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View Full Version : Setting Decay - When fantsy worlds go bad



Yora
2015-05-18, 10:35 AM
Being very much interested in various fantastic worlds, I noticed a pretty common trend that many of them reach a point where lots of fans consider new additions, expansions, and revisions to actually make the setting worse. Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Dark Sun, Planescape, Warhammer and Warhammer 40k, and of course Star Wars.
Nostalgia is of course an important factor when it comes to this, but having been a huge fan of Forgotten Realms 2nd edition, I was actually quite amazed that the 1st edition stuff seems so much more better and all the best things about it got removed. When I started reading about Mystara a only a short while ago, I quickly noticed that all the really good stuff is the short and chaotic material from the early years, and most of the bland and stupid parts were all written later. Dark Sun is quite famous for having a revised edition that actually flips the whole theme of the entire setting on its head, and most people somewhat familiar with Planescape probably have heard about the very ambigous reputation of Faction War. I am not a fan of Warhammer 40k, but reading some of the complaints people have about the later editions even makes me as a neutral outside observer ask "What were they thinking?!" I also love Star Wars more like anything else, but at some point in the 90s I simply started ignoring everything that advances the timeline and stick only to the old material.
Eberron seems one of the few setting to have escaped this fate, but it probably would have suffered it as well if WotC hadn't stop developing their settings anymore.

Why might that be?

Is it just greed that makes companies churn out more material even though they don't have any ideas how to improve the setting anymore? Quite often the production quality of the later material is very high, but the content doesn't seem to match the older stuff. Or do the creators think they actually make the setting better?

Almost always this goes hand in hand with timeline advances. I can't really think of any setting where this worked out well. (Perhaps Star Trek, but that's not fantasy and doesn't have much to do with RPGs.) Are they inherently bad, or is it just the same thing happening with regular setting expansion?

Honest Tiefling
2015-05-18, 11:04 AM
I think a great deal of it is that people love to complain, and love to complain when companies don't do exactly what they want, despite not being psychics. I think one problem is that what is in-theme for one person isn't for another. So the authors make genuine attempts to continue, but someone's gotta complain.

Through I think brand recognition seems like a good idea, (but turns out to be crap) which is why 4e Forgotten Realms is a thing despite making no sense and kinda going against a lot of things people liked about that setting. People probably buy things because they recognize that brand, hence why a lot of the DnD videogames seem to take place in whatever setting they are trying to push. And then we get level 20 Paladins of Tyr not being able to smite an person that's killed the entire city they were trying to save.

Churn is probably another factor, that would have struck both Star Wars and Star Trek, IIRC. They had a lot of authors making a lot of books, and very little oversight on what they were making up. But hey, the novels were making money! Who cares what gets stuck in them. Keep cranking those babies out! I think Dragonlance had a touch of this, because I vaguely remember a god of cats showing up and chilling around a city, which again, IIRC, doesn't really make sense in terms of the setting. Another book I think sorta made up a war that never gets mentioned again. But that was a while ago.

Amphetryon
2015-05-18, 11:31 AM
I think a great deal of it is that people love to complain, and love to complain when companies don't do exactly what they want, despite not being psychics. I think one problem is that what is in-theme for one person isn't for another. So the authors make genuine attempts to continue, but someone's gotta complain.

Through I think brand recognition seems like a good idea, (but turns out to be crap) which is why 4e Forgotten Realms is a thing despite making no sense and kinda going against a lot of things people liked about that setting. People probably buy things because they recognize that brand, hence why a lot of the DnD videogames seem to take place in whatever setting they are trying to push. And then we get level 20 Paladins of Tyr not being able to smite an person that's killed the entire city they were trying to save.

Churn is probably another factor, that would have struck both Star Wars and Star Trek, IIRC. They had a lot of authors making a lot of books, and very little oversight on what they were making up. But hey, the novels were making money! Who cares what gets stuck in them. Keep cranking those babies out! I think Dragonlance had a touch of this, because I vaguely remember a god of cats showing up and chilling around a city, which again, IIRC, doesn't really make sense in terms of the setting. Another book I think sorta made up a war that never gets mentioned again. But that was a while ago.

