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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5021974" data-attributes="member: 26473">Whereas I understand it to be a positive example of a status quo setting.First, in my experience a group of high-level characters showing off their awesomeness on weaker but still deserving foes tends to make for a fun encounter.A group of mid-high level characters in my 3e campaign were confronted by a swarm of first level bandits while travelling; the players talked about that encounter for weeks afterward, of the many ways they sliced and diced and fricaseed the hapless would-be brigands. And they received accolades from a neaby villagers for clearing the road of the menace to the settlement; the players reveled in the rock star treatment for quite a while, actually.Second, a status quo setting (I'm getting tired of the ways 'sandbox' is being misused in this thread, so I'm going to go back to the older, pre-video game descriptive phrase) isn't challenge after challenge after challenge served up my a complaisant game master. If you eliminate a threat in an area, then you need to go looking for trouble instead of waiting around for it to find you (while expecting it to be level-appropriate at the same time).Adventurers in status quo settings must be proactive. Adventure is out there, and if you're bored by the local offerings, you need to dig deeper, or sail further, to find it.Of course it is. It's what you, and a whole lot of other gamers, grew up expecting from roleplaying games because that's what the designers served up.Because background is, to me, mere fanwank that no one experiences in play.What I tell my players is a good background explains your character's motivation for not staying home and being a tradesman or an accountant or a courtier, and then stops. A background sets up the game; it doesn't intrude upon it.Some examples of what I mean will help. <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> "My character hates orcs because they killed his family when he was a boy!" versus "My character hates orcs because they killed half our party, including my best mate, in those caverns we were exploring near the keep."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> "My character has sworn vengeance against the baron de Bauchery for abducting Princess Pinkflower, my teenage love!" versus "My character has sworn vengeance against the baron de Bauchery for abducting my mistress, Princess Pinkflower, while we were on a diplomatic mission for the king."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> "Oh noes, the wight is my long-lost father!" versus "Oh noes, the wight is our former cleric!"</li> </ul>See the difference? One belongs to no one but the player; the other is part of the collective experience of everyone playing the game.What happens around the table should always be more interesting and more exciting and more troublesome and more glorious to the players and their characters than stuff that never happened except in one person's imagination.This goes back to the idea that status quo settings 'lack depth,' where depth is defined as how much 'background' the players and the game master force into play. The depth in a status quo setting comes from the relationships the adventurers build during the game. Again, it requires proactive players who understand that the game-world is wide open to their machinations, that friendships and rivalries result from what the characters do, not who they are, in particular not who they are based on what the player wrote down on the character sheet before the first die was thrown with real consequences on the line.</blockquote>

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