The Subtle Hand of Awesome

[rob_donoghue]

I'm a big fan of the Birthright setting that TSR put out back in the day. It hit a lot of notes I really liked - the world felt populated, politics had a powerful role, monsters felt mythic - it just rocked. But one subtle note always impressed me. In one of the nations of the game, the default one detailed in the core book, the High King's

Comments

[samldanach]

There are a few tricky bits to that approach, though, from a writer's perspective (I realize that I'm now the choir preaching to the preacher here, but...).

First, the trap the Greenwood and others fall into is that writing your own setting is an opportunity to showcase all your cool characters. It's a lot like the classic GMPC problem, but generally not as obnoxious (because the GM can ignore the author's GMPCs much more easily than the players can ignore the GM's GMPCs). When you are obligated to populate your world anyway, restraining yourself from playing with yourself is hard.

Second, any given party is only going to explore a tiny fraction of most game worlds. The stuff that is going on all around them still needs to move forward and get resolved, if the world is going to feel "alive." Which means the setting material needs to suggest to the GM which NPCs are providing that resolution. Given that so many GMs can't find the line between "author's suggestion" and "setting law," PCs then get locked out of resolving those threads. This is especially true in AEG's worlds (L5R, 7th Sea, WotA), and to a lesser degree White Wolf's (WoD, Exalted) and Pinnacle's (Deadlands).

Third, there are an awful lot of people who read the metaplots and settings like loosely-connected novellas, who never actually intend to play through them. The various WotC settings have a surprising number of novels associated with them. These customers want to read about what happens, not decide what happens. Given the oddly large percentage of buyers of certain lines that fall into this category, the writers end up indulging their inner novelist tendencies. This often makes for awesome settings that end up almost impossible to fit a PC group into (assuming that PC group is interested in acting on the world stage). Strangely enough, Rifts tends to fall into this category, though Rifts GMs tend to be better than many at conveniently ignoring bits of the books they find inconvenient (possibly because that's a necessary skill to GM Rifts). Most licensed products also tend to end up in this category, for obvious reasons.

Given these issues, it becomes tricky to write settings that feel alive and engaging, but still leave ample space for a maverick group of misfits to come out of nowhere and save the day. Especially to leave multiple spaces for that to happen, so that campaigns don't turn into forced railroads. But leaving too many empty spaces makes the world feel like an empty stage, and leaves a lot of work for the individual GMs ("OK, great, so I know all about the shadowy cabal and their goals, but I don't have a single name or description of anyone in it!").

[rob_donoghue]

This is part of the reason I really feel like setting (and by extension, adventure design) is the red-headed stepchild of game design. There have been some really solid innovations, but they have been strongly outpaced by the focus on rules and such. Add to this the desirability of creating IP which can be used to create novels, video games and such, (as well as the growth of "our world, but..." Setting design) and it's not hard to see why setting doesn't get the love it deserves.

[samldanach]

I think that one of the other reasons that setting design continues to flail rather than proceeding is that too many people keep trying to apply principles from writing. Developing a good setting for a novel or film is not remotely the same as developing a good setting for an RPG. Well, there are some lessons that carry over, but they are mostly the basic ones (make it engaging, throwaway lines do a lot to extend the setting in the mind of the reader/viewer, keep it consistent).

The primary difference is that readers of a novel have no choice but to stick to the tracks the characters follow. Players, OTOH, will explore, and often in the most inconvenient corners. That requires higher degrees of consistency and explanation (q.v., the floating city problem). It also requires that every direction be interesting. In a novel, you can have the entire western half of the continent be vaguely noted farmland dotted with nearly identical keeps/towns. In an RPG, as soon as you fail to give an area detail, the players will make a beeline for it.

But, settings also need to be relatively easy for the GM and players to digest. Too much detail will scare people off fast (it's the main reason I've avoided a couple settings, like Exalted). Before play even begins, the players need to find enough hooks to create a character that actually makes sense in the setting. Obviously, this is never a problem in a novel. There are also a number of players (myself included) who like to be able to casually include common knowledge and local slang into their "in character" speech. The more setting material they have to digest to do so, the harder it is.

Additionally, settings need to be open. The author of a novel gets to, essentially, manipulate both sides of the table so that the characters go exactly where he wants, say exactly the right things, and make exactly the right mistakes to make the plot come out right. And, the plot only has to come out right once, so fantastic coincidences are allowable. An RPG setting needs to allow for infinite replay with an infinite variety of characters. And to allow for interesting stories to continue to be told, no matter what decisions those characters make. Yes, some of that falls on the shoulders of the GM. But, a well-crafted setting makes the GM's job so much easier.

Solomon's judgement

[samldanach]

My own take, as a procrastinating champion who spends far too much time designing and far too little GMing is as follows:

The setting, problems and storyline often predate the character's involvement. Nearly all of the NPCs involved are stuck, inluding the dreaded GMPCs (I plead guilty). Otherwise, said storylines would have been solved already (with a few delay-based exceptions).

Each PC is directly involved in at least one of the main threads, sometimes without realising it. On at least one occasion, without anybody knowing (a negligible child growing up to obsession where most would have forgotten). There is at least one storyline with multi-character involvement.

And those PCs are the ones with the fresh view, the ones with the potential for a solution.
If they find it, the laurels will be theirs.
If they do not, inexorable fate will grind all involved, and sometimes more.

So, the NPCs messed up or are utter bastards that need stopping, including the GMPCs. The early stories and the problems are theirs.
The PCs may be the saviours; at the very least, all hope for resolution rest on their shoulders. The endgame is theirs.

Re: Solomon's judgement

[samldanach]

Hmm. I'm not sure I like that approach. It tends to set the PCs up as Messiahs, and makes the world revolve around them, rather than simply including and challenging them. You end with epic fiction in the vein of Terry Goodkind and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Robert Jordan. I prefer even my epic fantasy to feel more like Tolkein, in which there are clearly all sorts of stories unfolding at the edges of the PCs stories which they might not even influence at all.

I also find that a living setting (one where NPCs continue to struggle against each other and advance plots whether or not the PCs are there) tends to write its own campaigns. All you have to do is give the PCs a little bit of power, a few connections, and a reason to join the fight. The machine of a relationship map will pretty much do the rest. The biggest advantage to this is that it also strongly enables story-telling at a variety of levels. Your method strongly enables epics, but wouldn't work so well to tell, say, Saving Private Ryan. The machinations of the Allies vs. Axis, or even the outcome of a single battle, are not going to be affected by the PCs. Instead, they have a goal inside that grand conflict. But, to keep it feeling realistic, troops move around, battles break out, supplies and medical resources come and go, all at the orders of NPCs who are not even aware of the PCs and their story.

Re: Solomon's judgement

[samldanach]

Well, to be honest, I like the PCs to be important, to have an impact (or at least a chance at one). Hence, they need to be larger than life or have a big lever.

But not all of the storylines mentionned before were epic: most were just about people not managing to get up after a fall too many, and/or destroying themselves, occasionnally with colateral damage (once, rather largish).

Tragedy is less abstract when it's personnal rather than large-scale. You just have to make the involved NPCs part of the personnal backstory as early as possible, and long before the threads appear.
My use the Reverse Chekov rule is borderline obsessive, to be true.

Back to my baby, only two of the threads actually touched the one epic storyline, and that only indirectly (as in two more influences towards/back from the tipping point).

The epic story itself was, incidentally, free from any direct PC involvement by design. It was supposed to be only revealed after years of obscure hints, with catspaws and shell games galore.
Afterwards, the Apocalypse (in all possible meanings).