosmology.

Hollyphants predated Planescape too, I think.

It's from the 1E Monster Manual II:

 

[MRY]

rusty_shackleford Well, to begin with, style rules would have required the word gyroplane...

 

[Kalin]

So many walls of text to say you did some shit work on a shit game you didn't even play.

 

[MRY]

It's mimetic.

 

[Tigranes]

I think MRY's friend is on point, and the whole point about 'stupidity' also. Perhaps the way to say it without using the word is - Planescape feels like a bunch of guys who sat down with a cool Big Idea and then also threw some stuff in for kicks, being guided by their sensibilities, let's say from years of playing P&P together. Of course that means it's inconsistent, sometimes whimsical, sometimes nonsensical, but the big idea comes through nevertheless.

Then, imagine a really books-smart 13 year old comes along, gets really excited by Planescape. He reads every single lorebook top to bottom in a weekend, says he wants to make a super awesome PS v2. But instead of being guided by sensibility, he's sitting down and overthinking every single thing. Every single name, every single aspect has to have this cool well thought out meaningful twist. That's what Numenera felt like in the end.

I don't know much about how Numenera (and not TTON) was developed. You wonder how it would have turned out if Numenera was a P&P setting that developed more organically across players & collaborators over a couple of decades, before being adapted for a spiritual Torment successor.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I mean, if you really want to debate it.... Planescape deliberately breaks the fourth wall to create goofy scenarios. You have a whole race of robots that correspond to the dice you use in AD&D. Mt. Celestia features a number of deities from our world. Why? To break the fourth wall and create goofy scenarios. Hollyphants live on Mt. Celestia. Some levels are inexplicably based on Roman god names (Jovar, Mecuria, Venya), but then inexplicably Saturn shows up in the quasi-Greek Chronias, but of course he's not an Olympian deity in either account, and none of these layers are tied to the Greco-Roman gods they're named after. Again, "stupid" isn't a pure pejorative here. Feel free to substitute "successful silly middlebrow fun." The knock on Numenera is that its "unsuccessful preachy pseudo-highbrow tedium." I'm not sure that's fair, but that was the distinction that my friend (herself a radical lefty, so it's not a political point) was trying to make.

I think MRY's friend is on point, and the whole point about 'stupidity' also. Perhaps the way to say it without using the word is - Planescape feels like a bunch of guys who sat down with a cool Big Idea and then also threw some stuff in for kicks, being guided by their sensibilities, let's say from years of playing P&P together. Of course that means it's inconsistent, sometimes whimsical, sometimes nonsensical, but the big idea comes through nevertheless.

The Planescape campaign setting (1994) was created by David "Zeb" Cook as a revised and expanded version of existing AD&D cosmology from Jeff Grubb's Manual of the Planes (1987), which itself drew on earlier writings from as far back as "Planes: The Concepts of Spatial, Temporal and Physical Relationships in D&D" by Gary Gygax in The Dragon #8 (July 1977) . This cosmology in turn was something of a kitchen sink of influences on Dungeons & Dragons from fantasy (and other) literature.

Modrons, for example, feature some basic geometric shapes at the lowest ranks (sphere, rectangular prism, pyramid, cube), were inspired by the classic novel Flatland by Edwin Abott (1884) and/or the Abraham Merritt novel The Metal Monster (1920), and were introduced in The Monster Manual II in 1983.

Pantheons of deities from real world mythologies were introduced into original Dungeons & Dragons in 1976 by Supplement IV: Gods, Demigods, & Heroes, written by Rob Kuntz and James Ward, which continued into AD&D, first under the same name and later as Legends & Lore. Mythology itself being one of the primary influences on D&D.

The concept of a Law versus Chaos alignment axis comes from Poul Anderson's novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, various works by Michael Moorcock (including the Elric stories), and Zelazny's Amber novels. The idea of planes and a multiverse similarly was inspired by the writings of Moorcock, de Camp, and others.

To hate Planescape is to hate D&D.

 

[MRY]

Who is hating Planescape?

I have long loved Beavis & Butt-Head Do America. Stupid isn't always bad. This whole thread began by noting that the problem with Numenera (and TTON) was the lack of the goofy/stupid quality of Planescape, and its replacement with overwrought seriousness.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

One of my biggest grievances with the Numenera setting is that while the books suggest that setting it as future Earth is meant to allow the GM to include stuff like communism (I think that's an actual example!) or Inspector Clouseau films or, being less facetious, cultural references to our own world (e.g., a character quoting the Bible or using a conventional turn of phrase), the manual also says (and our marching orders were consistent with this) that nothing from our era can survive in normal terms into Numenera so you can't have a dog that is a dog, if you have a dog it has to be an octopus with 1d4 (haha, no d4 actually) heads.

