Quote from: BadApple on December 03, 2024, 07:25:44 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on December 03, 2024, 07:13:01 PM

Quote from: BadApple on December 03, 2024, 04:47:32 PM

Quote from: tenbones on December 03, 2024, 11:00:43 AM

Quote from: BadApple on November 21, 2024, 07:22:52 PMIn my opinion (and I stress that) a good setting has some well established material that a GM can run games in for a long time but includes some foundational material for a GM to do his own thing without breaking the core setting.  A good example of this is in The Third Imperium for Traveller has an entire sector that there is no official material for just GMs and independent creators can fill it up.

Do you buy into a system for those settings? Or is it the system itself that is the selling point? Or is it both? Would you buy D&D or Traveller, for instance, for just the rules?

When I was younger and first running games, I absolutely needed a setting to get started.  I did buy setting material so that I could run it.  As I gained some experience, then I pushed into the uncharted areas but deeply rooted in the setting so that I felt comfortable branching out.

Now, I build my own settings but I like setting material for ideas and sometimes set pieces I can drop into the game in a hurry.  I'm certainly a system over settings guy now but didn't start out that way.

Interesting. I had almost the exact opposite experience. I started playing D&D in around the 5th grade if memory serves. For the first couple of years we effectively played without a setting. We just had the core books and we played games in "D&D world", just going with whatever setting assumptions were in those three books.

I drew my first homebrew world-map in 7th grade science class (I think I still have it somewhere), and ran that world up through somewhere in high school. But around the same time I met a friend who was really into Forgotten Realms, so most of the games I was a player in were set there. That guy and myself became the reliable DMs for our friend group. I ran almost all homebrew, and he ran a mix of FR and homebrew until the friend group finally died in our late 20s.

Since then, I've run almost exclusively published settings. Partially that's because I don't have the free time to homebrew, and partially it's because older players are less willing to accept "it's standard fantasy/cyberpunk/sci-fi world, and that's all you need to know".

That's only D&D-like games though. When we played other games (usually White Wolf games at that time), we always at least tried to play the canon setting. It's entirely possible that it would only have worked in D&D or a similar game. One of the great strengths and great witnesses of D&D is that the system can easily be the setting. Within the corebooks you have races, classes, magic, gods, flora and fauna; all the setting information except for place-names and history, which if you don't care about that, you don't need it to play the game.

Prepackaged setting gave me two things when I started running, a blueprint and permission to be inflexible on core issues.

Being inflexible about how the world is structured, how society works in that world, etc. goes a long way to making a campaign work IMO.  It was a lot easier for 13yo me to say "it's in the book" than to say "I'm the GM" as to why I made a call or why an NPC did a thing.

Also, as a 13yo GM is was easy to world build but also messy as I would include stuff that would never be playable.  Published setting helped me learn what I needed and what I let die on the vine.

I mean, I wouldn't argue that the way you came up isn't probably better than the way I did.

The level of fast-and-loose at which I ran games as a teenager would drive adult me insane if I had to play in them. I only learned like half the rules, made everything up on the fly, invented monster stats mid-combat, guessed at current HP levels, ripped off jokes and characters from movies, inserted my own video-game characters as NPCs and basically committed every DM-ing crime you can list except for railroading and running "DMPC"s. We were effectively playing "meme D&D", but hey, we were having fun.

WARNING: I am mostly a medium to medium-hard SF designer. It's not that I don't enjoy fantasy, but that my skillsets are intentionally trained into other directions, so you may need to take my opinions with a grain of salt.


I think the big thing I dislike about most RPG settings is that most RPG writers do not actually internalize the medium differences between an RPG and a novel and how that translates to the worldbuilding. I generally despise most pre-designed settings because they are written like they are supposed to be novels and the designer turned it into an RPG as a sort of plan B.

The big differences between RPGs and novels is that RPGs inherently require creative input from the GM and to a less extent the players. Most designers miss the fact that the more you use your creative muscles, the easier it becomes to use them, and at the same time, the less you use them, the harder it becomes to use them because it feels like you're breaking the social contract of the game. Writing encyclopedia setting splatbooks paradoxically makes the game harder to play, not easier.

As a result, the core question an RPG needs to ask is not what worldbuilding the designer can provide, but what worldbuilding the designer should leave out so the GM or players can fill them in and warm up those creative muscles. The most important part of RPG worldbuilding is actually what you don't include.


This means you have to ask an additional follow-up on what creative skills your target players have. Most RPG players these days are actually pretty darn genre savvy compared to things like movie watchers or video game players. You may want to give them a dose of education on things like flat vs round characters or Vonnegut's Rules for Writing a Short Story to make sure that players are all on the same page. But most of the time when you turn a table of RPG players onto a creative worldbuilding problem, the solution will not only be unique, but it will tend to be relatively high quality.

