Worldbuilding Theory: The problem of advancing timelines and global plots

[Yora]

Personally, I can't think of a single case in which updating a setting was generally recieved favorably by the fans. I think the New Jedi Era of Star Wars has it's fans, but at that point I already disliked the later timeline so much that I ignored everything after the Rebellion Era, so I missed most of the fan reactions.
With roleplaying games, I think people were never happy. Faction War in Planescape, the second Dark Sun box, Spellplague in Forgotten Realms, and boy, have I heard lots of second-hand complaints about World in Darkness in general. With Forgotten Realms, there are still lots of people who praise the 1st Edition Box to no end, even though it doesn't really contain that much content.

This got me thinking. What options do creators really have when it comes to these things? Do settings really get too convoluted over time, that they need a major purging of content through a timeline advance, or a complete return to the very beginning (which I think is what Dark Sun 4th Edition did)? Or is that just a cheap trick to print and sell new books that mostly have the same content as the old ones people already have?

And if there is actually a need to do something to clean up a world, what could creators do to keep that from happening?

[Craft (Cheese)]

This got me thinking. What options do creators really have when it comes to these things? Do settings really get too convoluted over time, that they need a major purging of content through a timeline advance, or a complete return to the very beginning (which I think is what Dark Sun 4th Edition did)? Or is that just a cheap trick to print and sell new books that mostly have the same content as the old ones people already have?

And if there is actually a need to do something to clean up a world, what could creators do to keep that from happening?

My main thought here is this: There's no such thing as a setting with too much content. There is, however, such a thing as a setting with impenetrable or newbie-unfriendly content. I firmly believe this "Canons get overly complicated over time and need to be rebooted" is a problem of presentation, not a problem of too much detail in a world.

First of all, an FR-style timeline advance that shakes everything up actually makes this problem worse. In order to understand the significance of the changes you have to understand the world that came before the changes. You can communicate these major changes effectively only if you present the new setting as something completely different (and background the links to the previous world at best), which defeats the entire point of having continuity in the first place.

Second, the real problem with continuity is a problem of exposition. Players and DMs alike need to have a context for the world their characters are inhabiting, and perhaps more important, these expectations need to be in-sync. The problem with overcomplicated continuities like FR (or the DC universe) is that they take this context for granted. When you just drop a casual reference to an obscure book written 20 years ago that nobody bought or read, and you assume everyone will understand this reference for the sake of the integrity of the story, you're setting yourself up to fail. Stick to one core book (maybe two if you split them between player and DM versions), and in supplements assume your audience hasn't read anything outside of that book.

Third, if you find that making this assumption means you spend two thirds of all your books explaining or repeating content from other books, stop, throw it out, and start over. This is just bad and inefficient writing. Stop it.

[Yora]

First of all, an FR-style timeline advance that shakes everything up actually makes this problem worse. In order to understand the significance of the changes you have to understand the world that came before the changes. You can communicate these major changes effectively only if you present the new setting as something completely different (and background the links to the previous world at best), which defeats the entire point of having continuity in the first place.
Good point. :smallbiggrin:

The one case in which I really love having different periods in the timeline, is the Old Republic Era of Star Wars. Which is so far removed from the other eras (I think there are seven officially recognized ones), that continuity really doesn't matter. Effectively, it's an alternative Star Wars universe that is more or less entirely self-contained. It still has the Republic and the Sith, and the Jedi, but none of the active players in that period have any active role in the other eras. (There are some Sith ghosts and artificial intelligences representing powerful individuals, but they are completely powerless and hidden in remote ruins insolated from the rest of the Galaxy.)
You can perfectly understand the Old Republic galaxy and enjoy the comics and the games, without knowing anything about Luke Skywalker or the Emperor and all that stuff. However, I attribute that mostly to the Era being a long way back in time instead of a continous progression forward, so the creators were much more conscious about establishing a new setting, instead of fiddling around with existing material.

Having done some more thinking on this subject, I am now wondering how much it is really neccessary to make any progress within the political situation of the game world. Planescape and Dark Sun had such timeline advancements towards the end, but since those never made it into the Box Sets that were released at the beginning of the run, I never really learned much about those. And from what you read on the internet, lots of fans simply ignore them. But I think Eberron isn't really advancing either.
Is it really the case that a setting eventually becomes stale because all questions have been answered? After 20 or 30 years perhaps, but intervals of 4 to 6 years seem much more common.

[Water_Bear]

My main issues with setting advances in RPGs are that they "lock in" certain events as cannon, shrinking the amount of freedom you have to play the setting, and they have an annoying tendency to change core parts of the setting. Neither of those are to say that settings should be static and unchanging, but just that there are inherent dangers.

