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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5537069" data-attributes="member: 3820">I imagine if there were a high enough priority on the entire world changing, the PCs wouldn't be doing as much work as they do not allowing Events to take place that would wreck the places they care about. The players matter. Their opinions matter. And some players would rather prevent a cataclysm than let it happen and pick up the pieces afterward. I can assure you than I'm not being some kind of horrible tyrant who is enforcing a "you cannot break my precious stuff" rule. The whole lack of permission to wreck things can come from players who say "this is our stuff, let's knock the teeth out of anyone who wants to wreck it."It depends, because places can have cultural identities, and thus they inform character. If you blow up Japan, then you deal a rough blow to people interesting in playing characters informed by the Japanese cultural identity.Oh, plenty, just as we've seen plenty of second and third-string characters killed off (not to mention countless redshirts). Destroying something that you designate as expendable is the simplest way to say We Mean Business. Certainly, if your standpoint is "the campaign that centers around that PC." However, if multiple campaigns take place in the same world, should the desert-based pseudo-Al-Qadim campaign end when the frozen north saga ends? Especially if the latter ended because some of the players moved away, but the former still has players who want to ply the seas and wander the dunes?Well, my question is "How do you achieve a sense of scale without invoking a theme of cataclysm?" I'm genuinely interested in answers that address this. If the answer is "you can't," then that implies that epic is much more limited in the themes it can address than other tiers are. I hope that's not the case.I admit I mostly run heroic-tier games, because they go all over the place and address a lot of themes. The quirky exploration and cultures of a bizarre lost city, urban intrigue in Italian-inspired fantasy, northern blood feuds a la Icelandic sagas, the fantastic narrative of Arabian Nights-style desert fantasy: I'm curious how such games could retain their distinctiveness if they were to tack on enough levels. If a sense of sufficient scale can only be achieved by having them all blend together into generic world-shaking cataclysms, I find the loss of that individuality considerably more disappointing than collateral damage alone. I would much rather see a game model where each individual campaign has the potential to hit epic level while maintaining its themes, without invalidating all the other campaigns.I mean, we may simply be talking past each other; if your experience is largely with one single group of PCs who inhabit the only campaign in a given world, your concerns just aren't the same as those of the various groups I play with. That's cool. But I figured that it's worth pointing out that some people play like we do. Like I said, I'd be very interested in seeing if someone's seriously addressed ideas for a variety of epic campaign models in a world where multiple campaigns are running at various level. It may simply be that heroic and paragon are the ideal way to share a world between multiple player groups (particularly those where some players overlap but others don't). But I'd like to think that there are more possibilities out there.</blockquote>

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