el-remmen said:
1) How much do you change about your setting as the years go on? Do you care/worry about the continuity and logic of those changes? Does it matter more if your regular players are used to some aspect of the setting? Does it matter if a change in rules/edition is precipitating this?
From my players PoV the setting changes greatly. My current group has been in 4 of my campaigns, spread out across ~700 years. My first campaing had an "all-powerful" church, later campaigns dealt with its fracturing power.
The ravages of hobgoblin hordes were (and are) a feature of my game at one point in time, but are non-existant in later times (I've yet to run the campaing where the hobgoblin hordes are destroyed, it involves what happens when traditional calvary (hobgoblins) go toe-to-toe with pike and musket formations backed by cannon (human-dwarf alliance)
My campaing setting started at the end of 2nd, and did most of its development in 3rd, but I'm unsure what rules changes would cause a big change in the structure of the world. Bob, the greatest swordsman in XXX is still the greatest swordsman when hes a 2e fighter or a 3e fighter/rogue
I try to keep everything logical, and to aid with that I leave areas not ready for development as vague as possible.
As an example:
One of the more powerful nations IMC has been Reiksland, a germanic empire. In most campaigns its been portrayed as an ancient empire, and fully united under a common culture and in service to the imperial throne. Now in one recient campaing the party learned that there were deep divides within the empire, between the noble caste and the warrior caste. They also learned that there was an undercurrent of religious conflict between followers of a monotheistic faith and the fading power of a contient spaning polytheistic faith.
In the last campaing I ran (taking place during a much earlier age, about 600 years before my first campaing) the party learned that there was no "Reiksland Empire" only scattered tribes warring with each other. The Imperial Throne at that time was little more then a figurehead created to rule over the southern most reaches of what would one day become the Reiksland empire. Rumors of a brutal warlord conquering the central region with aid from northern barbarains later revealed that the "brutal warlord" was, in later times, the great hero/uniter... the northern barbarians were the foundation of the "warrior caste"
el-remmen said:
2) How much crunch do you put in your development of an area? Do you create stat blocks? Do you just allude to someone's power/ability and fill it in as needed later? Or do you just ignore that facet and deal with it as needed?
Unless I expect the party to have to fight a character they will rarely receive more then a few skills and maybe a will or fort save. I've never run up the full population of a city, with a breakdown of how many in the city are X class, as there is no way for the party to ever find out that information. If they need to know how many fighters are in a city I'll say "encluding the town militia and the household guard of nobles willing to support you you'll get maybe 8000 solid troops. I dont need to know the level of the king (unless the party is going to try and save him or kill him), if he needs to be poisoned for plot reasons I dont roll a fort save, he just gets poisoned.
) and now they are more regulated to a fey creature. This is due to my opinions and veiws changing. Before, my setting was more kitchen sink, and now it has a focus, unlike before. It's all apart of the evolution of me as a gamer, and it's not something I could or would want to stop.
