Quote from: Ravenswing;898683This is part of the reason I'm militant where player agency is involved.  

Great story!

Just one observation: "the Big Threat" doesn't have to involve bad guys. It might be also something along the lines of the force of nature - an army of mindless monsters (zombies), an unstoppable savage beast with bad temper (Tarrasque), a threat from beyond (an asteroid), or simply a thing that must be switched off (the Doomsday Device), etc, etc. Such scenarios allow the GM to postpone the inevitable (zombies wander in different direction, monster becomes trapped in a crater, an asteroid devastates some other celestial body and now the world is threatened by many smaller ones, the Doomsday Device stops the countdown...) - not the perfect, kind of "cheap" moves actually, but still they or their more sophisticated variation might be used.

Side note: around here we address that "escalation" as "Dragon Ball solution". Yes, there's always some bigger, meaner and more powerful guy out there.

QuoteI run a sandbox, and it's not any part of my remit to tell players what to do.  If the PCs are citizens of Country X, it's up to them to decide how patriotic they are.  Some of them are, some of them aren't.  I've had groups decide "Hey, we live here, let's pitch in and help defend it."  I've had groups decide "Screw this, I'm not dying just so the King can rest easy, I hear Drakanium's nice and warm this time of year."  I've had groups decide to fight for what I would objectively, OOC, deem to be the Evil Aggressor Empire, because they were natives of that realm.

I see. A few times I managed to convince my players that local "Mordor" is the land of evil. Then, they had to travel there and to their surprise they learned that it's not that bad, and in some ways it's even better than their PCs' fatherland. I find it quite nice alternative to usual "shades of grey" style.

Quote from: S'mon;898690Shattered Star AP is nice - plays much better than it reads...

Yep, I've heard that about pretty much every Paizo's Adventure Path. The only exceptions are Reign of Winter and The Council of Thieves. I honestly don't know why people hate them so much (providing they hate them). Anyway...

Quote... - and blending it with Rise of the Runelords AP will keep it fresh for me, I know upfront I'm not likely to use everything (eg might never use Book 6). Crimson Throne AP was really tough though; read well but really hard to run. Running SS in 5e so I know to ignore most of what's in the stat blocks helps a lot. I am feeling depleted since restarting Loudwater though (plus my non-gaming social life is getting busy) so planning to rest the Wilderlands campaign after one more session. That will leave me with 3 games, 1 weekly & 2 alternate fortnightly, which has been ok so far. I think I'm going to try to keep it to maximum 3 campaigns in future.

tbh, I still don't know how it's possible to be engaged in such a creative process like GMing on so many fronts at once in addition to real life. I mean, heck, I know people (not counting myself), who played a few separate campaigns in parts, with some of these parts landing on the shell for a month or so. Simultaneously? Nope.

Out of curiosity: what do you feel is the biggest challenge in PFRPG -> D&D 5th conversion? Aside of numbers, of course.

Quote from: AsenRG;898691I've said it before on this forum: if you have even a hint of suspicion about your players' ability to find adventure, make them create motivations that they really crave, and put them on their character sheets:).

The problem might lie in the fact that our setting became... how to put that... too borderless, too unlimited. It's the first time I lead such an inexperienced group that far into "whatever you think about, such a place exists somewhere out there" and they have trouble processing the possibilities, I think.

tl;dr: they still think in micro, rather than macro -scale.

QuoteStart it, then ?

Naaaaah, I've been already told I'm talking too much.

QuoteI can dispute that. But if it is up to the GM...why would I promote a threat to world-spanning, if I didn't want world-spanning threats in the first place:D?

The error in judgment. I'm afraid that my players might not be ready for exactly this kind of adventures the system/setting encourages. I'm entertaining the idea of "going back to roots" at least for the time being.

QuoteOr it might not happen, even if those elements are part of the setting, and even if I deemed it likely...because then I threw percentile dice, and it wasn't meant to be. And it's not a given that they're present.

Yes. Ultimately it's up to dice. Unless it's a diceless system.

