How involved are you in D&D's "metaplot"?

[Morrus]

Confession time. I don't really know what The Sundering is. Not out of any deliberate animosity; it just hasn't intersected with me at any point. I think it's some kind of Infinite Crisis-style reboot event of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, and that it's also a series of novels. And sometimes there are some videos for it. But I'm not really sure what it is in the context of D&D.

Maybe that makes me a bad D&D player!

Is it something to do with D&D Encounters? I've not interacted with those, either, and I'm not 100% sure what they are. A series of adventures played in game stores? Do they intersect with the overall FR metaplot?

But then, I've never been one for campaign settings much. I kinda liked Dragonlance when I was a kid, and Ravenloft was interesting (I only ever ran one adventure in it though, Feast of Goblyns, and ended up reading it more than playing it). I've never bought a Forgotten Realms product of any kind except for the Crystal Shard and Homeland Drizzt novel trilogies, many years ago (I understand the former went beyond a trilogy, but I only had three books). Same goes for campaign settings of other games. Actually, I lie - I bought "The Triangle", a setting book for FASA's Star Trek 20 years ago.

Conversely, I do enjoy adventure paths. And I'm OK with - even prefer - each adventure path having its own setting. I kinda see them like campaigns in their own right, and for me they're a better model for 'settings' - you dip in, play the series, then move on to something else. I've played D&D APs, a Pathfinder AP, and my own APs. They're a model which really suits me.

So how about you? Do you get involved in the D&D metaplot? Or the metaplot of whatever game or setting it is you play? Do you participate in scheduled events by WotC or Paizo?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

The only D&D setting metaplot that I ever got really involved with is Dark Sun. The setting was popular enough with my players that they liked it, but not to the point that they had read the novels, so I didn't have to deal with any FR or Dragonlance-style problems.

The "metaplot" was what happened if the PCs didn't do anything (and of course the plot of the adventure paths we were doing).

There are settings (Dragonlance, Eberron, even FR) whose history I liked, but once it reached "present day" it stopped. Unfortunately Dragonlance was the worst at this. I quickly realized I wouldn't want to run or play in any time period except the Kingpriest era or Wars of the Lance, and both were heavily metaplotted. I doubt I could find a D&D player these days who wasn't familiar with the Wars of the Lance either.

Not knowing what the Sundering is doesn't make you a bad D&D player. It doesn't even make you a bad FR player (you have no idea how much willpower I expended to not make a joke there). It just means you're not interested in that particular FR era. Any setting that gets large enough tends to cut itself up into mini-settings anyway. (Star Wars, for instance. I doubt I would ever play a Star Wars RPG unless it's in the KOTOR era, or right in the middle of the Clone Wars, about as far away from Annakin as is possible.)

 

[Ahnehnois]

I run only homebrew settings and I try to incorporate a variety of inspirations.

Some of those inspirations are D&D-based. I have, for example, taken a lot of the big-scale elements from the Manual of the Planes. There is a Great Wheel. There is a Blood War of sorts.

There are certainly other examples of things I've "stolen".

But do I follow ongoing developments in any particular published campaign setting? No.

 

[The Human Target]

Fairly in the ones I play or just like.

 

[fjw70]

I also am not overly fond of D&D's metaplot and campaign settings. I like to do my own thing setting-wise but I steal liberally from what it out there. My favorite setting is 4e's Nentir Vale. It's basically just a map with very little details behind it. A perfect balance for me. An example of stealing from established setting is that Neverwinter is the name of a city north of the Nentir Vale in my game.

 

[Pseudopsyche]

I'm not generally a fan of metaplot--growing up, I hated being told to buy some other comic book titles to get the full story. I'm involving The Sundering only insofar as I play D&D Encounters. From my vantage point, it's looking like it's an adventure path that will help determine the canon of the Forgotten Realms moving forward. I could see how that would appeal to Forgotten Realms fans (who aren't sticking with an earlier point in the timeline).

By the way, D&D Encounters is an organized-play program (played in game stores), where you play an adventure out in two-hour blocks at a time, over the course of several weeks. For overly busy people like me, it's a great way to keep playing D&D despite not having time for an ongoing campaign. It's like an "encounter path" instead of an "adventure path", played out one encounter per week. With the Sundering, it sounds like we're getting five 13-week adventures.

 

[Halivar]

I run only homebrew settings and I try to incorporate a variety of inspirations.
...
But do I follow ongoing developments in any particular published campaign setting? No.

Same here. If I don't invest in someone else's setting or adventure path, or whatnot, they can't break my game by changing it.

But this also means that adventure support or published settings rank at the bottom of my concerns for a game.

 

[steeldragons]

D&D has a metaplot?

 

[billd91]

I do engage in setting metaplots when I run games. I like to have something going on in the background because it helps me add a little more life to the setting if thing are actually going on around the PCs.

 

[Mercurius]

One of the joys of play D&D for me is setting design, so I've never used a pre-published setting, although own tons and enjoy browsing and reading through them for ideas and entertainment value. The same with Adventure Paths - I generally don't run them (although am considering Rise of the Runelords for D&D Next, or at last part of it), but like reading them for ideas and fun. I will use a module now and then, but as a "module" - plugged into my world.

As for the D&D metaplot as a whole, I don't really follow it - I don't read the novels, haven't read an official D&D novel for, I don't know, 20 years? I found that my fantasy reading was best fulfilled elsewhere, although some of my favorite stories are heavily D&D-influenced (e.g. Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen).

All that said, I enjoy the default D&D setting and take bits and pieces of it for my campaign world. I like the idea of being part of a network of D&D worlds - whether different variations of published worlds, like the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, or the thousands upon thousands of homebrew worlds.