This could not be more antithetical to the philosophy that has driven me in my own work (especially but not exclusively Fallen Gods), which is that there is a unity to our lives: to the natural world, to our language, to our cultural signifiers, our religion, our family structures, etc. To give a dumb example, the phrase "cultivate one's own garden" is situated in a whole web of meaning -- not just literary (Candide) and religious (the conversation in Candide immediately draws a connection between the act of garden-tending and the Garden of Eden), but also ecological (it presupposes a wilderness that exists in contrast to gardens) and economic (it presupposes a level of economic development in which people cultivate not just farmland but gardens) and cultural/historical (it invokes the hortus conclusus as a longstanding "safe space"(!!)) and social (the expression is not referring to huge public gardens or estate gardens, but to the smaller kind of family gardens perhaps tended by a grandmother and played in by her children etc.). It's not necessary that the listener be able to consciously follow every strand of that web (I'm sure I've missed or mistaken many), but the web trembles all the same, as long as it has not been totally torn apart.

"Cultivate one's own garden" can't exist in TTON because, inter alia, as far as I know there are no gardens in the game, and to the extent the Ninth World has gardens, I'm sure they only grow piranha plants, except that since piranhas in the setting are actually lobsters, we'd have to call them Venus fly traps, except because there's no Venus and flies are actually robotic transformers that switch between cars and urethras, we can't call them that either.... But aside from the inability to use that or some other particular expression (and believe me, this was something that pained me daily, like, you can't call someone "loyal as a dog" because there are no dogs, they can't grin "wolfishly" because there are no wolves, etc., etc.) The problem is, no webs exist at all.

Thats even worse then i thought.
Until now i considered it a giant failure because of trying to force every thing and everything and EVERYTHING (and magic and science and sci fi and fanatasy and - ad infinitum) into its content which only results in incoherent mess, but insisting nothing can be connected to well known terms, concepts and ideas is actually intentionally insisting on everything being incoherent and divested from anything familiar and logically connected.

Its the dumb paradox of postmodernism, if nothing is considered a base foundation that is true, then nothing - including that very idea is true.

Planescape was not a perfect setting -- a lot of it is idiotic, like Mount Celestia as a concept seems horribly stupid -- but at least as filtered into PS:T, there were some webs. For instance, the "rule of three" is a web with strands that are both within the setting and within the broader life of the player. Internally, it comes up over and over again, in different permutations (e.g., enemies three, the three principal incarnations). And externally, it conjures not just the fairy tale norm of three but also the Trinity, and all sorts of strands radiating out from those concepts. And the game's characters were clearly designed to reference well-worn and familiar tropes -- to subvert them (to an extent) but at the outset to rely on them as shorthand to get the player up to speed -- Dak'kon as a ronin samurai, Grace as the whore-madonna, etc.

In writing this out, I Unlocked a Memory: just about six years ago, in early March 2013, I told an all-around genius I knew from Primordia's development that I was excited about the TTON Kickstarter because the team seemed to have captured the PS:T feel. Here's what she said:

"They didn't (yet), and they won't. Not enough 'stupid' to have traction. The setting will go the way of nWoD, with a bunch of dissociated ideas no one cares about. Planescape the setting was stupid. It was written on the intellectual level of college kids in pre-Internet times. Because of the former, its philosophies make no sense but have memetic power; because of the latter, its logistics couldn’t have possibly been made to work, but hardly anyone really cares. What I see in the new Torment is too unusual and not stupid enough to have traction; and RPG writers famously suck at logistics, so I don't trust them to actually make use of the weirdness enough to deserve the “science” qualifier. Neat art, though."

She wasn't right about all of it, but she basically called it.

Its not the stupid that was the glue that held it all together but concepts that were specific and known, recognizable and already established as specific ideas.

Besides, the quality of PST came from not blindly adhering to the setting but instead abusing it and subverting it for its own purposes - to talk about even more fundamental and basically true issues and questions.
PST story was an archetypal myth of Joseph Campbell and Tolkien kind - in its own original form and twist - and that resonates with every human.
It did its own thing with a lot of tongue in cheek aimed at the whole DnD and Planescape setting base stupidity.
Brothel of intellectual lusts being just one more obvious example.

The fact we never even saw Mount Celestia and the case of the fallen Deva seem to point out how stupid that part of the setting was. As well as basing the game inside Sigil - where Gods cannot enter.
It was something to rebel against.

And its gameplay was constructed in a way that supports that archetypal hero myth foundation - by making the player work for it.
On top of that it provided additional considerations about higher concepts as questions about belief and human - one own nature. But those were based on the foundations they arose of and connected back to them.
In other words it had woven a meaningful interconnected structure.

In which some silliness - which was also based around familiar and real concepts - was welcome.
It wasnt dour and oppressing. If anything it figured out how to occasionally use comedy to talk about more serious issues - which is art in itself.

 

[Efe]

MRY would you put this game on your resume?