QuoteMy players would really laugh at me if I sent such a message...or assume I'm on drugs, because that would be a drastic change.

I can only guess why. Let's see... Is it because of its directness or because you don't introduce clearly "bad guys"?

Quote from: Xanther;898718Yes.  Most commercial settings I've seen or played don't have such threats hard baked in.  Most settings I've played are not commercial, they are peoples personal creations.

Care to name some? I feel like revisiting some old places, so to speak.

QuoteI and my players hate the Big Threat setting.  It's trite and limiting.   It is fun to play such games and completely ignore the Big Threat and turn the tables on the setting creators idea of how you are supposed to play.

Yep, plenty of groups - usually veterans - are that way.

QuoteWhy yes. I've used the Big Threat (it's the end of the world) with mixed players (some liked it some not) but it wasn't really.  Oh the NPCs thought it was the end of the world, it was just really a bad thing (locally), the world goes on.  Not sure how clever it is, just part of my view that even the best intentioned, informed and trustworthy NPCs can be wrong about things.  Players should think for themselves.

I think that it's more "how" rather than "what". The idea doesn't have to be that original, complicated, or like you're saying, clever. It simply has to be believable, entertaining and interesting enough to convince the players to pursue this plot hook (if they have the choice, that is). I've seen very simple and quite overused tropes being used (most recently, "Alien" scenario with a twist) and critically acclaimed.

The End of the World being just a local stuff/superstition? Not bad.

...

Come to think about it, I might use it - what everyone thinks is the end, might be merely a natural process that devastates some parts of the universeand then ceases to progress. Hmmmmmmm... Thanks, man.

Quote from: Trond;898721We had quite a bit of fun with Houses of the Blooded. It does not have any such threat in the setting.

Houses of Blooded, Houses of Blooded... My memory is a bit hazy these days. Are you talking about that Wick's Arabian-themed game where players lead lineages rather than separate characters, or am I mistaking it with Burning Sands?

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898761Houses of Blooded, Houses of Blooded... My memory is a bit hazy these days. Are you talking about that Wick's Arabian-themed game where players lead lineages rather than separate characters, or am I mistaking it with Burning Sands?

Yes, it's John Wick, but no Arabian Nights theme in this one. It is a bit inspired by the Melniboneans in the Elric stories I think.
It is one of those games where players take part in building the setting and narrative, so maybe not for everyone.

Quote from: Trond;898768Yes, it's John Wick, but no Arabian Nights theme in this one. It is a bit inspired by the Melniboneans in the Elric stories I think.
It is one of those games where players take part in building the setting and narrative, so maybe not for everyone.

...Weird. I'm 100% sure I've been playing HoB a few times, but I have troubles remembering it now. Perhaps it's time to check my facts.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898465Plenty of settings feature a plot device in form of some Big Threat constantly endangering whole world, civilization, society, virginity of our women and such. It might be some impending doom, an ancient monster, now dormant but slowly waking up, a giant meteor destined to reduce whole civilization to ashes, hordes of others, be it drow, enemy kingdom, devil worshipers or other cultist, and so on, and so forth.

I don't want to discuss whether it's useful or not.

I have used a pseudo threat that isn't in my current science fiction campaign.

The idea is that there is a rumour of AI while actually the "threatening software" is far less intelligent (and making errors that are really stupid when you look those activities in hindsight). Thus players believe there is AI threat and have their characters talk to experts about possibility of AI making some kind of world-ending viral attack come across as idiots. This rises tension in PC group and makes them search the elusive AI even more desperately...

Lots to respond to so this will be long.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898661Out of curiosity: would you rather send a clear message about who is "the worse one", or choose ambiguous solution? You know, "Hitler, that way", or "well, you start in country X, there's a tension on western and eastern borders, but who is right and who is wrong it's up to you to find out, guys".

Depends on the setting.

