Does Metaplot ever work? Forked Thread: Greyhawk 4e

[Delta]

Here's what I see as the yin-and-yang of publisher-driven metaplots. (a) Short-term, it increases sales as some number of people are completist and buy everything related to a certain campaign setting. (b) Long-term it fragments the player community because some people are not completist and break off their purchases at different times in the cycle.

I think the problem is that the big publishers don't care to support or lay a foundation for a game system for more than a couple years anyway, so to them advantage (a) generally outweighs disadvantage (b).

 

[el-remmen]

As a homebrewer since the late 80s, I never used a published metaplot, though I happily borrowed from published sources, so I read a bunch of that stuff, my alternative to metaplot would be remove the "plot" part.

What I mean by this, is that a setting can be advanced 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years between supplements, but there should be little to no explanation on how it got that way, leaving the details to the DM. That way, the DM could easily ignore any new supplement and continue with things however they happen to develop in his or her own campaign, OR have something to shoot for without being told how it is supposed to happen.

 

[Mark Hope]

I don't think the first Dark Sun novel wrecked the setting; IIRC, Tyr was always meant to be free from the start of the setting, and you didn't have to start there. However, by the fifth book previous well-written source books such as the Veiled Alliance were rendered null and void. (VA went into detail about non-Veiled Alliance life in several cities, and much of that was no longer valid after the deaths of so many sorcerer kings.)

Agree completely. It is clear from the writeup on Tyr in the first boxed set that the city is set for a revolution. Indeed, the first adventure released after the boxed set, Freedom, centres on that revolution.

Where it fails (and this has always been my biggest gripe with Freedom) is that it relegates all the cool action of the rebellion to off-screen antics by the NPCs and confines the PCs to the slave pens. The most exciting thing the PCs get to do in the adventure is flee the stadium and help random NPCs not get squashed.

When I read The Verdant Passage (the accompanying novel) and get to see what all the NPCs were doing, my first thought was "Why wasn't the adventure about all this stuff instead?" Yes, Freedom should have plenty of cool dealings in the slave pens. But then have the PCs escape, head over the Ringing Mountains, bring back the Heartwood Spear and face Kalak themselves. Make Kalak all but crippled by his transformation and you have a challenge the PCs can handle. Honestly, if you haven't read the novel, the final scenes of the adventure don't even make much sense. At the very least, the PCs should be able to lend a hand with the action rather than be bystanders to NPCs from the novels.

The second adventure, Road to Urik, did a much better job of integrating the PCs with the metaplot, but after that novels and adventures pretty much diverged, which was to the detriment of the setting, imho. As others have mentioned above, within a few years, key setting elements were rendered irrelevant by the shenanigans of the Prism Pentad. Damn shame.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Ravenloft: The Grand Conjunction, which reshaped the domains of dread, removed domains and domain lords, added seas, and pretty much shook everything up.

I'd actually argue that the Grim Harvest, which got rid of Azalin and turned the setting's largest city into a Necropolis, was worse, since that affected core and high-potential elements of the setting more than the Grand Conjunction, which mostly just shuffled things around and focused most of its changes on the underdeveloped domains.

Dragonlance: SAGA. The whole book-line moving from and away from the SAGA iteration of Dragonlance was chock-full of meta-plot.

Well, Dragonlance is a special case--the initial changes were driven more by the novel (DoSF--that came first and was finalized before the game system relaunch) than the game demands, and then you had to get the setting to a point of relative stability and with functional magic again before it would feel playable. However, the models and novels picking up after the starting point did tend to metaplot things a bit, what with the disappearance of one of the Dragon Overlords, the ambiguous death of Goldmoon, and other matters.

 

[Deset Gled]

Do you think any or most work well? Are there examples you've liked and enjoyed in-play? All the examples I can think of range IMO from marginal fail to Epic Fail, when it comes to actually using them in an RPG campaign. They seem designed more to appeal to readers who don't actually play.

Here are some I'm thinking of:

There is one metaplot that always seems to work out in the end: the plot of the Star Wars universe. It's pretty much impossible to play any version of that RPG without at least choosing which section of the timeline you're playing in. And if you play long enough (in game time), eventually a major event will cause at least minor changes in the setting.

I can remember the arguements that always came up when starting a SW game: when (in the timeline) to start the game, what technology and races were available when, and how different government would work, etc. But it's pretty hard to make the arguement that absolutely no good RPGs work around a major metaplot when we've seen so many successful editions of the SW RPG.

