Adverse to the Verse

While we loved D&D 4 and the battle-chess game, the worst part about the game is the endgame let us down. From level 10 on, the game was about traveling the planes. The great wheel. The D&D cosmology. All the iconic locations like some endgame MMO floating continent raid content.

In short, the D&D Multiverse.

And we got this feeling the base worlds of the games, such as the Forgotten Realms, Grayhawk, Eberron, Dark Sun, and all the others, felt like level 1-9 sandbox MMO starter zones in 4E. It did not feel like there were high-level challenges on these worlds, since the high-level expansion books went all-in on the cosmology. A starting town did not need much more than a surrounding area map. You did not need a world map for any of these places other than something like a "what starting zone do you want to begin in" sort of question before your super amazing planar adventure begins.

That boring old starting town you defended and grew to love? Forget about it! Best for like, a home for your gates and a place to store treasure. It is too low level, the monsters around there push-overs, and the shops have junk, so it's best to move on and hang out in Sigil, Planescape, or somewhere cool like that with easy travel options to different planes.

Mind you, Planescape is cool all by itself for different reasons and it can be its own campaign. But not used as a "high-level area" to diminish equally great settings elsewhere.

And our game died because we got sick of the same-old Multiverse that has been overdone and used as a reason for everything, and every unique campaign setting had to be fit into it as a starting zone. A pale comparison of the Grayhawk of old with its high-level dungeons and the super-deadly world, and one you did not need to leave on your way up to the most potent levels in the AD&D 1e.

You could drop a high-level dungeon on the world a few times, but it didn't feel right. The book had this assumed progression path, and it mirrored your typical MMO. Get to the Elemental plane of Fire and start doing Tomb of Horror raids, which will get your gear score up so you can do Temple of Elemental Evil. Part of this was D&D 4E's strong MMO feeling, which felt great at the start but devolved into the grind and numbers game later.

When the 4E expansions detailing the places came out, our game started to crater. We had a cool world with high-level areas and challenges developing, but the Wizards 4E cosmology model took over and we did not even see this coming.

In the old days? Planar travel was strange and weird and something you did not really want to do. You had the ethereal plan and silvered cords and the chance of getting lost forever. Today, planar travel feels like air travel, you go to the airport, get on a plane, and it is nothing special. This feels like the case even in D&D 5e, sometimes more so with the anything-goes Magic: The Gathering science-fantasy content in there, and it does not appeal to me.

And the Multiverse is the generic setting content that will sell regardless of whatever setting you begin in, and the publisher doesn't have to split the market by supporting one campaign setting over another.

Verse: Not Really a Place...

And these days, it feels like the Multiverse is getting marketed harder and harder as the default setting, like some tech-company wannabe wagon-hitching to Facebook's Metaverse. Writers, being writers, tend to chase buzzwords and get hired by Netflix, comics, or other big-money outfits and they tend to follow trends and please their employers. "Verse" is also an NFT-style buzzword and increases the parent company's stock valuation.

A Verse is a nebulous thing you can hang existing IP onto while having infinite room for new ideas as me-too-isms, and you are hoping to elevate your new IP alongside the old IP by linking them through the Verse and selling them as paid-for optional expansions.

It isn't really a real place at all.

And most importantly, it is a vehicle to sell you new things.

A Verse is actually a marketplace.

Our Pathfinder World

We had a cool Pathfinder 1e world and the first thing we did was cut it off from the Multiverse. Getting there or going there was impossible. Leaving it was impossible. We did not do planar adventures. You could not gate out and leave.

All the monsters and NPCs lived there and nowhere else. The highest level creatures roamed the land. The place was packed and cool. The highest-level dungeons were on this world, out there, waiting for you to find them. You had no reason to leave because the gods forbid it, and face it, your entire experience of leveling to maximum level was on this world and waiting for you to grab that brass ring.

There was no Verse.