For the first issue, with , think about it like this; when Star Wars Episode 1 came out how much EU material and how many fan theories were destroyed because of information "revealed" about the Galaxy before A New Hope, and how much is going to be lost when Episode 7 comes out in the new Disney trilogy? Now multiply that by thousands, that's how many campaigns you've disrupted and how many past campaigns you've made difficult to include in the backstories of new ones every time a setting is updated. And unlike in passive media where fanwork is just a nice addition, those campaigns are the core of RPGs.

For the second, Forgotten Realms is an extreme but useful example. Every edition there's a huge cataclysm which changes out Gods and Races, rearranges continents, even affects how magic works. And as a result each new version of the Realms has a different flavor, meaning fans of the old ones are often frustrated that what they liked about their settings has been obliterated. If you loved the Realms in 1e and now find out your Assassin isn't playable until late 2e that's one thing, but the changes from 2e to 3e and 3e to 4e actually change the core assumptions of why you would play in the Realms.

Continuity reboots are attractive to long-running shows comic series and game-lines, but the tendency should be reined in where possible because it's easier to mess up than to do right. And if comics have taught us anything, it's that reboots typically make continuity more difficult to follow rather than less.

[Yora]

Reboot is an interesting idea, if you actually use it to make something different. If you just use it to stage the same play slightly different, it's not going to work out well. I think that's what's happening with superhero comics all the time. On the other hand, the new Star Trek goes to great efforts to clearly make itself different from the old (while still having those silly crossovers, but still...)

But what situations do some people believe, make it actually neccessary to "clean house"? Do such situations even exist, and if they do, how can they be avoided?
In case of the FR, I have a feeling it's always done because they want to do it, and find a justification why they "had to", after the descision was already made.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Is it really the case that a setting eventually becomes stale because all questions have been answered? After 20 or 30 years perhaps, but intervals of 4 to 6 years seem much more common.

Not really: You can only answer all the questions about the past. The future, however, is always uncertain, especially with PCs running around. "There are no big mysteries to resolve that haven't already been explained in some sourcebook or adventure module" is only a problem if:

1. Your campaign's dramatic tension relies on the player's desire to resolve such an ancient mystery. You can have fun in a game where your characters pretend to not know a thing (when the player does), but you can't make "learning" that thing important. Once the players know, that dramatic load is blown.

2. You're an absolute slave to the written word of the canon. Changing fundamental things about the premise of a setting ("Okay, so we're playing Eberron with no Warforged or Dragonmarks...") is a no-no unless everyone is behind it, but I think changing details about things that are *supposed* to be a grand mystery, in-world, is fair game. Who the **** cares what some adventure module says about the Day of Mourning, you're the DM, you can make what happened there whatever you want.

[Grinner]

"There are no big mysteries to resolve that haven't already been explained in some sourcebook or adventure module" is only a problem if:

1. Your campaign's dramatic tension relies on the player's desire to resolve such an ancient mystery. You can have fun in a game where your characters pretend to not know a thing (when the player does), but you can't make "learning" that thing important. Once the players know, that dramatic load is blown.

This is a problem with a number of horror games. Often, the games' secrets are stuffed into a GM chapter, and what is seen cannot be unseen...

After a certain point, I think the best option is to just release a Collector's Edition compendium and let the setting rest in peace.

[Blightedmarsh]

I propose a more directed aproch.

Assuming that cannon can and will have its reboots you plan ahead. You decide how and where this will take place and the basic shape of what will follow after. You then spend this edition both fleshing out this edition as well as building up to a crescendo of the "event". You use things like foreshadowing to drop hints about the event and about the shape of the future.

This all needs to be backed up by a setting "bible". This is a fairly simple list of setting properties and commandments that will be kept throughout. A change to this setting bible will fundamentally alter the nature of the setting. Further more you might consider using a list of inviolable mysteries; things that will never be revealed in any source and are known only to the settings creator.

[Grinner]

I propose a more directed aproch.

Assuming that cannon can and will have its reboots you plan ahead. You decide how and where this will take place and the basic shape of what will follow after. You then spend this edition both fleshing out this edition as well as building up to a crescendo of the "event". You use things like foreshadowing to drop hints about the event and about the shape of the future.

This all needs to be backed up by a setting "bible". This is a fairly simple list of setting properties and commandments that will be kept throughout. A change to this setting bible will fundamentally alter the nature of the setting. Further more you might consider using a list of inviolable mysteries; things that will never be revealed in any source and are known only to the settings creator.

A fair approach, but keep in mind that such a thing would lead to metaplots. That may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your fanbase.

