A commenter to my Retrospective on From the Ashes wrote the following:
It's a known problem in fantasy worlds with metaplot that the stakes need to escalate until each new world-threatening villain and their attendant cataclysm is met with a yawn.
This is an accurate observation in my opinion and one that I've very deliberately tried to avoid in my ongoing House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. Escalation of the sort the commenter mentions is, in my opinion, poison to the health of a long campaign. To show you what I mean, here's a very incomplete list of just a few of the major endeavors of the player characters over the course of the last nine years of active play:
- A Funerary Mystery: The campaign kicked off in 2015 with the characters assisting their clan in attending to the affairs of a dead elder, who'd died at an advanced age. In the process of doing so, they uncovered evidence of a plot by foreign agents provocateurs to destabilize a border region of Tsolyánu.
- An Extended Trip Abroad: The House of Worms clan sent the characters to neighboring Salarvyá to tend to the clan's business interests there. After a few weeks seeing the local sights and exploring places of interest, a magical mishap propelled them thousands of miles away to the northern land of Yán Kór. The journey back to Tsolyánu took more than six months, during which time they met new friends, made new enemies, and tangled with the dreaded Ssú for the first time.
- Tsolyáni Politics: Returning home, they accidentally interfered with the plans of an imperial prince (Mridóbu). In return for his forgiveness, they pledged their future assistance to him, no questions asked.
- Cult Investigations: In their home city of Sokátis, the characters looked into the disappearances and strange behavior of important local people, leading them to discover evidence of a secretive cult dedicated to one of the Pariah Gods, perhaps the fearsome Goddess of the Pale Bone herself. In the process, they come to realize one of the player characters was not who seemed to be but rather a magical copy employed by the cult. They rescued the real character and disrupted some of the cult's activities.
- A Foreign Posting: Prince Mridóbu called in his favor and sent the characters to the far-off Tsolyáni colony of Linyaró to act as its administration. This posting is a "reward" for the characters' proven ability to disrupt hidden plots. Mridóbu believes something suspicious is afoot in the colony and the characters have the skills necessary to reveal it (plus he wants them far away from Tsolyánu, lest they cause more trouble for him there).
- A Journey by Sea, Land, and Sea Again: The characters then spend many months traveling by water before reaching the plague ravaged land of Livyánu, where they disembarked. They then trekked across its length to catch another sea vessel for the final legal of their trip to Linyaró on the coast of the Achgé Peninsula.
- Showing the Flag: Having reached Linyaró, the characters must establish control over the colony and deal with several scheming factions, at least one of which was probably behind the murder of the previous governor.
This list represents only the first two years of play – and I've left out plenty of smaller adventures. Over the next nine years, the characters traversed the length and breadth of the Achgé Peninsula, dealt with the rulers of several Naqsái city-states, explored a huge ruined city, tangled with the Temple of Ksárul, battled the Hokún, treated with advanced AIs, visited an alternate Tékumel, traveled to several of the Planes Beyond, prevented the Shunned Ones from altering the atmosphere of the planet, and dealt with one of their companions' deaths, among other things. That's not even taking into account all the social interactions and alliances they've formed, often through marriage, in the course of play. After nearly a decade, there are simply too many adventures, expeditions, and escapades to recount, even if I were minded to share them all with you here.
What I hope is clear, though, is that campaign events largely have not threatened the world as a whole. I dislike dramatic hyperbole. I feel that threatening to end the world makes for boring roleplaying sessions, not to mention making it difficult to continue playing after the supposedly world-ending danger is inevitably averted. The referee cannot keep upping the stakes and expect players to continue being interested in the campaign. After the first few times Armageddon is put on hold, players quickly come to realize that there are no stakes. This is why the characters – both player and non-player – generally drive the action: it keeps the players invested. They know that their actions have consequences and that events unfold logically from their choices. I doubt the campaign would still be ongoing if I'd opted for any other approach.
I wonder if the escalating metaplots are the result of needing to provide high-enough stakes for higher level characters? Not a lot of 15+ level adventures out there.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting question.
