Is 'Good vs Evil' fantasy better for long-term campaigns than more 'amoral' Swords & Sorcery?

[pemerton]

You need players who can set a common goal, and I've never seen that happen without the DM giving them one.

The players in my game have differing goals for their PCs. Part of their job is balancing/reconciling them. Part of my job is engaging multiple goals at once.

In our session on Sunday there was a disagreement among the PCs (and the players): the paladin/Questing Knight/Marshall of Letherna wanted to continue trekking through the Underdark to find Torog's Soul Abattoir; the invoker-wizard and the chaos drow wanted to take a detour via Mal Arundak, a besieged fortress of Pelor. In the end I made them decide by rolling dice modified for CHA. The Mal Arundak faction won, and the PCs therefore found themselves on the Abyss.

In the end the paladin's goals ended up being engaged anyway, as he was able to lay several dead spirits to rest, and in the process of doing so initiated a showdown with his main rival in the Raven Queen's hierarchy.

 

[haakon1]

It's almost the wrong question. I think the issue is more "structured/railroad" versus "player driven/sandbox" campaign styles.

There are many different questions in Good v. Evil opposed to Swords & Sorcery:

1) Party alignment and motivation. Are they good guys whose motto is "Truth, Justice, and the Gondorian Way", or just low-life scum looking for something to steal who say "Who Wants to Live Forever"?

2) Non-dungeon NPC motivation. Are there lots of mostly good PC's to defend, people who make themselves worth saving -- in my wording, is there a Shire? Or are all NPC's just jerks trying to steal from the PC's, assassins in disguise, or at best props to be kidnapped to "motivate" the PC's to action?

3) Is there a plot to the campaign? Are adventures a bunch of mostly unrelated stuff, perhaps with some recurring themes or villains, but no overall story arc (like Classic Trek)? Or is there a story arc from beginning to end that the DM has planned out (like Babylon 5)?

4) Is there more than one enemy, or just one uber BBEG behind it all?

5) Is the choice of episodes/direction of the plot primarily DM-driven ("after the Dwarven Hall, they'll need to deal with the dragon threat"), or completely free-form player driven ("we don't care about the Realms anymore -- let's teleport to Mystara this week!".

6) Is the purpose of the campaign 'save the world'? Will the PC's go through the Adventurer, Conqueror, King, Godling cycle and become superheroes in the end to complete the plot?

7) Who's the best fantasy writer ever? Tolkien or anybody else?

My preferred answers are usually: (1) Gondorian, (2) there's a Shire, (3) episodic only retconning an overall plot, (4) multiple enemies, (5) DM picks/writes the adventures, (6) stop at a level lower than "top" and with a final plot where it's not down to the PC's to Save All Mankind, and (7) Tolkien.

Others, obviously, prefer other feels, and I bet most people mix it up on these issues in different campaigns.

 

[pemerton]

Is there a plot to the campaign? Are adventures a bunch of mostly unrelated stuff, perhaps with some recurring themes or villains, but no overall story arc (like Classic Trek)? Or is there a story arc from beginning to end that the DM has planned out (like Babylon 5)?

<snip>

Is the choice of episodes/direction of the plot primarily DM-driven ("after the Dwarven Hall, they'll need to deal with the dragon threat"), or completely free-form player driven ("we don't care about the Realms anymore -- let's teleport to Mystara this week!".

I feel you are making some assumptions here, such as that a consistent story or campaign direction relies upon the GM to drive it. I think this can be achieved without the GM planning things out; the players make choices, including choices about who to oppose and what sorts of goals to pursue, and the GM responds to those choices and puts more opportunities for choice in the players way.

This is really a repeat of my response a few posts upthread to [MENTION=1165](Psi)SeveredHead[/MENTION].

 

[NewJeffCT]

In my comments above, I also mentioned player skill. You need players who can set a common goal, and I've never seen that happen without the DM giving them one. Instead, you get one goal per player. (Well, with the players in my group. Perhaps other groups have more skill at this.)

A "fight versus evil" is a pretty common DM-imposed goal, but there's lots of other ways to structure a campaign.

When I ran a game recently, the players had no contact with each other ahead of time, but came up with the following for backgrounds for their PCs:
1) An escaped slave
2) A cleric of the deity of freedom & liberty (aka, the anti-slavery deity)
3) A paladin who was inspired by a group of slaves fighting for their freedom against near impossible odds, and the group of paladins who saved them.
4) A PC whose sister had been captured by slavers and he was trying to find & rescue her.

I took that as a sign that the players wanted a campaign where they fought against slavers and the powers behind the slavers and gave it to them. I don't think imposing that on the PCs was imposing a "fight vs evil" on them. If I had decided the players were going to build a kingdom in the wildlands or fight against goblin raiders, it would have been imposing my ideas on them. (and, yes, there was a theocracy that was led by followers of the deity of slavery & tyranny on the map, but it was not that close to where the players started in game...there was also another evil theocracy on the map, as well as a larger "evil" empire.)

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

When I ran a game recently, the players had no contact with each other ahead of time, but came up with the following for backgrounds for their PCs:
1) An escaped slave
2) A cleric of the deity of freedom & liberty (aka, the anti-slavery deity)
3) A paladin who was inspired by a group of slaves fighting for their freedom against near impossible odds, and the group of paladins who saved them.
4) A PC whose sister had been captured by slavers and he was trying to find & rescue her.

Are you sure they had no contact with each other? They all managed to come up with related concepts.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Are you sure they had no contact with each other? They all managed to come up with related concepts.

positive - it was a new group who had no contact with one another other than through me in the beginning. Each person developed a background before the entire group got together at the table.

I had just run a different group before I moved through an epic campaign where they fought the followers of this same god of slavery & tyranny. I was hoping for some sort of change of pace, to be honest, as I didn't want to do another anti-slavery campaign.

 

[S'mon]

It's almost the wrong question. I think the issue is more "structured/railroad" versus "player driven/sandbox" campaign styles.

That's not the question I was asking. All my campaigns have been pretty player-driven by modern standards; they grow out of the stuff the players are interested in, interacting with the stuff I'm interested in. They are emergent, never pre-scripted; I always keep in mind the cautionary tale of James Wyatt's pre-scripted Greenbriar Chasm (described in countless Dungeon magazine articles) as the perfect model of how not to plan a campaign. I've toyed with the idea of running a Paizo AP, but never actually tried it yet.