Zeitgeists

[Jim DelRosso]

Killing a Zeitgeist will be an Epic-level challenge using the social mass-combat rules from the DMG2!

 

[Belorin]

It's one of the most unusual articles I've seen in a while.
I like it! Lots of thought provoking concepts.

Bel

 

[Xethreau]

Killing a Zeitgeist will be an Epic-level challenge using the social mass-combat rules from the DMG2!

Someone cast Regenerate, I just busted my gut laughing!

 

[Jim DelRosso]

Someone cast Regenerate, I just busted my gut laughing!

In all seriousness, that's a really cool article. Thought-provoking reading, and the sort of the stuff I like to check out in Dragon.

 

[~Johnny~]

How come there's no credit for the art? Were those pieces really done just for this article? If so, I'm impressed.

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

Yeah, this is the kind of article that could get me reading D&D insider

Ken

 

[A'koss]

A very good article, if not particularly useful to me personally. I thought the Lich-King pic though was nineteen kinds of awesome.

 

[robertliguori]

OK. How do they work?

Are they compulsion effects, overriding the facilities of mortals at key moments? Do they influence moments of random chance, weighting the scales of the universe towards a particular outcome in general? Most importantly, what happens when a Sufficiently Powerful mortal declares "**** this noise." and ushers in a new era, the 'Age of You Are ****ing Dead If You Start ****.'?

Encoded into D&D on a bone-deep level are two assumptions; random chance and the actions of certain individuals simply cannot be predicted or accounted for. As long as D&D is played as a game and not as a pre-determined-outcome collaborative storytelling exercise, it is impossible for anyone in the universe to know the outcome of certain events with certainty, because random die rolls and the ability of the characters to make decisions are both out of the purview of the game universe. As such, destiny is, at most, a rough map of the way the future might go.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea as so presented; in fact, I make it a point to include an active, quasi-anthropomorphic force of destiny in most of my campaign worlds. However, I do so treating it pretty much like any other NPC; I give it rules and limits, decide its goals and how it hopes to see them enacted, and then have it compete with every other character in the universe fairly. Hell, this is D&D; I say give Destiny stats like Pratchett's stories (detailed in Witches Abroad); we absolutely be able to kill fate and take its stuff.

 

[Lackhand]

I suspect that they're Harry Seldon-style Psychohistory effects.

Trust Hong. He's a statistician.
(And, PS: You cannot kill an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.)

 

[Incenjucar]

I think it's mostly so that a DM has something behind why the whole fricking world is acting in manner X or manner Y.

The actual statistical results of this would vary a great deal between campaigns.

Very nice article.