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Vercingex
2012-02-18, 01:29 PM
I began running my first D&D campaign back in November, and so far it has been going well. My players are into the homebrew setting, their characters are interesting, and we've had a few fun and memorable adventures. Currently, I stand poised on the brink of introducing my main villain, who poses a dire threat to the world that the PCs will have to combat, and, somehow overcome.

But then I began thinking. Basically, almost every single fantasy story ever as centered around a plot of a powerful villain's ambitions. This basic plot thread is so ubiquitous that it has become the expected norm- when I introduced a powerful villain (not the main one) into my campaign, my players immediately declared him the Big Bad.

So, my question is this- Has anybody run a fantasy game that you feel successfully breaks the standard fantasy plot mold. Alternatively, how would you craft a campaign to avoid the cliche. And finally. since most D&D players are fans of fantasy stories, and oftentimes their enjoyment is in either playing out or subverting the stock story, is the fact that most games tend to follow the standard plot really such a bad thing?

GreyMantle
2012-02-18, 01:47 PM
Cliches and tropes are never bad unless you make them be bad.

For starters, you can follow the Shadowrun model, and have the evil people be more a faceless organization than a specific foozle meant to be stabbed. Or you can pull a Witcher 2 or Song of Ice and Fire and have the plot focus on people who are not EVILL but are just pursuing their goals, sometimes in a less than morally sound manner. Or you can make your campaign be like a disastermovie, where the plot is about trying to avert some nasty natural process, and any "villains" are emergently created from people the PCs already know.

Grinner
2012-02-18, 01:53 PM
Well, most stories are driven by conflict, and the villain is usually the primary source of conflict. So, without a villain, the players would have little reason to do anything.

LibraryOgre
2012-02-18, 02:27 PM
Exactly. What drives your plots? While "evil dude" is a standard, you might have a natural disaster that the PCs have to deal with. Or a secret coming to light. Species coming out of hibernation/back from ancient journeys/showing up here for no reason whatsoever and now having to interact with the current world.

One of my favorite plots does not involve a strict "evil dude"; instead, it's having a semi-civilized race (I like hobgoblins) declare themselves to be a nation, and start interacting with the world as such. Hobgoblin shows up in town, wanting to trade. Town, like many would, kill him. Town is destroyed for killing an envoy, its lands incorporated into the growing hobgoblin empire. Maybe the players killed the hobgoblin. Maybe they arrive a week after it's destroyed to find it garrisoned by their new overlords I mean, protectors.

In this case, you don't have anyone who is particularly "bad"... the hobgoblins aren't invading, just claiming a chunk of land... but the shake-up to the power structure might cause all sorts of problems.

Tvtyrant
2012-02-18, 03:29 PM
I ran a campaign where the main enemy was snow before, if that counts? The planet was simply going into an ice age, and it was driving all of the various species that had lived all over the planet into smaller and smaller confines. The party had to kill a lot of animals/magical beasts/people who just wanted to survive, because otherwise they wouldn't.

Nerd-o-rama
2012-02-18, 04:00 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_(narrative) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_%28narrative%29)

Most RPG stories are, as stated, Character vs. Character, because this is what most RPGs are designed to emulate. Based on this, you could also have plots like...

...plots that revolve love triangles and jealousy, or other interpersonal relationships.
...plots that are primarily about survival in a hostile environment
...plots primarily about an internal conflict between the characters and themselves (cf. Vampire: the Requiem)
...plots about changing or altering society rather that fighting an external enemy.

Really, just looking at the examples there should give a pretty good idea.

kieza
2012-02-18, 04:14 PM
My last campaign, which ended before it got to the good bits, was about a group of explorers whose airship crashed on a newly-discovered continent.

See, this world has multiple moons, causing some very severe navigational hazards out to sea. Ships can't go very far from land without a high risk of a wreck. The nations on the main continent of the setting, however, have recently discovered flight, and a foundation has taken advantage of this to try and confirm an ancient map that depicts additional continents. So, they've built a massive airship that can make the ocean crossing, crewed it with explorers, and sent it off to see if the nearest continent on the map is really there.