All of this. At an employee training seminar I once attended, we were reminded of the axiom that folks who have a good experience will tell 2 people, while folks who have a bad experience will tell 10. . . and this was before widespread proliferation of internet message boards. People are almost universally louder in their complaints than in their praise, so that the praise is harder to hear. Folks also tend to have extremely divergent tastes (somethingsomething can't please everyone somethingsomething), meaning that the people who dislike a particular direction taken by an RPG are all but assured to exist and, due to the first point, complain loudly. Couple this with different authors working in relative isolation from each other within the same settings - each with their own directives and their own concept of what makes sense within that setting - and you're all but assured of getting some products released in close proximity to each other with curiously divergent and conflicting ways in which the world they're both describing grows.

For an RPG, this gets complicated even further by the way that individual campaigns at different tables throughout the world find the canon morphing as a result of their own emergent gameplay. Your Players completed a quest to get Tyr his hand back? Nifty. . . except now anything published where Tyr has but one hand is grounds for complaint for not meshing with your head-canon. Apply that same problem over and over, across a thousand minor details from a hundred different campaigns, and making the official canon mesh seamlessly with everyone's expectations and experience is somewhere between daunting and impossible.

Maglubiyet
2015-05-18, 11:45 AM
I think the term is "jumping the shark".

The Time of Troubles and Spellplague for FR were definitely marketing devices. You've gotta come up with something new to sell your product if you want to stay in business (5e anyone?) At some point most of your target audience will have bought all of the material they are ever going to buy from you -- the only way to continue to make money is to come up with a new gimmick.

Lurkmoar
2015-05-18, 12:48 PM
Ah Dark Sun. We never talked about the novels where a small group of under leveled, unoptimized and poorly equipped group manage to kill Borys, the Dragon of Tyr and then three Sorcerer-Kings were killed off before they were even vaguely developed. Then they expanded it with a 'revised' edition with an entire friggin' body of salt water(the Last Sea, hur dur) and a Sorcerer-King who felt bad about what he did and reversed the Dragon metamorphosis and became an Avangion(lolwut).

The really insulting thing was reading through Beyond the Prism Pentand and seeing how author fiat let an underage Sun Cleric, two Gladiators(okay, one of them did have a Vorpal sword) and a Preserver with a few levels boosted up during the day overcame the Valley of Dust and Fire and killed the Dragon inside his own city. The many times my group tried to crack that puppy, we died horribly and in amusing ways. Never did make it to the city center... and when I read the combat tactics for the dragon I figured it was for the best.

I think Troy Denning forgot that he was supposed to enrich the world with detail and color, not have a bunch of his scrappy heroes solve all the problems of living on Athas. That's the PCs job.

Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms had similar problems in that regard, at least from casual observation.

Oh, and Troy Denning also wrote Pages of Pain. Where the Lady of Pain keeps a diary.

Talakeal
2015-05-18, 01:42 PM
Its pretty simple if you think about it. If someone is a fan of something, it is because they really like something (or everything) about it. If you change that something you have therefore removed something that the person liked, which may have been what drew them to the setting in the first place.

Yora
2015-05-18, 01:52 PM
But is it inevitable?

I can kind of understand how Forgotten Realms nuked Hellgate Keep and killed of Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul to sanitize the setting. But they did that with everything at the transition to 2nd edition. Who thought reshuffling the factions of Sigil and killing of the Sorcerer Kings of Athas would make any fans happy?

Is it intentional to make new updated versions of books that people already bought? Or are there perhaps really writers who think it could be an improvement of the setting? Can you keep adding material without the material either becoming very boring (late 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms) or replacing existing content? Or do you have to pull the break at some point and call it a day? (Eberron looks like that right now, and it might perhaps even be better for it.)

Maglubiyet
2015-05-18, 02:13 PM
But is it inevitable?

I can kind of understand how Forgotten Realms nuked Hellgate Keep and killed of Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul to sanitize the setting. But they did that with everything at the transition to 2nd edition. Who thought reshuffling the factions of Sigil and killing of the Sorcerer Kings of Athas would make any fans happy?

Is it intentional to make new updated versions of books that people already bought? Or are there perhaps really writers who think it could be an improvement of the setting? Can you keep adding material without the material either becoming very boring (late 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms) or replacing existing content? Or do you have to pull the break at some point and call it a day? (Eberron looks like that right now, and it might perhaps even be better for it.)

Sadly, I do think it is inevitable. Either the original creation stays the same, in which case the only way to generate revenue is to re-publish the same material in new formats. The old and the new contain the same info, so what's the advantage of buying the new versions? Or the creation evolves to keep generating interest (and sales), in which case it has the potential to alienate the original fans by changing what attracted them in the first place.

