Is my world
meant to be Persistent or does it exist for Plot? When you design a campaign,
this is an important element of your world building.
To explain,
you need to make a determination if you plan to use the campaign setting again
and again, or if its sole function is to provide a fun game for the players at
the time. This is important because it determines how you treat the world and
the things in it, and how you play things out.
A Persistent
World is one that is well, Persistent. After the adventure is over, another
group of adventurers will have another campaign. This campaign might happen a
thousand miles away, concurrently, or a hundred years afterwards, but the world
continues existing as the stage for all of them.
The Plot
World is a world where everything is designed for the purposes of accomplishing
a given plot or storyline. The world is a backdrop for the story to be
accomplished, and locations tend to be treated less as ports of call, and
almost more like ‘nodes.’
For a lot of
DMs, what they really want are Plot Worlds. Even when they pick up a module for
Golarion, or the Forgotten Realms, or Mystara, they don’t really plan on
revisiting each town. Once each place is ‘used up’ you don’t really need to
come back to it. And when some games can run for years on end, well, that world
dedicated to Plot can feel pretty consistent and persistent because its damn
persistent to its own Plot.
When you
design a world for Plot, you design it to be consumed. The towns are there to
serve the plot. The dungeons serve the plot. Plot worlds tend to have what I’d
call a big ‘story focus’ where most baddies are tied to the main storyline,
most locations have plot elements tied to the main storyline, NPCs are involved
with the main storyline in someway, and NPCs are also involved. The story tends
to involve things that shake the world’s basis to its foundation. It feels put
together, and feels, well, well designed. Your world in your average video game
or the like is designed this way, most everything ties in and forms a cohesive
whole. That’s because the Plot world assumes that plot threads will be handled,
side quests will be pursued, and the main quest will be resolved. The bad guy
will be dealt with, the horror of the day declawed, and the PCs disappear off
into happily-ever-after epilogues. 100% completion, good job!
This is not
bad. The players walk away fulfilled, they feel like they had fun spending time
in the world, and are ready to move on.
Persistent
worlds are however, different. They aren’t as clean.
Towns are
there because they are. Subplots are floating around from two campaigns ago.
The world may have persisted through edition changes, players or even DMs. Bad
guys exist who have plots and plans that are completely unrelated to the main
quest elements. The main storyline for your guys is just one of many the world’s
suffered over time (and as a result most DMs will tend to make it less world
shaking). The plot threads might be all over, waiting for players to follow up
on them, and they will metastasize into other threads if left unexplored. Bad
guys might float through the setting for no discernable purpose, and continue
with their own stories despite the players. Threads are everywhere. The main
quest may be resolved, but other nonsense will keep happening, and when the
heroes retire at the end of the story, they do not necessarily disappear over
the horizon but may find themselves as NPCs for the next batch of heroes.
Persistent
worlds tend (note tend) to have plots
that are more local, and less ‘world shaking’ then Plot worlds. This is because
Plot worlds eventually run out of Plot, and Persistent worlds tend to nurse
their plot elements, never wanting to give one up until they have a new one to
replace it.
An example
of why this is an important distinction to keep in mind is a Persistent world
gone wrong: Dark Sun.
Dark Sun was
a world based around survival in a dusty desert wasteland. A magical
post-apocalypse, where water is scarce, and the pathos of living in a world
dying is the guiding focus. People lived at the whim of insane king-priests who
lived over the few spots of civilization. Man’s spirit was being crushed and
consumed as the landscape had been consumed. And heroes were needed to contend
against vile kingpriests and reclaim what could be lost. And then the first
novels came out.
Now, novels
aren’t adventures, but the novels do show what a player would do, or want to do
with this setting. They set out to fix things. Defeat the kingpriests. Liberate
the people. Restore the world.
After the
first novel series, the world was unrecognizable to what was originally
pitched. Green arable land had been discovered. The iron law of the kingpriests
was shattered. It rained occasionally.
Things were improving. And the question that became raised was ‘we still have
all of this interesting setting, but what do we really do with it?’ The
Kingpriests were the only really established bad guys. There were some
slumbering evils, but they were also inexorably tied to the Kingpriests.
Without Kingpriests, you kind of didn’t have much.
Lord of the
Rings is another “Plot World,” once Sauron’s army is defeated, you’re not realty
in Lord of the Rings anymore, which is also why I’ve always found games of Star
Wars or Lord of the Rings based in the era of the mainstream kind of awkward.
You tend to end up either trying to tell The Plot differently, or spend the
entire time dodging it, and I’d rather have something new.
The Elder
Scrolls: Skyrim is set in a Persistent world. This is because while the game
has a clear driving element to it, the setting leaves the world at large
relatively untouched. There are threads and streams only hinted at in the game,
and things with which the player can only shallowly interact while going about
his own quest. There is more stuff going on. Now this frustrates the player,
but it frustrates him into wanting more. Now at the same time, that Persistent
World desire to keep the Persistent World stable, also robs the player of his
chance to do stuff that’s /world shakingly awesome/. The world itself is huge,
with countless troublemakers, problems, issues, and so on. When you visit a
town, the town might have nothing at all to do with the ‘main quest’ or you, or
your desires or personalities. It might just be a town. Maybe it’s a town that
meant something to somebody who played in the world before, and your engagement
with it now is just a shallow thing.