[Thinker]

Advancing the world around the players is good. It makes the world feel more alive and makes it feel like it does not revolve entirely around the players. Similarly, not every event should not involve the same small cast of characters. Once Luke Skywalker's story is done, the focus should move on to another player in the universe; a mention that he is helping is fine, but he should not remain a primary protagonist.

[NichG]

Once a setting is 'being run', I feel the future of the setting is left to the devices of the individual GMs and players. So thats part of why setting reboots are so annoying, it feels like someone went over the history you and your players built up over the campaign with a steamroller. Its hard not to take that personally, and even if you don't get pissed off over it, it increases the chance that you just ignore the new content.

So here's a semi-new idea that might be interesting to try. Write the setting backwards in time. The first books are at the tail-end of the setting's canon of history. Games that start there go forward, no future interference, etc. The next book is 'play this setting 100 years ago, during this historical period that was briefly mentioned in the core book'. The next book after that is 200 years ago. Etc.

I feel this would work well with a setting in which lots of things have died out or become lost. In the core book, mention 'there are some bits of artifacts from X era, but people don't know how they were made or who made them'. Then in a future book, you can detail that and give rules for playing in that era.

This way, you never have to do a canon reset, and you have to consciously design the historical details such that they're not crucial to the modern era of the game, but can be made relevant or brought back.

The other option is a kind of infinite-planes setting, where there can always be new stuff being introduced or discovered, because the planes are infinite.

[Beleriphon]

This is the thing I think Eberron got super, super right. The setting gives you a bunch of information up to the current day the campaign setting assumes you'll start at which is sometime in the year 998 YK. Even at that most of the information is pretty generic about what happened in the past, even the setting's creator doesn't know the setting's biggest secrets because they were never discussed beyond the mystery stage. For example there is no official answer to what caused the Mourning, Keith Baker says he has ideas he'd personally use but these were never presented and the real actual cause was never chosen.

[Yora]

The main reason I got bored with Forgotten Realms is that everyone knows pretty much everything. Not every player knows every detail, but you basically have to assume that everything that's in the books is common knowledge to many of the players. Maybe advancing the timeline helps somewhat with that for some people, but I feel like that situation should never have been created in the first place.
As mentioned, Eberron did a different approach right from the start and works more by presenting theories and common assumptions, rather than stating 100% true facts from the creator who knows all those things for certain.

Ambiguity is the spice of good settings. And many things just don't need to be known to run a game. You can enjoy a big old ruin even if you don't know the name of the people who created it and for what purpose. All you need is to know who is using it now and what they are using it for. Quite often I feel, that with every old mystery solved, the setting is falling a bit more apart.

[supermonkeyjoe]

This is the thing I think Eberron got super, super right. The setting gives you a bunch of information up to the current day the campaign setting assumes you'll start at which is sometime in the year 998 YK. Even at that most of the information is pretty generic about what happened in the past, even the setting's creator doesn't know the setting's biggest secrets because they were never discussed beyond the mystery stage. For example there is no official answer to what caused the Mourning, Keith Baker says he has ideas he'd personally use but these were never presented and the real actual cause was never chosen.

These are my sentiments exactly, for a DM the air of mystery around certain past events is excellent for weaving a plot into Knowing that the Mourning was caused by Faction X completely precludes it from being a part of a plotline that doesn't include that faction without some wrangling and having to introduce an entirely new faction.

If anything I wish they had gone further with the mystery, King Kaius explicitly being called out as a vampire for example, In my games I've made him a necropolitan just to keep players guessing.

[navar100]

This is why I prefer a DM's own made-up world. We only need concern ourselves with what the party does and the world's reaction to it. When a new campaign with a new party is played however many years later, stuff our previous party did is now canon history for the world and we see the results. I was thrilled when temples a cleric of mine had built had grown to prominence in a later campaign taking place hundreds of years later.

[TheCountAlucard]

Once a setting is 'being run', I feel the future of the setting is left to the devices of the individual GMs and players. So thats part of why setting reboots are so annoying, it feels like someone went over the history you and your players built up over the campaign with a steamroller. Its hard not to take that personally, and even if you don't get pissed off over it, it increases the chance that you just ignore the new content.

So here's a semi-new idea that might be interesting to try. Write the setting backwards in time. The first books are at the tail-end of the setting's canon of history. Games that start there go forward, no future interference, etc. The next book is 'play this setting 100 years ago, during this historical period that was briefly mentioned in the core book'. The next book after that is 200 years ago. Etc.

I feel this would work well with a setting in which lots of things have died out or become lost. In the core book, mention 'there are some bits of artifacts from X era, but people don't know how they were made or who made them'. Then in a future book, you can detail that and give rules for playing in that era.

