Status Quo Is God/Tabletop Games

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Examples of Status Quo Is God in Tabletop Games include:

Board Games

  • The new[when?] edition of Warhammer 40,000 states that mankind has entered the Time of Ending, with the long-awaited fall of the Imperium imminent. However, The End of the World as We Know It is very, very unlikely.
    • On the other hand, the series has seen the introduction of new races, and changes to old ones—the Tyranids, for example, are a vastly different force from the Genestealer infiltrators that first attacked the Imperium.
    • The whole point of Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 was that the world is always almost about to end.
    • Warhammer Fantasy Battle Fantasy does this too, to the point where it gets kind of silly. The final battle of the Storm of Chaos ends when an enemy why had gone almost entirely unmentioned (and in game terms had been marginalized for months) shows up, attacks another villain from behind and leaves. And the other villain leaves. And then a third villain leaves, despite being guaranteed an easy victory. Why? Because otherwise the game world would need to change.
    • The rules of both systems managed to avert this to some extent. 8th edition fantasy shook up the way the rules had worked for years in a huge way and 5th edition 40k altered things to a big extent too.
  • BattleTech seems to avert this with the different eras (Star League, Clan Invasion, Jihad, etc...), but plays one constant straight: Don't expect anything that threatens to seriously shift the overall deadlock to last for very long. In fact, it's usually the point where everybody goes back to shooting each other that begins and/or ends each Era.

Tabletop RPG

  • White Wolf is not fond of this trope. In the Old World of Darkness, any apocalypse foretold in a gameline would come to pass when that game went out of print, ending with the Time of Fire when the oWoD ended. The New World of Darkness is designed as a more static universe.
  • Scion has the Overworld War take noticeable steps between the three main books.
  • Exalted is even more blunt about shooting this trope in the face. In the second book they ever published, they made it abundantly clear that the metaplot would not be moving forward canonically from the Day 0 of Realm Year 768, as the characters are intended to deform and reshape the setting around them in their image. More detail has been given about the setting as it stands—mostly to provide new and interesting ways for Creation to go to Hell in one way or another, or for players to fight against it—but nothing has definitively gone forward and progressed information on the inside of the core book. Actually, in Exalted, Status Quo may well be God. On the other hand, starting characters can start off with a power suite to murder the gods.

UNSORTED

  • This trope is literally true in the CD&D Hollow World game-setting, as the Immortals (CD&D's deity-Expys) slapped an extremely powerful spell on the place to ensure that cultures preserved within it wouldn't change.
    • MOD: What is "CD&D"? CDs are usually listed under Music, not Games.
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