What RPG settings do you believe advanced there meta-plots in the best way, and how do you think settings should deal with progression?For anti-examples, I remember a lot of people really liked the initial setting of seventh sea, but had a real problem with how it progressed and with author pet characters everywhere doing everything important in the setting. Or People really disliking the major shake up in Traveller's Third Imperium where the emperor let out some computer virus across the galaxy, or spellplague in Faerun. Or Most prominently the complete ending of Warhammer fantasy in the end times.So. What are examples of decent setting progressions that you can think of and what do you think are generally good rules of thumb you think should apply? Is there a balance to be struck between named characters doing things and Unnamed player characters doing things? Is there a certain degree of world change you like from more slight to more notable? How much of a status quo should be maintained and for how long? I think its a very tricky topic to adress that satisfies different parties.IDK if this is a thing anywhere, but I thought it would be a cool idea if moduals and adventures that involve previous pre-established character also accounted for those characters being dead/different due to things your group already did. Like that character is replaced by another similar one but with some amount of resources deducted to illustrate the effect your party had.
>>93397167eberron with the definitive "no material will ever be made past this point" and building backwards from there
J-just let your players play, OP.I promise you they are more interested in their characters and their goals than your meta plots.Let meta bullshit happen on the sides, and if it interests the players they will involve themselves. Don't expect it to interest them.
>>93397167>So. What are examples of decent setting progressions that you can think of and what do you think are generally good rules of thumb you think should apply? Is there a balance to be struck between named characters doing things and Unnamed player characters doing things? Is there a certain degree of world change you like from more slight to more notable? How much of a status quo should be maintained and for how long? I think its a very tricky topic to adress that satisfies different parties.I think part of the issue is that they build the settings to need adventurers to come in and shake things up or upset the status quo, and then they try to assume what adventurers would do.Ideally you make a world where things are weird enough for adventurers to play a big role in solving/resolving things, but you also make it so that if no one interferes things can still progress.So you might have a few events slightly different "we assume someone took out the guy who wanted to turn everyone into zombies" but otherwise you just let the world continue on the path it was going on, which generally speaking will be a little bit better than it was before in most areas but also with downward trends in others.
>>93397205I never said it mattered for most parties or even that it should.I just asked for the best examples of handling it or best practices.Since it happens to some extent between almost any major edition of a game. Not asking how to run a game session better.>>93397190Will look into.
>>93397273>I never said it mattered for most parties or even that it should.ah, maybe the problem is my use of the term "Party". In OP second paragraph, I ment "Parties" as in the authors, the GM's, and the Players, not in game "Parties".While in this response >>93397273 I am refering to in game "Parties" ie, the player. My bad for unclear termonolgy.
>>93397167Fading Suns did a good job of building the setting with ongoing plot in small sections via Austro's Journal entries and letters to his uncle in all the sourcebooks as they came out. Made the game world feel alive and like it was changing, that there was novelty as the reader discovered it and not in a way that foreclosed on player agency. The in game timeline being just after the videogame's events helped give everything gravitas but still left it open for exploration. The first and second War in the Heavens books for the trilogy that will never be finished is kind of a bummer though. Really it demonstrates the effectiveness of gestural writing and hint-don't-show. Still want Book Three though.
>>93397167>What RPG settings do you believe advanced there meta-plots in the best wayNone. It has only ever been a mistake to "advance" "muh metaplot" and the like.>>93397190Fpbp, and I don't even like Eberron
>>93397273Setting advancement is really not a thing to worry about: worry about the players, and let them move the setting and story.As they interact with the world, things will change naturally.I promise you they won't spontaneously care that the local duke is up to no good and secretly plots to take the crown by unleashing the archdemon of Pain in the capital city.They will care about the guy sneering at them from across the common room, tho...
>>93397512ok, but im not looking for GM advice.Im looking for setting book advice.
>>93397593>I don't WANT advice for traditional games!>I WANT literary masturbation suggestions!I dunno, try >>>/lit/?
>>93397167Unironically Age of Sigmar. If you kept up with the settings progress, it went from "wtf is this shit, lmao Mortuary Factory" to "Oh, Nagash is pulling some shit. I still have no idea what all this abstract shit is like" to "Oh, the good guys are actually reclaiming stuff and these places are fleshed out?" to getting more and more established, grounded, the the silly early stuff pushed into the background. There are precious few big meta events that really have had a outright negative reception.
>>93397167I'm not going to say that they handled the metaplot advancement "the best way", but BattleTech was doing pretty well with it for a while.The problem is that any change is always going to piss off:A. GrogsB. Anyone who feels that their faction is either getting harmed, or not helped enoughStill, BattleTech weathered not only the introduction of the Clans with few problems, but also the transformation of the game's aesthetic from "Mad Max with knights in giant robots" to "Pretty ordinary mecha setting". The new factions proved massively popular. One thing that they did which probably helped was that they made a new faction that existed for a few IRL months before being destroyed as a sacrifice to the new factions, rather than do substantial damage to existing factions.