The other factor is the changing cast of talented writers and game designers. If you're a creative person hired to oversee the FR, for example, if you just re-publish existing material you're not getting a chance to showcase your creativity. You're going to want to tweak things and "make them better". New blood, new ideas.

Amphetryon
2015-05-18, 02:34 PM
But is it inevitable?

I can kind of understand how Forgotten Realms nuked Hellgate Keep and killed of Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul to sanitize the setting. But they did that with everything at the transition to 2nd edition. Who thought reshuffling the factions of Sigil and killing of the Sorcerer Kings of Athas would make any fans happy?

Is it intentional to make new updated versions of books that people already bought? Or are there perhaps really writers who think it could be an improvement of the setting? Can you keep adding material without the material either becoming very boring (late 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms) or replacing existing content? Or do you have to pull the break at some point and call it a day? (Eberron looks like that right now, and it might perhaps even be better for it.)

Anything anyone adds, or subtracts, from extant canon in any RPG is more than likely to displease at least some portion of the fanbase, and a displeased fanbase with an internet connection is likely to let others know of their displeasure. This means the only way to entirely avoid the issue is to release exactly one book for your RPG, containing all of the rules, and all of the fluff, that will ever be 'official' for it. Allow no authorized fiction based on the world, allow no supplements to the RPG, and release no updated versions, as all of these elements will change something by their very nature.

Anonymouswizard
2015-05-18, 03:23 PM
Anything anyone adds, or subtracts, from extant canon in any RPG is more than likely to displease at least some portion of the fanbase, and a displeased fanbase with an internet connection is likely to let others know of their displeasure. This means the only way to entirely avoid the issue is to release exactly one book for your RPG, containing all of the rules, and all of the fluff, that will ever be 'official' for it. Allow no authorized fiction based on the world, allow no supplements to the RPG, and release no updated versions, as all of these elements will change something by their very nature.

Bah, singlebookRPG was far better in the beta leaks where there were 8 types of demon rather than 13.

Lurkmoar
2015-05-18, 03:33 PM
Anything anyone adds, or subtracts, from extant canon in any RPG is more than likely to displease at least some portion of the fanbase, and a displeased fanbase with an internet connection is likely to let others know of their displeasure. This means the only way to entirely avoid the issue is to release exactly one book for your RPG, containing all of the rules, and all of the fluff, that will ever be 'official' for it. Allow no authorized fiction based on the world, allow no supplements to the RPG, and release no updated versions, as all of these elements will change something by their very nature.

I think additions can work, as long as they're consistent and thematically true to the setting. Subtractions are a much harder to accept unless they were widely hated additons or disregarded/neglected canon in the first place.

Of course, you can end up burying the original work with too many additions or starve it by not updating at all. Hamruph.

Amphetryon
2015-05-18, 03:41 PM
I think additions can work, as long as they're consistent and thematically true to the setting. Subtractions are a much harder to accept unless they were widely hated additons or disregarded/neglected canon in the first place.

Of course, you can end up burying the original work with too many additions or starve it by not updating at all. Hamruph.

Often - not always, often - additional content runs into issues with fans who don't see how the new material meshes with extant resources. For crunch, I've seen this complaint about the Binder in 3.5, for instance, despite it being generally well-received as a Class on the various forums. Fluff additions can run headlong into a given fanbase's belief that the world is fully fleshed out as it is; see also "The Changed It Now It Sucks" on TVtropes.

Keltest
2015-05-18, 03:42 PM
I do know that forgotten realms at least, what the authors actually want and what the big wigs who tell them what they can do are not necessarily in agreement. For example, the conversion to 4th edition was done without the approval of any of the authors, so they decided "yeah, this is going to muck things up, lets embrace the crapstorm!" And are now going about putting things back together for 5th edition. I suspect this is the case for other large multi-author settings as well.

Honest Tiefling
2015-05-18, 06:18 PM
I think additions can work, as long as they're consistent and thematically true to the setting. Subtractions are a much harder to accept unless they were widely hated additons or disregarded/neglected canon in the first place.

You know what I'd like to see? A campaign setting that establishes the norm of life. And then optional books for stuff to take it in new directions. So if you don't like a certain direction, don't buy that particular book, but other directions might be right up your alley. With material updated for the 'standard' aspect of the setting. A bit like that Elder Evils book, where it had world changing events, but if you don't want it you could safely ignore it.

Aedilred
2015-05-18, 06:52 PM
A lot of it is down to personal taste and, as people say, that if you like something and then some aspect of it is changed, there's a chance it's changing the very thing you liked.

