[Game Design] Worlds Enough in Time
Jan. 27th, 2006 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stevekensonRecent Traveller discussion on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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).
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).
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-27 05:57 pm (UTC)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?
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Date: 2006-01-28 01:39 am (UTC)There's no actual 'network externality', even down to the basic ruleset... past "roll a d20".