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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9530917" data-attributes="member: 29398">Sorry, but I've no idea who or what Sheridan and-or Lorien are so this example goes completely over my head.Well, yes, to me it goes without saying that the story forms post-hoc; particularly in a more sandbox-y game where there's little if any long-term aforethought to what happens next.And dead ends are a fact of life.  We're not writing a novel here.  Repeat: we're not writing a novel here.  There can and will be many plots and sub-plots, stories and sub-stories, and some of those will for any number of reasons end up going nowhere.  So be it.There's 4000 bricks that went into the finished building and another 5500 that were discarded or broken along the way.  What matters is that the building was eventually built, and that each brick - whether used in the finished product or not - had its role.And 40+ years of doing this tell me loud and clear that yes you can have a party story that continues and flourishes even as the membership of that party changes over time and maybe even turns over completely.During my current campaign I ran a 5-adventure "desert" arc made up of three (modofied) published modules and two homebrew.  The payoff at the end, after numerous sometimes-self-inflicted twists and turns, was that the party had to decide* whether to awaken a sleeping deity (very bad idea!), destroy that sleeping deity (very bad idea!), do nothing and leave (punting the choice down the road until someone else came along), or stay there forever and guard the deity so nobody else could ever make that choice.  (in case it isn't obvious, this was very intentionally set up as a no-win scenario)During those 5 adventures the party went through about 30 members, some very short-lived, some who lasted onger and then died or left, and a few who made it from start to finish.This was all ten years or so ago in real time; and sure, while there's stories still told now about what some individuals did during that run, the story that matters - and that gets retold most often - is what the party did.* - they destroyed the deity; and parties today are still dealing with the very serious downstream effects not least of which was the planet got (temporarily, now fixed) knocked out of its orbit...I wasn't there for the Battle of Hastings but I can still be interested in hearing about it.  If someone only wants to be in the here and now and ignore the how and why of how things got to where they are (i.e., ignore history), that's fine; but that history is still there and cannot be denied.</blockquote>

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