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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DragonLancer" data-source="post: 5322109" data-attributes="member: 11868">I fully agree with this. Vampire the Masquerade had the best metaplot I have ever found in an RPG. Each supplement had small references to events as time went on. Nothing major just little things like a Justicar being sent to quash an Anarch revolt, or a mysterious rash of vampire deaths across Asia. Things like that make the world come alive and can be dropped in or ignored.The major Masquerade metaplot events such as the Week of Nightmares could still be used or ignored by the Storyteller. Nothing ever took up so much space in a supplement that you could look at it and go "I've wasted my cash on something I can't use". The loss of a metaplot in the new World of Darkness is what makes the games feel somewhat bland. There's no Caine or Gehenna threat, no conspiracies between ancients or elders, no take overs of power....etc. It's still a fun game but there's no life in it.D&D handles metaplots badly however. People have already mentioned The Time of Troubles killing off gods (why do that?), but to me it is Dragonlance and Dark Sun that got the screw more than any other.At the point of the Blue Lady's War/Twins Trilogy on Ansalon, Dragonlance was at a perfect point to be static with lots of adventure/campaign possibilities. Ansalon was still rebuilding after the War of the Lance, the Silvanesti forest needed restoring, the remnants of the dragonarmies needed to be contained...etc. Instead we get a sudden shift by involving too large a metaplot and having the world swept away and we lose all the gods again. The recent 3.5 releases of Dragonlance material by Margaret Weiss were too focused in the here and now of the settng that the majority of them were hard to use if ignoring the advanced metaplot.Dark Sun was the other setting that got messed up and within only a short span of time from release. A perfect setting ready to be used with a cool initial scenario that lets the characters take part in the liberation of Tyr made sense. Wiping out all the setting's BBEG's destroyed the feel of the setting and the expanded lands, while nice ideas, didn't fit very well.I like metaplots but not to the point where they affect a setting unnessecarily.</blockquote>

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