Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 3961694" data-attributes="member: 5143">And this here is what I see as the key concept of both PoL and 4th Edition design.  The goal is to get people to design their campaign worlds in pieces rather than a whole world.Sure, your campaign might be a lot of fun if you have a map of the whole world and the entire history of the world written from the beginning of time until the present day as well as the names of every major NPC in every city in the world.However, if WotC releases a book next year that comes out with a cool class and you read it and really want to use it, you might be stuck since nowhere in your world do people teach those skills and you KNOW, you have it all written down.You also start running into canon issues.  You can't retroactively change history or the details of your world.  So, the canon of your world prevents you from using published adventures in it, it prevents you from adding new classes into your game on the fly, it prevents you from having a dragon attack town Y and having the adventures save it.  Why?  Because you already know that the kingdom that Y is in has level 15 archers stationed at the borders and around all towns.  The King also has a squad of 20 men ready to teleport anywhere in the kingdom at the first sign of trouble who are 10 levels above the PCs.On the other hand, if you design your campaign world in points at a time, you have an open world where anything can be added when it is needed.For instance, the PCs start in the starting town in the DMG, they are aware of the ancient history of elves and dwarves from the fluff in the PHB.  They get the idea of what the shell of a D&D world looks like.  They go to a dungeon and defeat some monsters.  They go back to town and decide to head north to see what they can find.Before the next session, the DM sees a book about Arcane magic and in it there is a race which is made out of magic and are incorporeal.  He loves them and decides that they live in a forest to the north and are very protective of their domain.  The PCs get attacked by them and have to make piece with them in order to get through the forest.  And suddenly you have an adventure planned.If the next week "Dungeon of Ultimate DOOM" is released as an adventure and you decide that it's to the east of the forest about a days travel away.  You have another adventure.And that's kind of the point, not only does it give a great excuse why the PCs are the heroes(there are no large kingdoms filled with powerful armies and wizards waiting to stop any threat, it is dangerous so towns have very little contact with one another, etc) but it gives an opportunity for DMs to use all the books that come out in their campaign.</blockquote>

Verification