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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 3189744" data-attributes="member: 11760">I think the problems on this thread seem to be coming down to disagreements about what certain terms mean, specifically "BBEG" and "story."I don't think that adventures/scenarios/whatever need to all be part of a big over-arching plot. I agree with the folks who find that silly, and best left to conspiracy theorists.However, I use the term in a different way, that there are multiple BEG (leaving off the first B, I suppose) running around. Some of them aren't even E. In my campaign, there are multiple forces working on multiple things, sometimes in conflict with the heroes, sometimes supporting them, oftentimes opposing each other. And as of yet, most of them are unknown to the heroes in my Midwood campaign. (They've even met one of them face to face and I don't think any of them realize that he's more than what he seems to be.)So my players tell me, when I'm wrapping up an adventure, what hooks in the setting they're interested in next (current votes are for poking at the Wizard of Green Mountain some and finding out what's beneath Midwood Pond that is causing people to disappear), and I flesh things out. That said, both do have more stuff going on than is immediately obvious (although the players are rightly very suspicious of the wizard, although he unfortunately knows it) and in one case, will eventually lead up to a BEG of sorts.Each adventure stands on its own, without Blofeld coming out from behind the scenes, stroking his white cat. But I like my adventures to have a climax, whether it's discovering who's been masterminding the thefts from Blackberry Ridge or putting down the ghost of a haunted abbey (the two climaxes coming up now in the two forks of my Midwood campaign). And, just as importantly, the players seem to like them.There's no railroading involved -- no plan for an adventure survives first contact with my players -- and I'm not trying to force my players to act out the scenes from some great unpublished novel, but a lot of the elements that work in fiction work for a good reason and make for satisfying adventure games. I suspect Joseph Campbell would have been a heck of a DM.As for gangs/pirates/thieves guilds, the organization will probably go on, but fighting the gang leader/pirate captain/guildmaster is likely to be a tougher fight, requiring more character resources, with higher stakes and potentially longer term consequences (not killing the guildmaster of assassins is likely just as bad as doing so) than just Assassin #3. And that's the sort of stuff that makes the nice wrap-up of an adventure to me. Just wandering out of the local hole in the ground filled with stuff to fight and rob when the players get bored of it seems at least as artificial as having a climax to an adventure apparently feels to other people.But hey, the odds of any of us being in each others' games is pretty slim, so no harm, no foul.</blockquote>

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