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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 1470024" data-attributes="member: 463">Hopelessness might be ok for a one-shot game of All Flesh Must Be Eaten, but I'm not going to play in a campaign that the GM says is 'hopeless'.In the Midnight campaign I play in, my character simply refuses to accept that the situation is 'hopeless'.  She plans to defeat the Night Kings, rally the forces of Light, and defeat Izrador.  All in good time - she just made 4th level.Really, the way D&D rules work with the exponential power increases by level, in metagame terms there's no reason to think the situation (bad guys triumphant) is hopeless anyway.  If the Midnight designers wanted a truly 'hopeless' setting they shouldn't have used D&D as a base; keeping any D&D game truly 'hopeless' requires heavy arbitrary GM intervention which harms the integrity of the setting.  If Blake in 'Blake's 7' could hope to defeat the Terran Federation, a party of 20th level D&D PCs certainly can hope to effect some big changes wherever they are!I don't see Paranoia or Call of Cthulu as 'hopeless' settings - in Paranoia your PCs aren't expected to change the world or overthrow the Computer; just survive in a dysfunctional world.  They don't have an inachievable goal; and if it is inachievable - well, it's a comedy setting.  If you played it seriously, well, PCs could always flee the Complex to a better place a la Logan's Run, or (likewise) try to change the system from within.  Unlikely, but no harder than defeating many real-world dictatorships that have in time passed.Call of Cthulu is more about the 'real world' and humanity's inherent lack of importance in the universe.  Again I see no reason for despair in that (although Lovecraft did) - humans are very good at making themselves feel important to themselves.  REH's Conan lives in a basically Cthuloid universe and he seems to do fine, he just doesn't worry about the existential nihilism of it all!  The Cthuloid 'End Times' might destroy human civilisation at some unspecified future date, but so will a giant meteor or any other number of causes.  Death is part of life - deal with it.I guess if there is a truly 'hopeless setting' in RPGs, for me it would be Ravenloft, where the whole universe was created as the plaything of evil forces.  In that case trying to chang anything will always just make it worse, so apathy is inherently the best policy.  Since apathy is boring that's not a setting I'm interested in.</blockquote>

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