Editing Planescape (section)

==Critique==
While fans defend it zealously, the truth of the matter is that the setting is not without its critics; many harsh comments have been laid at its feet over the years.

For one thing, the heavy use of the 'Cant' has been both praised as adding to the game's feel and attacked as making the sourcebooks a pain in the ass to read and thus potentially alienating to players who can't wrap their heads around it. It doesn't help that the Cant is both recognizably based on 1800s British Cockney slang, and used without a lot of care - the term "berk", which the Cant flings around freely as equivalent to the 90s surf-bum's "Dude", actually means "cunt" in Cockney, for example (which makes the Cant the D&D version of Australian English).

Then there are the Factions, which aimed to replace or at least to nuance that hoary Alignment straitjacket with philosophy.  Some of the factions are pretty well loved. Others are seen more as "nice ideas, bad execution". And then... there are the other ones that shouldn't exist, at least not for player characters. Such have proven, [[kender]]-style, to cause internal conflict and disruption. For example, a Fated membership is easily abused to justify bullying the party or stealing from it, whilst the Xaositects outright ''expect'' a player to play [[Chaotic Stupid]].

Then there's the cosmology that Planescape runs on itself. As a setting involving actual ''gods'', it runs into The Problem Of [[Elminster]]: where players cannot and arguably should not threaten certain NPCs. This constrains the stakes of the narrative.

As to the overall setting, we awaited the expansions to see how they'd fix certain narrative issues we could see coming as long ago as 1979 and then 1987, in particular how to handle the heavenly planes where there didn't look to be any real conflict therefore adventure. Here [[skub]] has seethed around the "Planes of Conflict" (the [[Outer Planes]] that sit in between two [[Alignment]]-exemplifying Outer Planes) and the [[Elemental Planes]]. The general theme of such complaints tends to focus on how comparatively bland and disinteresting such planes are perceived as being, arguing that they feel more like they were used to mark points off of a checklist than having actual interesting ideas for DMs to explore there and, yes, the Good aligned planes were absolutely phoned-in here. The Elemental Planes also get attacked for their sheer lethality and perceived emptiness; critics arguing that they serve little more than the setting's equivalent of the monster generating pits in Gauntlet. We resented having to purchase three (3) boxes to get all the lore for the Lower Planes which we needed to run campaigns where it mattered. It all should have been one setting box (supplemented with ''Faces of Evil'', ''Hellbound'' etc.); for the heavens, a splatbook aimed at player-characters, for magic and items.

And it doesn't help that Planescape was actually made to cash in on the same audience as the [[World of Darkness]], and that the tonal comparisons are obvious - the whole existence of the [[Harmonium]] is often cited as one try-hard attempt at being "punk".

And that's just talking about the game. There are also complaints about the game's players, who have a reputation for both being especially [[grognard]]y and for arrogance, which stems at least partially from the conceited, know-it-all tone of the game's viewpoint characters.