[Game Design] Worlds Enough in Time

[stevekenson]

Recent Traveller discussion on maliszew's LJ has gotten me thinking again about the nature and limitation of RPG settings or "worlds" (although such settings often include multiple worlds).

There is an inherent contradiction in building an RPG setting, the struggle between completeness and creative freedom. On the one hand, you want to provide enough detail about the setting that it appears complete, a real, living, breathing world with enough information to be useful and (hopefully) compelling, crying out "come and play out your adventures here!" On the other hand, you want to provide enough "elbow room" for gaming groups to have said adventures. If every corner of your setting is mapped out, every major event has already happened, every conflict is resolved, and every major supporting character is more powerful than the players' characters can ever hope to be, then the setting is like a closed system rapidly approaching its inevitable heat-death. What's the point of playing there?

Unfortunately, such seems to be the ultimate fate of any long-lived RPG setting: apart from rules supplements and extensions (which have their own theoretical limits) and adventures (which publishers, ironically, don't do because common wisdom says they don't sell), the only products left to do are supplements adding more detail to the setting. After you've done the complete gazetter of the world, the individual sourcebooks on its major subdivisions (be they nations, star systems, or parallel universes), and covered the various cultures in nauseating detail, you've built up a world with so much detail and backstory that only the true hard-core fans can know it all (and argue over it endlessly). Would be new visitors to your world are so intimidated by it they look for a more friendly clime where there's room for their own ideas.

Perhaps one way around this (apart from just not over-detailing a setting) is to avoid the creation of an official "canon" at all. Instead, provide the basic framework for the setting, then make all the add-ons modular and optional, kind of like how White Wolf has done three "official" versions of the Vampire nemesis splat called "VII" any of which can be the "real" one in your game. Likewise you can offer variations on elements of the setting, providing more of a "toolkit" approach. Users can then add on as much or as little detail as they want and can customize the setting, rather than feeling like they're beholden to your official version. It would be more complex, since some options would be mutually exclusive, and you'd need to take that into account as the list of options grew, but I think it would be doable, especially with the growth of the PDF market and the viability of little modular products that can stay "in print" effectively forever and the sort of "pick and mix" options for sales (wherein customers assemble their own products out of modular parts).

Comments

[doccross.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on settings being more like frameworks, with later optional/modular products that people can pick and choose from. I'd like to see something like this...

The "world setting": Xaria, Land of Magic. It would provide rules (unless it was designed to use a seperate rules set, like True20), at least two variant maps and an overview, plus variant semi-loose settings by different authors. Such as...

Steve's setting: Xaria is a land of political intrigue and military manuevering, with each WizardKing trying to become top dog.

Doc's setting: Xaria is a land where the poor wizards are hated, and must work in secret to protect the dumbass population from the machinations of monsters and demons.

Spike's setting: Xaria is a wild and dangerous land and the wizards are just discovering the powers of magic, which they use to help clear the land of evil.

And so on. I think the plethora of very detailed worlds is one of the big problems with RPGs nowadays. Many of them make great reads, but playing in them means your game world is pretty much the same as anyone elses.

[xomec.livejournal.com]

I think the plethora of very detailed worlds is one of the big problems with RPGs nowadays. Many of them make great reads, but playing in them means your game world is pretty much the same as anyone elses.

I agree, remembering the time when everyone's D&D campaign (for example) was fairly unique, even if it was just their own spin on Greyhawk or Blackmoor.

On the other hand the whole "network externality" bafflegab would have us believe that homogenity of settings is a good thing; so when somebody says "it's an Eberron game" (or whatever), newbies immediately know what that means. Of course, that assumes a newbie is going to know anything about Eberron and it ignores the fact that virtually every campaign I've heard of starts off with "here's how I've changed the game/setting." The kind of customization we're talking about happens whether the publishers support it or not, so why not support it?

[ogier30.livejournal.com]

However, RPG settings end up having to be so broad and encompassing, that it becomes next to meaningless to say "it's an Eberron game". Are you playing a game of political intrigue in Karnath? An urban game of investigation in Sharn? Plundering the jungles of the new continent? How many of the supplements are you using? What house rules?

There's no actual 'network externality', even down to the basic ruleset... past "roll a d20".

[gamescribe.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately too. I think that there's got to be a trick to creating good world supplements. One such approach you mention here is to not make things too "official," which is a pretty good solution. The other one I've come up with that solves the "elbow room" problem but doesn't do much for the "newbie-entering-into-a-world-with-lots-of-continuity" problem is to make sure everything you write focuses on a part of a larger whole. For example, say you're doing a city supplement for the capital city of a fantasy nation. Where you might normally be tempted to name and detail every member of the Lord's Council for the book, instead you focus on one or two members, and then allude to the remaining 10 members of the council to leave lots of room for expansion. You then blacklist that topic for future publications, preventing from building up too much continuity on any one subject. Granted, that may be difficult. But at the very least it gives the DM something specific to start with and then room to grow the world on his/her own (shiould the DM choose).

