Quote from: Matt;904161EPT is actually a great example of why Bite is correct. There is such a huge barrier to giving a shit about the fake cultures and history in EPT that many can't be bothered with it at all. Too many silly names and people that mean nothing. Too much work to even begin to understand the setting. You just disproved yourself.

There is absolutely nothing universal in what you are saying. There are also gamers who love to obsess over the minutia of fictional settings. There are also games who recoil from historical gaming completely.

I agree with him but only up to a point.
Using the real world as a substrate is a very direct way to having Players know the world and feel confident moving through it... but add enough bizarre elements (like Lincoln being an agent of the Drow) and Terra Firma becomes Uncanny Valley, and that familiarity becomes suspect. You end up back in the dungeon with a ten foot pole, checking for traps.
And there's more pressure on a GM to 'get it right' regarding trivial details the Players might be familiar with.

Also, setups where Hitler/Kennedy/Obama is a vampire/alien/Cthulhu cultist get old real fast.


Real world settings generally are more interesting, but imaginary settings are often more fun.

I think it's important to point out that his actual thesis is that players are in charge of CHARACTER, GMs are in charge of PLOT, and the designer's job is to design the SETTING in such a way that buying into it is worthwhile and easy.  The article linked to is one about ways for designer to make that easy for players.

In lieu of some magic wand that makes players buy in, and makes them read up on it, then he says use the real world, because historical personages and events already come with a certain weight and pre-knowledge by the players.

That's what he's saying, to a degree, and in that I agree with him.

Nope.

There's a reason why Fantasy RPGs out sell modern or science fiction ones.

Quote from: Matt;904159What's a Kenneth Hite and why do we care again?

Let me google that for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Hite

Kenneth Hite is a long-term RPG writer who also writes fiction.  He's half of the team (with Robin Laws) who do the excellent gaming podcast "Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff", and is an extremely widely read person.  He wrote the well-reviewed series "Suppressed Transmission" for Pyramid magazine (when it was an electronic magazine you had to subscribe to - you can find two collections of it for sale by Steve Jackson Games).  He wrote several editions of GURPS Horror, GURPS Cabal, and contributed to a number of GURPS anthology books such as Alternate Worlds and Y2K.

He's recently written Trail of Cthulhu, Bookhounds of London, Night's Black Agents and the Dracula Dossier.  Non-fiction wise he's written "Tour de Lovecraft", where he went through every Lovecraft story and had something interesting to say about them, and apparently 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to US History', which I think I need a copy of.

If you don't know who he is, I suggest learning more about him - if nothing else, the podcast is free, and worth listening to.  (It's won several awards, IIRC.)

Mildly disagree. Real world stuff is more important, since it really happened. But I find fictional settings far more entertaining and engaging, because I'm not tied down to real world details.

And I'm not a fan of wargaming or RPing in historical settings. The more a setting is historical, the less interested I am. I'm not quite sure, but I suspect part of it is that it's making light of real world events. I've never been able to explain my reaction in a definite way though. It's more a feeling than an intellectual argument.

So playing in Vietnam as a soldier is high on my "No thanks" list, playing in the Vietnam with zombies and robots is a bit better, and playing in the Vietnam analogy in space is even better.

BTW

QuoteBut saying "Abraham Lincoln was secretly in the pay of the drow" is compelling

I'm not sure if I'm picking on a bad example, but that shit is just dumb. I'd laugh at the GM and go play a video game instead.

Taken out of context like this, the statement is clearly and totally wrong.
Essentially, all settings we ever deal with, is invented, more or less, including those that builds on our reality.
The only way to actually even attempt to interact with the real world, is by living .... and we do that daily to an extent that we want to fantasise about other things.

Quote from: Matt;904161EPT is actually a great example of why Bite is correct. There is such a huge barrier to giving a shit about the fake cultures and history in EPT that many can't be bothered with it at all. Too many silly names and people that mean nothing. Too much work to even begin to understand the setting. You just disproved yourself.

"Huge barrier?"

Well, no.  It's a matter of a game designed for gamers interested in diving into a dense, non-Western culture.  Some gamers can handle that, and are able to put the work in to do so.  I gather you can't.

Now that's alright.  Not every musician is Mozart, not every diner serves tournedos of beef under bouillabaisse sauce, not every car fancier's into restoring 1930s Packards.  There's nothing wrong with preferring a Big Mac to 3-star Zagat ratings, with turning the TV to reality shows instead of PBS, with preferring Stephenie Meyer to Tolstoy or Bunuel.  To each his own.

