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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9735964" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I find it's a hard sell to come up with a completely different group that somehow manages to be all the things needed, without any of the connections the previous group had. If Frodo and the rest of the Fellowship die trying to take the Ring to Mount Doom...it almost certainly gets acquired by someone who can use it, either Saruman or Sauron. You can finagle it, but the finagling itself is an undesirable complication. If the TPK happens very early, maybe it can be worked around without too much effort, but like, if the Fellowship had stuck together through the start of Return of the King and then ended up dying in the Paths of the Dead rather than recruiting them. Suddenly, you've lost your Ring-Bearer, your True King, your nearly-unique Wizard, and almost all connection to that plot. Yes, it still exists, but so much has been built up, I find a lot of people would disengage rather than accepting a kludge to replace with the B Team that never existed until the TPK made them necessary.But I would also argue that the idea that separating one campaign from another in the open format is a lot harder to do. That is, I would personally argue that that isn't a new campaign, so long as it's starting at more or less the same time that the previous group died, and getting to see the ripple-out consequences (as you reference below) that the other party had. Now, if there's a timeskip, so that the previous party's actions have mostly rippled out already and the group is having to rediscover the world again, then I would definitely call that a brand-new campaign.I guess what I'm saying is, the linear campaign "stays the same" by retaining narrative proximity: new characters who can step into, or at least patch over, the roles that the original characters filled. Conversely, the open campaign "stays the same" by retaining setting proximity: new characters existing near the same time and location, rather than the same purpose and goal.Well that was my point: when things go wrong, just as a railroad is a linear thing going wrong in some way, the GM feels they cannot do even that local interconnected stuff with ripple-out consequences, because that might be seen as "forcing" people to do things. Hence, when that temptation actually manifests, it contributes to the "wasteland" experience, just as the GM shielding players from any real consequences contributes to the "railroad" experience.</blockquote>

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