• In D&D campaigns it was a spectrum of good/neutral/selfish/evil. PCs themselves ran along the spectrum, some were evil, but most tending towards neutral to good.
• In Star Trek and Star Wars campaigns, where the source material is kind of a morality play, there are black hats, white hats, and gray hats. Except for the rare double agent, I don't think I've ever made the difference between white and black ambiguous. It may be unclear though whether they are more white than gray or more gray than black.
• In Glorantha almost everyone is shades of gray who think people from other cultures/religions are all gray to black while people from their own culture are gray to white. Except for most Chaos which is mostly on a spectrum between black and nutso-toxic.
• In Call of Cthulhu the cultists are nearly always clearly black. The PCs are some shade of gray. And the deities are mostly incomprehensible but effectively black.
• In Honor+Intrigue you can't tell until you know someone well. And even if you think you know them they may have secrets or concealed agendas. Opponents may be just as or even more honorable, loyal, patriotic, religious, kind, honest etc. than the PCs. Or they may be cruel sadistic, egomaniacal bastards (sometimes literally). One of the more cruel and sadistic opponents was extremely honorable amongst those of his social class. More honorable I some respects than any of the PCs.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898665Side note: Glorantha is my weakness. I wanted to play it since time I encountered The King of Dragon Pass video game...

I've found it interesting since before Runequest was published. A friend of mine had the original White Bear, Red Moon and Nomad Gods board games and the setting seemed enough different than what I was seeing with other 1970s fantasy settings. So when RQ was published it was a natural fit. It helped that I had one buddy who probably like Glorantha even more than I did. So he was an easy player to recruit and I even got him to GM so I got a chance to play.

QuoteDoes it concern RPGs only?

No. The source material has the problem in spades.

QuoteOut of curiosity: is "Frodo" solution (simpletons of low level coming from dumbfucktown, carrying some anti-threat plot device to place X) popular in the big world?

Not sure what you are asking here. I think the nobody from nowhere is usually some version of a hero's journey. Frodo is an atypical hero whose heroism is focused on morality and martyrdom. I don't think that sort of situation, with that sort of hero is very common. The growth (literally and figuratively) of Merry and Pippin is more typical of the progression seen in most RPGs than is Frodo or Sam.

QuoteIt's not that I have a problem to solve, I'm simply looking for interesting, and, if possible, original alternatives to this specific theme.

It looks like you are finding some ideas that interest you. So that's a win.

QuoteAs for the PCs failing - this isn't applicable to all scenarios, but the doom might be either postponed indefinitely, averted in some other way ...

I find those sorts of solutions unsatisfying. They seem like a cheat. "Oh yeah the big bad that was going to destroy the world...well news of the world's destruction was greatly exaggerated. Nothing really to worry about."

QuoteAs for my players - we're playing in the many-world setting, and I think that at least two players feel a bit clueless. It's not the problem of the lack of options, but in their abundance.

I think that the more expansive the setting is the more difficult it is for the players to care about any particular aspect of the setting. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. Too many options is one problem. Lack of focus is another.

If player A may cares about the Baroness NPC in World-1, while player B cares about this family that runs the Blue Bottle tavern in World-2, while player C cares about the Queen and his pal, the captain of the Queen's guard over in world-3 it is going to be difficult to get the players to focus on anyone of the three worlds, much less brand new World-4. And you need them focused and motivated to more or less work together on the same thing...whatever that thing might be. Narrowing the focus for a while on one of the worlds or even one city on one of the worlds might help alleviate the overabundance of options and possible lack of focus.

QuoteThis is weird, you know. I recall way less famous games being mentioned every now and then. I'm not sure why it's like that.

I can't recall the exact month of publication but OD&D was published in 1974. Tunnel & Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Boot Hill were all published in 1975. And all but T&T were published by TSR so for really old gamers, there was a period of time where T&T, EPT, and Boot Hill were the only published alternative RPGs to D&D. So for the fanatics who bought RPGs off company catalogs through the mail and later read fanzines those games were all fairly well known. A couple of years later Traveller, Chivalry & Sorcery, and I don't know what all else got published and the hobby became increasingly more diverse.

QuoteI had similar experience, yet in my case, sooner or later parting the ways with current setting was discussed and rather than simply putting it on the shelf players almost always choose some world-ending campaign.

