Thaluikhain wrote:
Going on a bit of a tangent, but would the best (or at least a decent) way of changing the setting be to change the way the game works, as the way the setting is viewed depends on the game? You're going to change the game to some extent every edition anyway.
I recently had a concept of a Mecha vs Kaiju game where humanity gets out (or more exactly is forced out) of its shelters to reclaim the Earth. The game is meant to be played in a campaign where the players gradually reclaim Earth by beating the Kaijus.
One of the concept of the game is that humans have a very limited understanding of how the Kaiju work, they've found a way to harness some of the power that allow them to exist (which they used to build the mechs) but it's still quite early. So during the campaign, the players will discover new stuff (they are even encouraged to draw theories and find ways to test them) and this will sometimes introduce new rules, tweaks to the existing rules or shed light on some up-to-now GM-only mechanism.
One of the things about different time zones is that they're really different settings; it just lets you play with a bunch of commonalities. You'd think that's a good thing, but it usually isn't.
Dragonlance is a setting with a per-Cataclycsm, War of the Lance, and post-War settings. Even someone who LIKES Dragonlance, probably only likes one or two of them. Seeing things canonically 'wrong' is sometimes worse than not having a canon at all.
If you're advancing your setting enough that it is unrecognizable, why use the same world to begin with? Magic jumps from one world to another so they USUALLY don't have to completely destroy a setting; but even in revisiting a setting some people don't like the meta.
If your meta actually integrates what happens in campaigns, the diversity of outcomes becomes unmanageable quickly. Some groups will have lost to the villain so there's a new kingdom of undead and others will have defeated him, so that area of the map is happy fun land.
I think playing in the same campaign world is fun, but the part that makes it fun also necessarily makes it an individual experience.
