Planescape: Torment
I played the game Planescape: Torment pretty far as a kid, but couldn’t finish it due to some game-breaking bugs, and anyway my English was a bit lacking at the time. I finally completed the game in 2023-05. Planescape is name of Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting where the game takes place.
Playing more Torment. I realized Annah is the only one of the companions who isn’t really old. Not sure about Ignus and Nordom. In any case this game definitely has the most interesting player characters of any RPG.
Playing more Torment. Spent the most of the day at it. A silly “feature” in the game had a print shop owner lock his doors to me after I pestered him too many times — too late did I realize this and that he was a key figure to joining the Anarchist faction. I had to load an older save and spent close to an hour clicking through the same things I just had, but at least I succeeded in the task.
Got to Ravel. Damn, that discussion with her is some boss fight, so many traps that cause a fight and make you miss out on lot of content, items and experience points. I used a guide to help me, but whenever I do that with a game I have certain rules for myself: I mentally pick the option I want to choose or I think is the right one. Then if the guide confirms it does what I expected it to, I will usually choose that option even if it’s not the best one. So I avoid bad mistakes that would usually be rather annoying: Either I lose something significant, or I need to load the game which causes loss in immersion.
After the very lengthy discussion with Ravel, of course I still need to kill her. Pretty tough fight for the nerves, since there was no opportunity to save in between, and I’m playing on an increased difficulty setting.
I had forgotten much of the plot and almost all of it’s good even if I did remember it. Now I’m actually getting to the parts of the game that are new to me. I learned something about Morte’s past which was pretty cool and didn’t seem familiar. Also I think on earlier runs I missed most of the discussion with Ravel, it was rather interesting.
Finished Planescape Torment for the first time now. Went through all the endings. Great game, but I thought the ending would be a bit different. Specifically, I was expecting there would be more closure with the companions. If I had written this, I would have made TNO (The Nameless One) “fight” all of the companions in dialogue. His past decisions would have heavily influenced the results, some of them mutually exclusive. I would also have made those fights symbolic, a bit hard to explain, but basically every character would have had a “role” in allowing TNO to confront the final boss. The meeting of the other incarnations was a bit like what I mean. In any case, TNO would “win” 1-3 companions and use that as a party to fight the boss (of course non-fighting ways of winning the game would exist as well).
Analyzing the game, I thought about the quote “To write a might book, you must first choose a mighty theme”. I read somewhere that the theme of the game is “regret”, but I guess personally I felt it was more about the past and eternity of time. The impossibly long quest of TNO and everything created by the wake of it was really cool and made me think.
I started to think about the factions in Planescape Torment. Torment’s cities have no governments, just members of big factions who have taken it upon themselves to take care one part of running the city. And that leaves a lot of holes and conflicts between the factions for all sorts of interesting things to happen. In real modern societies it is implicitly accepted that every citizen will follow the laws of the state and be subject to punishments upon failing to do so. But if the society’s key functions were split into disagreeable pieces, it would seem more logical for the “citizens” to consider only some of them just.
https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/planescape-torment.pdf
The Torment design doc is pretty good. Even for a legendary game like this, there’s plenty of stuff in the doc that got scrapped or changed. I guess the designers knew that at the time of writing the doc, but the point is that even if you know things will change, you won’t know which ones, so your doc will never be accurate. Yet it doesn’t lower the value of making one or doing planning otherwise.
https://crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/crpg-book-preview-5.pdf
Skimming this community-created book on influential PC RPGs. I loved the introduction to Torment:
Most fantasy RPGs follow the tried and allegedly true formula, which strips them of anything ‘fantastic’ and grounds them in the dull ‘reality’ of the familiar. Sadly, the much coveted instant recognition usually means instantly forgettable. How many times should we save an utterly predictable and generic world before it gets really old? Why is that when we see a town on the horizon, it’s not a place of wonder and strange customs, but a place to restock on FEDEX quest and trade in your loot? Now compare it to Planescape: Torment. You wake up in a mortuary. Dead. A gravity-defying skull starts chatting with you, making it clear that you aren’t in fantasy Kansas anymore. The rules are completely different and you have no idea what they are yet. Where are the familiar elves and orcs – the foundation of quality storytelling? Why isn’t an ancient evil stirring? Where is a kind lord of the realm to send you on a mission of great importance? Why your character isn’t a dashing young hero, destined to be awesome, but a scarred, formaldehyde-soaked corpse, cursed with immortality? You open the door. Zombies are crawling everywhere, yet it’s not a zombie apocalypse. The zombies mind their own business; in fact, they are nothing but indentured workers whose bodies were sold to the Dustmen, one of the many colorful factions in the game. You can attack the zombies if you’re a creature of habit, but you can also walk around, studying the undead, and even get very unusual items from them.
Chris Avellone, lead writer and designer of Torment plays the game. He was also a designer and writer on Fallout 2 and New Vegas.
Reading the Planescape rulebooks. I figured out this on my own, but it’s nice how the Dungeon Master book explains meta things like this:
Bluntly put, as far as a PLANESCAPE campaign’s concerned, the Lady of Pain’s little more than an icon that crystallizes the mood of the campaign setting. Player characters should never deal with her. She doesn’t give out missions, she never grants powers to anyone, and they can’t rob her temples because she hasn’t got any. If she ever does make an appearance, it should be simply to reinforce the wonder and mystery of the whole place.
Cranium rats are cool. They gain intelligence when their numbers grow, able to cast wizard spells. I remember Avellone noting that it interesting that normally rats are the weakest monster in an RPG, but in this setting they are one of the strongest.