What remains then, is a bunch of stuff which you can be fairly done by anyone involved in the RPG...and a worldbuilding postage stamp. How do you guarantee that the world will produce certain campaign flavors and conflict lines?

I think this is one of the few things Call of C'thulu does perfectly; the Elder God will either get summoned or not, and the end of the campaign will either be you win, but most of your party is dead or going insane, or you lose and Everybody Dies (TM). The heart of the flavor of the setting and the conflict lines of the campaign come from the antagonist.

So what do fantasy settings need to be? They need to be more like Call of C'thulu. 


I am not saying that Call of C'thulu is a work of genius or anything--if anything I think Chaosium stumbled into this with more blind luck than true skill. The idea that you would pair a game about unintelligible cosmic mysteries and insanity with a perfectly transparent D100 baffles me beyond belief, and I think that in an ideal universe, Shadowrun would have been a D100 system and Call of C'thulu a dice pool. But I do want to emphasize that they got this part wildly right and that we should copy the core idea that the core worldbuilding and the defacto antagonists of a system are almost inseparable.

Quote from: Fheredin on December 03, 2024, 08:24:37 PMWARNING: I am mostly a medium to medium-hard SF designer. It's not that I don't enjoy fantasy, but that my skillsets are intentionally trained into other directions, so you may need to take my opinions with a grain of salt.


I think the big thing I dislike about most RPG settings is that most RPG writers do not actually internalize the medium differences between an RPG and a novel and how that translates to the worldbuilding. I generally despise most pre-designed settings because they are written like they are supposed to be novels and the designer turned it into an RPG as a sort of plan B.

The big differences between RPGs and novels is that RPGs inherently require creative input from the GM and to a less extent the players. Most designers miss the fact that the more you use your creative muscles, the easier it becomes to use them, and at the same time, the less you use them, the harder it becomes to use them because it feels like you're breaking the social contract of the game. Writing encyclopedia setting splatbooks paradoxically makes the game harder to play, not easier.

As a result, the core question an RPG needs to ask is not what worldbuilding the designer can provide, but what worldbuilding the designer should leave out so the GM or players can fill them in and warm up those creative muscles. The most important part of RPG worldbuilding is actually what you don't include.


This means you have to ask an additional follow-up on what creative skills your target players have. Most RPG players these days are actually pretty darn genre savvy compared to things like movie watchers or video game players. You may want to give them a dose of education on things like flat vs round characters or Vonnegut's Rules for Writing a Short Story to make sure that players are all on the same page. But most of the time when you turn a table of RPG players onto a creative worldbuilding problem, the solution will not only be unique, but it will tend to be relatively high quality.

What remains then, is a bunch of stuff which you can be fairly done by anyone involved in the RPG...and a worldbuilding postage stamp. How do you guarantee that the world will produce certain campaign flavors and conflict lines?

I think this is one of the few things Call of C'thulu does perfectly; the Elder God will either get summoned or not, and the end of the campaign will either be you win, but most of your party is dead or going insane, or you lose and Everybody Dies (TM). The heart of the flavor of the setting and the conflict lines of the campaign come from the antagonist.

So what do fantasy settings need to be? They need to be more like Call of C'thulu. 


I am not saying that Call of C'thulu is a work of genius or anything--if anything I think Chaosium stumbled into this with more blind luck than true skill. The idea that you would pair a game about unintelligible cosmic mysteries and insanity with a perfectly transparent D100 baffles me beyond belief, and I think that in an ideal universe, Shadowrun would have been a D100 system and Call of C'thulu a dice pool. But I do want to emphasize that they got this part wildly right and that we should copy the core idea that the core worldbuilding and the defacto antagonists of a system are almost inseparable.

It reads like you and I are of similar minds on the subject but expressing it differently.  Let me try to restate my views more clearly and see if you agree.

A good setting gives the GM the ability to hit the ground running and provide a rock solid "normal" condition while leaving enough open for GM to get creative. 

As a side note, I agree with you on CoC being excellent as a format for settings that deal with the fantastic.  I prefer to run a fantasy game where everyone is human and everyone has mundane abilities and gain supernatural powers by unraveling mysteries of the unknown. Sadly, this isn't an expected game play and really takes some mature players to get it going.

A good setting gives me some idea of how the game designers intended the game to be run.  That's useful information, even if I have no intention of using that setting or even running the game the way they intended.

Quote from: BadApple on December 04, 2024, 03:39:16 AMIt reads like you and I are of similar minds on the subject but expressing it differently.  Let me try to restate my views more clearly and see if you agree.

A good setting gives the GM the ability to hit the ground running and provide a rock solid "normal" condition while leaving enough open for GM to get creative. 

As a side note, I agree with you on CoC being excellent as a format for settings that deal with the fantastic.  I prefer to run a fantasy game where everyone is human and everyone has mundane abilities and gain supernatural powers by unraveling mysteries of the unknown. Sadly, this isn't an expected game play and really takes some mature players to get it going.