This way, you never have to do a canon reset, and you have to consciously design the historical details such that they're not crucial to the modern era of the game, but can be made relevant or brought back.This did not work well for Dreams of the First Age.

Hopefully Heroes of the Niobraran will do a better job of it.

[jedipilot24]

I don't think a lot of the classic Dragonlance fans were particularly thrilled by the ending of Dragons of Summer of Flame or the later War of Souls. I certainly wasn't. I doubt they were any more thrilled about what happened at the end of that whole arc.
Takhisis dies and Paladine becomes mortal.

[Endarire]

Part of it is human comfort level. No matter what something was, it becomes the standard (and therefore comfortable) for a certain set of people. Changing things is asking for trouble.

[GoddessSune]

This got me thinking. What options do creators really have when it comes to these things? Do settings really get too convoluted over time, that they need a major purging of content through a timeline advance, or a complete return to the very beginning (which I think is what Dark Sun 4th Edition did)? Or is that just a cheap trick to print and sell new books that mostly have the same content as the old ones people already have?

And if there is actually a need to do something to clean up a world, what could creators do to keep that from happening?

The creators don't have much choice. After just a couple years, even just five, a setting becomes 'old and lost'. It won't be on the shelf at a book store shelf more then a year, maybe a game shops up to two years. But after that, you won't even be able to buy it, other then online warehouses and maybe a used book store. So the company of the creator does not make any money off of the product. And even if a customer wants to buy it, most of them can't.

They can put out as many ''lakes and streams' of the world'' as they want, but nothing will sell as good as the ''must have'' core campaign book.

And there is always the temptation to make things ''bigger, better and more awesome''. And they almost always fail. It is amazing that they can look at something, see the good and bad things about it...and then just remove the good and make the bad worse.

[Frozen_Feet]

I don't like advancing metaplots or reboots. My ideal is a setting that is frozen in a certain point of "present", and all additional material expands on that present. The future (and to a lesser extent, past) are left for the players of the game to determine.

And the key to expanding such a setting is to do it in small bits. Not whole continent at a time, maybe not even one country at a time. One village, one tribe, one creature at a time could be better. Instead of quantity, aim for quality. I don't care for another big fantasy setting filled to the brim with poorly fleshed-out crazy stuff, when I could run whole games based on one, well-thought novum.

I own one monster manual, and it has more fantastic creatures in it that I like to use for a year-long campaign, perhaps even a whole setting. This is why I was pretty disappointed with Eberron, actually. It had a handful good ideas... and then it had to go and stuff decades' worth of baggage among those ideas. It ended up way too busy for me to want to play with it.

[Thrudd]

I don't like advancing metaplots or reboots. My ideal is a setting that is frozen in a certain point of "present", and all additional material expands on that present. The future (and to a lesser extent, past) are left for the players of the game to determine.

And the key to expanding such a setting is to do it in small bits. Not whole continent at a time, maybe not even one country at a time. One village, one tribe, one creature at a time could be better. Instead of quantity, aim for quality. I don't care for another big fantasy setting filled to the brim with poorly fleshed-out crazy stuff, when I could run whole games based on one, well-thought novum.

I own one monster manual, and it has more fantastic creatures in it that I like to use for a year-long campaign, perhaps even a whole setting. This is why I was pretty disappointed with Eberron, actually. It had a handful good ideas... and then it had to go and stuff decades' worth of baggage among those ideas. It ended up way too busy for me to want to play with it.

I agree with you. I have never felt compelled to include every single monster from every manual in my campaign settings. I state to my players that the books are only the guidline I have used to create the gameworld, don't use the MM or DMG to look for definitive information about anything (ideally, players shouldn't really even be looking in the MM or DMG, but of course everyone owns them). It isn't impossible to explain, but I always felt like having ten (or more) different evil humanoid races, not to mention all the PC races, infesting a relatively small area of the gameworld was excessive. If the continent on the other side of the planet has a couple different monster races than the one the players have been on, sure. But that is part of the lateral expansion you're talking about.

