Yeah, I'm looking for something where even if the players read all the setting info, they will still have no idea what's real when the game starts.

I'll check out Emergent and see if there's anything I can pull out from it.

Quote from: Ashakyre;940139Yeah, I'm looking for something where even if the players read all the setting info, they will still have no idea what's real when the game starts.

The problem is people are too focused on the big reveal. The "master key" to how the universe of the setting works. If a referee relies on that to make the campaign work then there is going to come a time when the player know everything about the "master key". Then what?

The alternative is to look at how our world works. In the 21st century we know a lot about how our planet and universe works. Sure we still don't know everything but our knowledge is now godlike compared to a thousand years ago. Yet the Earth is beset by problem and adventures caused by limited information. Why? Because knowing how the world works at the high level doesn't translate into knowing what going on in your immediate surrounding or the intermediate layers.

It doesn't matter if the player is a total novice in my Majestic Wilderlands or knows as a cold hard fact that all the gods in the world boil down to an aspect of one of ten cosmic entities calling themselves the Lords. That magic is enabled by the flow of mana through the Chromatic Crystals used to seal the entrances into the Abyss. That evil dragons are renegade outlaws from a group of creatures created to guard the Chromatic Crystals.

You still have to dig into what happening locally in order to figure out the deal behind the evil lord who usurped the throne from his predecessor. Suffer long and dangerous month scouting the Dearthwood to figure out how to free the forest from the Orcs or any number of other epic things that the players had done in my setting.

The general rule of thumb I use that that the cosmic answer informs the players of what happening around him but never solves his current complication. Like in the real world that knowledge could serve the basis for a tool but the players still has to figure out how to properly use that tool and when.

Take a Call of Cthulu campaign. Suppose all the players know exactly what the Elder Gods and their minion are. That is not sufficient knowledge to figure out exactly what happening in Dunwich in October of 1922. Which Elder Gods is operating there? In what aspect? What minion are involved? Who impacted among the locals? All question that are unanswered until the player actually undertakes the adventure.

Finally you can design things that are inherently mysterious, yet are not random. Look at the depiction of the God in various cultures. Note what consistent and what differs. There is a bit of learning curve to master but it can be done. For example in my Majestic Wilderlands, I have a firm idea of what each of the ten cosmic entities are about. However I don't roleplay them like the Greek Gods, larger than life humans with immense power. Instead I emphasize the role of faith and free will. I juggle a presentation that more advice than commandment leaving it to the player to figure out what it means. There are some clear cut boundaries but within those it gets pretty fuzzy.

Thanks Estar, but you're giving me advice on how to do what's already been done. I'm not trying to rely on a big reveal, I simply enjoy exploration, and want to know how broad it can be. It's not about the reveal, its about the uncertainty that permeates the game.

If it hasn't been done, then it's an untapped design space. Challange accepted. It's fine to outline the challenges, but no one's done that. We're just circling back to things which don't do what I talking about, and saying "do this."

If you don't know how, you don't know how. Right now it seems emergent is the only game that touches on this.

Quote from: Ashakyre;940166Thanks Estar, but you're giving me advice on how to do what's already been done. I'm not trying to rely on a big reveal, I simply enjoy exploration, and want to know how broad it can be. It's not about the reveal, its about the uncertainty that permeates the game.

Exploration can be as broad as you want and not limited to geography but social connections as well. You need to look at the complete picture, pick out the areas of potential interest to the players, and then focus preparing those details.

Quote from: Ashakyre;940166If it hasn't been done, then it's an untapped design space. Challange accepted. It's fine to outline the challenges, but no one's done that. We're just circling back to things which don't do what I talking about, and saying "do this."

If you don't know how, you don't know how. Right now it seems emergent is the only game that touches on this.

