Does Metaplot ever work? Forked Thread: Greyhawk 4e

[Jack Colby]

No, metaplot never works and only exists because some people misunderstood the point of RPG gaming. It was compounded by bad advice given in rulebooks over the years "It's like a TV series!" until it became a given that RPGs were all about stories, and that game publishers needed to provide the basis for them, and that campaign worlds need to be "updated" if enough novels and so forth get published. Thank god some enlightened players online have been fighting back against this awful trend recently.

At least that stuff above is the truth for me, and aside from that, what should it matter? Metaplot = avoid at all costs, for me, and that includes everything from campaign setting metaplot, to pre-ordained adventure paths, to scripted plot in individual "railroad" modules that try to tell a story with scenes and plot. That ain't gaming.

If some people enjoy it, good for them, really. But I have also heard many complaints that are related to this, even from those who claim to enjoy it...

 

[Obryn]

(In regards to the big metaplot event of this year, the Spellplague, I'm a bit conflicted. I never liked Forgotten Realms pre-4E, and I honestly like post-Spellplague FR quite a bit better. But I suspect I'd feel differently if I were a Realms fan.)

I keep on seeing the spellplague referred to as a "metaplot" both here and elsewhere, but I'm not buying it.

An RPG metaplot is an ongoing, emergent storyline which gets expanded in published materials. A prime example would be Earthdawn - it starts out in a certain way and there are some supplements for that. Then, they released Prelude to War which advances the timeline, has the dwarf king assassinated, and the beginnings of a big outright war against Thera. After this, the setting changes - so you get new nation books like the reborn Cara Fahd. Following that, you get the Barsaive at War campaign - which follows Prelude to War. I think from there it kept going under Living Room Games or Red Brick, but I stopped playing it well before then.

Torg would be another big one - where the setting literally changes based on info from PC groups and new realms appear, or old realms change.

Anyway, what happened with FR isn't a metaplot as I see it. It's not something you play through, and it's not something that's ongoing. It's basically a setting reboot done in a convenient way - by fast-forwarding the timeline and telling you how it is now.

If there were a series of adventures about the Spellplague itself, I'd call that a metaplot. 4e FRCS? Not so much, imho.

-O

 

[Staffan]

Anyway, what happened with FR isn't a metaplot as I see it. It's not something you play through, and it's not something that's ongoing. It's basically a setting reboot done in a convenient way - by fast-forwarding the timeline and telling you how it is now.

I agree. FR has in the past been pretty meta-plotty, though. The most annoying example for me personally was the Tethyr civil war back in 2e. When I read the blue box FR set, I thought that Tethyr would make an excellent place to set a campaign, seeing as how it was a country split into a multitude of factions each waging war on the others. So, I went out and bought the Lands of Intrigue boxed set, which covered Tethyr and Amn. And what do I see? "Here's Tethyr, reunited under the new queen, and her consort is Elminster's former scribe. Most everyone is happy with the new, reunited state of affairs."

Damn that Steven Schend (writer on Lands of Intrigue) and Victor Milan (author of the novel where this crap apparently happened).

 

[Obryn]

I agree. FR has in the past been pretty meta-plotty, though. The most annoying example for me personally was the Tethyr civil war back in 2e. When I read the blue box FR set, I thought that Tethyr would make an excellent place to set a campaign, seeing as how it was a country split into a multitude of factions each waging war on the others. So, I went out and bought the Lands of Intrigue boxed set, which covered Tethyr and Amn. And what do I see? "Here's Tethyr, reunited under the new queen, and her consort is Elminster's former scribe. Most everyone is happy with the new, reunited state of affairs."

Damn that Steven Schend (writer on Lands of Intrigue) and Victor Milan (author of the novel where this crap apparently happened).

I don't know of your specific examples - I didn't pay too much attention to FR in 2e, and almost no attention at all in 3e - but you bring up an interesting point.

The spellplague and timeline advance, as currently presented, is an anti-metaplot. It was a way to bypass the previous FR plotlines so 4e could start from a clean(ish) slate. I think that's why I'm digging the 4e Realms.

-O

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I think a campaign setting IS its meta-plot. When we see a copy of Eberron or Greyhawk for the first time we read it and think 'Cool!' because the setting builds up a potential for heroic conflict and leaves us poised on the brink of it.

Greyhawk in 576 is a continent on the brink of major war. Trouble is brewing everywhere. It's says so in the original folio edition.

Eberron is just out of the War to End All Wars and the beginning of the next one is already brewing away.

We want this. The essence of drama is conflict and all that. As with any drama that gets our interest we want to know how it turns out. We want to see what happens next. This is where OUR games begin. We hash it out ourselves, in our own various ways, to our own various satisfactions. We fulfill the expectation ourselves, rather than waiting for an author to do it for us.

Once we've hashed out this one we want the next exciting episode. Unlike a TV show though, the plot of the original has been decided by the viewers (players.) This makes consistency difficult to say the least.

I don't see how a publisher can write additional meta-plot that will work for every single game out there. They can either keep it static and hope it's not too static (running the risk of boring people) or make broad, far reaching changes that run the risk of making many (most?) folks unhappy. It's devil of a problem. RPG publishers are businesses after all. They want to sell new products. And the products have to be different because if we're buying a new product we want it to be new. At the same time, because we want the security of knowing what we're getting for our money, it really helps sales to have a known brand attached, one that fulfill expectations of similarity to previous products.

But that's their problem. And somewhat beyond the scope of this thread too.

