Some have
called ACKs a ‘Points of light’ setting. It’s not.
Points of
Light, the default D&D 4e setting, posits numerous small kingdoms and
sparks of normalcy (the points in the points of light) amidst the bleak,
chaotic and insensible wasteland. It’s a return to the Dying Earth of Jack
Vance, where if you went forty five minutes away from your particular
encystment of ‘civilization’ you were liable to come across some sort of brain
eating slug monster, or daemon, or dark thing from before that would crush your
spirit and render you a motive husk. D&D owes a lot to Jack Vance and this outlook,
but the problem with basing your setting on The Dying Earth is that well, it’s
a freaking dystopia.
The Dying
Earth is a world where people stab one another over who has the fanciest chair,
the sun is going out, everybody is a backstabber, there are practically no good
people left on the entire planet, and basically things just kind of suck. Dark
Souls is cheerier. Dark Souls at least has good people in it.
I bring this up in our High level discussion because
the way a world is structured, determines how high level play is meant to look.
The Points of Light setting, notably, and as I touched upon in the last post,
is terrified that if anybody can do anything, the players won’t be ‘heroic
enough.’
As a result,
the only people who have ‘good stuff’ are the bad guys, and the PCs are solely
responsible for fixing every damned thing in the entire setting.
Lost
puppies? Players.
Orcs?
Players.
Demons?
Players.
Chaos gods?
Players.
Inefficient
tax code? Players.
Marriage
ring down the well? Players.
The players
are the only competent people in a world of benighted super-competent hell
barons and ‘normal folk’ who are so normal and folksy it’s a surprise they can
breathe without assistance.
All, in the
misapprehended belief that if the king can keep his own people safe from orcs,
the players would have ‘nothing to do’ or ‘wouldn’t feel special.’
This creates
additional problems as the players level up as it never feels like they
actually accomplish much. Their legacy will disappear the second they stop
playing their characters, and there is always. ALWAYS. A bigger, badder threat
and one day they will be worn down and destroyed.
Evil
triumphs ultimately, screw you.
In the short
term, they get to lord over the 0-level humans and town guard, at least unless
they piss off the DM, at which point the town guard who can’t fight a kobold
effectively become hyper competent in taking them down.
The problem
here is that the DM or world designer wants so badly for the players to feel
important, he makes a world that doesn’t function properly. Nobody exists
except for the players. Inns and merchants exist to supply and provision the
players. Bad guys exist solely to challenge the players. The afterlife and
demons exist only for the players. And there must always be an enemy to
challenge the party, so the forces of evil just seem to constantly unlock
bigger and bigger guns as the players level up, like some sort of hidden arms
race.
And if the
players do make solid changes? They have to be undone, or negated, or pushed
aside, so the next batch of PCs can feel ‘important’ compared to their PC
predecessors.
The
motivation to make players feel important and special is good. Evil however
works by bending goods to wrong purposes. And so it is here. In such a desire
to make the player and his accomplishments meaningful and challenged, they are
instead rendered pointless. Nothing fixed can be allowed to stay that way.
Meaningful changes to the setting cannot be achieved.
The player’s
actions are meaningless beyond the initial thrills of success.
Now, if the
players never intend to revisit the setting, or are happy with the sudden flash
of success, then this can work, but points of light settings never work as
recurring campaign settings, or they stop being points of light.
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