Emergent as a campaign is a gimmick. Something that works once. What I am talking about works regards of setting or level of detail. You think of the setting as a real place and how people live in it. There are several tricks

1) The initial context must be interesting to the players so they develop the interest to interact with the setting.
2) The you need to figure out what range of interests the players have so you can do some preparation.
3) Develop large enough bag of stuff for the campaign so you can run things by the seat of your pants without seeming repetitive, or inconsistent.

For example a friend of mine developed a Ancient Rome setting centered around the conquest of Etruria by Rome. The wrinkle is that we are playing the Etruscan.  One of the reason we readily agree to this is because he is good at fleshing out the culture, mystical and social side of his setting. There is a lot of fun to be in his campaign at figure out who is who, why they do the things they do, and the fantastic stuff (magic, demons, etc) that woven in.

The geography and locales are not a mystery in his campaigns. Nor is the larger cosmology for that matter. Sure there are hidden truths but the background the game lays it all out as if you are a 5th century BC Etruscan. And they have some pretty definite ideas.

Again this is a result of him treating the setting as a real place and developing as such.

Quote from: SkargHomebrew setting and game world, with a GM like me, who is careful to only give in-character information (which is just what their character thinks and experiences) about the game world. Little OOC discussion from the GM.

Quote from: nDervish;939919This is pretty much the approach I take and it works quite well.

The only other option that I've seen used is the line of books with an ongoing metaplot, where the early books leave gaps in the setting information they provide, which will then be filled in by later books as they are published.  Personally, I hate this publishing model, because the authors intend the mysteries of the metaplot to be a (if not the) primary focus of the game, but I feel like I can't go anywhere near them without contradicting as-yet-unpublished canon.  And, of course, it also doesn't solve the OP's original issue, since players can buy the new books when they come out and read the new information just as easily as the GM can.

In principle, I think someone could publish a line of setting books which intentionally undefined areas - where it is intended that the GM fill those in, rather than being provided by a later book. I can see some parallels in Harn, where there is a metaplot in the sense of ongoing events in the world that are described in increasing detail with more books, but there is a hard cut-off where nothing is defined after midnight on the first day of the year 720. It is left open how the various plots set up will resolve.

Offhand, I can't think of a setting where this was done with cosmology, but it seems possible in principle. The books describe the world as it is seen from various points of view, but they don't define the higher-level truth.

Quote from: jhkim;940176Offhand, I can't think of a setting where this was done with cosmology, but it seems possible in principle. The books describe the world as it is seen from various points of view, but they don't define the higher-level truth.

Or construct it so that the higher-level truth has multiple points of view.

The question is do you know how to make it work, or have any examples of where it's been done before, not whether you like it, think it's a gimic (its not), or how to make a campaign interesting. Those are seperate questions, worthy questions, but irrelavent to my question. I'd rather try it out myself and make up my own mind. But first I'd have to try.

Is Hell a philosophical idea or a physical place you can travel to in a space ship? If a game's mechanics accomodate either possibility what design considerations do you have to make? Does  the spell "Banish Evil" require two descriptions or is there a more elegant way to handle it?

Quote from: Ashakyre;940189The question is do you know how to make it work

I thought I been telling you that. The starting point is that I think of the Majestic Wilderlands as a real place with all the supernatural and fantastic elements in place and proceed from there.

Quote from: Ashakyre;940189Those are separate questions, worthy questions, but irrelavent to my question. I'd rather try it out myself and make up my own mind. But first I'd have to try.

You start by making a setting that interests you and think about why it exists and flesh out the details that interests you. Does this sound high light and vague? Sure because we are talking about generalities. If you have a specific setting in mind then I can be more helpful with suggestions to emphasize the things you want to empathize.

Quote from: Ashakyre;940189Is Hell a philosophical idea or a physical place you can travel to in a space ship?

Yes and no, my view that the planes are pockets of the Wilderlands that have been carved out and turned into a pocket space. No is because so much mana has a been infused in these pocket that in part what you see depends on what you believe. My conception of Mana includes the fact that it is shaped and influenced by one's emotional state. What you see when you enter one of these pockets is a function of the will of it's creator plus what you emotionally expect to see.

