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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 7718169">Sure, repetition can be boring.  But I think "saving the universe" misses a lot about what you're saving it from and how you go about saving it.  If the threat is physical, tangible, "real" then yeah, you're likely to dive head-long into waves of enemies, battle impossible odds and save all the princesses.  But that's a very narrow selection of "saving the universe".  Threats don't have to be bold-faced mustache-twirling villains seeking semi-phenomonal nearly cosmic power.  Threats can be subtle, subversive, intangible.  Threats can be ideologies, threats can be things you can never just punch into submission.  Threats can require different solutions, diplomacy, puzzles.Ex: in my Dragons campaign, the world is dying.  The players know this in an indirect way in the same way you can look outside and tell its going to rain.  Part of saving the world requires finding out the cause.  In this case, there are two ancient dragons locked in eternal combat.  One has trapped the other on this world, but in order to do so, he had to cut this world off from the rest of the multiverse, which is killing everything on the planet (them included).  One is irredeemably evil but seeks the aid of the players in order to defeat his good brother, free himself from the world and escape.  To that end he promises the party great power, to save their families and friends, to restore the world to greatness.  The Good Brother seeks a new way to trap his evil counterpart but offers no easy solutions to it.  Punching your way to victory simply isn't a solution and neither side is going to throw endless armies at you until you're defeated (they simply dont exist in the world).  Meanwhile, there are 3rd parties interested in the outcome of this fateful battle who will likewise attempt to influence the players (there's a deevil lord who is trapped in the "Black Book" who seeks to escape and use the world as a staging ground for an infernal invasion of the planes.  The 1st generation of the Immortal Dragons' children have in secret torn open a hole in the Veil surrounding the world, unfortunately while they could open the door they couldn't control where it went and the Breach links to the Abyss.  A plane-traveling race of "Elken" (elves with deer-like physical features) have breached the Veil from the outside but are set on conquering the world and turning it into a giant battery for their homeworld.  Meanwhile the incarnation of death "The Lich" has awoken and requires the planet to die for as it does he gains power.  In addition to a wide variety of other problems on the world.The goal for the players isn't really to "save the world", sure it's there as an option but that means doing everything right and really, what party has ever done that?  It's more about knowing when to pick your battles and where to take your victories, and the cost of easy victories may outweigh the gain.  There's very little room to "punch your way to victory."But beyond that, I think there are plenty of games where you save a city, a town, but they're not something you're going to run for 30 years.And while I hate to shoot the messenger, I couldn't help by see who this article was contributed by and re-read it in the context of some of his other commentaries and I do get a startling vibe of "back in my day..."Social commentary has limited appreciable value when it doesn't come with any sort of suggestions on a resolution.</blockquote>

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