Why the Lady of Pain has no Stats

by Zeb Cook and Colin McComb themselves!

Our Serene Lady

The following quotes are all from the PlaneScape mailing list.

Colin McComb wrote...

With the current bunch of TSR Planescapers around, I can absolutely assure you that there is NO plan whatsoever to make the Lady of Pain any more concrete than she is today. There is NO plan to reveal anything about her. There is CONSIDERABLE opposition inhouse to doing anything about it, and as long as Ray, Monte, and Michele have their hands in the product line and have any say about it, it's going to stay that way.

Clueless berk wrote...

I've seen plenty of requests for stats, numbers, or answers from TSR on the list, why is the Lady of Pain the one aspect that I have to make up myself to prove I'm not lacking in imagination?

David 'Zeb' Cook replied...

I, for one, don't doubt the capabilities of your imagination and I don't think you need to create anything to prove you have one. When I made up the Lady of Pain, there was a conscious decision among a lot of us at TSR not to give her stats.

There's several reasons:
1) we wanted a mystery and wanted to make the point about the PlaneScape world that there are things that do not have answers
2) she was cool and giving her stats and numbers robs her of that factor (we thought)
3) if we made up an answer then somebody would make up a thing to overcome her (be it designer, DM, or player) and all PS would wind up going to Hell
4) we didn't know and probably wouldn't have agreed; and
5) I didn't want to deal with letters saying "My player killed the Lady of Pain and now runs Sigil so you can take her out of your manuals," etc.

I honestly don't understand the need to give her stats. She does the things the DM needs her to do. Why, how, and by what rules is pointless and robs the imagination.
It's like I don't understand the desire to quantify the powers or to create exact rules for how players become powers. If these things need to happen in a game, then they will and if they don't, then they won't.

One of the most curious statements I've seen on this list is that PlaneScape is a logical world. I must have erred. I was trying to create a world that defied logic.

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