There are ways to keep generating material without changing anything per se: if you focus on adding depth to the setting rather than broadening it, you're less likely to annoy people who like it the way it is, but you're still giving them cool new things to play with. In Warhammer, for example, many of the RPG supplements for both first and second edition were very well-received because they gave new information and interesting features without fundamentally changing anything or forcing a really new perspective on the world. Stuff like Tome of Salvation, Sold Down the River, Shades of Empire and of course Realm of Chaos (although Realm of Chaos was itself the first iteration of a lot of what later became the standard 40K setting).

Part of the problem though too is that setting and story are largely incompatible. If you want to give people a setting to play in and write their own material for it needs to remain relatively unchanging on a large scale, otherwise you run the risk of invalidating half the things your players come up with. If you've invested a lot of time and effort in a character or story of your own in a part of the world that gets destroyed in the next update, that's the sort of thing that puts you off the setting for good. This is the sort of thing I imagine afflicts a setting like Forgotten Realms where there's periodically a "setting update".

On the other hand, a lot of players don't understand that and will clamour for updates to the overarching story of the setting because they're bored of nothing ever changing. Again, Warhammer found itself caught between these two stools for about ten years where they introduced events like the Storm of Chaos that threatened to change everything but of course never did (40K went through something similar with the Eye of Terror). This pleased nobody, really, as the people who wanted change weren't getting it and the people who liked the setting as it was were annoyed that everything was getting sucked into big world events. Eventually they decided just to blow the fantasy world up - but I'm not sure that was the right decision.

To an extent though I think it's a good problem to have.

Grinner
2015-05-18, 08:36 PM
But is it inevitable?

Of course it's inevitable. Everything dies.

When you define what something is, you also define what it is not. The entire point of a product is that it has something to offer the consumer. Should you advance some kind of metaplot and break the stasis, then you are changing what it is. Should you subvert the truths the setting is built upon, that too is fundamentally changing it. If you change what it is, it is no longer the same product, and it no longer offers the advertised experience.


There are ways to keep generating material without changing anything per se...

Will Wright has proposed that games are "possibility spaces". You can fill in the gaps with things like adventure modules and region books, but eventually the possibility space will become overcrowded. You will either have to change something or accept that you've written yourself into a corner.

Leliel
2015-05-18, 08:55 PM
Will Wright has proposed that games are "possibility spaces". You can fill in the gaps with things like adventure modules and region books, but eventually the possibility space will become overcrowded. You will either have to change something or accept that you've written yourself into a corner.

That's what happened to Exalted. They kept on focusing on what was written that they choked out the ability for anyone to fill in with their own groups.

Ultimately, to answer the question, "decay" is not the same thing as "change", but "decay" is a form of "change." And people hate change they don't like, because change they don't like must be change in the key of decay.

Take nWoD 2E, currently known as the God-Machine Chronicle. A lot of people called "metaplot" when said God-Machine (think what would happen if the Matrix had a mind of its own, and took place in the real world instead of a simulation though still with mechanical aesthetics) was introduced...except that thing was always explicitly made to be a campaign setting of a sort, a version of the nWoD where it was the ultimate mastermind. While it exists in the "core" nWoD 2E, it is never assumed to be in complete control of the situation; it's just a very well-entrenched and subtle chessmaster in a setting filled with hundreds of them (including the players, if they want to be more than pawns of the chessmasters). It's an expansion.

And yet, people hate the God-Machine in principle, because it explicitly isn't a God humans would recognize (although it pretends sometimes). Never mind that a core tenet of the nWoD is that nobody knows if there's a real God or not, and if so, He's a distant one. The fact that the God-Machine has more Science in its Science Fantasy is a little more understandable...and I reply so does Cthulhu, and people are fine with him.

(I'm not a person who minds 2E at all, in case you were curious).

AceOfFools
2015-05-18, 09:32 PM
A good addition to a setting needs a couple of things:

Follow naturally from what HAS been established
Be different from what has been done both in and out of setting
Be interesting on its own.
Not completely overshadow everything that's come before


Without 1, you aren't really in the setting, you're just cashing in on the brand that was previously established with the same name.

Without 2, why bother?
Do you really care if kind, just and wise Josem II is on the throne of Nuramarch or his twin brother, the kind, just and wise Issem III? Unless Josem and Issem are either different from each other, or you have something invested in one from previous experience, the name really doesn't matter.