 

[S'mon]

Metaplot is one of those amazingly polarizing topics where it seems that people either love it or they hate it with the hate of 10,000 hells.

Me? I adore well written metaplot. Things like the metaplot of oWoD Vampire, or the past and ongoing metaplot from Shadowrun (and its linked Earthdawn stuff), and even the much more subtle metaplot from Planescape (though it did end 1/3 through its planned metaplot and was never picked up when TSR/WotC stopped having a distinct PS product line).

I find a well-written metaplot to be the hallmark of a rich, interesting, and evolving setting. Without a metaplot or some (gradual) timeline evolution of the setting, a setting strongly risks becoming stale, sterile, and of little interest to me. I adore a setting with a metaplot to continually inspire and interest me in seeing how that world develops (even if I don't use all elements of it in my own campaigns).

But when metaplot becomes an openly destructive hammer (see 4e FR) it doesn't work as well, or at all, and risks fracturing the fanbase of a setting pretty harshly.

And you use these metaplots in your game? They benefitted games you ran/played in?

 

[Fenes]

And you use these metaplots in your game? They benefitted games you ran/played in?

I pick and choose some plot lines from metaplots, but I let player actions define the outcome. This pretty much means that no matter what system I play, after a few years any setting book with metaplot is no more useful than a generic book, or a book from another setting or system since my world will not match the official one.

 

[S'mon]

There is one metaplot that always seems to work out in the end: the plot of the Star Wars universe.

Yes, I didn't address the actual plots of fictional universes that have become RPGs. Lots happens in Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Lord of the Rings, et al. I think that's a different issue; though these share the problem of NPC protagonists doing all the important stuff (unless your PCs are Indiana Jones & James Bond). Star Wars & Star Trek have the advantage of huge universes to play in. Certainly when I ran Star Wars d6 ca 1987-1989 I had no problem in setting my game just after A New Hope and running it until after Empire Strikes back.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

When it dominates the game (Realms, Vampire) or pushes the PCs off to the sidelines (Realms, Vampire) .... eh that sucks.

I have played in the realms 3 times (twice in 2e, once in 3.5) and with exception of the first 2e game (that I refer to as I can't belive it is not the realms) We always got boged down in meta plot and over reatching NPCs

As for WW games and the OWoD...if you tried to follow that meta plot the PCs ended up being spectators, and just watching the NPCs put on a show...YMMV

I'd love to chime in on Dark Sun but I've never found anyone who actually PLAYED it - which is a shame.

I ran darksun from the first box set, but adding in free tyr, and never paid attention to the metaplot

Planescape
It should be given special award to Die Vecna, Die: a module that manages to trash no less than THREE different settings (Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Planescape) in the course of one module.

Hey I liked that mod...but I do agree enough to sig this comment, becuse It is funny, and more then a little true...

 

[Set]

White Wolf seems to be the grand-daddy of metaplots.

In Vampire, after a certain point, one of the Clans was all dead. Which, in D&D terms would be like saying, 'Okay, due to story reasons, you can't play Rangers anymore. They all died and we won't be releasing any more books supporting them.'

In the Scarred Lands setting, the Elves were 'forsaken,' their diety having died in a war, and been expunged so thoroughly from existence that his *name* was forgotten, even by the elves! In the metaplot, he came back, as a result of some powerful NPC doing something. I have no idea, I never read the novel. My game was set in Hollowfaust, which, last I heard, had been blown up and destroyed. I have no idea how, but it's, IMO, the coolest darn city in the entire setting, and even if they hadn't cancelled the line, they made it clear that they weren't publishing any support for people who used it anymore.

I could care that a particular class / diety / whatever gets kacked off. I don't like that I'll never have official 3E Domains for Lleira in the Forgotten Realms, because some poorly-conceived and inconsistently written novels killed her off-stage in a single sentence that can be paraphrased as 'The uber-cunning goddess of deception, lies and trickery was invited into a dark alley by the dude who had just killed the god assassination and stolen his power, and, I guess he had candy, because she went alone and unprepared and got herself assassinated and devoured.'

It sounds like some munchkin's power fantasy. 'I say to Thor, 'Psst, C'mere' and he does, and then I grab Mjolnir and push him off a cliff!' But apparently it's canon, and there won't be an Initiate of Lleira feat anytime soon.