The ship arrives, and it finds the continent where the map says it should be, but while exploring some ruins near the arrival point, they trigger a device which screws up the airship's flight systems. It crashes, taking most of their supplies with it. They're now stuck on this foreign continent. They head out towards the nearest city marked on their map, in the hopes that there will be people there who can help them get in touch with home.

The campaign started out with a trip across a desert, moving from oasis to oasis, during which they made enemies of some desert-dwelling nomads, ran across some djinni, and briefly encountered the local variety of Sidhe. Just as they left the desert and found some friendly locals, the married couple in my group had to move and the game dried up.

If it had continued, it would have involved a lot of first contacts: the local dwarves, who unlike their cousins on the other side of the ocean still know how to work adamantine. A tribal society of were-creatures and skinwalkers. Gypsy-like halflings. Some Polynesia-ish coastal islanders. And, near the end of the journey, the magocratic remnants of the continent's dominant culture.

The end of the campaign was planned to involve these magocrats, who worship a giant pyramidal structure that they think that the gods left behind for them. (The gods did build it, but they buried it under a desert. These people's ancestors diverted a river to try and irrigate a desert, and the river uncovered the pyramid. The gods certainly didn't want it to be found just yet... Also, the gods are actually Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.) The mages have a thoroughly nasty culture involving slavery, blood sacrifice, and chickpeas, but they could send the expedition home. Or, the expedition could open the pyramid, or they could start a slave uprising, or rally the nearby towns that the magocracy raids for slaves, or they could talk the Vistani-esque halflings into guiding them home, or any of a number of endings I had planned out.

Eric Tolle
2012-02-18, 08:09 PM
My upcoming game is going to involve an independent city sandwiched in the intersection between two expansionist empires and a nomad horde. The situation wouldn't be so bad, except the "goddess" (actually an ancient piece of technology) that normally runs the city has gone to sleep and hasn't woken up for a century, and now the neighbors' armies are gathering....

The real conflict will be trying to keep the city from being a battleground, choosing which power to ally with, and maybe, finding out what's wrong with their goddess and fixing it.

So no real evil mastermind, but a desperate situation.

jseah
2012-02-18, 08:24 PM
Lots of stories are focused around recovering from a negative. Evil villian is just one of them.

As above, we have natural disaster, social upheaval, being stranded. Exploring past ruined civilizations is also a favourite.

What about acheiving a positive?
Closest I saw in this thread is that hobgoblin one, and even that one is about negotiating a ceasefire in the most positive scenario, outright war at worst.

Exploring a "New World", making an artifact, advancing magical/scientific knowledge.
Starting a new brilliant social experiment. (people in most fantasy worlds haven't heard of capitalism and meritocracy; or if you want to go the other way, communism is fairly new too)


Are 'good things' really that boring?

JohnnyCancer
2012-02-19, 04:59 AM
Make the party monster wranglers, bringing in exotic beasts alive for science. They'll need to go further and further afield and check out increasingly bizarre locales to find new specimens for the royal zoo. They might also have to deal with poachers who have less enlightened interests in the same creatures or people who think rounding up and imprisoning monsters is cruel.

Siegel
2012-02-19, 11:51 AM
You can go the "Pillars of the Earth" route. Make it about the building of a huge tempel or a new settlement out in the wilderness.

Also, the Court/Nobel campaign

Knightofvictory
2012-02-19, 03:45 PM
What really made Pillars of the Earth interesting to me, was the big bad ambitious Bishop and the evil royal family. Whenever you have heroes, you have to have villians. Heroes are defined by the villains they face- the greater the evil force, the better the heroes are when they overcome it. It's not cliche having an antagonist, just a necessary part of the story. Whenever I come up with a campaign idea, I always start with the BBG because, to me, that's the most important part of the game, after the heroes. Thankfully, there are an infinite number of ways to make the 'bad guy'- cartoonishly villainous, affably evil, morally ambiguous, extreme idealist, and on and on. I really don't think you can make a fantasy story with heroes without having a counterpart to them, but to me, that's ok.