The reason there any consistency in these places is because of the myths and legends that have spread through various cultures.

In practice what this amounted to techno-babble to justify why my planar adventures work the way they do. But a handful of time in the 30 years I been running the campaign, a player or a group of players figured this out and used this knowledge to their advantage. But even then it didn't represent a "I win" moment. It meant they knew that they had to focus their time on. Basically researching who created the plane and what they considered important. In short it just created more fuel for more more adventures.

To get maximum use out of mysteries, you need the answers not solve the problem but also to create more complications to fuel future adventures. If you are lucky you will hit on a solution that has no real answer. It just is what it is and become another fact to take in account when your character has to deal with that aspect of the campaign.

Quote from: Ashakyre;940189If a game's mechanics accomodate either possibility what design considerations do you have to make?

You could have mechanics, but my view it is over kill and focuses you on the wrong things. Just describe how it works or how it is in natural English and go from there.  The description will provide the rules. For example when dealing with gods and divine servants the players find that the gods provide aid but in a way that all the heavy lifting is still done by the player.

Quote from: Ashakyre;940189Does  the spell "Banish Evil" require two descriptions or is there a more elegant way to handle it?

What Evil? In the Majestic Wilderlands Banish Evil would work against a summon Vrock (Type I Demon) but not against a Vampire. This is because Vrock are demons. Where D&D mention Evil for magic, I translate as it works against Demons. Vampires are contrast are not demon, but undead blood children of the Goddess Kalis.

The basic premise I developed is that all gods are against demons. Demons are not a faction like how many setting present them. But beings who reject the natural order of creation in favor of their own selfish desire. A short explanation is that they are spiritually insane with the caveat of they brought this on themselves of their own free will.

However the ten gods are not all sunshine and puppies. Some of them you would consider them evil. This is because they are neither omniscient or omnipotent. But beings with vastly more knowledge of how the cosmos works than the mortal races (or the immortal Elves). As such they were each affected by the Uttermost War at the Dawn of Time in their own way. Three of them wound up advocating philosophies that most cultures consider evil or tyrannical. Two of them have enough in their view that a small number of cultures has adopted their ideas. And one, the previously mention, Kalis, is so radical that culturally only bat shit crazy cults wind up following her.

This creates a nuanced situation that does several things for the players. There are bad guys, the demons, that you can be against at all time. There are bad guys with a bit of the anti-hero in them, the three deities I mentioned. Then there are numerous cultures that have their own quirks and complications all interacting with each other much like our own history.

If a players, and there a handful that played enough to be fully aware of the situation, know this it doesn't solve their immediate issue. There is no lever in any of this to simplify the situation to a us versus them. There just more layers to unpeel and when you start interacting with a new group the process is repeated.

Look at the diversity of Christianity in our own world. At some point it ties the accounts of what happened in 1st century Palestine. This provide a set of common elements that allows you label all these groups as Christians. Certain patterns of behavior are common to large sections of Christanity. But if you want to know about the Raguel Church in Abbas Ababa, you going to have to do the research. The same for the Thomasites in India, or the Vatican in Rome.

General knowledge of Christianity will inform you of some of the details but it doesn't change the fact that to understand a specific place at a specific time you have to do more. And when you do this you are exploring in every sense of the word. In roleplaying campaign this stuff can be the stuff of adventures.

It's also one of the main reasons that I almost never run games using published settings. The chance that a player would have read the setting details seems pretty annoying. Not only because someone might get into an OOC cheating mindset, or because it could spoil important information that the PCs ought not to know, but largely because it just feels different and weird compared to the effect of having the players need to discover and learn things organically. Besides, I like making my own settings and tend to prefer most of what I come up with to most of what others publish, though I have used published stuff for ideas, inspiration, and occasional looting of bits and pieces. Oh and also when I've invented a setting, it tends to make sense to me in ways that isn't so easy when I'm using someone else's setting. It can be a lot of work to try to really understand everything going on in a published RPG setting or even a single location, especially at the level that I could if it were all something I came up with myself.

