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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5544549" data-attributes="member: 3820">I'm unlikely to kick off a war that has nothing to do with the PCs, largely because that's a lot of work! If I were to do something like that I'd want it to be a major showcase of one campaign or another; the players would start caring pretty quick. We're working pretty hard to avert a civil war in another of my friends' campaigns right now, actually. It's interesting because if we were interested in fighting the war we might find metagame ways to let it break out and then pick sides, but both players and characters would rather it not happen. There's plenty of stuff already to do without a war going on.Several cars running along the same track at different speeds. It's 2719 in some games, 2720 in others, one may have hit 2721 -- a side effect of playing some campaigns more frequently than others. We might revisit a game with old college friends that hasn't been played in years. Another game chugs on every other week. New games tend to take the form of new areas within the same world, happening generally concurrently. I did let the players of one campaign find out, on a visit to a foreign land, some hints that a previous game they'd played there had taken place about 20 years ago, instead of actually being concurrent, but they didn't linger much on the topic, as they were a bit concerned with going into Limbo to fight off valkyries to bring back the soul of their warrior-priest NPC companion. (I'm not much of a fan of raise dead as a reliable process with no prerequisites other than money...)To be fair, that's kind of self-selecting. These are movies about cataclysms, so yeah, they're pretty cataclysmic. On the other hand, superhero movies may or may not feature collateral damage on the same scale: often averting it is what makes the superheroes seem epic in the first place. Same thing with some high fantasy: Minas Tirith takes a good beating but isn't destroyed to showcase the power of Mordor, for instance. Massive destruction to demonstrate epicness is a tool, but I don't really think it's required to engage an audience. It's just one technique among many. (Of course, I may be slightly biased because I don't think Roland Emmerich movies are particularly good, for instance, so there may be some failure to inspire going on there...)Sure. But remember that I got into this saying "Take the players' attitudes into account." Don't keep something intact if they're actually quite bored with it, but also don't blow a major set piece up to fix their boredom if they're not bored with it. That's my philosophy.I like not sleeping on the couch. Puns are a way to provoke the wife.</blockquote>

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