Mostly yes. The game designer should build parts of the world to get things started, but also leave specific parts unfinished, so I think you sum up the situation succinctly.

Teasing out a few nuances, I think that one of the problems is the exact nature of the game designer/ GM creative handshake. Traditionally, the idea is that the game designer makes a world and then the GM designs a campaign. I don't think this works particularly well because this means the campaign and the game world may or may not work well together.

Instead, I suspect the better view is for the game designer to partially build both the setting and the broader strokes for the campaigns. The GM then customizes and finishes both, creating a unique riff on the setting and the campaign. To use music theory terminology, the game designer's part of the process is to provide the Theme, and the GM's part is to provide Variation.

I personally dislike playing in traditional fantasy games. we know all the tropes, its all too familiar. I love to do high fantasy and keep things pretty unique, as unique as i can make it without it being overly strange, which is why i never run pre published settings. When i read Numenera it was like a breath of fresh air (i know its not D&D but it heavily inspired my setting)

Quote from: Fheredin on December 03, 2024, 08:24:37 PMWARNING: I am mostly a medium to medium-hard SF designer. It's not that I don't enjoy fantasy, but that my skillsets are intentionally trained into other directions, so you may need to take my opinions with a grain of salt.


I think the big thing I dislike about most RPG settings is that most RPG writers do not actually internalize the medium differences between an RPG and a novel and how that translates to the worldbuilding. I generally despise most pre-designed settings because they are written like they are supposed to be novels and the designer turned it into an RPG as a sort of plan B.

The big differences between RPGs and novels is that RPGs inherently require creative input from the GM and to a less extent the players. Most designers miss the fact that the more you use your creative muscles, the easier it becomes to use them, and at the same time, the less you use them, the harder it becomes to use them because it feels like you're breaking the social contract of the game. Writing encyclopedia setting splatbooks paradoxically makes the game harder to play, not easier.

As a result, the core question an RPG needs to ask is not what worldbuilding the designer can provide, but what worldbuilding the designer should leave out so the GM or players can fill them in and warm up those creative muscles. The most important part of RPG worldbuilding is actually what you don't include.


This means you have to ask an additional follow-up on what creative skills your target players have. Most RPG players these days are actually pretty darn genre savvy compared to things like movie watchers or video game players. You may want to give them a dose of education on things like flat vs round characters or Vonnegut's Rules for Writing a Short Story to make sure that players are all on the same page. But most of the time when you turn a table of RPG players onto a creative worldbuilding problem, the solution will not only be unique, but it will tend to be relatively high quality.

What remains then, is a bunch of stuff which you can be fairly done by anyone involved in the RPG...and a worldbuilding postage stamp. How do you guarantee that the world will produce certain campaign flavors and conflict lines?

I think this is one of the few things Call of C'thulu does perfectly; the Elder God will either get summoned or not, and the end of the campaign will either be you win, but most of your party is dead or going insane, or you lose and Everybody Dies (TM). The heart of the flavor of the setting and the conflict lines of the campaign come from the antagonist.

So what do fantasy settings need to be? They need to be more like Call of C'thulu. 


I am not saying that Call of C'thulu is a work of genius or anything--if anything I think Chaosium stumbled into this with more blind luck than true skill. The idea that you would pair a game about unintelligible cosmic mysteries and insanity with a perfectly transparent D100 baffles me beyond belief, and I think that in an ideal universe, Shadowrun would have been a D100 system and Call of C'thulu a dice pool. But I do want to emphasize that they got this part wildly right and that we should copy the core idea that the core worldbuilding and the defacto antagonists of a system are almost inseparable.

I feel exactly the same way. Game settings should be designed for games, not novels. In addition, these sorts of fake game settings attract a bunch of obnoxious fuckwits into their fandoms who worship the canon and attack you if you don't follow it like a religion. This even applies to video games, too. If it's a crpg, then the emphasis should be on player agency, not watching GMNPCs do stuff instead. I don't think I need to name any particular offenders. If you know, then you know.

This is why I prefer universal systems with a plethora of settings. It doesn't remove the behavior entirely, but encouraging individual group creativity tends to discourage such types. For example, I love Night's Black Agents for letting you invent different strains of vampirism for different campaigns, such as classic Draculas or weird aliens inspired by The Stress of Her Regard. Unfortunately, most games seem to be of the obnoxious failed novelist's microfiction pretending to be a game type.

Quote from: radio_thief on December 04, 2024, 01:29:44 PMI personally dislike playing in traditional fantasy games. we know all the tropes, its all too familiar. I love to do high fantasy and keep things pretty unique, as unique as i can make it without it being overly strange, which is why i never run pre published settings. When i read Numenera it was like a breath of fresh air (i know its not D&D but it heavily inspired my setting)

I am completely burned on fantasy. The genre is oversaturated. There's more diverse fantasy settings than any gamer can play in multiple lifetimes. Give me that level of creativity in other genres, please.