Quote from: Ashakyre;940189Is Hell a philosophical idea or a physical place you can travel to in a space ship? If a game's mechanics accomodate either possibility what design considerations do you have to make? Does  the spell "Banish Evil" require two descriptions or is there a more elegant way to handle it?

This is how I run stock standard Great Wheel of D&D with no changes.

The Great Wheel being the philosophical visualization of the multiverse.  The actual physical structure not being a perfect square, but rather, various many different dimensions all intertwined among each other, 16 of which in game philosophers describe as the Great Wheel to have some type of visualization instead of the actual abstract nature of how different dimensions are connected.

Quote from: estar;940178Or construct it so that the higher-level truth has multiple points of view.

When I was reading Spike's recent rant thread about Modiphius Mutant Chronicles, I was thinking that (if someone cared enough to do so) they could take what's written in the books about the setting (which is quite dumb in many ways) and take it as "this is what some cretin in the world might think is accurate" and then design what's actually going oneself. Of course there's no "Bauhaus" faction who all speak a language called "Bauhaus"! How stupid would that be? No, that's just a derogatory slang term that some prejudiced idiots use to refer to people of German descent. Of COURSE the Russians don't have all-female pilots who only wear onesies and fly around in frozen conditions exposed on hover-bikes! Of course they don't have elite monster hunter police who refuse to use guns and only use bone swords. That would be idiotic. Of course not all pistols are the same, and they do have a certain number of bullets before they need to be reloaded. Of course you don't have to be a billionaire to afford to buy a used car or a firearm. Etc.

Quote from: jhkim;940176Offhand, I can't think of a setting where this was done with cosmology, but it seems possible in principle. The books describe the world as it is seen from various points of view, but they don't define the higher-level truth.

Dunno if this qualifies, but the Fading Suns game has this phenomenon, in which the Suns are, you know, Fading?

While I can't speak for Redbook editions, the original game line absolutely refused to address the issue... for which it was named... in any way what so ever!  Like... what does it even mean that teh Suns are... you know... Fading? Is it darker outside? how fast are they fading?  

Mind you... this isn't simply the matter of a clever name. They repeatedly stressed that this is an issue to be explored, that people in the setting explicitly, implicitly and mosplisitly (I like threes...) believe and are terrified of.

They also never really talk much about the truth behind the church (a big deal), but we do learn the demons of the setting are pretty real. In fact, all the religions of the setting have mystical power, so in theory they all could be real, but no attempt is made (deliberately again...) to resolve this.

Quote from: Skarg;940710When I was reading Spike's recent rant thread about Modiphius Mutant Chronicles, I was thinking that (if someone cared enough to do so) they could take what's written in the books about the setting (which is quite dumb in many ways) and take it as "this is what some cretin in the world might think is accurate" and then design what's actually going oneself. Of course there's no "Bauhaus" faction who all speak a language called "Bauhaus"! How stupid would that be? No, that's just a derogatory slang term that some prejudiced idiots use to refer to people of German descent. Of COURSE the Russians don't have all-female pilots who only wear onesies and fly around in frozen conditions exposed on hover-bikes! Of course they don't have elite monster hunter police who refuse to use guns and only use bone swords. That would be idiotic. Of course not all pistols are the same, and they do have a certain number of bullets before they need to be reloaded. Of course you don't have to be a billionaire to afford to buy a used car or a firearm. Etc.

What have I DONE???!!!!?

Quote from: Skarg;940710Of COURSE the Russians don't have all-female pilots who only wear onesies and fly around in frozen conditions exposed on hover-bikes!

Don't they? Damn, another thing I can't see when I go back next time.