Emerald wrote:
Why is preventing large-scale changes to the setting a bad idea, exactly?
1. There are only so many extended RPG campaigns you can run or play in your lifetime. Particularly once you and all your circle of friends get demanding jobs, and doubly so if you're not the only GM in the company, so you run your game on odd weeks and play on even ones.
2. Consequently, one eventually comes to conclusion that, at least once your gaming company had stabilized enough that you don't have to run games for people you barely know
there should not be any throwaway campaigns.
(Note: this point and consequently all the corollaries below do not apply if you ARE running pickup campaigns for people you barely know, found through Internet, in such cases at least starting with a light plot where realities of the setting's politics serve as little more than an excuse for stringing together dungeon crawls is not a bad solution.)
3. Consequently, any campaign should meet the bare minimum set of standards of quality, like a game set in a particularl genre, which for DnD is high fantasy, actually doing its best to reflect good parts of that genre, and not triple-derivative drivel.
4. In famous works of high fantasy it is more common for a story to involve large-scale changes to the setting, than not. Leiber's stories are almost as low-scale as it gets, but the MCs were still involved in at least two government changes, never mind your usual foiling of world-destroying plots. Conan reshaped much of the political landscale of his continent, LotR described an end of an age, Moorcock's novels eventually involved a multiversal shakeup.
5. Furthermore "status quo forever" and "antagonists are proactive, protagonists are reactive" are writing tropes only tolerable, and then to an extent, in a serialized format, where you expect to reuse the same setting for a long time. But, going back to #1, the probability of running
two campaigns plot-heavy enough for changes to the setting to even be in question in the same setting is not actually that big. I'd even say, it is fairly low. So why not go wild?