DeleteI'd say that's certainly more the case in 4e and 5e D&D than in earlier editions. Characters level up more rapidly, are much less likely to die (and from mid-levels onward, stay dead if they do perish), and advancement doesn't tend to plateau the way it did in older editions, particularly the TSR ones. Older D&D didn't let players experience an "epic endgame" without years of continuous play and considerable luck (or outright cheats like starting at higher levels), especially with number of save-or-die effects and level drains you could expect to face in a long career. Newer editions not only allow a realistic chance of epic play, it's somewhat expected that you'll reach that stage.
DeleteThere are some exceptions - those Immortals rules in basic weren't just for the fun of it, Dark Sun players started of stronger and had their own rules for epic PCs, and there were oddball campaigns like Council of Wyrms - but it's mostly the latest few WotC editions that need to provide epic competition. Same goes for cousins like Pathfinder and 13th Age - the latter of which levels up just a little too quickly overall IME.
And EPT? Almost a decade of regular play and IIRC none of the characters are even close to double-digit levels, right? That's a snail's pace compared to 4e/5e, and while I can't say definitely I believe it would be much slower than any of the other Tekumel rule sets out there - certainly the eponymous one from Guardians of Order saw faster improvement, although it was a level-less BESM spinoff so it's a bit apples and oranges to compare it to EPT.
Yes, the highest level PCs are now 7th level.
DeleteWow, you're not only a grognard, you're a miser too! ;-)
Delete@michaeljpastor I'm not sure about that. I'm foggy on teh exact detais of EPT at this point, but I dimly recall it having a terribly slow XP table even by old school standards and I don't think it awarded experience for completing journeys at all. Just look at that synopsis for the first two yers of teh campaign. His party has traveled farther than, what, 99% of the people alive on Tekumel by now? And that's not even considering treks through spacetime to other dimensions and alternate branches of the Tree of Time. Pretty sure EPT treats that as though it were nothing for purposes of leveling up. It's not exactly a modern system and that kind of alternate reward was rare or unheard of in the 1970s.
DeletePoor Frodo went from the Shire to Mordor and back again and gained maybe a level or two from random encounters the whole time. :)
This post teases out the EPT XP system in detail: https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-sweet-spot-in-focus.html
Deleteoh I was being totally facetious (";-)") I admire his restraint. I must admit to being impatient with leveling up in 5e, because the abilities you get at the next level are so enticing for what I'd like to be able to do with my character.
Delete"It's a known problem in fantasy worlds with metaplot that the stakes need to escalate until each new world-threatening villain and their attendant cataclysm is met with a yawn."
ReplyDeleteI immediately thought of Doctor Who on reading this. This is the difference between Classic episodes and Nu-Who...particularly in the Moffat era, where the Doctor has to save the earth at the end of every season!
“Cinematic universes” have this problem too. Also epic fantasy (Robert Jordan, I’m looking at you). Sometimes I just want to enjoy spidey beating up the lizard or some such.
ReplyDelete"The referee cannot keep upping the stakes and expect players to continue being interested in the campaign."
ReplyDeleteI'm not 100% sure that's universally true. You can keep raising the stakes for a very long time, but you have to do it in reasonable increments instead of immediately jumping to blatant "end of the world" scenarios. Your PC's shouldn't even know who the Big Bad is at first, and when they do trace them through their web of minions and lieutenants and sub-bosses defeating them should lead to the revelation that there was someone/thing even more terrible behind them all the time and the PCs have to find a new line of approach to counter the next Big Bad because beating the first one has severed the trail they were unknowingly following. It's more about pacing and unravelling mysterious conspiracies of evil than stakes.
There's good examples of workable "always something worse" in both literature and gaming. EE "Doc" Smith's Lensmen saga is well-known for ramping up its power curve over time, with every seeming boss defeat leading the heroes to realize that they were just part of a much larger organization and the ultimate threat only gradually coming to light. Boskone was seen as a few minor pirates at first, grew links to dirty politics, then became a whole rival planetary civilization, then interstellar, intergalactic, and ultimately extradimensional and so powerful only posthumans could even comprehend what was behind it all - and supposedly there was more planned. The guy knew how to keep going bigger without losing your interest or investment.
