What are the best features about those games or campaigns that involve travel through different dimensions (parallel earths or fantasy worlds, or impossible/divine realms)?  What do you want in such a game? What ideas do you have for these types of games to have their fullest potential?

RPGPundit

Well, there's a problem with them, which I'll mention in the other thread: lack of context/continuity. So I think one way to improve them might be to have some meta-dimensional continuity--like villains who are also dimension-hoppers, or interdimensional police forces.

Also, because of the lack of setting continuity, and relative lack of character ties to a given dimension, I think this type of campaign is well-suited to the mission of the week approach. I.e. characters don't have overarching stories (as it were), so a session is largely a matter of presenting an isolated problem or situation, using the particulars of a given dimension as backdrop. The real point is dealing with and adapting to those particulars.

**You can use a lot of stuff you have for different planets (modules or NPCs),  
*you can create games with an epic scope or power level.

One of the best "multidimensional" campaigns I've seen actually wasn't multidimensional so much as built out of bits of other campaigns. The GMs world had areas in his campaign that corresponded to the standard D&D campaign worlds - all of them - with the idea that his campaign world was a "seed world" that all the others were created from. We trekked from the woods just outside Ravenloft, through Blackmoor and into Athasia, amongst other places.

There is space (permission even) to use highly divergent settings for what might only be a small part of a campaign.

There can be more than one "great king" without them all having to deal with each other.

There is by implication a meta-place that houses all these planes, and that's a cool place for gods and other beings (githyanki!).

You can manipulate physics and other essential laws without messing up existing places in your campaign. Need a Library of Babel, which is infinite in size but is just about books? Now it needn't use up all that space you wanted for jungles and deserts.

It encourages big stories, that are about entities capable of crossing between planes and, presumably, interested in issues that span them as well. Maybe "big" should be "Big" there.

I ran a multi-dimentional D&D game for a couple of years which is odd as it emerged out of a single ad-libbed one off game.

The good stuff was

i) There was an overarching 'divine' multi-planar quest which gave the game focus
ii) The recurring opponent came out of the idea that there were set archetypes across all worlds and so you encounters differing aspects of the same heroic figures which were recognisable but different
iii) I got to play with all sorts of cool worlds mixing technology/magic and restricted settings (a rennaisance world with gunpowder, a gormenghast castle, fairy, post apocolyptical etc ,)
iv) When a setting gelled I would extend that section and when a setting didn't work I would close that setting quickly and move the PCs on. worked really well
v) Because I had a quest 'chosen' pC background based on archetypes the PCs had a certain script immunity however I was able to counter this by killing them and then forcing the party (though their divine sponsors) to go and rescue them from hell, fairy, ghenna whereever they ended up.


We also ran another unlinked series of multiverse games where the players could bring their favourite characters from any system the GMs rotated through the group and everyone got to try out their old favourites and GMs got to other PCs fromty eh past as NPCS. Was really good but fell when one GM tried to explain the logic behind the linked adventures. Of course that game only worked becuase the Players had all been playing in the same group for 20+ years and the fun came when you heard that single quote from a classic game 15 years before.

World-hopping makes for a "quick and dirty" change of pace without changing games, or GM, or PCs. Take Rifts, nominally a post-apocalyptic RPG setting; you can have your PCs travel to Wormwood for epic dark fantasy with a touch of weird, or to Phase World for space opera. And that's only using the published "dimension books".

Alternate histories. I love them and I just can't get enough of them. The more fantastic and unlikely, the better. And a world-hopping campaign can explore several different histories. *drool*

Hey I'm gathering that you're doing research for your LoO game here.  You might also expand the pleasures and pitfalls questions  to include dream-based games since a lot of the same issues arise when genre hopping in dreams.

Pete

To me its all about Gonzo and Grandeur.  Multi-dimensional games can have all kinds of really surreal stuff you just couldn't fit in a normal campaign, and can show spectacular "views" as part of its setting.  They just operate on a huge scale.

RPGPundit

Quote from: The Butcher;397001World-hopping makes for a "quick and dirty" change of pace without changing games, or GM, or PCs. Take Rifts, nominally a post-apocalyptic RPG setting; you can have your PCs travel to Wormwood for epic dark fantasy with a touch of weird, or to Phase World for space opera. And that's only using the published "dimension books".

Yes, that's a very good point, and I think that the ability of such a campaign to provide for "changes of pace" without having to switch campaigns is one of those big strengths that has to be harnessed correctly as a counter-measure to some of the potential pitfalls of such a campaign.

RPGPundit

Taste of the Bizarre... though something weird on multiple levels might be too much for a long term campaign, a strange place with wierd conditions can make a great backdrop for a short term game.

Epic themes... on game we had (the end of the same one I mention in the best game ever thread) featured the players trying their foe to eternal judgment in the Courts of Thunder. The afterlife, spirits, gods, heavens and hells, these are heady themes that can add great feel to a game.

A Paladin in Hell. Sort of a subset of the above, but one extreme is the survival scenario surrounded by intense peril and evil. The abyss, the hells, what have you.

Variety. If the premise of the setting isn't limited by traditional physical constraints, a whole palette of worlds might be available to the players (and GM), either as source for adventure or for PCs.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;397158A Paladin in Hell. Sort of a subset of the above, but one extreme is the survival scenario surrounded by intense peril and evil. The abyss, the hells, what have you.

Yes, epic scale is a big part of what makes a multiplanar campaign feel different from a regular one.

RPGPundit

In the Fringeworthy rpg, you can go to many different alternate earths to solve a problem.  Many with differing rules of reality and physics.  So you can ask a wizard to teleport an object inside a box to be presented to someone on another world as a puzzle present.  

You can confir with people throughout history or get documents created by their hand without having to resort to forgery.

You can take knowledge of mineral deposits on one world and use them to stake claims on another becoming filthy rich.

You can find objects that were lost or damage, animals that have become extinct, and restore them to another world or at least provide information about them like pictures or video.

The impossible, physics-defying locales are the big draw for me.  I think most of the time, unless you build the world around a gimmick, a world in a D&D campaign should be grounded in laws we understand---things like the day/night cycle, gravity, climate, should function more or less like you'd expect.  When you have things like floating islands/cloud cities, impossibly vast cliffs or mountains it pulls the rug out from under the players and deprives them of a connection to the setting and having a basic idea of what to expect from it.  But once you enter other planes all bets can be off.  There you can have rock formations that defy gravity, endless cities, hollow worlds.  It lets you set the action against whatever vista your mind can create and populate it however you like.

I've always taken it for granted as an aspect of the D&D game -- thanks to deCamp & Pratt, Moorcock, Farmer, Zelazny, even Fafhrd & Mouser -- but had only one D&D campaign that made it the focus: Cynosure, inspired by the city in the Grimjack comics (though it may have started before I encountered those).

My only other major RPG campaign along the line was Fringeworthy, sort of like the later Stargate movie/TV series but less military (though there were rules for lots of military weapons).

I think of it in terms of getting a bigger world than typical with "in dungeon" portals or spell/treasure jaunts. There are more long-term interactions among the worlds. From that perspective, it means more care going into their creation. Weirdness can get to be too much.

Depending on the setup, it might not be much different from a "space opera" or "paratime" theme.It could even be quite episodic, especially if there's no easy way to make repeated trips between given universes reliable.

Basically, as Gary Gygax observed, it's an open ticket to try whatever kind of game you'd like to try.

Quote from: Phillip;852189I think of it in terms of getting a bigger world than typical with "in dungeon" portals...

Does anyone else find that PCs these days NEVER seem to go through those in-dungeon portals unless they absolutely have to?