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Message: <blockquote data-quote="J_D" data-source="post: 1900993" data-attributes="member: 20956">I prefer the opposite.To me a world needs to be bigger than any one story.  The world not about "a" story.  It's about the people and places in it, and the lives of those people in those places, and the flavor that arises from the sum of that.  There should be innumerable stories in a world, some small, and some large.  Even with epic stories involving nations and large numbers of people, the end of the story can signal the end of one era and the beginning of another, but the world goes on.  People still live and have stories.  Even if the story the game characters are involved in ends and the campaign ends, there must be the sense that the world itself goes on and it could be returned to later for still more exiting stories.What happens when the story of the "one-story world" is over?  It's the end of history?  There are no more stories to tell?  Everyone dies?  The world ends, disappears into a primordial nothingness?  If that's what you enjoy, that's fine, but I personally would regard that as shallow and lame.  If I were a player, I'd be asking  "That's it?  What was the point?"  If there is any one single story that once finished makes the world less exciting, then the world had no depth to start with.A movie or novel is about one story, but even when the story is done there is still a sense of continuation — the crisis is resolved, but the people go on living and the world still goes on.  Even Middle Earth isn't about one story.  The world didn't end with the War of the Ring - the war just signals the end of one age and the beginning of another.  There's a new king, even a new kingdom that is greater than just Gondor.  The War of the Ring was not waged to end the world — it was waged to save the world so that the people could go on with their lives and that new stories could unfold.  Not only that, but Middle Earth also has a back story, epic stories of the past as told in the Silmarillion and other works published posthumously.  So I adamantly disagree that "world=story" is a Tolkienesque idea; Tolkien's Middle Earth is specifically not that!Even if the campaign setting is "done" in rycanada's sense of having the entire world fleshed out to at least some detail, the world itself in the sense of its history and the stories that could still be told should never be done.And I'm sure there's still more detail you could go down to, even if the world and it's peoples and nations are moderately detailed.  Is every city mapped out?  Is every building in every city identified, every street named?  Every trade route established?  In the worldbuilding sense (which is a big part of what I like about RPG's anyway), no world can ever be truly done!</blockquote>

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