The G-D-Q module series for AD&D is similar, with multiple steps to unraveling Lolth's schemes and very little sign that she's even involved at first, just bigger and bigger giants and the gradual realization that the drow are manipulating things, not just some evil allies. The threat (destruction of civilization) is the same throughout but the reveal of that is gradual. It's far from perfect but considering how ambitious it was for when it was written it really handles its pacing pretty well - at least until Q1 rushed the ending.
Funny, I immediately thought of the Lensmen series while reading your first paragraph - nicely done. Have you read.his Skylark of Space series? I have not but from what I understand it might count as a negative example, where the escalating threats are not presented well.
Delete@Bonnacon I don't dislike Skylark but I would say it's on par with Lensmen, and that despite Triplanetary not originally having been written as the start of a series. Not only is the overall writing weaker (and Smith is already an acquired taste for many people) the pacing on the scale-up effect feels a bit rushed and the final baddies feel like they come out of nowhere, really only being introduced in the last book or two. Compare that to the Eddorians, who are consistently teased to the reader (if not the characters) from word one and sit soundly on top of a pyramid of ever-more-potent foes.
DeleteOTOH, as impressive as the super-scale lunacy of Lensmen's finale is Skylark DuQuesne does manage to top it by a fair margin, with...oh wait, no spoilers. It arguably goes TOO far even for my tastes (and I really like Smith) but it sure is gleefully over-the-top. Inevitably makes the two lead geniuses feel like complete supermen (without the benefits of Arisian eugenics programs) but they've been trending that way from the start.
I'd still recommend reading them if you liked Lensmen, but the threats don't build on one another nearly as well as they do with Boskone. It's more a series of bigger Big Bads showing up one after another without much connection between them.
This definitely shows a long campaign does not need to be epic, but interesting.
ReplyDeleteJames, as much as I enjoy reading the House of Worms campaign I can't help but wonder why you haven't entirely switched over to your Sha-Arthan setting? Maybe the PC's could switch campaigns via a gateway or portal? Either way, I find your original ideas far more interesting then the Mad Professor own these days.
ReplyDeleteAfter nearly a decade of play in Tékumel, I feel as if shifting the campaign over to another setting would be pulling the rug out from under the players. I understand your perspective and, to some extent, even share it, but I'm not prepared to switch horses in such a radical way. My plan is to start up a separate sha-Arthan campaign once I've got some space in my schedule to do so.
DeleteI think an overlooked aspect of metaplot and gaming supplements in general, is that they were written more as reading materiel for fans rather than as game supplements. This tends to be true whether they have metaplot or not too.
ReplyDeleteLots of Planescape stuff was really cool to read but hard to pull into any sort of game
It isn't just isolated to TSR/WotC D&D books either. I have a hell of a lot of OSR stuff that is amusing to read and pretty useless for gaming with. 3/4 of my Lamentations of the Flame Princess stuff sort of falls in this group, for example.
I had the opposite impression of Planescape. There were lots of gameable ideas, but I couldn't tolerate the product line's condescending tone. The narrators were all snarky douchebags who never passed up an opportunity to remind you that as a native of the Prime Material Plane, you are a backwater rube who can't possibly comprehend how big and cool the multiverse is.
DeleteToss in the insufferable faux-Cockney slang, and trying to read any Planescape product was an outright slog.
Isn’t it OK for the world to sometimes “end”, with the PCs failing but the campaign continuing with a much altered setting? That allows big stakes without predetermined outcomes. I am struggling to think of a good example, though. Comic books have attempted this a number of times but failed in the long term by eventually resetting to the old status quo (but with perhaps confusing retcons). And if the Shunned Ones had succeeded in your campaign that might have brought an abrupt end.
ReplyDeleteIt's a tough line to walk. The Shunned Ones plot was one of the more "cataclysmic" ones from the course of the past nine years and I was a bit apprehensive about introducing it at all. However, it was a natural development of previous events, so I didn't want to "cheat" by avoiding it. Fortunately, the characters were successful and I didn't have to contend with a truly disastrous conclusion.
Delete