Open Worlds vs. Closed Worlds

[The_Gneech]

I don't like planar stuff in D&D generally. "Outside" is a mysterious and dangerous thing where mind-numbing horrors gibber in the dark, not a place you can hop a handy portal to so you can shop around for the best prices in ten universes.

I have occasionally allowed cross-universe characters, and regretted it every time. In my game, your character must come from my world. Besides, D&D especially is like a sword-and-sorcery Disneyland, so just about every sort of creature or character you could possibly want to play is probably in there somewhere.

-The Gneech

 

[Dark Mistress]

I picked other. The reason is I always run homebrew settings and I include what I want from the start. So in a way it is always open, but depends on the mood and feel I am going for and if it fits with the rest. But once I have made those decisions it becomes closed, no one droping by from other planes unless I am running something like planescape.(aka the game is meant to run that way)

 

[Belen]

It depends. I run a fairly closed world. However, I have always loved the idea of planescape, so I have used some of the elements from other worlds in the past. For instance, when Sigil lost its prminence, I created a new city of doors. Sigil is still there, but now I have a city that fits my own cosmology.

I would never let my players play anything other than the classes and races found on my homebrew unless I decided to run a planar homebrew, but I do not mind using some of the published worlds in my homebrew.

Could a kender appear using planar portals? Yes, but only as an NPC.

I guess other fits me best.

 

[Wombat]

My world is my world. There is no "multiverse". There is no Greyhawk, Darksun, Forgotten Realms, Arduin, Glorantha, or Middle Earth connected to it.

I may take material from other game rules, but not the worlds themselves.

Nope, I have closed worlds and am quite happy with that. Indeed, I don't even allow the "basic" planehopping spells...

 

[Gez]

I wanted to vote for every option but the first, so I voted "Other".

There's a caveat: in my metacosmology, you don't travel between universe through the Shadow Plane, but through what's behind it (as well as behind the Astral, the Ethereal, and everything else). You travel between cosmologies through the aptly-named Far Realms.

So, when you eventually arrive somewhere, you are unlikely to be still what you used to be. Gods and epic alienists are capable of making the trip relatively unscathed, but that's all.

Kenders would not explode, but they would become pseudonatural lobsters long before they can reach my world.

 

[Ibram]

No one has ever tried this in any of my campaigns, but depending on the character I would allow it (my cosmology allows for such things).

I would make it perfectly clear that my campaign setting would be the one truth and the other would have been based on misconseptions (i.e. the planescape cosmology is just an illusion, or a small fragment of a larger cosmology)

 

[the Jester]

Currently, my campaign is closed but with bits integrated from other settings (some Scarred Lands spells, etc).

My old campaign was totally open- hell, we even had a party of Gamma Worlders in Greyhawk for a while- but then Tharizdun woke and ate the multiverse, so the new campaign world doesn't really include most old-skool otherworldly stuff since it's all been devoured.

 

[Mercule]

My world is my world. There is no "multiverse". There is no Greyhawk, Darksun, Forgotten Realms, Arduin, Glorantha, or Middle Earth connected to it.

I may take material from other game rules, but not the worlds themselves.

This is pretty close to my sentiments. I have no problem harvesting crunchy-bits, or even ideas from other settings, but that's as far as it goes. If I wanted to run characters from DL, GH, or FR; I'd be running a DL, GH, or FR campaign.

I even take it a step further. At the beginning of my current game, a made it explicit that, "I plan on running this game until the characters are 30th level, at least. I will write them into the history of my world for future players to experience and to share stories about. I will make them an integrated and indispensible part of what my world is. In exchange, I expect the characters to remain exclusively a part of the world. If one appears in an email game or someone else's campaign, I would consider it disrespectful of my efforts as a DM. If there are stories that remain to be told of the characters by the time we are done, we aren't done."

All characters originate on my world, and they run their entire existance on my world. If someone breaks this trust, I will find a way to scrub them from the ongoing history of my world.

Of course, I'm considerably more relaxed when I run Greyhawk. FR stuff is still banned, but characters come from and go to other Greyhawk games. Every now and again, this even includes other worlds. Of course, I don't offer the same level of shaping the landscape -- politically, metaphysically, or otherwise -- in Greyhawk that I allow in my homebrew setting.

 

[Umbran]

I allow things that I've adopted into my continuity. Note, however, that planar travel has not played a big part in my games, to date. So, if kender exist, it's because I adopted them for my own world, they would not likely be travellers from elsewhere.

 

[Ozmar]

Depends on the campaign.

Generally, I would allow anything you want, except kender and fairies. (I usually find that anyone who wants to play a kender or a fairy is just going to use it as an excuse act silly all the time and be really annoying.) No kender or fairies!

Often, I will setup a carefully crafted or selected game world, with all the races and classes listed and detailed, and then have half the players want to play something outside that list! Then I say no, and some of them say "why not"? "because I said so, darn it!"

I tell ya, there's just no respect for the DMing profession anymore. >

Ozmar the Old Timer