NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9251612" data-attributes="member: 8461">I haven't watched any of the new MOTU, so I'm going off of the original series here, but I agree that there are some settings where the hows and whys are essentially changed up as the story progresses. Mortal Kombat is a notable example here, since even in the more recent multimedia entries into the franchise (which have had a tighter presentation than their earlier counterparts) seem to delight in changing things up on a massive scale every so often. And yet it remains entertaining.The thing is that, in both of those examples, the setting doesn't so much "work" as it does "stay out of the way." Which is fine if you only care about a particular campaign world insofar as to how much it plays into what the characters are doing. And in my experience, there are plenty of TTRPG fans for whom that's their raison d'etre; the world revolves around the PCs and their exploits, and so it only matters in terms of how exciting the players find it.But that ignores all of the other players for whom that excitement comes from having a world that isn't just window-dressing.Being able to explore how a world works, and interact with it on its own terms, has been a source of a lot of fun for myself and a lot of other players that I've known over the years. Sure, if all we wanted was "fight the advancing evil" (which basically summarizes MOTU, Mortal Kombat, and a lot of other franchises), particularly where how the PCs fight relies entirely on their own powers and abilities, rather than needing to engage with powerful local forces (who are presumably dynamic characters who have their own vested interests, considerations, fears, and such, all of which are tied into aspects of the world they inhabit, rather than being static characters until the PCs interact with them), search for long-lost artifacts, recruit extraplanar/divine aid, carve out a power bloc of their own, etc., then yeah, the rest of the world doesn't really matter. You can be dungeons-delving murderhobos all the way to level 20+ and have a great time, not caring about anything else except buffing before facing the monster in the next room. But I prefer to think that the PCs are moving toward some sort of <a href="https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-loss-of-d-endgame.html" target="_blank">endgame</a> that means doing more than killing things and taking their stuff, and that means engaging with the world as a world, which means recognizing its conventions as features, not bugs."Need" is a poor term, when discussing recreational entertainment. You don't "need" such entertainment at all, let alone any particular aspect of it. But for me, TTRPGs aren't about what you need, but what you can aspire to, which is an immersive quality that comes from being able to role-play what your character would do in the situations they find themselves in, and having a greater awareness of their world abets that, or at least it always has for me. That requires giving the world a degree of immutability once its conventions are set, and while that immutability is entirely illusory (just like the entire role-playing experience), buying into it is what makes that illusion seem more immersive, akin to turning your cell phone off at the movie theater. The guy who insists on changing the conventions, by contrast, is the guy taking a call three rows over, even though the film is starting.</blockquote>

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