I've never done a cataclysmic ending. I've always put games on the shelf, as it were. Several have been picked up again after a hiatus of one or more years. Call of Cthulhu we've been playing on and off since the 1980s with a large stable of characters and a world shared by 3 regular GMs (Keepers if one is into silly names for the GM) and several occasional GMs. I'm certain we'll pick that up again once someone (possibly me) temporarily runs out of inspiration or enthusiasm for H+I. I don't see a reason to end a campaign – it seems like Doyle's decision to kill Holmes and we know how well Reichenback Falls actually worked. Although I do think it is nice to have the characters in a somewhat settled place or position while the campaign is on the shelf – oh yeah he is the Baron of Black Serpent Tower, he is the steward of the castle, she is a lieutenant with the Black Wolves mercenary company, he's the champion for the King of the Skellani tribe, etc..

QuoteThose are very good ideas, but that's pretty much how we're playing so far - PCs are acting as field agents to more powerful figures, protectors, defenders, thieves, diplomats and what not. They also build their own power structures and amass personal wealth and influence. Surprisingly, they didn't start to plot against each other, which is very uncommon in this kind of a game.

It sounds like the players are interested in the setting. Maybe you just need to focus on the part of the setting where the PCs have power and influence to expand and protect.

QuoteNow, adventurers - that's entirely different kind of breed. They actively seek troubles, they thrive on them, so according to them the world might be quite hostile, deadly and the danger might hide behind every corner. Still, it comes with the territory and this is exactly what their players want.

I seldom run games where the PCs are adventurers, though they nearly always are adventurous. One might ask, what's the difference?

When I think of adventurers I think of the sort of rootless wanderers that a lot of D&D assumes. Rootless wanderers are often difficult to motivate based on saving someone or something. Thus the tendency can be to up the stakes to try to get the players and their PCs to care...I try to avoid having to up the ante just to get the PCs off their asses, "Well OK, but it's not just Old Barnjie and his village that are in danger from the Necromancer it's the whole kingdom...I mean the whole world.  And nobody but you can stop him!"

Adventurous characters are the sort of people who enjoy, whether consciously or not, adventure or who, when push comes to shove, are the sort who will step up, push back, and say "Here and no farther!" Connections to other people, places, and things are especially important to motivate the latter sort of PCs.

For motivation, I find it is better to play things out first so that players come to care about Old Barnjie and/or his village...or some other village...or the capital city... or the Baron or Baroness...or some one specific person, place, or thing. Then helping, that person, place, or thing is interesting to the players/PCs. You may not need to threaten him/her/it with destruction as they may be motivated to help Old Barnjie and the villagers by helping them enact the ritual of Harmast Barefoot so they get a great harvest this year or leading a caravan to West Bumfrack so they can sell their apples at a premium or winning the tournament so they can have the Baroness crowned the Queen of Love and Beauty at the tournament, etc..
 

Quote from: Ravenswing;898683And yeah, that's part of the problem with Save The World: either you mean it, in which case you have to press the case for the Bad Guys to get the job done if the PCs boot it, or you don't, in which case you're giving them meaningless make-work adventures.

Yes. Make work is a great description.

Quote from: Ravenswing;898683The other problem is in escalation; a term I use for the syndrome is "What do you do the day after Armageddon?" which was the title of a Legion of Super-Heroes comic issue right after a multi-year apocalyptic plot arc.  Great, so in the first movie you blow up the Death Star.  Urr, okay, in the third movie you blow up ANOTHER Death Star.  Urrr, okay, in the new movie there's a super-uber Death Thingie that can snuff multiple planets at once, from light-years away!

Quote from: AsenRG;898691All the people that play urban fantasy, which is set in the modern world, and that's just for a start?

A setting where dozens of vampires stalk every town looking for human cattle on which to feed doesn't strike me as safe and that's just one possible urban fantasy threat. Typically in urban fantasy the protagonists, because they are aware and involved, are in greater danger than the mundane humans who form the mass of the urban population. So for the PCs the urban fantasy city is not a lot safer than the wilderness in your average D&D setting.