>>93397593Sorry you dont know this anon, but setting guides and updates are pretty standard across games. and they are written by people, playing it is on the other end of things. If you use them at all.>>93398018>The problem is that any change is always going to piss off:>A. Grogs>B. Anyone who feels that their faction is either getting harmed, or not helped enoughyah, thats What im thinking. you are going to piss off someone whatever you do. But I do think there are more constructive practices and more destructive ones. A faction on the decline isnt so bad as just wiping them off the map and just starting fresh. And likewise, something just being a rehash of an earlier version defeats the point of a new edition. It seems to me there is a delicate balance between respecting and building upon the old, while not washing it away or being too stagnant with it.
>>93398761first comment was for >>93397644
>>93398761No one will ever care about that bullshit.Are there people who refuse to play Greyhawk because of the wars?Are there people who refuse to play Forgotten Realms because of the spellplague?Not really, because no one cares about bullshit that can be hand-waved away and isn't actually relevant to play.Only storyshitters and no gaems worry about that.
Uh oh, it looks like I accidentally left baby >>93399255 stay up past his bedtime. He really gets cranky if he doesn't get his nap. Sorry guys.
>>93397205>>93399255Ill try to level with you anon. It seems like you are assuming I think setting progression is important in an actual rpg session. I don't. I mostly do one shots and like season long campaigns.Im just saying when there IS a resource that provides plot progression in a setting, which is pretty common, how do you like it to go down?Im asking what you like/dislike in a resource book of this kind, not how you conduct your rpg sessions.
>>93397167I'm not a big fan of L5R, I know some people aren't happy with how they handled the metaplot over the years, but I always thought it was cool as hell when they'd update the metaplot based on tournament results.
>>93397167It can't be done well from the point of view of existing players, because the whole point is to change it to appeal to new ones.
>>93397950>picrel>established and groundedLOL LMAO even
>>93399255>Are there people who refuse to play Forgotten Realms because of the spellplague?Unironically yes, there are grognards who seethe and piss and screech about how bad it was to this day and refuse to acknowledge it happening and say the only good time in the setting was in 1e/2e because LORE and SETTING mattered and TSR CARED ABOUT THE WORLD.
>>93400580I dislike that they exist.I like that I can choose to ignore them in my games.
>>93397167>What RPG settings do you believe advanced there meta-plots in the best wayNone, settings for games shouldn't ever advance but only expand in detail (hârn for example). ttrpgs and wargames aren't novel or comics books, having to deal with continuity in such cases is only extra useless work that mostly don't really care about and most of the times setting advancing remove good stuff and/or add senseless shit because of multiple writers schizophrenia. Case in point your picrel, FR were raped multiple times during the editorial history of d&d, the og, close to greenwood FR is what you read in greybox and the man's novel.
The best metaplots are those that provide diegetic explanation for rule updates. That's it.
>>93400783I'll play in 5e FR if that's where someone wants to run their game, but the spellplague has definitely diminished my experience in that case, I won't take pleasure in the setting in the way that I would if it were real FR.You know how a lot of pulp scifi/fantasy shows will have that one episode that takes place in a weird dystopian timeline where everything got fucked up? But then the main characters prevent the fuckup and everything goes back to normal by the end of the episode? Post-spellplague is kind of like that, except even worse, because ultimately the writers tried to pretend that the spellplague never happened and go back to the status quo. So it doesn't even have the virtue of contrast, it's just a lazy post-fanfic version of a good setting. I would urge you to meditate on the differences between the Time of Troubles and the spellplague, because the basic ideas come from a similar place, but the Time of Troubles was better in every possible way and was also better-executed in every possible way. No one actually cared about the spellplague, it didn't influence anyone creatively, it was just a fart in the wind.
>>93401011You mean as it was implied in Die, Vecna Die? I kind of agree because of subtlety (Vecna did some meddling and we can speculate it changed the "rules of reality" from 2e mechanics to 3e ones) conversely dropping a nuke in FR exactly because 4e magic system was no more traditionally vancian (an we also needed a reason to inject nutieflingd and dragonborns in there) is hamfisted as fuck.
>>93401056The Spellplauge is even worse because multiple areas within the realms in 5e still have not been addressed in any significant way. Like Calimshan had some fucked up Dijinn emirates that enslaved humans and were overthrown by a human rebellion.But their has been no follow up on hat and likely never will be because the entire region risks accusations of orentalism and slavery, so even Ed is under NDA about it.
