If you thought that Azeroth had it bad, being torn up by a catastrophic Cataclysm, spare a thought for the poor inhabitants of the D&D world of the Forgotten Realms: They already had two world-shaking catastrophic events, the Time of Troubles and the Spellplague, and are about to experience a third, the Sundering. At GenCon WotC announced that the Forgotten Realms would become the primary world for D&D Next, and that a series of novels from different authors describing the Sundering would lead up to that.

While I read the early Forgotten Realms novels, I already skipped the Time of Troubles and the Spellplague, and I won't be reading about the Sundering either. These events simply don't have room in my Forgotten Realms campaigns. I don't want a world constantly shaken by huge events, where the pantheon of gods is repeatedly changing, and the heroes are characters from novels like Elminster or Drizzt Do'Urden. And I don't want to have to read hundreds of Forgotten Realms novels to be able to run my game.

In my campaign the players are the heroes. Due to an absence of CNN the players don't even know what is happening in other parts of the world. If they hear of a war it is because they have an opportunity to play a major role in it. And I don't make them feel small by letting them meet heroes much more powerful than they are. Whatever parts of a world I create, I create for them. There might be powerful adversaries or NPCs, but those aren't designed to steal the show from the players.

In a way this is a major advantage of pen & paper roleplaying over MMORPGs. If in LotRO you are on a quest to kill 10 rats and run across Gandalf and Aragorn, that doesn't make you feel like the hero of the story, but rather like a bystander. World of Warcraft has the same problem, where even if you kill the Lich King the cinematic sequence then tells the story of other people. Not to mention the "too many heroes queuing up" problem of nearly all MMORPG: The average orc invasion in a MMORPG has more heroes fighting the orcs than than there are surviving orcs in the invasion force. Having to wait for monsters to respawn doesn't create a sense of those monsters being a menace and you being the hero.

In a pen & paper game all these problems can be solved, because the group of players can be made to be the only heroes around, and thus the most important people. That allows for far more epic and heroic stories to be told. And characters from novels would just get into the way of that.