That being said, I am not bothered when designers advance their game universe timescale and create new environments to play in. As long as I have the choice of what era the game takes place in, it doesn't bother me to ignore/overwrite their suggested timeline with my own. All RPG settings I take as suggestions and starting points only, regardless of how detailed a story the designers have written. If I like the system, but not the setting, I'll just create my own. In regard to Star Wars, I don't mind having the choice of what era to start a campaign. Republic/Clone Wars, Rebellion, New Jedi Order, all have interesting scenarios to play out. There's nothing that says you can't ignore something, even if it is canon or EU (though I think most people prefer not to ignore canon). Old World of Darkness went pretty crazy in their effort to bring about the apocalypse so they could reboot the whole thing...but still, anyone can ignore anything they want and play with the system in whatever setting they like. Even though they wrote a book that said the Stargazers are now extinct or in self-exile, or whatever, so what? I can still have Stargazers if I want. :p So I don't hold it against any game designer/company for creating new modules and new game-world events as a way to write more books and make money. If I don't like them or don't feel I need them, I ignore them. If there are players who wouldn't like that and insist I follow whatever is in the latest book to the letter, they are not players that would be in one of my games.

[Yora]

I think adding new locations and groups to a setting rarely bothers anyone. It's taking away locations and groups that some people have been enjoying, that's really unpopular.

[Trekkin]

The unpopularity of adding new locations varies depending on what the new place is designed to do. I've seen some disastrous attempts to build a sort of MMO-like level sequence into the locations by making each one more dangerous, which brings on cries of power creep. Even with the general power level remaining the same, there's still the issue of making them different enough from the rest of the setting to stand out but not so different that they steal the spotlight.

Personally, I'm starting to think what works best for metaplot advancement is a static setting advanced in short, localized quanta by adventure modules or something similar; there can be a metaplot as an internal reference, but there's never a book out about "the world a decade after core". That way, the changes are incremental enough that as long as you aren't dropping meteors on population centers it's more intuitive to say "this didn't happen in my/our game, but that did", and that can help ameliorate any feelings of loss of agency that metaplot advancement can bring about. Then again, maybe that's just me; I don't mind just not buying/implementing a book that advances the metaplot in a way I don't like, but when I need it anyway for setting or crunch, setting out the dividing line between what is and is not in my game can confuse my players.

[Yora]

But that would mean that none of the adventures or stories are refferencing or building on each other, and then it could be hardly called a meta-plot. That's just plain plot.

[huttj509]

I think adding new locations and groups to a setting rarely bothers anyone. It's taking away locations and groups that some people have been enjoying, that's really unpopular.

The issue comes when those locations and groups take away from the "here there be dragons" parts of the map. It can wind up stifling for a GM wanting to weave their own stuff, especially if the group wants to play "FR" not "Bob's alternate history FR."

[Yora]

With that situation, I rather see the blame at writers not really considering with what distances and areas they are dealing. If you just add castles and towns in the middle of nowhere, that wouldn't really be intruding on anything nearby. But usually, it seems that a week long journey is treated like a 6 to 8 hours train ride with some camping inbetween.

[Scow2]

With that situation, I rather see the blame at writers not really considering with what distances and areas they are dealing. If you just add castles and towns in the middle of nowhere, that wouldn't really be intruding on anything nearby. But usually, it seems that a week long journey is treated like a 6 to 8 hours train ride with some camping inbetween.

Well... given the difference in speeds, both are about the same distance.

[Yora]

Perhaps, but in practice it does not matter how far you travel. Only how long it takes you and what amount of effort it takes. It's a major difference if I am away for a single night or gone for two weeks. Especially when I have to carry everything I'll need with me, because there won't be opportunities to buy stuff.

[Lord Torath]

I must admit, I really didn't like the Dark Sun revision/update. The setting was initially introduced as a place where PC's can become exceedingly powerful and change the setting through their actions. They they took Troy Denning's DMPCs and did everything you had planned for your PCs. Urg!

I don't think a lot of the classic Dragonlance fans were particularly thrilled by the ending of Dragons of Summer of Flame or the later War of Souls. I certainly wasn't. I doubt they were any more thrilled about what happened at the end of that whole arc.
Takhisis dies and Paladine becomes mortal.
He then moves to the Deathgate worlds and changes him name. A bit. From Fizban to...Zifnab

[BWR]

The real problems of advancing timelines and making sweeping changes is someone will always feel it's a bad idea. They will disagree, sometimes very loudly, with what is being done to change. Basically, it comes down to how much of what attracted people to the setting in the first place is changed.
Factions were a lot of what gave Planescape its flavor and were a favorite amongst many of its fans, including me. Shaking Sigil up in that manner technically didn't make much of a difference to the Multiverse as a whole even if it made Sigil a very different place. As Sigil was the face of the setting, this made the change seem a lot greater than it actually was.
And most of the hardcore PS fans I spoke with, whether they liked the changes, disliked them or didn't care, were more upset with the fact that it was the death knell for support for the setting than stuff they could easily use or ignore.