>>93401219Yea, that's what I mean, lazy post-fanfic. Some dumb fucks said a bunch of shit about my realms and then the never backed it up. Contrast with the Time of Troubles, which were equally audacious in their scale and equally trite in their motivation (just explaining a new edition), but lead to decades of rich beautiful storytelling just because people believed in it and were able to have fun with it. The spellplague is just a fart in the wind. They destroyed the old setting and then never got around to building a new one.
>>93397167Progression implies a goal.Wars happen, plots resolve, the political landscape changes, monsters rise, others die.The setting should change, not progress
>>93401247Progress implies forward motion, but in this case "forward" just means "forward through time"."Change" can mean a lot of things, whereas "progress" implies that the changes follow logically from the previous canonical state of the setting. I could write a version of the setting where everyone was catgirls and that would count as change but it wouldn't be progress. That said it's not such a bad thing for a setting to have a goal. Sometimes the progress isn't purely logical, sometimes it's thematic based on the themes established in previous writing, and there's nothing wrong with having a thematic endpoint.
>>93397950Most retarded post in this thread, possibly on the entire board.
>>93399255>Are there people who refuse to play Forgotten Realms because of the spellplague?No, but I absolutely refuse to play in the abortion they try to push as the "Forgotten Realms" post-3.5. If you think you can just handwave the Spellplague you're a fucking idiot.
>>93400580All right then,It all depends on how free-form you want to be, though. Total free-form seems best to me: have the plot advance on a set timeline, to be affected or not by player interaction. So and so does such and such this month; other guy does something next month; these cause that other thing to happen in one year - all of these can be affected by the pc's, or not.If you need to diagram it, then use a flowchart.
>>93401423>If you think you can just handwave the Spellplague you're a fucking idiot.But you can. Imagine all the people who jumped on the DnD train in the last couple of years and only ever knew 5e. Some solid 95% of them will never have heard of the Spellplague and for the other 4% its just another random background cataclysm that happened i guess. 1% might care and sperg out
>>93397190Harn did it first. Still the absolute best way to build an RPG setting's timeline tho.
>>93400609>>93401011idk, I feel like it could be done well by keeping in mind a balance of plausable change and stasis. Like, setting something in a potential future 20 years after the previous setting book. Something that both provides additional information about the setting broadly that you could take a lot of stuff from it and just incorporate it in the original time point if you wanted to stay there, but also progresses the world in a satisfying way. the empire that was in ascendancy is now declining. One interesting pc has moved to a next step in their life,The wandering cleric found the holy artifacts and has now set up and manages an abby containing them, The beserker has gone mad from the death of his wife and is now undergoing a vision quest.shit that doesnt feel out of left feild, but feels like a constructive element on top of the original, so that you could take something from one source book that expands the other. expansions of plothooks you may or may not take, more depth involving a culture when its in a different situation, etc.Im not certain, But I think Greyhawk did something like this where the future source books were in a time period that was much grimmer, but a lot of the stuff inside it made good sense so you could plausably take stuff from one to infor the other and vis versia.so the world wasnt just a single snapshot in time, but multiple so you could pick and choose from for insiration.cause I think there are better ways to deal with shit then what >>93401056 is talking about with spellplague.
>>93402844what does a place look like in war vs what it looks like in peace. How does new dwarven craftmanship effect this human town. what rare beasts are there that just werent discovered till now cause the dwarves havent dug deep enough before?Has new information about this long lost civilization been discovered by adventurers plummeting its depths leading to other ruins?I feel like there are a lot of ways to add in a constructive way.
>>93397167>Giving a single flying fuck about the pre-packs that got sold with the rulesFor what fucking purpose?I'm buying games, because someone did the math for me (or didn't, which is where I sell them back), not because they have any kind of setting attached to them.
>>93403639not that you should care, just if you do.if you dont, this threads probably not for you.this is for people who buy gazzeters and splat books, not for people who just get the rules.
>>93403837>No, you are not allowed to any other opinion than the one asked by OPFuck off back to plebbit, where this thread belongs with you. It is you being a dumb consoomer on my hobby board, not the other way around.
>>93403880Why are you throwing a buzzword fit? im saying what the topic is. if you dont give a shit about the topic, why are you here?
>>93397167Is there any at all? Metaplot progression just seems to strictly make everything worse in every setting that I've seen.
>>93404381IDK, But id love if someone went back to settings I liked and added shit to them instead of just night and day fullsail changed them. So Maybe I like "The Burning Vally" then they come out with "The Burning Valley + more!" that expands further on the topic and gives some interesting potential plot progressions you could take or ignore as you please. Rather than nigh on full setting wipes.
