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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9038180" data-attributes="member: 29398">Inetesting, in that I have a character of my own in a similar situation: she has ve-e-ery big long-term goals, the end point of which is to become the Empress of that setting's version of Rome.  That said, I harbour no expectations those goals will be realized during her adventuring (i.e. played) career, as they really don't involve adventuring.  In fact, even now she's starting to realize that going adventuring in fact runs a bit counter to her aims (though the funds it provides are welcome!) in that if she's in the field it means she's not in the political arena where she really should be.To take your end points in sequence, for my own part:"It's unrealistic to expect your character to do great things".  Well, it depends on a) what those great things are and b) whether you expect to happen during the character's played career.  I mean, knocking off the orc tribes forever is great adventuring fodder, but all the politics around becoming overlord of the Yu states is IMO something best done after retiring from adventuring (and thus from day-to-day play)."That changing the world is basically impossible".  I don't hold to this one either as DM or player.  As DM I'll sometimes put PCs in positions of potentially making great changes to the world - for better or worse - and see what they do.  Some real-world years ago in my current campaign I put a party in a huge-scale lose-lose position: they could either kill an imprisoned god and in so doing doom the world later (a large part of the reason the world exists is as a holding cell for this guy), or let him loose and in so doing doom the world now.  They chose to kill the god.  Three in-game years later the winters are already noticeably colder to much colder everywhere, and I've currently got a completely different party on a long and twisty path to maybe un-dooming the world, though they don't know it yet."They don't seem to want to upend their lore".  Established history, no.  The future?  They can make as big a mess of that as they like. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />That seems to me like one of the many obstacles along the path to reaching your goal.  As DM I can handle that just fine.  As player, it'd be situationally dependent both on the character (characters of different ethics/morals/alignment would have widely different approaches) and the situation (just how badly do I need this guy's alliance anyway).I look at the game/campaign as being bigger than any one PC's story, in part because I don't want the campaign to end if-when that PC's story ends.  And so, there's always going to be lots more out there at any given time than just what matters to the PC you happen to be playing at the moment.</blockquote>

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