When I start Pathfinder 2 I am doing the same exact thing. One world, one sandbox, no way out, nor do you need a reason to leave.

And this world remained compelling and interesting all the way up until the end, even after our D&D 4E game died out. I can honestly say there really was no D&D 4E world of ours since it became that nebulous "Verse" creation that we never really could wrap our heads around, it was this vague cloud of ideas and places, and it never really became something real to us. The starting area was the best, and the rest of the 4E cosmology was junk that was easily forgotten.

I feel it is the same thing with Grayhawk and the Forgotten Realms to me these days; those are what I remember. Those are what is real. Those are the things I love.

Tentpole Settings

I recently got my hands on a POD reprint of one of our favorite campaign settings of all time, the original AD&D version of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set. This was before the novels and GMNPCs ruined the world, and again, this was a world we purposefully cut off from the Verse, much like we did Pathfinder's Golarion later.

And we loved this world, and it was one of the best campaigns we ever ran.

I had the feeling I wanted to use For Gold & Glory, and then later Castles & Crusades to replay this original campaign setting, and again cut it off from the Verse to let it shine on its own. I would love to experience this place again like we did.

And a great setting does not need a Verse at all.

A weak setting does, and worse, a Verse encourages one-shot settings and acts as a collection for them. Then they supposedly sell you the idea that dozens of weak settings are somehow better than a single great one. A Verse ultimately ends up in choice paralysis and a collection of settings you never really want to go back to, remember or care about.

This is what happened to our 4E game. No place we really visited in the Verse we ever really wanted to stay in, and a new more exciting place always popped up to replace the old one, and we threw out the last place we visited on the Verse like day-old junk food. It felt like an exercise in hoarding for one-shot campaign settings.

And the only thing we felt gave any of those throwaway places any legitimacy was the original campaign worlds all that stuff was linked to, like the Forgotten Realms. And what happens is the tentpole setting withers and an endless procession of throwaway one-shot settings entertains players like a low-attention span diet of junk food.

Our tentpole campaigns did suffer when linked to the Verse. Not much happened there. The big evil people were out in the Verse somewhere, gating and teleporting in like some sci-fi enemy every once and a while. The great world that once held a thousand stories was sidelined, the nostalgia place they fought to protect, and ultimately unimportant.

My Fault?

Do I suck as a DM none of this worked out for us? Maybe. My players agreed with me though. The less Verse we had in our game worlds, the more they wanted to return to them. The worlds we cut off and isolated flourished, and we came back to those for years. The worlds on the Verse felt like a strip mall on a freeway interchange, with an ever-changing roster of chain stores that came and went. The more they became like every other well-visited place in the Verse, the less interesting they got.

Even the Verse-based enemies tended to feel like GMNPCs. They had a universe of infinite options to cause trouble in, but they somehow chose the places the players cared about to threaten and attack. It got to be like a Saturday morning cartoon where the villain gates his forces in, a battle happens, and the bad guy flees through a gate to fight another day.

And the sad part is these bad guys had infinite lands and places they could have been spending their time in, but no, they just had to go after the players again. Seriously, why are you threatening this one world when you have infinite elemental planes to be evil in? And infinite parallel worlds? And infinite fantasy worlds on the prime material plane?

With our one-world model, there was one infernal hellish place. They want to cause trouble, they come up to the surface. They can't leave either so we got this deathmatch fight between demons and the heroes, and the demons could take a part of the surface world - and it meant something. With very tight limits on realities and the world, the conflicts and fun multiplied.

I don't like infinite X versus infinite Y in infinite Z places stories. Maybe I don't run Multiverse games right. Maybe they are just not my thing.

I have problems with them, and in my style of play is a more grounded affair with places with history and meaning and other areas of great danger and peril. I like building a world, starting in a small place, and expanding outwards. And I like the world we play in to feel important and the center of our universe.

You take that away with an infinite Verse, and all of a sudden the world we loved feels very unimportant and small.