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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5393314" data-attributes="member: 42582">Hussar, I share your dislike of the prioritisation of setting over story/plot. But I've run multiple years-long campaigns (8 years, 11 years, and 2 years for the current one).In the sort of game I like to run, the setting nevertheless plays an important role, as a source of plot elements. My games tend to have a certain same-iness about them (if I was any good as a creator of fictions, I'd be doing it professionally!), with the early part of the campaign involving the PCs (and the players) developing a sense of the history and scale of the gameworld and the range of relevant adversaries/allies given their own inclinations and PC backgrounds. As the game develops, the PCs become more and more directly invovled in the myth and history of the gameworld.To keep the momentum going, in my experience you need (i) a fairly rich and layered myth/history, with (ii) lots of interrelated elements that both relate to the PCs' backgrounds (and players' thematic concerns) and will give the players lots of scope to make choices about alliances/enemies/how to engage, and (iii) a story structure (established via geography, antagonist's motivations, etc) that makes it plausible for multiple such choices to be made and have their ramifications play out over many sessions of play without things being forced to an early conclusion (the game can become derailed if things go too far in this direction, and the story is so convoluted, dense or just plain slow that no progress towards a conclusion seems to be possible). And obviously the players have to be happy to buy into this.The upshot is fairly complex plots with the PCs at the centre of events in the unfolding history of the gameworld. The game can become fairly sprawling, in terms of the relevant geography and the PC's salient field of action, but it's not a sandbox (ie the players aren't exploring the world with their PCs - if anything, they are exploring their PCs with the world as a tool in that endeavour). At the practical level, players ensure at least some of the PCs have sufficient knowledge skills to engage with the gameworld, and they take lots of notes to keep track of everything, and draw relationship charts or similar to keep track of enemies/allies/factions/historical connections etc. I think it's a playstyle to which 4e is well-suited (certainly better than Rolemaster, which is what I was doing it with!).</blockquote>

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