Changes - what is possible?

[Umbran]

If you're playing 4E, and believe its retractors in that it is a MMO, the answer is "no changes at all"...

If you're posting on these boards, and believe that baiting is acceptable behavior, then the answer is, "You're wrong."

Pick your edition-war fights elsewhere, please. Oh, and you won't be posting to this thread again.

Anyone else want to pick fights, or otherwise show disrespect to those with contrary opinions?

 

[Mercule]

There are a few cosmic principles that are so far behind the scenes that I doubt the players/PCs would ever even become aware of them, let alone want to change them.

Otherwise, anything up to, and including, the destruction of the world, changing the way magic inherently functions, casting down or raising up deities (including themselves) could be accomplished by a group of sufficiently motivated PCs. Of course, just because it's possible, doesn't mean I offer it up on a silver tray with a neon sign.

Still, that feeling of possibility is one of the main reasons I prefer to run a home brew setting, rather than a published one.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

I'm currently running Keep on the Shadowfell, and intend to go on to Thunderspire Labyrinth, Pyramid of Shadows and so forth, right through to 30th level.

However, during all of that time, I'm keeping a wiki of what's happened, what's happening and so on and so forth, at Obsidian Portal. The long term goal is that the players actions in this game will form the history of the next game, and so on and so forth throughout the years.

By using the pre-made defaul PoL setting, but letting the players write history from here on in, I'm hoping to get the best of both worlds.

For a start, I ran them through Into the Shadowfell from the Worldwide D&D day as a starter adventure, and as an epilogue they discovered that the two boys that they rescued are the secret scions of the Kaius dynasty mentioned in the adventure. As such, they are now seeking to revive their family line and start to rebuild it's power. This is going to have some interesting consequences, depending on what the players do.

 

[Greg K]

Once the campaign starts, the PC's are free to do what they want and that can lead to changes. The only limitations is that they cannot play evil characters and they must work within the confines of what is available in the setting and their character's knowlege. Some of the things that have happened.

- The characters Inadvertantly started a war between a theocracy and the dwarves whom the theocracy had given sanctuary. The players decided that the party's cleric had the authority to speak on behalf of the theocracy and made promises that they shouldn't have with regards to the dragon's treasure (most of which had belonged to the dwaven ancestors).

- They allowed a plague to spread by not truly investigating it until they realized that the spreading plague was moving toward their homelands. Three nations fell to the plague by that point.

- The enemy won, because the party was too afraid to open the last of four magical gateways.

Two campaigns later the setting was post apocalyptic.

 

[Scribe Ineti]

How many and how far reaching changes can PCs in your campaigns achieve? If you are using (semi-)official settings, how far can your PCs go? Is there a line they cannot cross, powers and beings they cannot topple, catastrophes they cannot cause (by accident or design)?

I'm running a 4e Eberron game, and I'm basically leaving it to the players to how they want to shape the setting. I took the setting as laid out in the core setting book and used that as a starting point. If the PCs' actions end up changing something significant in the setting, so much the better. I don't have any lines in the sand as far as stuff they're not allowed to alter or change.

Some of the players may not realize this yet, but they may eventually.

I intend to run this game until the PCs reach 30th level, at which point I expect the setting will look very different from the core setting as presented, and hopefully it'll look very different directly because of the PCs' actions.

The next campaign I plan to run will be in a different setting entirely, so I don't see myself coming back to Eberron right away. If and when I do, I'll either start over with the baseline or (more ideally) use the revised setting with a new group of PCs who know of the antics of the first group of PCs.

 

[Crothian]

In short, how free to create and destroy are the PCs in your campaign? Do their actions top "official" events and changes?

The player characters are the star of the show. They can potentially do and change anything. However, it might be very difficult for them to do and there is the definite potential for failure.

Last campaign the group basiclally wiped out the Mindflayers and even killed their god, getting themselves very dead in the process. But a bigger example is the first campaign in the setting (about 12 years ago) the orcs were wiped out. Now we are a dozen real yerars later, about 8 campaigns or so later, and the first orc since that day was encountered. Considering how common orcs are in most D&D worlds this was a pretty big change.

We've had PC's attain demi god hood. We've had PCs create and destroy artifacts. We had the PCs take out all natural light (everywhere in the planes) for almosta year. Basically it took that long for the Sun God to get everything right again.

 

[Obryn]

They tend to dramatically change the setting of every campaign I've run. As far as I'm concerned, if they don't, I'm failing to respond to their actions.

PCs in my games tend to turn into movers & shakers. That's kinda by design, and kinda because I think it's a natural outgrowth of becoming extremely powerful.

In my Arcana Evolved game, they directly contributed to a dragon conquering a town, started a major war, opened up a planar gate that disrupted teleportation world-wide, and got worshipped as gods by a sub-race of feral, subterranean faen. (And this religion started spreading around the aboveground faen later on... They kept hearing about "prophets" for about a year, real-life time. Only near the end did they figure out what was actually going on.)

-O

 

[steenan]

My campaigns tend to start small and end epic (not in a sense of levels - as most of them are not D&D, but in scope). The following are examples of things I had my players do, I expect them to do in current game or I'd allow if they tried with good plan and/or enough power:
- Influencing, assasinating or becoming leaders of empires.
- Learning and doing things that were done in legendary times of a setting, but forgotten in times the game is played
- Challenging and defeating avatars (in some settings gods)
- Getting to know gods on personal, friendly level
- Finding ways around what is seen as a absolute restriction in a game worls (e.g. casting in an antimagic area)
- Designing and creating creatures, spells, magic items or technology the setting never saw before
- Attaining god-like skills in some areas; attaining godhood in some settings
- Causing social, political or geographical changes that require redrawing the map of the game world
- Creating aliances on world's scale, playing crucial role in wars that decide the world's fate

What I wouldn't allow players to do:
- Changing the basic laws of how a setting works (how magic works, who can use it, how gods get their power etc.)
- Winning world-scale wars by themselves (they may be the most important persons in winning it, though)
- Destroying world's economy or ecology just because game mechanics allows it
- Becoming the most powerful beings in a game world

 

[steenan]

(double post)