Iceforge
2016-06-11, 01:20 PM
Greetings fellow playgrounders!
Many years ago, I heard the quote by John Wick (paraphrased, as I cannot find the video in which he said it) "James Bond was never first level", and how playing high level characters (or very powerful characters, based on which system you use) can be fun for the players, specially if you often play low-powered campaigns, which I am also a fan of, but variety is gold.
One problem I always had with high level characters is that I prefer to build my own worlds when I DM, and a mixture of me being poor at getting a lot of it into writing and having players, who simply don't have the time nor energy to read a ton about a world in advance to a game (which has made it fruitless to do the effort in getting it writen down in a way readable by anyone else but me), means that high level characters often don't make a lot of sense, as someone high level is supposed to know a lot about the world in which the game takes place, understand how the world works and know about what exists in the world (or even more importantly, what does not exist in the world!)
An idea I had recently and am slowly building up more and more in my mind, is a world where multiple worlds exist, once ravaged by ancient evils (think Titans, like Greek Titans) and these evils was locked away in each of their seperate worlds, with an order of guardians in each world (explaining common language and common races across the multiple worlds) and one last world seperated from the rest, the central world that connects all the other worlds, in which no titan was trapped and locked away, ancient magic locking all the connections between the world (effectively blocking all planar travel).
The players would then take the role as someone from an Order existing in the central world, whose job it is, through magical means, to monitor the other worlds for signs of this ancient evil escaping captivity, and while it has been without any signs for time beyond counting, the order still have powerful individuals in their service, who battle the evils of their own world, when suddenly activity is spotted in multiple worlds, most significantly in one of them.
Fearing if orders still exist in the other worlds to deal with it and not wanting to leave the other worlds to their own fate and give the ancient evil time to grow powerful enough to open the connections between worlds themselves, the connection is opened and our heroes are sent into an, to them, unknown world to try and find out what is going on and make sure the ancient evil does not escape captivity, not knowing what form it might even have manifested in, if it has indeed escaped entirely from its ancient prison.
Would that be a pitch that appeals to you?
What other ideas do you have to make high level characters make sense in a world they might not entirely know out-of-character?
Many years ago, I heard the quote by John Wick (paraphrased, as I cannot find the video in which he said it) "James Bond was never first level", and how playing high level characters (or very powerful characters, based on which system you use) can be fun for the players, specially if you often play low-powered campaigns, which I am also a fan of, but variety is gold.
One problem I always had with high level characters is that I prefer to build my own worlds when I DM, and a mixture of me being poor at getting a lot of it into writing and having players, who simply don't have the time nor energy to read a ton about a world in advance to a game (which has made it fruitless to do the effort in getting it writen down in a way readable by anyone else but me), means that high level characters often don't make a lot of sense, as someone high level is supposed to know a lot about the world in which the game takes place, understand how the world works and know about what exists in the world (or even more importantly, what does not exist in the world!)
An idea I had recently and am slowly building up more and more in my mind, is a world where multiple worlds exist, once ravaged by ancient evils (think Titans, like Greek Titans) and these evils was locked away in each of their seperate worlds, with an order of guardians in each world (explaining common language and common races across the multiple worlds) and one last world seperated from the rest, the central world that connects all the other worlds, in which no titan was trapped and locked away, ancient magic locking all the connections between the world (effectively blocking all planar travel).
The players would then take the role as someone from an Order existing in the central world, whose job it is, through magical means, to monitor the other worlds for signs of this ancient evil escaping captivity, and while it has been without any signs for time beyond counting, the order still have powerful individuals in their service, who battle the evils of their own world, when suddenly activity is spotted in multiple worlds, most significantly in one of them.
Fearing if orders still exist in the other worlds to deal with it and not wanting to leave the other worlds to their own fate and give the ancient evil time to grow powerful enough to open the connections between worlds themselves, the connection is opened and our heroes are sent into an, to them, unknown world to try and find out what is going on and make sure the ancient evil does not escape captivity, not knowing what form it might even have manifested in, if it has indeed escaped entirely from its ancient prison.
Would that be a pitch that appeals to you?
What other ideas do you have to make high level characters make sense in a world they might not entirely know out-of-character?