Without 3, who cares?
Sure you could detail each of the 862 noble families in Nurrich, and yes that's the number that was established years ago, but the best you're going to do is get a fan to read through all of them and pick whichever one is the most interesting and set my story about those families. The rest are waste of everyone's time.

If you violate 4, you basically change the setting enough that it's no longer what you liked. How steampunk replaces the old world order could hit all three of the first points, but people who are here to see about the sword and sorcery are just going to leave and find a setting that caters to there taste.

The more things you add to a setting the harder it is to find something that can be added that hits all 4 points. Since stopping publishing means you aren't monetizing that franchise, you have to keep producing something, you don't just say "alright, this setting is done," at least not if the setting is corperate owned.

So you violate 4, and shake the setting up. If you do it well, the fans will follow along and be like "that was great," and follow along; my understanding is that Changeling: The Lost is better received than Changeling: The Dreaming, but I'm fairly well insulated from the White Wolf community. I have a few other examples, but not from within the RPG medium.

I don't use published settings, so I can't really comment on anything that went for a long time without screwing up the later parts.

JAL_1138
2015-05-18, 09:48 PM
Everything dies.

That's a fact. But maybe everything that dies, someday comes back.

Sorry, I couldn't resist quoting "Atlantic City." :smalltongue:

Also...have to quote Lovecraft too: "That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange æons even death may die."

Modest Mouse had a line on this as well: "It takes a long time, but God dies too--but not before He'll stick it to you."

Waywardson
2015-05-18, 10:58 PM
In addition to the above, I have a personal theory.

Fantasy settings tend to be made by talented individuals or small groups, usually driven by a passion for their idea and little else. The more the setting grows, so does the number of people working on it. With that increase of people comes the consequence of that passion and talent "thinning." The new writers may not have the same skill or drive that made the original great, and the more it grows the thinner the passion and talent get.

This is just a thought with obvious exceptions, but it might be part of the reason.

Yora
2015-05-19, 03:49 AM
Isn't there a saying like "Too many cooks spoil the soup" in English? (We have it in German.) Multi-author worlds always seem highly problematic to me, though in an RPG with more than half a dozen books that pretty much unavoidable.

Maglubiyet
2015-05-19, 04:06 AM
Isn't there a saying like "Too many cooks spoil the soup" in English? (We have it in German.) Multi-author worlds always seem highly problematic to me, though in an RPG with more than half a dozen books that pretty much unavoidable.

Yes, there is a similar saying in English.

Sometimes, however, it is awesome (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8).

TheCountAlucard
2015-05-19, 04:45 AM
That's what happened to Exalted. They kept on focusing on what was written that they choked out the ability for anyone to fill in with their own groups."There's always an ending."

Anonymouswizard
2015-05-19, 07:07 AM
Isn't there a saying like "Too many cooks spoil the soup" in English? (We have it in German.) Multi-author worlds always seem highly problematic to me, though in an RPG with more than half a dozen books that pretty much unavoidable.

Almost exactly the same (at least here in England), too many cooks spoil the broth.

Maglubiyet
2015-05-19, 07:35 AM
Almost exactly the same (at least here in England), too many cooks spoil the broth.

That and "too many witches spoil the brew".

Too many DM's spoil the campaign?

JAL_1138
2015-05-19, 08:36 AM
Almost exactly the same (at least here in England), too many cooks spoil the broth.

Exact same phrase as the Brits in the US.

Waywardson
2015-05-19, 06:08 PM
Isn't there a saying like "Too many cooks spoil the soup" in English?

I've never heard that particular phrase, but we do use "Too many cooks in the kitchen," a lot, which is more or less the same meaning.

draken50
2015-05-19, 06:24 PM
I ended up picking up a bunch of FR books on the cheap during the 4e days, and at this point, even going to the 5e ruleset I'm probably just going to keep making use of the 3.5 setting information.

It's not because 5e is bad per say, but I really just don't want to find out all the 4th ed history stuff and then get a bunch more books.

Mando Knight
2015-05-19, 07:01 PM
I ended up picking up a bunch of FR books on the cheap during the 4e days, and at this point, even going to the 5e ruleset I'm probably just going to keep making use of the 3.5 setting information.

It's not because 5e is bad per say, but I really just don't want to find out all the 4th ed history stuff and then get a bunch more books.

The 4e history stuff is basically "Mystra was backstabbed by Cyric, causing the Magepocalypse, and in the middle of all that, Kara-Tur was replaced by a continent from a parallel world, gripped in the fierce talons of its dragon tyrants."