Another problem with setting changes is apocalypse creep. Dragonlance has been mentioned already. Sure, technically the Cataclysm was a bigger event than the War ofd the Lance, but then You have Raistlin going bonkers and having to be stopped from destroying the world, then suddenly there's a new übergod that's been there all along.
Rokugan is another excellent example. It's story was actually supposed to end when the Second Day of Thunder was won, but it was popular enough that its story has kept on going. Sadly, rather than focusing on good stories, the story team has fallen into the trap of trying to make bigger stories, which adds more and more stupidity and removes the setting further and further from the original, usually in ways that make no sense whatsoever (I freely admit I am not a fan of what it has become). Whether or not you like the stories, trying to make everything bigger just makes whatever came before less impressive.

Honestly, you'd think that setting designers would learn that providing detailed setting is popular, providing adventures and campaigns is excellent, but keeping the setting more or less as it was introduced is best: DM's and players can make the lasting story changes they want to well enough.

[Yora]

There is also a major difference between a setting for an RPG or a setting for novels, movies, or video games. A good example is Mass Effect, which from the very beginning pretty much demands that at the end of the plot line, the whole setting will be drastically redefined. Or take Lord of the Rings, where at the end of the story again, the world is a very different place. Because making that change is all that those stories are about.
As I think I mentioned before, Star Wars is one of the few examples where, apparrently purely by accident, the writers established that over the span of decades and centuries, people come and go, but the basic situation always remains the same as it has been for thousands of years. There has always been a Republic, and there have always been wars between the Jedi and the Sith, that resulted in either side getting the upper hand and the Sith establishing some short-lived Empires. And most writers stick to that formula, regardless of when in the continuity a story takes place.

And I think that's the real issue with Dragonlance. Dragonlance has always been a setting for the stories of the creators and never really a setting for players. The Dragonlance world works like that of Lord of the Rings, not like say Eberron or Planescape.

[Earthwalker]

This whole thread reminds me of TORG and its plan for moving the meta-plot forward.

At the back of each published adventure was a form to fill and send back to the makers (I think it was WestEnd Games) and tell them how the adventure ended for your players.

The results were totaled up and this decided the future plot and changes to the game world.

Oddly this was even a part of the game mechanic anyway as it involved different realities and universes (Infiniverse I think it was called) so that you might remember at the end of that trek to the lost lands you didn't managed to stop Malcome Kane on top of the black ziggurut but thats ok, the universe remembers you did stop him. (This bit was optional)

[Amphetryon]

I think the main problem with advancing timelines in RPGs is the havoc such "official" advances wreak on individual games that are set in those worlds.

For example: Let's say Yora (as the OP) and I each started a campaign in the Forgotten Realms on the same day, when we received our FRCS. Each of us reads carefully through the entire book and zeroes in on a section in Plots and Rumors, on page 171, headed "The Ruins of Ched Nasad."

Yora takes the direction hinted at within that particular paragraph to install a deep dragon in these ruins, and Yora's campaign centers around the Players ultimately defeating said dragon, and using the loot obtained (several "long lost" Drow magic items, and gold) to open trade relations between the Drow of Menzoberranzan and the Gnomes of Milvarune, with significant political and trade ramifications all around.

My campaign, by contrast, chooses another listed option, and installs a Mind Flayer enclave in Ched Nasad instead. The adventure my Players get is based on investigating the odd behavior of several Cormanthyr townsfolk who, it turns out, had been made thralls to the Mind Flayers. Misinformation, behind-the-scenes machinations, and a failed Will save combine to have my Players working as pawns of the Mind Flayers to help them successfully wipe out the population of Menzoberranzan, decimating the Drow population overall to a level from which they may never recover, and giving the Mind Flayers additional power both above ground and in the Underdark.

Now, regardless of what the "official" timeline advance for the Forgotten Realms becomes after this theoretical point, at least one (quite possibly both) of our campaigns is wildly out of sync with canon, entirely through following the suggested courses OF the canon. We can retcon events so that the worlds again line up with the canon, or we can throw our hands up in the air and decree that the canon isn't applicable in our campaigns, at least in this area.

[Yora]

While I see that being a potential problem for some, I don't think that really makes much of a difference for a considerable majority of groups. I've been playing for 15 years and never have our campaigns ever really resulted in establishing new power groups or adding or removing any major settlements.
If that happens in your game, then of course any timeline advancement will not match with that. But I feel that this is pretty much a given when you play such a campaign, regardless of how much a new setting book changes the content. Even if the books don't change anything at all, your group did change something and so it won't match.
The setting imposing major changes even though the PCs didn't do anything is probably a much bigger issue for most groups.