>>93403639IDK anon, I like well fleshed out setting so you have resources for how shits likely to interact instead of having to build that shit up from the ground up.If I want a good thieve's guild set up, I dont want to make that myself a lot, having the Pragmati elimination guild outlined in Mystara is easier, less of a load, and a good resource to go back too when needed.
ugh, the more time and energy you waste on bullshit that doesn't matter to the players, the less time and energy you have to create actually compelling content that your players will enjoy.Try to choose wisely.
>>93406604depends on the group. If you've played long running campaigns, you'd know the usefulness of sourcebooks.Anyways this is about the quality of source books, not if you use them or not.
>>93404883>I like well fleshed out settingNta, but this is one of those things you will never find out in rulebooks and even setting splats.
>>93406604For me having a sourcebook means that when a player asks for lets say a religious order to follow I can present them the sections on the clergy of whatever god they might be interested in without having to take the time to make all that shit up myself. Same if its an inconsequential background detail that might come up, my campaign might have nothing to do with royalty but if it somehow comes up and have a handy fallback on who runs the area.
>>93406743>still vague about what he needsMaybe spell out what you're after, then, kiddo, because so far you're confused.You won't get what you want if you don't spell it out.>>93407029Oh, you want the book to do all of the work? Maybe a video game would be more your speed. Steal ideas from your favorite media, then. No one will notice or care.
>>93407253Your hyperbolic posture does not help you in this discussion.
>>93401056His point isn't the differences between Time of Troubles and Spellplague, it's that there are a bunch of angry old retards who hate everything after TSR and think TSR was a company that cared. For them, nothing WotC ever does will be enough because they live in a magic fairy land where things are still what they were thirty years ago.
>>93407733Which is a shame because I genuinely believe that the 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting is the single best core book for the Realms that's ever been made.
>>93407972qr on this?why?
>>93407493>still can't spell out what he wantsQuel suprise.
>>93408188Almost every single nation in Faerun, from the Sword Coast to the Unapproachable East, from the Spine of the World down to the Shining South, had a detailed description of imports, exports, brief history, major religions, and ongoing plots which were ripe for adventure ideas. You can seriously turn to any page in Chapter 4 (which is about 130 pages total) and find a gold mine of inspiration. It also connected many of the lands and organizations together. The overall impression really is to create a vibrant, lived-in world.
>>93397167I've noticed that the biggest sign a setting has jumped the shark is when it's writers nuke a famous landmark (or character) to "up the stakes". Bonus points if they just casually rebuild it.>star wars: coruscant being partially destroyed by vong>40k: cadia>warcraft: cataclysm>forgotten realms: take your pickI could go on but why bother
>>93408445Be fair, the actual major Realms writers didn't want to nuke the setting the way they did, that was a mandate from WotC in order to turn the Realms into a "points of light"-style setting.
>>93408495Which happened because WotC and TSR before them had mandated the formation of Good Guy alliances like the Silver Marches, Lord's Alliance, turned the Harpers into the Justice League who always won, solved the interregnum in Tethyr and put the Good King on the throne, fixed Myth Drannor into a glorious beacon of elf power, authors refused to write Cormyr being anything other than same old same old even after the king died and court mage quit to leave inferior replacements, and more.WotC realised that the setting had gone too far in the direction of what amounted to forming modern nation states rather than the wilder adventuring fantasy they wanted, and ordered a reset of the North and elsewhere to a more dangerous place. Then the executives had a bunch of their writing department in silent rebellion because they didn't really want to do any of that, so they half-assed it, and incorporating the race creep of 3e (Genasi, Dragonborn etc. that weren't OGL) meant making even more changes that none of them wanted. Dragonborn in 4e? There was one single, solitary author who did anything with them, at all. Nobody in the writing department wanted them there. Nobody in the writing department wanted them to stay there, so they did nothing at all to elaborate on them. And since that writer stopped writing them, nobody has touched them since.
>>93408586>WotC realized that the setting had gone too far in the direction of what amounted to forming modern nation states rather than the wilder adventuring fantasy they wantedThat was ironically the fault of TSR for having a morality clause where the good guys always had to win in official material.
>>93410304Sure, but that just resulted in the creative department being full of people who wanted that to happen, so it stayed the same under WotC until it was too late to change it without drastic, shocking thematic shifts.If the Spellplague was inevitable - and necessary - owing to what people had done with it, then at least as much blame falls on TSR as WotC, arguably more since WotC at least tried to give "villains" more to do.
>>93397950Motherfucker age of sigmar isn't even a coherent setting yet.It's like a more retarded take on the planescape cosmology
>>93408288So you think its a pretty cohesive package that allows someone to really get a feel for how the different piece of the setting are likely to interact and respond to different things?Like having a good picture of the playing pieces themselves as a jumping off point.