In short: if a meta-plot doesn't work we wouldn't buy the campaign setting in the first place. Does it continue to work? Almost never. Either because the publisher is trying to tie in different aspects of their business rather than making a solid product (L5R, that's you) or because the direction the meta-plot was taken in was just plain naff. And then the whole illusion comes crashing down. I get around it by picking the bits I want and ignoring/re-writing the rest. Which is my advice on most all game elements.

This makes me wonder: when did the Forgotten Realms jump the shark?

 

[S'mon]

The relationships between different states in the Known World is one of those things one shouldn't look too closely at, because then you realize that that's because the setting was created piecemeal by a number of different authors without more overall direction than "this here is Elfland, here's Dwarfland, that's Mageland, and down here we have Islandland."

Yeah - the funny thing is though that they used a lot of very talented writers, and taken in isolation many of the Gazetteers are fantastic sourcebooks for their appropriate setting/genre. Eg I think Ken Rolston's Northern Reaches is a great D&D-vikings sourcebook; Allston's Dawn of the Emperors is fantastic for Rome vs Atlantis high powered war/politics, Golden Khan of Ethengar is the best D&D-Mongols sourcebook I've seen (much better than the excessively 'realistic' Forgotten Realms Horde boxed set); Glantri does high-magic Harry Potter gonzo fantasy, Minrothad does trade & swashbuckling very nicely, and so on.

Edit: I played in a short-lived Labyrinth Lord pbem campaign which used a Karameikos-clone setting, but put it on a new, largely unexplored continent being colonised, which I thought made far, far more sense.

 

[S'mon]

I agree. FR has in the past been pretty meta-plotty, though. The most annoying example for me personally was the Tethyr civil war back in 2e. When I read the blue box FR set, I thought that Tethyr would make an excellent place to set a campaign, seeing as how it was a country split into a multitude of factions each waging war on the others. So, I went out and bought the Lands of Intrigue boxed set, which covered Tethyr and Amn. And what do I see? "Here's Tethyr, reunited under the new queen, and her consort is Elminster's former scribe. Most everyone is happy with the new, reunited state of affairs."

Damn that Steven Schend (writer on Lands of Intrigue) and Victor Milan (author of the novel where this crap apparently happened).

This sounds like a classic example of destructive metaplot.

It seems to me that the worst metaplot derives from the writing of novels set in universes that were designed as RPG settings, eg Forgotten Realms. The metaplot has novel protagonists doing all the 'PC stuff'. Which really misses the point.

Metaplot specifically written to help GMs run exciting games may work much better (sometimes).

Finally, one-off setting reboots aren't really metaplot, I see. They may be done well or badly, and most seem to be done badly, but that's a slightly different issue.

 

[jadrax]

I think in general, Metaplot works to enable Gaming when it adds new stuff and fails to enable gaming when it takes things away.

Make a list of the ten most iconic things about a setting, if you can find a period in the plot where all ten exist, run the game at that point. If you cannot find a point when all ten exist, (Star Wars is a classic exmple,) then it may not be the ideal background to run a game in.

If all the support for the game is lacking a lot of thouse Iconic Elements, (Which is where I fear Forgotten Realms has done,) then it seems likly that you will end up disapointing players who actually *like* the setting.

 

[D.Shaffer]

Apparently from responses above it worked for WHFRP and for Battletech (the Clans) at least for some. And certainly I can see how the rather staid original Battletech universe could only benefit from an incursion.

Battletech has a couple of things going on that make the metaplot easier to swallow for a lot of its players. For starters, it's not really an RPG so much as a wargame with heavy RPG elements tacked on it. There have been RPG's for the setting made in the past, but they've never done all that great and I doubt many people have used it.

Anyways, keep in mind there's plenty of exceptions with individual players/groups, these are just my general observations...

We've got a background involving an interstellar war that's been going on for generations. This means anyone getting into the background already knows that things arent going to remain static if they've read about any of the rise/fall of different factions/units.

Since it's more of a wargame for many of its players, there's less of a sense of making up the story so much as following the history. They're wargaming different scenarios from that fictional history rather then making it up as they go along. In fact, part of the draw is getting attached to different factions/units and seeing how they've done as the metaplot progresses. Of course, THIS part can backfire spectacularly when a unit gets wiped out. There's been very few cases of any large faction getting completely wiped out, permanently. Only one major unit has ever been completely erased, the others have all come back in some form.

Those players who do make up their own campaigns and units tend to work around the metaplot. Either they play in a part of the setting where nothing 'hot' is going on, or they wait to see what's happening first, and only then do their games shift to that area.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Battletech has a couple of things going on that make the metaplot easier to swallow for a lot of its players. For starters, it's not really an RPG so much as a wargame with heavy RPG elements tacked on it. There have been RPG's for the setting made in the past, but they've never done all that great and I doubt many people have used it.

We'll have to agree to disagree there. True, it was a wargame first but the setting is so rich that it almost screamed for a roleplaying element. In a lot of ways role-playing in the Battletech setting is very much like playing in a setting based on Dune.
1) In both cases you have the great noble houses that plot and scheme against each other.
2) You have a supposed "Neutral" that wields power that the Houses do not have. In Dune it was the Guild, in Battletech it is ComStar. The Guild controls FTL space travel, ComStar controls FTL communication.
3) The houses fight against each other for some precious commodity. In Dune it was the Spice. In Battletech it is Mech factories since in the original release the ability build mechs was for the most part lost. The older Star League mechs were superior in technology to the newer mechs built by the houses.

Now I am sure most of us could come up with some good adventures based in the Dune universe. Those stories don't involve mechs but there is no reason that the story couldn't be ported over to Battletech. I played many games of Mechwarrior (the Battletech RPG) where mech combat never entered the picture. As a system it bore a lot in common with Shadowrun and I never had a problem with it.