It's sort of a combination of detail/lack of detail but it would require the campaign setting's line manager to enforce some pretty strict content restrictions on the authors. Still, it could be done...

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

I really don't think WW's toolkit approach is the way to go, honestly. Or maybe it's better to say that they went too far in the opposite direction. The old WW metaplot created a tremendous shared story that anyone could buy into, which was a really powerful selling point for the games. I admit it got way too convoluted (especially with all kinds of crazy retcons that happened over the years), but I am willing to bet that they aren't seeing any better sales with the new stuff. There's just nothing there to really inspire new ST's, at least in my opinion.

[xomec.livejournal.com]

I recognize and agree that "shared story" is apparently a major selling point. Hell, I'd lay good odds that a substantial fraction of buyers of old World of Darkness products didn't even play the game(s), they just wanted to read and keep up on the "story" as the world continued to unfold.

But that loops back to the original question: Is the "involving shared story" approach ultimately self-defeating? How can you do such a shared setting without detailing it to death or squeezing out or marginalizing the player characters so everything is about the "signature characters" and powerful NPCs and the players/readers are just idle spectators? If you're going to do that, write novels and try for a shot at sales like the original Dragonlance trilogy rather than sales like the current Dragonlance setting book.

Maybe it's a matter of a "core" game with a series of limited lifespan settings? That, in some respects, is the D&D approach: settings may come and go, but the game goes on and you can always come up with a new setting to spin the game systems in new ways.

[maliszew.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's a matter of a "core" game with a series of limited lifespan settings? That, in some respects, is the D&D approach: settings may come and go, but the game goes on and you can always come up with a new setting to spin the game systems in new ways.

That's the approach I personally like, but I get the impression that's not the most popular with game companies, judging by the products they create. I fear that, given the general shrinkage and insularity of the RPG market these days, that the D&D only works for D&D and then only because that's what people have come to expect of it. The core game plus limited-run settings might have been possible in the past, when gamers were plentiful enough to support that approach. Nowadays, you need to hook people into consistently buying a single line and the surest way to do that is through setting material.

I hate that, but there it is.

[xomec.livejournal.com]

Also, admittedly, the proliferation of D&D settings may have been part of TSR's undoing. The book trade had far more to do with it, from what I've heard, but much has been made of how the explosion of D&D settings/lines further divided the game's fanbase, most chosing to focus on their one or two favorite settings, with the new settings doing little to attract new players (or at least not enough to equal the splitting of the existing fanbase). But then perhaps some of those settings were also overdeveloped, or approaching that point.

The "core game and multiple settings" approach is still relatively rare in RPGs, and almost entirely limited to the "universal" RPGs. D&D has been the only "genre" RPG I can think of offhand that has really done it, although plans for Spycraft 2.0 seem to run along similar lines.

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

The "core game and multiple settings" approach is still relatively rare in RPGs, and almost entirely limited to the "universal" RPGs. D&D has been the only "genre" RPG I can think of offhand that has really done it, although plans for Spycraft 2.0 seem to run along similar lines.

Not exactly; the "historical" settings for the World of Darkness - Vampire: Dark Ages, Werewolf: Dark Ages, etc. - were for all intents and purposes an attempt to pursue this approach, and from what I learned it divided the fan base just like D&D's multiple settings did.

That said, I definitely agree that there is a limit to how much you can add to a game's value by publishing supplements. Past that point all you're doing is burdening the setting with needless and intimidating levels of detail. Finding that critical boundary is tough, and I think it varies from game to game.

[maliszew.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered about the extent to which multiple settings divided the fanbase. My gut feeling is that this only happens when there are too many settings and each has too much support. A more limited selection of settings with fewer products, each of which ties into the "core" material of the game itself, seems the best way to go. This seems to be what WotC is doing, but I have no idea how well it's doing for them.

[xomec.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered about the extent to which multiple settings divided the fanbase. My gut feeling is that this only happens when there are too many settings and each has too much support.

The crux of the question being, how many settings is "too many" and how much support is "too much"?

[gillshallows.livejournal.com]

Actualy, I've always felt that White Wolf was one of the worst purpotraters of this phenomenon (thou I've been told they've 'fixed' the problem now that they have re-booted their world).
Most of the Gamers I knew back in Minneapolis solved this problem, by useing the rules system of games they liked, and then creating their own worlds (usualy loosly based on a world for a gamebook).

[xomec.livejournal.com]

Well, White Wolf only "fixed" the problem with the World of Darkness insofar as they reset the clock, allowing them to do essentially the same thing (splatbooks, fleshing out the world, etc.) all over again. Seems to be largely the same theory with any "mature" RPG setting: new editions of the Forgotten Realms, Nth sourcebooks of Traveller's Third Imperium (although it's so frickin' huge it escapes a bit of the redudancy), reboots/revisions of Shadowrun, etc. It's the same approach Marvel is taking with its "Ultimate" line: restarting the whole universe in order to get that "fresh setting smell" again.