[Thinker]

Now, regardless of what the "official" timeline advance for the Forgotten Realms becomes after this theoretical point, at least one (quite possibly both) of our campaigns is wildly out of sync with canon, entirely through following the suggested courses OF the canon. We can retcon events so that the worlds again line up with the canon, or we can throw our hands up in the air and decree that the canon isn't applicable in our campaigns, at least in this area.

You don't have to retcon anything, nor do you have to declare that canon is inapplicable for your group. Your game centered around Ched Nasad and Menzoberranzan. Forgotten Realms is a big setting so you can take all of the changes to canon for everywhere except those two locales. It still allows the world to change without invalidating your group's past achievements.

[Amphetryon]

You don't have to retcon anything, nor do you have to declare that canon is inapplicable for your group. Your game centered around Ched Nasad and Menzoberranzan. Forgotten Realms is a big setting so you can take all of the changes to canon for everywhere except those two locales. It still allows the world to change without invalidating your group's past achievements.

The assumption that a new, friendly trade relationship with the Drow would not have impact outside that particular town, or the decimation of the Drow population and strengthening of the Mind Flayer power base, would have no noticeable impact on anything outside of their immediate region is fascinating to me. Do your games have no methods of far-range travel (wagons, Overland Flight (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/overlandFlight.htm), Teleport (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/teleport.htm), etc) or trade outside their own isolated communities? Or, do you not simply consider the implications of such things in your games/response?

[Yora]

In the games I run, I'd say both. Maybe the PCs give one faction or another a major advantage, but unless that's the direct objective of the adventure, it won't have any major effects.
And if I do run games in which the PCs do help one faction to overpower another, it's always small factions that don't affect the world as a whole in a meaningful way.
Not as a conscious descision, but it just doesn't come up in 4th to 8th level game.

[Amphetryon]

In the games I run, I'd say both. Maybe the PCs give one faction or another a major advantage, but unless that's the direct objective of the adventure, it won't have any major effects.
And if I do run games in which the PCs do help one faction to overpower another, it's always small factions that don't affect the world as a whole in a meaningful way.
Not as a conscious descision, but it just doesn't come up in 4th to 8th level game.

I see. As a believer in Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect), I tend to almost instinctively consider what the larger implications of relatively small changes would be. . . assuming you consider the decimation of an entire Race a "small" change, from my earlier example. I also tend to prefer games where the PCs CAN have a lasting impact on the setting, so a series of unconnected games at levels 4 - 8, where the actions of one group had no bearing on the experiences of the other regardless of scope, would probably be highly unsatisfying for my personal taste.

[BlckDv]

Some earlier posts have hinted at this, but a major issue here is taking the step back and looking at the business goals of the company publishing the setting, rather than the groups playing in the setting. To expand a few of the examples already used in this thread:

Forgotten Realms is the big boy and easiest to call out.. it is a NOVEL line that has an RPG setting tacked on to it. From the business side, FR novels are a much bigger business with more profits than the RPG setting will ever be. As such, their interests are not to keep players of the RPG already in the setting happy, but rather to keep updating the setting so that it will be the world currently known by the book readers if they get the itch to jump over and try out the RPG. Keeping the readers happy trumps the players, both due to numbers, and because the readers have many many more options for jumping ship if they don't like what they get from FR.

Rokugan is a related but seperate story, the cash cow here was for a long time (may still be but I lack current information) the CCG. They made a big deal that the results of sanctioned CCG tournaments would create the official storyline and impact the next seasons cards and events, and as such the setting for the RPG was slaved into a frame that had to update in meaningful ways in a fairly short frame of time, so that players up to date on the CCG story would find the world they knew if they picked up the RPG.

World of Darkness was an odd case of a similar outcome. billed from the start as a Storyteller game, White Wolf baked a cast of characters and a range of shadowy global events and hints of impending doom into the books. As the supplements began to advance these details, gaining a chain of continuity and a clear progression of events, they realized that they had a potent sales tool, people would buy books both for use in their game, and also for the meta-fiction to keep up on the storyline of the world. Of course, that meant that the story had to either go stale, or eventually come to an end. Notice that the nWoD has a much lower level of meta-fiction content in the books, detailing far more historical data and less current events.

Eberron is a great counter example. It has attached novels, but they don't dwarf the setting, and they made an early and I think wise choice that the various novels chains would each launch from the setting base info, but would not share continuity. In this way many stories can be told, but they don't have to conform to each other or expect a reader to have knowledge of other events to follow them. Likewise the "Shared Past, Divergent Future" means that their will never be a "One True Continuity" for the setting to need to be kept in synch with.

