Blizzard Entertainment recently made the speculation of many a fan site a reality with the announcement of World of WarCraft: Cataclysm. The third expansion for WoW looks like it’s going to change the game in a fundamentally different way than The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, the two expansions that precede Cataclysm.

The key difference is that TBC and WotLK, as expansions, primarily filled in blank spaces on the map of Azeroth. A few changes were made in old zones to facilitate the new content — the shifting of NPCs to Outland, or the construction of new travel hubs to reach Northrend — but for the most part, the areas from classic, or “vanilla”, WoW remained unchanged.

Cataclysm will break widely from this pattern. While content patches have had their effect on the existing areas of the game world (opening the gates of Ahn-Qiraj; the construction of the Argent Coliseum), and the “phasing” techniques introduced for WotLK were put to good use reshaping zones to reflect player actions, this new expansion will be dramatically altering old world content forever, and for everyone.

In brief, disastrous events are radically changing places players have grown familiar with. Some locations are flooded, others are overrun with lava, still others have sprung into new lushness and vitality. All this is being worked into the storyline of the Cataclysm expansion, with the added benefit of allowing the WoW developers to put everything they’ve learned designing new content to work in older, lower-level areas.

Indeed, for all the beauty of Northrend and strange majesty of Outland, many players experienced only a taste of Blizzard’s labor. The classic problem with the MMO system is that new content is produced to be tacked on after existing content — to appease those who have reached the end and wish there to be farther to go.

New races, as those in Burning Crusade, and now in Cataclysm, are one way to inject new material for everyone to enjoy. All players are able to create new characters in these new starting areas without needing to progress through existing content to see the new parts. Cataclysm is also allowing new race and class combinations, creating more opportunities for low-level newness.

Interestingly, Blizzard is also restructuring some old, lower-level content to be challenging to the current top end; in a short while the old Onyxia raid instance will be re-release with a version tuned for level 80 players. A similar retuning was announced for the instances of Dead Mines and Shadowfang Keep for Cataclysm.

The usefulness of this strategy is less immediately obvious than making new content that is available at low levels — why bother taking old content and shifting upward for the top-tier to enjoy? But the satisfaction of gamer nostalgia, not to mention the very real opportunity to make something new while avoiding creating it from scratch, make it a sound choice (even if the storyline explanations may end up a little contrived).

Revamping old content in this way is a likely crowd-pleaser, for veterans and newcomers (who may have missed such content the first time around) alike. How well the choice to drastically chance old zones completely will go over, however, is far from clear. Certainly some will be distressed to see favorite old content gone, or cry foul over lore developments for beloved zones and characters.

Cataclysm may be more of a gamble than WoW’s past expansions. Granted, the size of Blizzard’s playerbase means any expansion is almost bound for success, but I’m glad to see that the biggest player in the MMO arena isn’t resting on their laurels or sticking to business as usual. Count me as a fan — though if Garrosh Hellscream is indeed becoming the new Warchief of the Horde, I may have some difficult choices to make in the months ahead.

In my circle of friends, tabletop RPGs are a fairly regular portion of our weekly social activities — falling as often as twice a week, and sometimes more during the summer. Most of those who play are content to be players, are frequently busy with other concerns, or new to the hobby in general; such that of the eight or so of us known to roll the d20, only two of us run games for the most part.

As a dungeon master, or DM, perhaps the chief task is simply getting the right bodies at the table — once that goal is achieved, the rest often falls into place. Much as many DMs (myself included) enjoy preparing a suite of challenges for players to face, often the most predictive factor for fun in a night’s session is the percentage of players in attendance.

What to do then in summer, when the selection of players likely undergoes a semi-permanent change? At this stage in my life, and that of a large swath of RPG players, school of some sort is often still a part of the equation. In summer, some players are bound to have returned from abroad for a few months, or be returning to a hometown elsewhere until the fall semester. They might taking on accelerated summer courses that demand more full-time attention, or just working more hours at their job to prepare for the next round of tuition.

The games I run tend to be longer campaigns; one-shots just aren’t in my blood. A rotating player base, however, can throw a wrench into this process. So this summer, to accommodate this change (and the three-month stay of a former mainstay of our D&D group), I devised a game meant to specifically operate in the summer months only, then go on hiatus for the other eight or nine months of the year.

Making it happen was surprisingly easy, though the skeleton of the campaign was built to accommodate just this schedule in particular (the aforementioned player is attending an out-of-state grad school, and will be returning for the next two summers as well). In brief, the players were recruits for a covert military arm of the government, tasked with the retrieval of a specific individual.

I made that goal the only concrete part of my planned narrative; depending on the actions of players, that goal might be reached within a handful of play sessions, or only at the very end. With that goal achieved, the organization that recruited them might have further need of them, but only in situations that required “special attention.” Essentially, a hiatus was built into framework of the game’s story — call it “the sequel structure.”

To prepare for next summer’s edition of the same campaign, I planted a few plot seeds throughout this year’s sessions — elements that were tangential to the main plot, yet designed to pique the players’ curiosity. In addition, much of the last session of the summer before the player dissolved was given over to more story- and player-focused interludes. The next time we play, several years will have passed for the player characters, each of which will have been pursuing their own individual goals up until that time; addressing this specifically in the last session helps provide a launching point for the characters’ off-screen adventures.

Plotting a game this way is not unlike writing a screenplay that anticipates its own sequel several years down the line. Rather than pick up precisely where the last story left off, in the gap between films the characters of some series age and change, in minor if not major ways. And inevitably, events conspire to reunite and push them once more into the realm of action.

As examples, consider the sequels to Ocean’s Eleven, The Mummy, or the host of Star Trek films: All share a mostly-static array of characters and themes, yet aren’t devoted to the telling of a single tale. A campaign that uses the sequel structure should work similarly. Doing so will also lend itself to the real-life considerations of a summer RPG campaign — some players will be apart from others for months, and almost a year will pass between the end of one batch of sessions and the next. What might otherwise be a logistical problem is instead actively used to enhance the verisimilitude of the game being played.

Using the sequel structure is also a prime opportunity for a DM to make significant changes within the game world, without the pace of events seeing unrealistic. Players can design their characters with more complete social spheres, even families of their own. Their characters are only “on-duty” for a few weeks or months every couple of years in game-time, letting them break free of the usual adventuring life in the meantime. It’s almost as if the characters are in the RPG equivalent of the National Guard!

As gamers age, being able to meet around a table ready to play increasingly takes a backseat to other life concerns. But in thinking ahead, a clever DM can anticipate for these interruptions and plan for them, or as in cases like this, even harness and build on them. Part of the draw of RPGs is their endless flexibility, and rarely to DMs design a session that feels like duplicate of the one before it. Just as the story of a game adapts in response to the actions a player’s character takes, the style and format of a campaign is free to adapt in response to the changes in players’ real lives.

This obviously works both ways — one day, the game that was sequel-structured could become a more regular affair. Let it be as major a change in the lives of your characters as it is in the lives of your players!