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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 2146750" data-attributes="member: 12037">Status quo makes great background. But, really, the PCs will either avoid things too powerful for them (or run away if they can't) or ignore things too weak."There's a great wyrm dragon to the north? Okay, we won't go over there.""There's a group of 5 goblins harassing school children to the south? Meh, somebody will kill them."I think its nice to say how wonderful status quo is, but when I step into a dungeon as a player I don't want to die horribly in the first room because its realisitc (and it is very realistic) nor do I want to walk over everything there because they're so very weak (which is also very realistic). How many people would come back to a game where the DM did either of those things repeatedly?I remember a while back when I actually got to play a game; we went through a dungeon, the battles very difficult and challenging for our three 7th level characters. At the end was a hydra that, if we had fought, would have killed us. So we ran. Do I think of it as a status quo encounter? No, I think of it as an encounter created way above us so that we would run away.I would go so far as to say that there isn't actually such thing as a status quo "encounter" as long as the DM has knowlege of the PC party, since a good DM won't just throw insta-death situations at the PCs. A great wyrm dragon nearby exists, but it is a backdrop, a prop, an extention of the setting. It isn't an encounter unless it wants to talk to the PCs, in which case hasn't the encounter been altered so that the players won't die, or does it parlay with all travelers in its territory?So, if most status quo aspects of the setting have no effect on the PCs in actuallity, but they interact with the tailored things all the time, that doesn't make it a status quo campaign. That just makes it a mostly tailored campaign with a lot of versimilitude.EDIT: I'm partially just taking devil's advocate here. I would really like to hear some success stories of status quo.</blockquote>

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