Status Quo
Poor Vengeance! Our perpetually pissed-off Anti(?)paladin is still stuck in brooding mode. He’s been like this ever since the death of poor Patches the Unkicked. And that presents something of a problem for this joke-a-day comic. I quite liked the trio of kick-ass lady adventurers in the original Team Bounty Hunter. How are we supposed to get back to normal with an incandescent fire genasi glooming it up in the background?
At some point we all become sitcom writers. Serving as tabletop roleplayers, we run into the same problems.
Our audience likes the status quo. Hell, we like the status quo too! Our loveable band of misfits snark at one another in the local bar/coffee shop/office/dungeon! But now Plucky Newcomer is in a relationship with Jaded Grifter! Irascible Old Person has been offered a gig on another channel! We killed off the primary antagonist last season, but that tension was holding the show together! Maybe we can just say it was all a dream and start over?
To a large extent, this is the same problem we talked about back in “Quittin’ Time.” The same strategies apply. You can press on with the story and hope the fun sticks around. You can reboot. You can swap systems, or start a brand new game, or even break up the band and seek out a new cast of lovable misfits. But in addition to these strategies, there’s an underlying psychological fix: Embrace change!
This hobby is built on leveling up, gaining XP, and taking on new challenges. Raiding dungeons and haggling with innkeepers over “the good rooms” may be fun at level 1, but it gets old at level 9. At some point the story moves on. You begin to conquer nations, fight gods, and save the goddamn multiverse. That means the status quo is almost impossible to regain. But then again, that’s the fun storytelling.
So what do you say, Handbook-World? Have you ever seen a campaign shift away from the comfortable status quo? Did you manage a return to perpetual stasis, find new pleasures in unexpected plot developments, or mourn the jumping of your shark? Whatever your experience, tell us your tale down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Thrice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
Awww, this is cute.
Ranger out here loving that third wheel life. 😀
Unless you’re a patreon member, and know she’s just waiting for her significant other to find their cloths and join them.
The Handbook of Erotic Fantasy started as a distinct timeline/continuity. Now I don’t even know anymore. 🙁
There maybe some bled over, but I definitely consider them separate if only because of Fighter…
Hypertime. When in doubt blame hypertime.
IDK when I’ve played DnD the point of the adventure has always been “the Quest”, maybe theirs an evil god ruling creation that we want to take down, or maybe it’s something more personal and I want to find out what sort of entity I’ve bargained with for great power (don’t touch unidentified artifacts peeps), I’ve never really had the group of adventurers that adventure just because
the exalted games I’ve been in have been more in that direction but have all died before their time due to GM burnout or scheduling conflicts
I’ve played a lot of mage(awakening) in that regard, and the status quo there is chasing mystery and getting yourself into too much trouble, for that is what the awakened do, but the mysteries do get more mysterious and the trouble does become more troublesome, and eventually, it’s just time for new littler mages in a new location with a different set of mysteries
the games I’ve been in have by and large been driving at an end-point, and the whole campaign has been a deviation from the status quo, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood the question
Think of it as anime. Case Closed and Bleach are long running, and tend to return to stasis. Cowboy Bebop or FLCL are shorter, and wete able to progress their storylines to a natural conclusion more quickly.
It makes me wonder if this is an artifact of campaign duration?
Where a campaign is concerned, I’d say it’s a symptom of “Failure To Properly End”-itis. You know hte one… the campaign’s BBEG is defeated, but the Gm and Players want to play out the post-climax denouement, but then a new minor crisis emerges… the GM and PCs are too wedded to their ‘paper mans’ to give them up just yet, so the story drags on, slowly becoming a shallow, empty, hollowed out caricature of what it once was until no one is “having fun anymore”…
(Or at least more than half the group isn’t having fun anymore… and it’s usually the GM who either loses interest first and thus starts to ‘burn out’ or last and is whipping the Players onward despite them having lost interest.)
Or so it seems to me having only heard about these horror stories from the outside.
the games mentioned above have all lasted between 6 months and two years of more or less weekly games, bar some of the exalted games I’ve been in which has been a bit shorter, longest game was the epic quest vs an evil god ruling all creation, that was in DnD 3.5 and yeah lasted about two years, either that or a mage game which yeah a bit more episodic, but to chase mystery is what mages do, and we finished by stopping an arch-mage dropping the local town into the abyss… mostly,
I guess the Mage game had a status quo of just chasing little mysteries between calamities the force the cabal to pull out all the stops, the last calamity was just the latest and greatest of a long list, and although the ending wasn’t planned from the start most of the pieces for it to go that way were there in the beginning,
evileeyore could be right in that some games have difficulty ending, it’s just not something I’ve experienced
either way both games lasted about two years, the DnD was a one-off game, but I still play with the mage group, we just play other games,
currently I’m running DnD 5e but we’re probably moving on to ex3, either run by me or by one of the others in the group (maybe both on alternate weeks) once the adventure is over, but I’m just running a module (LMoP) and probably not more than that
Aww, Vengeance has lost his gold detailing. I loved that little design!
I shall make inquiries with the art department.
