As a player which do you prefer? Campaigns or scenarios where you go a roving through the land/plane/sector or multiverse? Or local campaigns/scenarios where you stay in one city/town to have your fun?
Can't answer the poll; too much is covered by the options.
I've played in one campaign where there was no sense of fixed geography at all; we just plane-hopped from adventure to adventure, and as far as I could tell (or remember) we never had anything like a "home base". Didn't care for it. Another campaign did have a continent drawn out, and characters were from specific places, but the action basically took us from one end to the other, with little or no retracing of steps and thus (to my mind) each locale might as well have disappeared as soon as we passed through. I wasn't too crazy about that, although I enjoyed other elements of that campaign.
By contrast I think I've had more fun with several campaigns where there was a sense that places could and would be revisited. So one was very local, centering on a single estate; another took place in an area probably equivalent to a county or dukedom, but we wandered all over it as we carried out various machinations. A third covered much of a continent but we had a sort of a home base; around that were more-or-less familiar countries/lands, and beyond those I had a sense of highly exotic locations that you might visit just once. By accident or design I think the last was an excellent way of arranging the map, since it provided opportunities for both humanocentric adventures (intrigue, pirates) and for more fantastic stuff without seeming like an illogical jumble.
Quote from: Elliot WilenI've played in one campaign where there was no sense of fixed geography at all; we just plane-hopped from adventure to adventure, and as far as I could tell (or remember) we never had anything like a "home base".
This is how I've approached my sword and sorcery games - a scenario in a jungle, the next in the desert. It seemed to suit the genre whereas in our Jorune campaign we just hung around the capital wheelin' an' dealin', which other Jorune fanatics seem to find a bit mad.
Ah, but there I take it you had fairly compact & self-contained S&S scenarios? Whereas the game in question was "epic" yet formless at the same time. It was like being caught in "Lost in Space" or "Sliders" but not even that episodic.
RIGHT, see your point - now that kind of setup would grate on me after a while.