Quote from: Ravenswing;898743Regarding your After-The-World-Ends scenario, I wonder how many GMs have dared to do it all the way: a true "hopeless" campaign, where evil has won, its victory is permanent, and its sway absolute?  Where the best the PCs can do before their inevitable deaths is to light a small candle?

I used the Mythos wins as an alternate earth setting for time travel/Mirror Mirror universe adventure for Star Trek. The alternate earth had some of the surviving Call of Cthulhu PCs as NPCs for the Star Trek characters to interact with. The Starfleet personnel had to fix the timeline. Since that side of the game was Star Trek, success was likely based on the genre and if they had failed, well it might have been a mirror universe anyways so they only would need to get home rather than save the earth.

Generally, I put in too much work on the setting to be very sanguine about tossing most of it away to reboot the game. And I don't particular want to play in the failed to be saved universe as I don't enjoy distopic settings.

Quote from: Xanther;898718Most commercial settings I've seen or played don't have such threats hard baked in.

Same here, it's usually up to the group as to how immediate and widespread they want the dangers to be. If you don't want bears attacking people in the forest then don't do that.

I don't think urban fantasy settings are any different... you can dial it up or down... have open wars between gangs, dangerous CHUDs coming up from the sewers, weird magics eating entire neighborhoods... or it can all be nice and shiny with pixies and rainbows.

I've never much cared for huge ongoing 'evil empire' stuff so tend not to focus on those, even if they're present somewhere else in the setting. Cthulhu is sleepy and Fu Manchu is on holiday.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898760Out of curiosity: what do you feel is the biggest challenge in PFRPG -> D&D 5th conversion? Aside of numbers, of course.

Grabbing an appropriate monster stat block out of the 5e MM. Sometimes the 5e version is pathetically weak, eg the lemures in book 1 of SS. A bit of variation is ok but a whole dungeon level of trivially weak critters got the players complaining. So I hit em with an ooze/hellhound combo and nearly killed one of them, they shut up then.
In general running SS in 5e has been far far easier than running Crimson Throne with Pathfinder. Paizo's tendency to include obscure monsters from Bestiary #5 without bothering with a PF statblock is annoying, considering how much space they waste on other stuff. Eg the Fiendish Seugathi in book 2 has no parrallel in any D&D creature. But this is still a minor issue compared to the brain-scrambling effect of trying to run a 3-page 3e/PF stat block off the page in Pathfinder rules.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898661It looks like deadly times to live in. Out of curiosity: how did your players react to such a setting? Did they perceive it as a challenge, a window of opportunity to have truckloads of great adventures, or were they "who, dude, isn't it too much?" In addition, was the overall situation immediately explained, or did they learn about everything on the way, sort of "one threat at a time"?

I wouldn't want it to become next politically themed thread, but I'm curious about that USA vs IU campaign of yours. Do you keep some campaign log by any chance?

They've reacted well to it, we're having a good time. The players are only vaguely aware of some of these threats. The lizardmen are mentioned on a map I made and in a rumor or two but nothing has been done with them yet. One of the PCs is from the Viking land so they are not perceived as enemies, yet. One adventure thread did deal with the nomads. The southerners haven't even been noticed yet, but I know they are there. Since it's a Runequest 6 sandbox they are free to pick and choose what interests them. (One PC rolled up a slave. He's just happy that he has won his freedom and is now chasing riches. Soon I might have them meet up with some women revolutionaries who are working to free their kingdom from a tyrant. They will work for the "Salation Liberation Unter Terre.)

Unfortunately I don't have any of my records from the Robot Warrior campaign. That was in the late 80s and was long ago lost in a move.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898661Precisely, or even more precisely: it's up to the PCs whether they choose to go this way. If they won't then the world stays as it is: threatened, indefinitely balancing "on the verge of destruction" and such.



This certainly sounds like Zothique.

A word, if I might: does that mean, that in your campaigns players face the Big Threat, but they can't do much about that? Sort of doomed situation where the only reasonable thing to do is to survive and at best, postpone/avoid the inevitable?