I had to vote "No", because "interesting" is one of those words that is meaningless outside a context. You have to define what you are interested in to determine if something is interesting. The context Ken Hite seems to be using here is "stuff players can develop a strong emotional response to quickly", and yeah, SOME real-world examples will have strong player buy-in, as will fictional examples based on those examples. But others won't. Just try running a Sumerian historical campaign for players who don't give a crap about Sumeria.

Another reason why Ken Hite is wrong:

Quote from: Matt;904158Disagree unless you can provide an example of a fake setting that is as resonant as reality.

Heaven. Hell. Purgatory. Hades. Olympus. Asgard. Faerie. Hell, even the example Hite gave of "King Arthur" is fictional, even if certain elements may have traced back originally to one or more real people. There are a lot of fake settings that have been created in many cultures over thousands of years that have had a strong resonance, possibly stronger than the real world in many cases. Our world is built on the resonance of fake worlds. One could even argue that certain literary settings, like Middle Earth, have a strong resonance for some people, enough that people are willing to memorize chronologies and learn fake languages. Maybe not as strong as the moments of history with the strongest emotional triggers, but much stronger than, for example, Sumerian history.

The best alien invasion stories take place in the Earth setting.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;904208The best alien invasion stories take place in the Earth setting.

Not quite:
Once the aliens invade, the setting is no longer "the real world".

Quote from: Christopher Brady;904184There's a reason why Fantasy RPGs out sell modern or science fiction ones.

To play in Fantasy Earth Europe settings.

Quote from: Catelf;904214Not quite:
Once the aliens invade, the setting is no longer "the real world".

Once any game starts, no matter its setting, it creates its own world. The game setting is a frozen start date in time for a campaign's beginning to branch from.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;904217To play in Fantasy Earth Europe settings.

Quote from: talysman;904206I had to vote "No", because "interesting" is one of those words that is meaningless outside a context. You have to define what you are interested in to determine if something is interesting. The context Ken Hite seems to be using here is "stuff players can develop a strong emotional response to quickly", and yeah, SOME real-world examples will have strong player buy-in, as will fictional examples based on those examples. But others won't. Just try running a Sumerian historical campaign for players who don't give a crap about Sumeria.

Ding!  Winner.

And some players don't really want to develop a strong emotional response at all; they're just playing a game.

"No invented setting is as interesting as the real world."
No.

The old saw "Truth is stranger than fiction" is an axiom.  Reading history books or just listening to interesting real life stories, you always come across things so crazy that if they were put into fiction...no one would believe it.  Fiction, not being real (and everyone knowing it's not real), has to kind of prove itself in a way reality does not.

It is true that using Earth gives you a level of detail you won't be able to get yourself without an immense amount of work, but there are settings out there that have resonance mainly due to their success.  Star Wars, Star Trek, Middle-Earth, The Hyborian Age, Westeros are all settings that to certain degrees and in certain ways can reach the "instant grok" that Earth provides.  Hell, Kenneth Hite is a Cthulhu scholar, he should know more than anyone that if any setting anywhere, real or imagined, happens to include a scrap of text, radio transmission, fragmentary holo recording that talks about the "Stars coming Right", players are going to be affected.

A completely home-designed setting is obviously more difficult to get players to that state with regards to setting so that your ability to rely on resonance and internalized identification to have players interface with plots and setting happenings without a lot of "here's what all that means" discussion or text.

You obviously can't start out that way.  You start with a rumor "Drolgnac the Unspeakable has been seen in the North" means nothing until somehow the players characters have heard that this is some kind of massive dragon akin to Ancalagon the Black, a mythical living WMD. (However, the whole point of a Skill System is to describe the character not the player, so using a successful Dragon Lore skill roll to explain to the player the significance and how much of a "Oh Shit" moment this would be if true.)

However, based on the choices of systems he writes for and associates with, I kind of doubt these days at least, that he runs a long-term (as in years) RPG setting.  If you do run a long term campaign, then players' knowledge of the setting grows just as the character's inside the setting grow  Also, if someone's character has died, or perhaps several, the player keeps the setting knowledge and internalization they have gained with other characters.

If you play a long campaign, with the same players, they will reach the Grok level you need for a single name to explain everything.  If you're talking about single sessions or single story arcs, or a WotC/PF "We'll start when summer hits, we'll retire at 20th when school starts" campaign, then obviously you need to come with a setting the players have already internalized or else you're doing a lot of explaining or they're doing a lot of reading or they're using skills to figure stuff out, and the players are playing catch-up to the character's knowledge.

Show Don't Tell takes a while when it's a brand new world and the less relatable to existing knowledge it is, the longer it will take.

So his actual point, that plots and setting are easier when the players already have instant understanding based on real life knowledge, is correct, but only easier.  It's not impossible to reach the same level with a public IP setting or a homebrew setting, just more difficult or time-consuming.