Alternatives to "Save the World"

[roguerouge]

Prevent the party's Alienist wizard from consummating his marriage to the Lethe-dipped spawn of Baalzebuul who is unknowingly masquerading as a pretty halfling girl who is unaware of her true form: a giant maggoty-beetle thing.

I hate you. That image is going to haunt me.

 

[cougent]

I used a slight twist a while back of having the players write up their history bio and include one major like changing disastrous event in it. I then tied all these events together into the ultimate evil (which was trying to destroy the world) but THEIR motivation was pure revenge on the BBEG, and saving the world (or not) was purely a side effect. This actually worked well on several levels, it unified a rather diverse party that had little reason to otherwise be united, and it gave them great motivation to do the right thing while simultaneously providing them lots of action and destruction. (Something my particular players liked very much)

 

[Irda Ranger]

Generally I don't like "Save The World" campaigns for three reasons:

1. What can you do once the campaign is over besides retire? No encore.
2. Why isn't [Insert Elminster/Mordekainen Equivalent] personally involved?
3. The PCs generally don't care. Really. As RangerWickett mentioned, you have to love a world before you want to save it, so starting out a campaign with "Save the world" before your PCs know or love the world is not inspiring.

My solution: ask the players what they want to do, and do that. It works like this:

Step 1: I ask the players to decide what they want to do.

• "Fill in the map."
• "Fight the Evil League of Evil in the City of Bigcity."
• "Recover the blade of Sir Strong Mighty, fallen in battle three centuries past in the land of Darkevil."

Step 2: We make PCs appropriate for that kind of campaign. Everyone needs at least one in-character reason (and preferably two) for why they're on this quest.

Step 3: We then decide on a Kicker. A "Kicker" is something just happend, like right now, that demands immediate action.

• "My father's store was just robbed; they left the money and took a book."
• "All of our supplies were stolen by bandits and we're naked in the woods. You hear Bugbears approaching."
• "A thief just pick-pocketed the map leading to Sir Strong Mighty's tomb; he's running down the street in front of you."

This gets the campaign off right quick.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

My current campaign is "save the barony," but the sequel is going to be about

Spoiler

preventing a dragon from becoming a god

, which certainly edges into "save the world" territory, without actually being a save the world plot.

 

[withak]

One of the potential goals I'm going to set before my players is to end the practice of slavery in the empire they live in, either by diplomacy, more violent methods, or both. But that will only present itself if they seem interested in doing so. I think of it as an optional long-term quest.

But, yeah, the long-term plot arc involves saving the world.

 

[Kmart Kommando]

I read this book where the forces of good and evil fought, and good won. Then, the world started turning all to light, because the balance was upset, and a band of evil people had to go save the world from the goody-two-shoes.
Villains By Necessity. good book.

Try that scenario on the party.

Kind of a kill-them-and-take-their-stuff...for-their-own-good kind of game.

edit: Use the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn approach: the heroes are running around trying to save the world, and end up doing exactly what the BBEG wants to be done. Hilarity ensues. They can spend half of the campaign 'saving the world' and the rest of it fixing what they screwed up.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Villains By Necessity. good book.

Eh. Fun concept, but I thought the book was really weak. The so-called "villains" were, with one exception, not villainous enough. They were, at best, "gray" characters.

If the book's going to be about villains who are forced to do what they do "out of necessity," the author should have the guts to actually make them evil. And the only one who was evil came across as a stereotype, almost a joke.

Bah. Sorry; I just get my hackles up any time that book's mentioned. It could've been done so much better...

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

A lot of posters seem to complain that ye olde "save the world from massive threat"-scenario is lame. I'm wondering - what's going on in your campaigns, especially at high levels and epic proportions?

Save the world is so much easier to use.

If the heroes' motivation is money, they become risk-averse (you have to live to spend it, right?).

For instance, I played my group's first session of Traveller. For the most part, we're merchants. On a weird planet (clothes and oil being the big thing there) we were contacted by this weird, three foot tall barely sentient penguin. It had a psychic ability that could render it invisible.

It wanted us to rescue its companion locked in a secret government facility. However, it could offer us little in the way of renumeration, a big deal since our ship has a massive mortgage on it. (Several character -- at least three -- are filthy rich, and together the whole group owns about 26% of the value of the ship.)

I was all for sneaking into the facility, but the group kept asking the barely sentient creature how it got out (the thing's grasp of technology was very weak; it thought grenades were just rocks, for instance), wanted it to draw a map (the thing was dumb), acted like it was lying (even after they found out it could turn invisible) and we spent an irrelevant half hour or so going to the "penguin village" and trying to extract more gold out of them and make the barely sentient creatures into an army to storm the base. (Which would, of course, just increase casualties.) We only got the one thing to go with us, which was fine by me because the dumb things were really annoying.

(This turned out to be important for plot reasons, but the inability to see the future turned the whole damn village into an exercise in frustration for me. And we would have found out about at the base anyway, especially since we could capture prisoners there.)

Finally we sneaked into the base, and the other players wanted to use the penguin as a scout. It could turn invisible, but the thing was so dumb it couldn't have really helped us. Then again, we all felt dumb when we figured out the first encounter.

So, I was getting quite grumpy at the group's wimpiness and so my character stormed off. And by stormed off I meant cautiously peered around the corner, since angry doesn't have to be synonymous with stupid (and this was a military base, potentially filled with hostile soldiers). I saw a large metal thing, and very briefly thought it was a combat robot before I realized the thing was an automated vacuum cleaner. The whole group had been terrified that there was "something bad" around the corner.

Good thing we didn't send the dunce; it probably would have said "I dunno, it's a metal thing" and the group would have screamed "combat robot!" and run away. Scouts need a certain amount of intelligence, after all.

In the end, we found more cash inside the facility than we could have gotten from the dumb penguin-thing village. However, the inability to see into the future was probably dismotivating the other players.

I ran into a similar problem running Raiders of Oakhurst. The players basically wanted to skip the final encounter, preferring to abandon the village to the dragon. Since the dragon was basically a baby, having it hire bounty hunters to hunt the PCs down was basically out of the question. (Also, I hate demonic dragons. I kind of like dumb force of rage dragons instead.)

 

[RFisher]

When it all comes down to it, why does (almost) anyone become an adventurer?

Chics

 

[Kmart Kommando]

Chics

Now all we need is chicks, Kenny..