menunhetet: I'm playing Torment and it's turning out to be my favorite RPG adventure since the Baldur's Gate saga, and that is saying much. I have to admit, though, I was expecting it to be a lot heavier in the way of philosophical content. It has some philosophical dilemmas but they are not unusually difficult, just enough to influence the alignment of your character by making decisions and talking to the various characters.
The most difficult problem in the game so far has been figuring out how to open those blasted gates in the Lower Ward! I must be slow or something but I've played this far with little difficulty and now I'm stuck at this late stage. >:(
With regards to the Lower Ward, what gates are you talking about? If you mean the gates to the foundry, you should be able to speak to the guard to get him to open the gate, iirc.
As to Planescape's philosophical focus, it's more about the plot and general commenting on things like the nature of good and evil and what, if anything, can change human nature.
Hell with it, I know I was going to try holding off the spoilers, but here goes. Sorry if it reads like a mess; studying is leaving me more addle brained than usual these days.
MINEFIELD O' SPOILERS
Deinorra prophesies that TNO will by the end face three enemies, embodiments of Good, Evil, and Neutrality twisted and given life by the laws of the Planes (of which there are many; hell, her prophesy alone fits the Rule of Three to a T). When I first heard that, part of me wanted to roll my eyes because I was expecting the result to be the usual mess that tends to get made whenever D&D tries to explore Good and Evil and does so with all the insight of a pre-schooler. The game went on and I got sucked more into the world of Sigil, a city where philosophy was the center of everyday life in a way that would be mere subtext in any other setting. I can't pinpoint the exact point when I started realizing that the game was going where it was, but one of the more telling moments that leaps to mind was in the Civic Festhall.
I had gone there to look for clues about my next objective and in doing so inadvertently stumbled across a Sensory Stone containing a memory of one of my past incarnations. This wasn't the first time I had run across evidence of him, but after that I was able to form a full picture of him. He was the definition of Evil; he cared only for advancing his own interests, he felt no emotion for any sentient life (other than annoyance when they didn't do what he wanted), and yet he was a great leader who consistently did good things in order to suit his own needs. He tried to help Dak'kon with his crisis of faith, but did so to make him able to master the Karach blade. He showed love and kindness to Deinorra, only so that he would be in a better position to emotionally manipulate her into following him so that he could kill her to establish a link to the place where his enemy resided. He was Evil, yes, but it manifested in subtle ways as opposed to Sarevok giggling while he killed people as if he were receiving a blowjob from a nun whose orphanage he had already decided to burn down.
Once we left the city and started running into the enemies Deinnora had prophesied, the foreshadowing of how Good and Evil were being treated in universe got brought home violently. We ran into Ravel Puzzlewell, supposedly one of the most Evil and selfish nighthags to walk the Grey Wastes, only to find a tired and lonely creature who had made her largest contribution to the plot out of love for another. Later still, we ran into a Deva, an embodiment of the concept of all things Good, and he was prepared to pull a Lucifer and wage war on the Upper Planes out of disgust for their role in fueling the Blood War by providing arms.
Good and Evil had both been flipped onto their heads, yet without disregarding the meaning of the terms. Ravel did what she did to satisfy her own desires, and Trias did what he did out of a belief that it was best for the Planes. They both acted as the planes dictated they should, but not as one would commonly expect. Ravel's actions were selfish, but they were no more selfish than anyone who does something out of desire for the love of another, and Trias may have acted out of a desire to act for the good of the planes, but he did so by committing treachery and planning to destroy the very manifestation of Good. They acted within the rules that the multiverse had laid down for them, but they somehow were doing things that felt... off.
Why was that? It could be part of Planescape as a setting showing that Good and Evil, as constructed from the beliefs of those in the Prime of what those concepts are, will always be somewhat imperfect and are not the objective truths that those in the Realms tend to treat them as; I could see that, especially after the setting material I beefed up on for my Planescape game. But near the end, the game reminded me of something that had happened earlier that made me think that there may have been more to it than that. At one point in the game, belief literally moves a city, and one of the game's dialogue options at the end comments on it, and it made me realize what they might have been aiming for.
See, the big question the game loves to ask is "what can change the nature of a man?" It sounds like it's going to be meaningless arc words that ultimately sound cool, but ultimately give the player nothing to think about. The game doesn't go that route, however; instead, it offers many different potential answers and provides many examples that could go either way, and forces the player at points to ponder the answer when conversing with certain characters. By the end, the game offers one suggestion that I hadn't considered all that much: belief. To quote the game, "I’ve seen belief move cities, make men stave off death, and turn an evil hag's heart half-circle." Belief has been the driving force of the status quo of the Planes, but it has also resulted in some of its more noteworthy deviations, as that option and the game as a whole showed.
tl;dr: By providing a close look into the nature of Good and Evil, the game suggests that belief defines how we understand human nature, and it also has the ability to change it. At the very least, that's one of the things I get out of it.