[Thinker]

The assumption that a new, friendly trade relationship with the Drow would not have impact outside that particular town, or the decimation of the Drow population and strengthening of the Mind Flayer power base, would have no noticeable impact on anything outside of their immediate region is fascinating to me. Do your games have no methods of far-range travel (wagons, Overland Flight (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/overlandFlight.htm), Teleport (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/teleport.htm), etc) or trade outside their own isolated communities? Or, do you not simply consider the implications of such things in your games/response?

Sure, it could have effects on other areas, but why go to all of the effort to map out the effects of areas where the players aren't going to be and will never see? Who's to say that the effects won't create the same (or similar) situations that arose in the company's version of the future? I don't think that weighing all of the implications of every change from the canon campaign is all that useful a way to spend time.

[Amphetryon]

Sure, it could have effects on other areas, but why go to all of the effort to map out the effects of areas where the players aren't going to be and will never see? Who's to say that the effects won't create the same (or similar) situations that arose in the company's version of the future? I don't think that weighing all of the implications of every change from the canon campaign is all that useful a way to spend time.

Given that this is a hobby we do for fun, I'm not sure that "useful" is the metric I'd use to measure time spent on it. But, if playing D&D feels like a useful expenditure of your time, aside from considering the implications of the actions of the PCs, more power to you.

[NichG]

For what its worth, most campaigns I've been in have followed Amphetryon's model rather than Yora's model (that is to say, with the actions of the PCs causing changes to the power structures of the world). Its not really that they're butterfly-effect dominated though. In practice there end up being just too many changes to 'compute' them all, so the DM is more likely to just pick plots that were inspired from considerations of the consequences of one or other of the changes.

I would also say though that those campaigns don't really have a logistical problem with divergent canon. They've tended to be shorter than the 10 year epics that I've heard of - generally from 6 months to 1.5 years long - so they don't get 'hit' by the canon-change events that much during their run.

The other thing is that in general, if you can compute the effect of changes made by the PCs, you can compute the effect of whatever 'big thing' drove the change in canon. Its usually that some new force descends on the world, or some fundamental thing breaks, etc; so if you want to incorporate the canon change you can just treat it like another thing the PCs did and compute the consequences to whatever degree you have time for.

Now, as to whether the canon change is welcomed by the group? Thats a whole other story. The effect of having tedious 'recompute' events pushed into the campaign by an external force could certainly make the canon change unwelcome by the DM, but at the same time it could be seen as sources of inspiration. At the same time there's a lot of complex matters of taste as far as who/what should change the world (e.g. 'it should always be the PCs' vs 'the world has bigger fish' vs 'the PCs should always have a change to interfere with changes' or whatever). I think this is where the particular nature of the change matters. Adding some new group or thing going on is mostly going to get creative juices flowing, or just be ignored if people don't like it. Wiping out half the gods and rearranging the map due to a cosmological event will just piss people off, since its low on the inspiration and high on the retooling content.

[Thinker]

Given that this is a hobby we do for fun, I'm not sure that "useful" is the metric I'd use to measure time spent on it. But, if playing D&D feels like a useful expenditure of your time, aside from considering the implications of the actions of the PCs, more power to you.

I enjoy world building, but I enjoy playing and running games more. I have limits on my time for these hobbies. Usefulness pertains to productivity, in this context productivity in pursuit of my hobbies. Pondering the earth-shattering ramifications of every event the PCs interact with is not something I have time for.

[JustSomeGuy]

Now, as to whether the canon change is welcomed The effect of having tedious 'recompute' events pushed into the campaign by an external force could certainly make the canon change unwelcome by the DM, but at the same time it could be seen as sources of inspiration.

It seems to me that the problem isn't necessarily the setting changes as such, but the pacing of the changes; instead of a gradual slope of continually evolving setting, there is a series of steep steps between each release where all the changes are thrown in together, so it makes it less of an evolving world and more a series of time jumps.

It might work in a campaign where the PC's are out of the loop for years at a time only to return back sporadiacally and see how everything changes, but not in a world where they live.

I would liken it to living in your hometown vs. moving away and returning every ~5 years or so for a weekend... you are no longer up to speed on current events, many things have changed and it all seems a little odd yet still the same basic place - it feels somewhat alien i'd say.

[Blightedmarsh]

What you could do is have a large setting with basic defining features kind of set in stone. These would be things like:

The broad way magic works
The over pantheon
The cosmology
The bestiary
The basic underlining cultures

This is the foundation of the world and remains unchanged. The specifics of a setting focus almost wholly on a relatively few key points and this is the only place where the "metaplot" really touches upon.

Beyond these "center points" is a vast swathe of "here be dragons". This is a place where things are deliberately kept vague and mysterious; possibly drawing on the concept of hyper-time, extra planar space such as the fey wilds or the astral sea. This would be designed to be the players playground.