Seharvepernfan
2012-02-19, 04:16 PM
To answer your question, I personally go one of two routes.

One, the bad guys are EVIL and want to do stereotypical things, but I put a lot of effort in making things unpredictable. Their plans are methods are complex and/or unique, I use new material, or sometimes just a shyamalan twist.

Two, the bad guys don't think that they are evil and have good motivations (in theory), but end up being bad, either because of how they go about it, or because what they perceived as good actually wasn't.

Both of those are standard things. Most of the time a standard Bad Guy is fine.

Anyway, I suggest watching some Miko Hayao Miyazaki films. That should help you get away from EVIL bad guys.

Mystify
2012-02-19, 07:32 PM
There is also the macguffin route. There is an item the party wants, and must defeat its defenses. scale it into a national treasure style campaign instead of a single dungeon.

jseah
2012-02-19, 08:45 PM
Whenever you have heroes, you have to have villians. Heroes are defined by the villains they face- the greater the evil force, the better the heroes are when they overcome it.

Headmaster, I would rather not define myself by my enemies.
<...>
I do wish... that I could have been defined by my friends.

XD
What kind of real person wants to be known for the kinds of enemies he made?
Sure, you might be proud that some really evil people hate you for stopping/killing them. But what have you actually *accomplished*?

Have you made a positive contribution? Or did you just remove a negative?

(from memory) Paraphrasing the words of that guy in Margin Call:
"There's a bridge I designed. Used to be an engineer, you know. Every day, 12 thousand people use that bridge and it saves them 30 mins of time they would have spent on the highway. That bridge has been around for 10 years, that's what... 170 years of time? 170 whole years that would have been wasted sitting in a car on a highway, that they could now spend with their family. 170 years... What have I done since then compared to that?"

valadil
2012-02-19, 08:48 PM
I don't follow the mold, but I don't try and break it either.

First off, I'm not a fan of evil with a capital E. All my NPCs have to be able to justify their actions. A bad guy who is irrationally obsessed with world destruction doesn't interest me. But a bad guy who is misguided and goes too far is a lot of fun in my book. Take someone who means well and intends to do good, but push them a little too far and make them just a little too desperate to serve their cause. That NPC is infinitely more interesting to me than someone with no morality whatsoever.

I rarely choose a BBEG at the start of my game. I like to run lots of plots that head in different directions. I like to run them at the same time. If my players feel like they're being torn in two or more directions, I've done my job.

However, under this model my games reach a point where the players decide that so-and-so is obviously the biggest threat. This is who they focus on. At this point it behooves me to treat that threat as a nemesis.

A huge part of being GM is reacting to your players. As much as you need to surprise them, you also need to give them what they expect. When I go to a Rush show, I damn well expect them to play Tom Sawyer. Until that song starts, I know there's more concert and if the show ended before Tom Sawyer, I'd leave disappointed. Despite what they say in interviews, I'm sure Rush has grown tired of Tom Sawyer, having played it for the last 30 years, but they still have to include it if they don't want to disappoint their fans. Your players expect a nemesis. If they don't find one, you risk leaving them unsatisfied with your game.

DaMullet
2012-02-20, 08:25 AM
There is also the macguffin route. There is an item the party wants, and must defeat its defenses. scale it into a national treasure style campaign instead of a single dungeon.

I second this; I'm particularly fond of the 'matched set on a theme' variant, such as collecting the four elements, the seven colors of the rainbow, or the five senses. The benefit of this approach is that it can easily be combined with any of the above suggestions to lend a sense of urgency to the plot.
Take The Fifth Element's route and have them collect the various plot coupons because uniting them will prevent the destruction of the world due to some natural confluence, for instance.