EDIT: Quoth the art department: “Ffff.”
I have a great appreciation for both the art department and the other departments of the comic and the work they do in creating this fine art series.
Perhaps one day I will have sufficient funds to support it monetarily.
I was in an evil campaign, where our party had managed to establish themselves as leaders of a local gang, and things were looking up for us. Then everything went to shit, as one of the party members decided to one vs one another gang leader, who ended up decapitating her. At the same time my character had gotten spooked by ghosts from the past, and had decided to fake her own death. Planning on changing her shape and linking up with the rest of the party a bit later.
So what happened was the other two members suddenly learning that one of their members had gone off, died and started a gang war, while the other burned to death in a tragic pie baking accident. And the whole gang just disintegrated as people decided they didn´t sign up for outright war with the biggest gang in town. One of the two “Suvivors” also decided to bail (The player had gotten tired of playing her, leaving only the fighter behind. My character, now in a new form, saw all of this and decided to bail as well.
So the gang was gone, and three of us made new characters. We often joke that the entire first half of the campaign was just the fighters backstory, as his player tends towards only writing the minimal required.
Lol. Love that moral to the story.
Do you regret not getting to follow through on the “rival gangs” storyline?
There was a bit of a follow through afterwards, but it was rather quickly sidelined. What I regret the most is not learning what happened to most of the NPCs in our gang, but we did get to take some revenge on the other gang with our new characters. Through for non gang related reasons.
Likely helped that most of the characters involved mainly saw the gang as a stepping stone, and that most of the major NPCs we were involved with carried over, as two of us with replacement characters made sure to include them in our backstory.
I’ve seen some campaigns end happily, and some come to grief:
A) My first D&D campaign (4th grade-HS), we finally hit 20+ level, became demigods, and retired (or died somewhere along the way).
B) Our long-running game night campaign ended abruptly when one player/DM wanted to end on a high note (king by his own hand), one player/DM wanted to burn the world down (Glorious Conflagration!) and the rest had the inclination to return to Cheers and order another beer and wait for the next comedic situation.
C) My son’s PC is reaching a status quo: A Mayberry-type situation with random encounters for the city watch led by his village blacksmith, who is transitioning from high-level one-shots to becoming the quest-giver to future low-level adventurers.
I feel like Option C reflects the “tiers” you used to hear about back in 4e. Different levels of play tend to focus on different narrative setups. Politics eventually replace dungeons, you know?
A general issue I feel is that game mechanics exacerbate this problem.
Way back, remember your house cat that’s actually an underboss over all the commoners because a house cat is more dangerous than a commoner? Or Fighter being tied at the stake and taunting them all about what are they going to do? It’s that situation.
..dare I use the word realistically here, *realistically* the players no exist in Superman’s World of Cardboard. And you can either embrace it or fight it.
Personally, I fight it, and I feel my game world holds together more cohesively for my stubborn refusal to allow game mechanics to dictate the universe.
You should chose a system that reflects the game you want to run. I recommend GURPS. It can handle ‘gritty but highly fantastical’ quite well.
I like Palladium personally, but it’s less my choice and more what the players want to play.
Some of that is playing the games they know, and just about all of it is playing what they want to play. Which is fine with me. But it does mean I will adjust some things, and I’m pretty upfront about it.
Honestly, players like that the townies might actually survive Round One of an evil wizard attack.
“So what do you say, Handbook-World?”
I think our ‘status quos’ are entirely different. My games (run and played in) all are the “campaign with long running plot” types and once that plot is done… we make new characters for a different campaign. Often entirely different systems.
While I know what a ‘dungeon a week’ game looks like, that’s not my style, I simply wouldn’t be happy playing in something like that. So for me, my ‘status quo’ is “constant incremental and/or sudden massive change”. Nothing ever ‘stays the same’ or returns to the ‘the way it was’.
Yeah, my group mostly plays zero to hero campaigns of various lengths, so there’s no expectation of a status-quo… it’s onward and upward. And we also play one-shots or short campaigns which don’t last long enough to establish a status-quo.
The exception would probably be games like the aptly-named Monster of the Week or some supers games, where the episodic format is baked in. But we’ve never had one of those last long enough for anything to significantly change…
Maybe this brooding new Anti(?)Paladin is just the kind of buddy Gunslinger could team up with!
Moving on is difficult, but it’s worse when the need to move on isn’t acknowledged. I think every Skyrim player has had their immersion challenged when their high-level character is addressed the same as they were at level 1, even if that was only a couple of days earlier.
Obviously the only solution is for Vengeance to come out as a kick-ass girl. The balance must be maintained.
I for one welcome our new fanfic overlords. 😀
Fighter has a girdle for that.
NOT WHAT I WAS IMPLYING, lol.
Besides, we already did a rule 63 on Antipaladin for one of the Patreon pinups. Girls with puppies and all that.
I’ll be honest, this one just reads to me as terribly sad. I’m glad Inquisitor and Magus are back together again, and I’m happy for the two of them, but Vengeance just seems so… lost.
Never doubt the love between a man and his dog. Love always wins out in the end.