Well, it wasn't in my plan per se. My primary purpose for the Necromancer is to be a mood setting edifice. Vut if they wanted to make a campaign of it, I'd let them. As long as it sounds like a fun game. Just like Zothique, powerful characters that get overconfident are ripe for a fall.

Quote from: Rincewind1;898672As a huge fan of both CAS and Heavy Metal stylistics, you'd not have this stashed on a wiki somewhere, would you?

I don't. I think most of my campaign notes were in a graph paper steno pad. I did have some electronic writeups in the adventure notes, but that's about it.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898465I'm not sure why, but every time I make a new thread, 99% responds I get cover things I don't wanna discuss about. Since I'm sober since a few days already I feel like trying one more time.

Welcome to the internet.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898465Anyway, I'll try to keep it as short and as straightforward as possible.

Plenty of settings feature a plot device in form of some Big Threat constantly endangering whole world, civilization, society, virginity of our women and such. It might be some impending doom, an ancient monster, now dormant but slowly waking up, a giant meteor destined to reduce whole civilization to ashes, hordes of others, be it drow, enemy kingdom, devil worshipers or other cultist, and so on, and so forth.

I don't want to discuss whether it's useful or not.

My questions are:

• Do you know/play some settings void of such a threat?
  
• Do your players/yourself enjoy them as much as ones with such a feature?
  
• Did you develop some clever alternative to the Big Threat - a thing familiar to your world's inhabitants, that motivates some (PCs) to move their asses and travel across whole world and beyond? A word of explanation: The One Ring from tLoTR setting doesn't match the criteria, since it serves the purpose of getting rid of the Big Threat. The quest to seek Holy Grail would be the better example of what I have in mind. While it might be used as a morale boosting icon for any ruler or general, its purpose isn't to counter any specific Big Threat whatsoever.
  

Thanks!

Oh, and just for the sake of clarity, the idea for this thread comes from this comment by DoughDee.

If a Big Threat appears in my games, it is due to Player Character involvement. I usually do not like using The Big Threat because it has been overused so much in published adventures. My Players like it when I pull some thing from their character backstory and use that as the antagonist. So not so much The Big Threat, but several of The Little Threats.

Quote from: David Johansen;898491If I use a big threat I usually let my players be the ones who release it.  They're good at that.

The best campaigns are when you give your players enough rope to hang themselves.  It's amazing how often they'll do it too.

As for me, if it's a capstone to a campaign, I'll use it.  But after three D&D adventure league seasons in which we had Dragons wanting to take over the world, Elementals wanting to take over the world, and then Demon Lords wanting to take over the world, in what seemed to be the span of about 3-5 months of in game/world time?  It's a bit much.  I'm more of a personal story kinda guy.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898661I rarely hear about anybody using fulls-scale religious conflict in SF environment and the majority of such events come form Fading Suns players. Quite original, I must say.

Mostly it is just self indulgent pretentiousness, I think too much, so I just took chunks of pre-existing canon and rearranged them into something that gives the enemy motivation for what they are doing. The sides aren't exactly black and white, however.

QuoteDo you plan for PCs to have something more to say about this situation, or are they destined to observe things from the back row, so to speak? Or, even better, do your players plan to do anything about that?

The players can interact with it on any level they chose, currently they are satisfied to travel around space and get into space battles with the enemy, occasionally to stop, investigate strange stuff, grift a bit like smuggling. They do have a good ship, with some interesting weapons, as well as the alliance is fooling around with using a weaponized life form called a "Meta-Cym", short for Metastasizing Cymbeline Entity, an electronic virus that wreaked havoc once before across charted space. The alien crusaders haven't encountered this life form before, so they are somewhat defenseless against it.

Kill the transponder and the radio, use a fiber optic backup computer.  And start chanting "you're old alone and done for"  Virus always had self esteem issues

Quote from: David Johansen;898864Kill the transponder and the radio, use a fiber optic backup computer.  And start chanting "you're old alone and done for"  Virus always had self esteem issues

That works until it walks up and plugs itself in.