Hey there Barastrondo!
Barastrondo said:
I imagine if there were a high enough priority on the entire world changing, the PCs wouldn't be doing as much work as they do not allowing Events to take place that would wreck the places they care about. The players matter. Their opinions matter. And some players would rather prevent a cataclysm than let it happen and pick up the pieces afterward.
A world is a big place, can the PCs be everywhere at once though...its very unlikely.
I can assure you than I'm not being some kind of horrible tyrant who is enforcing a "you cannot break my precious stuff" rule. The whole lack of permission to wreck things can come from players who say "this is our stuff, let's knock the teeth out of anyone who wants to wreck it."
As you yourself note, you mostly play Heroic Tier.
It depends, because places can have cultural identities, and thus they inform character. If you blow up Japan, then you deal a rough blow to people interesting in playing characters informed by the Japanese cultural identity.
Or maybe we lend an extra layer of angst for those who hail from [insert place] who were out of the country when it got blew up.
Oh, plenty, just as we've seen plenty of second and third-string characters killed off (not to mention countless redshirts). Destroying something that you designate as expendable is the simplest way to say We Mean Business.
Exactly, its a tried and tested trope for establishing the threat posed by a villains and monsters.
Certainly, if your standpoint is "the campaign that centers around that PC." However, if multiple campaigns take place in the same world, should the desert-based pseudo-Al-Qadim campaign end when the frozen north saga ends? Especially if the latter ended because some of the players moved away, but the former still has players who want to ply the seas and wander the dunes?
Then you pinpoint the key cities areas you least want to see bad things happen to and start the wars in neighbouring countries and so forth.
Well, my question is "How do you achieve a sense of scale without invoking a theme of cataclysm?" I'm genuinely interested in answers that address this. If the answer is "you can't," then that implies that epic is much more limited in the themes it can address than other tiers are. I hope that's not the case.
Epic is primarily about scale.
While that can certainly mean the scale of destruction (and often does since combat is one of the focuses of the game), it can also mean the scale of creation, be that natural creation, like the great world tree Yggdrasil, or something forged like a Flying Fortress carved from a mountain.
Of course scale can be inverted, such as a city in a bottle (Kandor reference) or perhaps having the PCs shrunk and injected into someone (Fantastic Voyage, Inner Space) to cure them of infection.
So to answer your question, you can have epic without epic destruction just as much as you can have D&D without combat.
I admit I mostly run heroic-tier games, because they go all over the place and address a lot of themes. The quirky exploration and cultures of a bizarre lost city, urban intrigue in Italian-inspired fantasy, northern blood feuds a la Icelandic sagas, the fantastic narrative of Arabian Nights-style desert fantasy: I'm curious how such games could retain their distinctiveness if they were to tack on enough levels.
The ideas mentioned seem better expressed in the Heroic and Paragon Tiers. Some stories or themes are better handled in the lower tiers.
Think in terms of local news, national news and world news. Would the events headline world news? If not, then they are not epic.
If a sense of sufficient scale can only be achieved by having them all blend together into generic world-shaking cataclysms, I find the loss of that individuality considerably more disappointing than collateral damage alone. I would much rather see a game model where each individual campaign has the potential to hit epic level while maintaining its themes, without invalidating all the other campaigns.
The epic tier can have its own variety. This returns us to something I mention in the article itself. Keep something unique for each tier of play. Each tier should have its own new wonders to reveal.
Something akin to Italian-themed Urban-intrigue at the Epic tier might revolve around a plot to assassinate the Lady of Pain in Sigil.
I mean, we may simply be talking past each other; if your experience is largely with one single group of PCs who inhabit the only campaign in a given world, your concerns just aren't the same as those of the various groups I play with. That's cool. But I figured that it's worth pointing out that some people play like we do.
You could still do it, but those of lower tiers would simply have to accept the potential changes which might occur from the fall-out of the epic events...which from what I can glean from you, might cause a bit of a mutiny, so it may not be worth the hassle - especially when you have already 'set out your stall' to be a certain way over the past number of years. It might be too much of a paradigm shift. Though I suppose you could always start slow, give the PCs slightly more responsibility over the next year or so, then gradually introduce a few potential epic elements.
Like I said, I'd be very interested in seeing if someone's seriously addressed ideas for a variety of epic campaign models in a world where multiple campaigns are running at various level. It may simply be that heroic and paragon are the ideal way to share a world between multiple player groups (particularly those where some players overlap but others don't). But I'd like to think that there are more possibilities out there.
I think you may just want to stick to Heroic and Paragon tier affairs and assume that any epic 'world-shaking' business is happening 'off-stage' and being taken care of by a group of epic NPCs working behind the scenes.
- a city-sized monster has some interesting possiblities (I'm very amused and intrigued by the adventure in Open Grave(IIRC?) where the whole adventure takes place in and on the body of a dead god/primordial)), I can see and appreciate the flavor. I also agree with the observation that many GMs aren't comfortable with large-scale changes in the game world - I include myself in that category, and am deliberately planning to break that barrier in this campaign. (Basically, whether the Empire stands, or falls, is restored, or is replaced, will be up to the PCs when they reshape the world during Epic tier.) 