 

[MRY]

Of course. That said, I don't have a resume with game names on it -- my real job is as a lawyer, and I don't apply for game jobs any more; I just work on my own and help folks out when they ask. But I do have the box reasonably prominently displayed in my office at work, behind a statue a fan made of Horatio Nullbuilt and my signed box of Kohan II.

Frankly, of games I worked on, it is much more prestigious than Kohan II: Kings of War, Heroes of Newerth, etc. I'm proud of my work on TTON, and, while I can't judge the game for a variety of reasons (even if I had played it, I'd be too biased), I'm proud of having worked alongside Kevin, Colin, George, and the rest of the gang. I think they all are passionate about making great RPGs, poured a lot of effort into the game, etc. Also, ultimately, this is a game where many people have had favorable reactions to it (to judge from Steam reviews). I take an additive view of these things -- for all people may have been disappointed with TTON, I don't think it made their lives worse,[*] and for those who liked it, I think it made their lives better. TO the extent I've criticized the game, it's only because I found aspects frustrating/challenging for myself and because I'm trying to understand how a game with so much effort by such great people behind it could disappoint a lot of players.

Ultimately, I can't imagine it's the best RPG that Kevin and George have made (given that they made MOTB, one of my all-time favorites) or the best that Colin and Chris made (given that they made PS:T, my absolute favorite), but it could well be the best RPG I ever do significant writing on. Who knows how bad Fallen Gods will be (if it even qualifies as an RPG), and I doubt I'll do another RPG after that one. If anything, they should be embarrassed about being associated with me, not vice versa.

[EDIT: * Let me caveat that, actually. Some people gave quite a bit of money to fund the game's development on Kickstarter. To the extent they didn't get what they wanted/expected, their lives probably were made worse. One reason I don't like Kickstarter from the developer side -- I've done a lot of backing from the consumer side -- is that it creates moral dangers like that. I don't really know enough who would be "to blame," as it were, for such disappointment, but on some level everyone is. Just as I try to apologize to everyone who buys Primordia and doesn't like it, I would apologize for whatever responsibility I had on TTON for those who backed it and didn't get what they wanted.]

 

[zapotec]

It's an actual giant mountain that people "confuse with Mount Olympus" (in in-setting lore) in a Tolkien-pastiche atop which dwarf and Hindu gods arm-wrestle and as you do a pilgrim's progress up its side, it removes status ailments.

It's not that it's "unsophisticated" -- I think the friend I quote above has it right, it's reasonably (i.e., college freshman taking humanities courses) sophisticated, but it's stupid. Like, goofy, ridiculous, not an effort to execute something thoughtful and interwoven. It might be fun for questing, and as sorinmask suggests, a way to have a kind of Dante comedy within an AD&D campaign (I assume it would be consistent to run into Sam and Frodo making their way up it, only to portal back to Shelob's lair when they go through a particular cavern entrance, etc.). "Stupid" isn't meant purely as pejorative here. If you look at the quotes I pasted, my friend's point was that it was the lack of such stupidity that doomed the Numenera setting -- the aspiration to grandiosity rather than "lol, what if there's a cave on Mount Celestia where Socrates is trying to persuade people to stop watching the shadows but then you have to actually fight the shadows unless you listen to Nietzche who is warning you not to gaze too long into them, but them a beholder comes out and is like, 'please, fam, i gaze into everything' and then Kali jumps out and enters Mahakali form and she's all, 'I've got 10 arms and you've got 10 eyestalks' and she grabs one in each hand and..." (College freshman DM tokes, fails saving throw). Very smart and well-educated people might create and enjoy such a setting, but the enjoyment is patently stupid.

ohhh i understand what you mean now and i agree too, thank you!

In fact i think Planescape can reminds of Rift where there are vampires, along with aliens, japanese style mega robot, horsemen of the apocalypse, atlantis and so on

 

[Mr. Hiver]

Speaking of people who were hurt, anyone knows what happened with Monty after that thread and those events?

Did he managed to get better after all?

 

[StaticSpine]

MLMarkland

 

[Strange Fellow]

I don't have any strong opinions on this debate, but it's very clear to me that a setting with Hollyphants is superior to a setting without them. Maybe that's where Numenera went wrong.

 

[Bohr]

Monty's fine, he just usually posts with his mfkndggrfll account these days

 

[Kalin]

And there it is:

I'm proud of my work on TTON

I'm proud of having worked alongside Kevin, Colin, George, and the rest of the gang

 

[Sacred82]

This whole thread began by noting that the problem with Numenera (and TTON) was the lack of the goofy/stupid quality of Planescape, and its replacement with overwrought seriousness.

lolwut

the Numanuma setting is way more retarded and goofy than Planescape ever was.

1 gazillion trillion boobillion years into the future… mankind no longer treads on dirt… but on drit

Numanuma's sloppy writing can only ever get a pass because of how silly the setting is to begin with.