DM/Players: How do you handle "hopeless" campaign settings...

[Vaxalon]

I don't use settings where there is no place worth protecting, no people worth saving, no ideals worth holding.

 

[S'mon]

'Last Heroes'. In Midnight, if you don't step on up to be heroes, chances are there will be no heroes...
...I love how now after maybe half a dozen sessions, most of the players have developed a sense of heroism all of their own.

This is what I love about Midnight - the chance to be a _real_ hero, much moreso than in a setting like Forgotten Realms where Elminster & co seem always just around the corner to save the day.

I think true heroism is much easier to demonstrate in a dystopian setting, it brings everything into heightened relief. Of course you can make an 'inherently evil' setting like Ravenloft where heroism is pointless, but a brutally bleak setting like Midnight or even Orwell's 1984 is a great setting for heroism IMO. Heroism thrives on adversity.

 

[DrZombie]

Hmmm. Ravenloft. It's "easy" to be heroic in your general fantasy setting, where you'll be rewarded with beer, gold, and willing maidens, in random order. In a dark setting, however, things are much, much harder.

For starters, the choices you make will never be black or white, therefore your motives will be more important. To keep your morality,your sense of right and wrong, your character needs to be very developped. Corruption, and the struggle against it, is what matters most. Personally, this is my favorite kind of game, even if it goes horribly wrong at the end.

According to my players, my games allways turn out that way, aaah well, they'll live.

As a last note, one of the powergamers I know once talked about how "he and his group killed Strahd in their ravenloft campaign"..... Where's the fun in that?

 

[Ibram]

To me a "hopless" campaing setting is one where the players will never be able to complete even the most basic task, any campaign/setting like that is just poorly designed.

One campaign I ran featured the destruction of a wide spread order of good knights buy the dominant religion. The players, known allies of the good knights were also marked for elimination. Now while they could not go to the religions capital and kill the high priest to save the knights they did help may of the knights escape to a distant land where their enemies would have trouble reaching them.

In settings like RL and MN the goal of a campaign is not "destroy the big bad" but rather "save the innocents" or "protect the helpless" which makes for a far more heroic campaign.

 

[S'mon]

As a last note, one of the powergamers I know once talked about how "he and his group killed Strahd in their ravenloft campaign"..... Where's the fun in that?

Sounds fun to me - not that killing Strahd does any good. Killing the Dark Powers now, that'd be something...

 

[maddman75]

I just started an All Flesh Must Be Eaten campaign, which pretty much is a hopeless setting. Zombies rise from the dead, feast on the living, and society breaks down and collapses. So what's the point? Why do the characters keep on going?

Because of the personal victories. *They* are still alive, not become one of the undead hordes. And just maybe they can make it to the military base, or find a nice quiet cabin out in the mountains to ride it out, or at the least manage to get through another day.

Plus the players really seemed to like the looting. I mean I understand needing to scavenge when society collapses, but they could have at least waited until the corpse was cold instead of loading their cars full of booze and guns after seeing one zombie.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Plus the players really seemed to like the looting. I mean I understand needing to scavenge when society collapses, but they could have at least waited until the corpse was cold instead of loading their cars full of booze and guns after seeing one zombie.

Sounds like a blast!

 

[Voadam]

I don't have Midnight but I ran a lot of Ravenloft. Horror does not need to equal hopeless.

Ravenloft is just a world with a lot of powerful evil and a lot of evil going on. That just means there is a lot for a hero to get involved in and work against. Most of it is hidden, most people don't know who the darklords are, they are not necessarily the political leaders of lands.

Good guys are not "doomed to lose no matter what they do." In my ravenloft games the heros fought a lot of evil and there was a ton of evil left when they were done but they felt they did good and were heros who stood up against evil (except for the evil party they delved into power politics).