Don't visit this thread, full of spoilers:
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2m0zn?Path ... much-of#22King of Vrock wrote:Half of the reason I loved the Planescape campaign setting so much other than the weird vistas and strange creatures was the overall metaplot. I bought every single product in the line because there were hidden gems strewn throughout. To date no other product has quite captured my attention or my dollars like that did.
I did not know this. I bought all the first couple of years' worth of Planescape products, but never got to playing anything with my group because I went off to university, and they stayed behind.
This would mean that Planescape's metaplot was far superior to the Forgotten Realms', and may therefore have been the inspiration for Pathfinder's. Either way, good to know.
That thread is from 2011, and is when Paizo started experimenting with carrying over metaplot from product to product, not limited to adventures but also including sourcebooks.
Lord Fyre wrote:[REDACTED BY ICY] is written up in [REDACTED BY ICY] (complete with spoiler on the Back Cover) as if the events of Rise of the Runelords have already happened.
James Jacobs wrote:Correct. That's also something of an experiment we decided to try out as well. I'm still trying to decide how it all worked out, honestly.
In the end, the experiment was a success, and Pathfinder has tons of metaplot now. But, from what I am reading in that thread, it seems overall the metaplot is less than Planescape's. There's considerable room for playing things out of order in Pathfinder, and in most cases there isn't even a required order, while it sounds like there's a pretty strict order in Planescape. And as people say in that thread and other similar ones over and over, is that you don't want the metaplot in a GAME to be TOO strict, for obvious reasons (it restricts interactivity).
Once more, that thread is out of bounds for my players.
There are more posts in that thread, especially by James Jacobs, that are helping me get a grasp on how Paizo treats metaplot. I'll quote those posts extensively and analyze them in another thread, but for now I'll just say that I love how they're doing things. There are a FEW products that directly follow up each other and shake things up in a big or even huge way, but the majority of the products have either light connections with each other, or basically none. So you're free for the most part, until at certain key points you're pulled into the vortex of a few major events that you might help shape in various ways... and then you're free again. It's a very clever way of combining the best of both worlds: freeform gaming and narrative metaplot. It really gives the GM the power to... allow the players to shape everything, all the while feeling that they are in the middle of a huge narrative and not just random events.
So I am super-interested to find out how Planescape handled this aspect. Won't have time to do the reading any time soon, but I will eventually.