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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 6812994" data-attributes="member: 7635">The question to me becomes "Is having a metaplot for a campaign better or worse than having no metaplot?" I tossed in a new term, so I'll define it. Metaplot is the overarching theme that ties all adventures to a campaign loosely or tightly together. It's a long term goal, a final boss, or an ultimate ender event. They bind the exploits of the adventurers into a more narrative whole. For two examples, let's take the literary granddaddies of D&D: The Hobbit and Conan. In the Hobbit, Thorin's company goes on dozens of adventures encountering trolls, goblins, wood elves, giants, orcs, giant spiders, a shapeshifter, a dragon, and eventually the Five Armies. Each chapter of the Hobbit could be viewed as a game session, each event self-contained but still leading to a greater whole, a final goal. The DM pretty much spells out that at level 1, the group is going to reclaim their homeland, and every adventure connects to that main goal (either as a distraction or an advancement of the goal). Contrast with Conan, which has no metaplot. In each novel, Conan is doing some grand adventure often for the sake of doing it. He may have long-term goals (kingdom, wealth, love) but these goals are not the end of the game; he acquires all three and loses them equally fast, spurring him to more adventure. The adventure's themselves have little direct connection to one another (slaying false priests one time, fighting pirates the next) nor do they build to some grand finale (indeed, part of Conan's allure is that the stories are open ended and never ending; leading to Conan chronology being the ungodly mess it is). Conan's "story" from an in-world perspective will only end in his death; until that point he will wander endlessly in search of a new adventure to take in. Neither style is "wrong", nor is one inherently better, in D&D or in Lit, than the other. Some people prefer the idea of building towards a final goal (stopping Tiamat's cult, banishing the Demon Lords back to the Abyss, saving the world from the Princes of Elemental Evil) and some don't (preferring to explore the Caves of Chaos one adventure, escape slavers the next, and crush Strahd's schemes the third).</blockquote>

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