Metaplots: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

[hawkeyefan]

It’s never a problem as long as it’s all just treated as a suggestion for gaming groups to use however they see fit.

 

[Azuresun]

I do not mind it that much. I find it lends to a 'living, breathing' world.

Surely making a world living and breathing is the job of the players? That's my main gripe with metaplot--since it can't take the actions of player groups into account, it's usually "one of our NPC's made a big change in the setting--if your PC's were lucky, they got to watch and clap in a railroaded module". It seems to encourage an unhealthy attitude where the writers are just producing fanfic about their pet NPC's rather than making the world a place where actual player characters can and should be doing those sorts of things for themselves.

I burned out on metaplot pretty hard after being a big World of Darkness fan. For those who remember, Mage: The Ascension in second and Revised edition was like watching a slow-motion wiki edit war between authors that blew up the setting, undid the blowing up to the point where it might as well have not happened, gave us three different versions of the Technocracy, and had at least a half dozen "listen up, here's what this game's REALLY about" editorials.

I think metaplot is something for people who enjoy talking about a setting and figuring out "the truth" about it, vs actually running / playing RPG's there.

 

[Eltab]

Metaplot should not crash into the fundamental rules of the setting.

Dark Sun taking out the Sorcerer-Kings was a mistake, but starting a trade war between two of the big Houses (and bad political relations between the respective home cities) would work.

 

[ccs]

I've never been a huge fan of meta-plots & don't really use them. Oftentimes flat out denying them in games I run.
To me they're just the tales of how someones campaign is progressing, but not mine.....

 

[Dioltach]

Not a big fan of the COVID-19 metaplot ...

 

[aramis erak]

I almost liked the metaplot for CT and MT - entirely ignorable, but there if one wants it, in the pages of JTAS, TD, and MTJ, and the sidebars of MT.

T:TNE... burned into the mechanics, hard to excise from them, as key elements of the classic setting aren't supported in the char gen. Whole different drives paradigm, too. Plus the new edition... Mechanics decent, but... hate the setting changes.

Vampire? Paid no mind to the metaplot.

Dragonlance? I prefer 5th age — both rules and setting — to AD&D DLA.

Jovian Chronicles claimed to have one, but I never got it.

Pendragon, the metaplot is as much a part of the game as the adventures. It's what makes it great.

 

[Shiroiken]

I'm of two minds about meta-plots. In FR, there used to be a lot of minor changes made due to the novels, but then they'd throw in a world-shattering event every few game years, making the world a very unstable place! The original Greyhawk wasn't supposed to age, with every campaign starting at 576 CY and making the future based on the DM and players (TSR changed this due to the popularity of the FR meta-plot).

Rokugan was an interesting setting with a meta-plot that was done fairly well in the 4th edition of the game. There was an official timeline broken down into various eras, with the most recent ones based on the events of the CCG. The GM would choose an era to run, and then decide if they wanted to keep to canon or go their own way. I always tried to keep to canon, feeling that GMs that wildly broke canon were silly, but after years of gaming I realized how easier it was.

 

[Li Shenron]

At one end, we have Eberron. . .absolutely no metaplot, the published game setting is intentionally fixed at one specific point in time and even 16 years (and 2 D&D editions) later it hasn't budged. New World of Darkness seemed to go far out of its way to avoid any kind of metaplot as well.

This is my ideal: a fantasy setting totally frozen in time, where it's up to the gaming groups to write the story.

Despite being one of my favourite published settings, I hate Forgotten Realm's metaplot, particularly the idea of "updating" the world every time there is a rules edition change. I always found it very lame and ridiculous that a world-scale apocalypse must occur to explain why a weapon's dice damage or character class' abilities have changed. I don't even like the idea that a fantasy setting must be associated with a particular ruleset. I'd much prefer to keep them separate, so that you can choose and combine your favourite fantasy setting with your favourite ruleset.

 

[wingsandsword]

I always found it very lame and ridiculous that a world-scale apocalypse must occur to explain why a weapon's dice damage or character class' abilities have changed.

For the record, there was no big "Realms Shaking Event" for the transition between 2e and 3e.

They had a few minor events to explain some things, like the Red Wizards of Thay giving up on attempts at conquering the world and going for a more economic hegemony, and starting to openly sell their spellcasting services and create magic and sell magic items for hire. . .to explain 3e's magic item economy. . .and the generation of the Thunder Blessing coming of age, to explain why Dwarves can now use arcane magic when it had previously been a strict AD&D rule that Dwarves just plain couldn't use arcane magic at all.

That was also the time that the Shadovar returned from the Plane of Shadow and became a new menace, but that wasn't tied to a rules change.

There was no huge cataclysm like the Time of Troubles (1e to 2e), the Spellplague (3e to 4e) or the Second Sundering (4e to 5e) to explain it though, just a few relatively minor events to explain a few things.

 

[wingsandsword]

I burned out on metaplot pretty hard after being a big World of Darkness fan. For those who remember, Mage: The Ascension in second and Revised edition was like watching a slow-motion wiki edit war between authors that blew up the setting, undid the blowing up to the point where it might as well have not happened, gave us three different versions of the Technocracy, and had at least a half dozen "listen up, here's what this game's REALLY about" editorials.

White Wolf was particularly bad about that. I have no idea how their internal editorial process worked, but I quickly realized that either there was nobody trying to coordinate plotlines and canons and various authors were just trying to do it informally on their own, or that the efforts that were being made had a lot of stuff slipping through.

Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand was one big example. It introduced into WoD metaplot a faction of vampires, the True Black Hand, that seemed to know an awful lot about other supernatural groups that keep things secret, AND introduced a HUGE retcon about the nature of vampires and vampiric disciplines, trying to say that some disciplines were actually infections by Lovecraftian abominations from the Deep Umbra, and that many vampires are actually not creatures of infernal damnation, but beings of cosmic horror, and only they know this truth and are trying to save the world, or at least themselves, from various extradimensional horrors that destroy minds and souls.

(I love how the White Wolf wiki describes that book as essentially being the peak of the "Superheroes with Fangs" game style that became really common in White Wolf, it really was the book for "Vampire Superheroes" as it turned Vampire: The Masquerade into a Call of Cthulhu game with vampire PC's)

. . .then cue later Vampire works going out of their way to say that the True Black Hand was completely wrong about pretty much everything, and they're all wiped out and dead and nobody knows anything about any of the things they were totally wrong about or pretty much anything else they knew.

THAT seemed like a wiki edit war.