The 5e history stuff is "And then Ao made the gods put everything right back where they came from, or so help him..."

NichG
2015-05-19, 07:23 PM
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the issue here isn't just inevitability and 'people don't like change'. I think the issue is a decay of the underlying artistic vision that initially constructed the themes and assumptions of the setting.

This just moves the problem back - why does artistic vision decay? But I think its a lot easier to see there.

Explaining something in enough detail to someone that they can write it convincingly is a really hard thing to do. It requires that the explainer not just be a really creative and skilled writer to start with to create something worth communicating, but that they also can summarize their own thought processes and the most important key points in a way that gets it across to the people they're telling and makes them buy into the idea. In a tabletop game, everyone who plays it is basically going to be slowly developing their own head-canon. They're buying into whatever the author managed to communicate by giving them the full materials.

So one thing you can do is look at a given set of materials and see how different the various campaigns that people run are. If everyone who receives the materials runs a very different campaign, that's a potential sign that new writers who jump onto that setting are going to be wildly inconsistent as well, because the material doesn't make people think the same thing when they read it. Add to that that new writers will likely mostly familiarize themselves with the newest parts of it, whereas the people playing will also be carrying information from the older parts, and it makes sense that the vision will actually drift more rapidly in the new writers than in the oldest fans of the setting, which creates the unified perception of the decay.

Even if a setting has the same writer for its entire lifespan, they're probably not going to be able to only and exclusively write that setting for their entire career. They'll be interleaving it with a bunch of other projects. Working on those other projects is going to give them ideas, reshape the way they think, etc, and if they're just going based on what the setting feels like in their head, it can change without them noticing.

So if you want to prevent setting decay, you almost need to design the setting to resist it. You need to summarize the core themes and constraints in a short design document, then get a writer to produce material, and iterate on the design document until the design document itself is causing writers to 'get the point' without having to absorb hundreds of pages of detailed setting material. Then you'd probably want to make it SOP to review and discuss the design document before embarking on any new project in the setting. That might have a chance.

You also have to commit to 'if I have an idea that doesn't quite fit but would be cool, I will just use that idea somewhere else'.

JAL_1138
2015-05-19, 09:15 PM
I sort of wonder if it might be possible to avoid the decay by avoiding continuity. (This post is mostly fueled by Wild Turkey so I apologize for being a bit rambling and disjointed here)

Something like releasing a once-per-edition setting doc detailing the world, and then a reboot for each edition after.

Rather than progressing or altering the setting, there'd just be different editions of it just like the rules. There wouldn't necessarily be continuity, either. So "well this happened in the third version" means nothing for the fourth one; the next version is free to retcon, incorporate, or just ignore anything from the old one. With each edition, conversion guides to the new rules are published for the prior versions of the setting.

Any "official" fiction would be expressly non-canon, and could be written for any version the writer preferred rather than needing to track continuity outside the writer's own work. Supplements for how to include events of a longrunning series and modify the setting accordingly would get released, but not be "canon."

Like, if it were FR (which I know little about; it was always my least favorite setting), you'd have FRv1, FRv2, etc., as different products keyed to the current rules, but just be nothing more than a base setting doc. No tracking of plotlines, no explanation for the edition change, no trying to track previous adventure modules as having had a particular outcome, just the setting info. No "And then part of another dimension merged with it and these gods died," just "new version. Those gods aren't in this version and never were, there's a different continent where Maztica was in the old version, it's always been there in this one, there's no explanation, no continuity snarl, this doesn't invalidate the old version, authors can still write for it, and if you prefer it here's a handy conversion guide." No "And then Ao said put things back," just "New version. This is how it's always been in this version. If you like the old one better, here's the conversion guide." And if you wanted to include Eleminster, there'd be an Eleminster Saga supplement, or to include the Drizz't books, a Drizz't Saga supplement, and so forth, that can be incorporated as you like or safely ignored.

Grinner
2015-05-19, 09:44 PM
Something like releasing a once-per-edition setting doc detailing the world, and then a reboot for each edition after.

I don't see that approach gaining much support. First, by disposing of continuity, you're kinda obviating part of the appeal of settings. Second, if you're going to just rearrange the setting with each edition, you're going to get accusations of laziness, and frankly, it is rather lazy. You might very well be better off just developing an entirely new setting.

Edit: Now that I think about it, isn't this exactly what Nobilis has done...?

Milo v3
2015-05-19, 10:41 PM
I see no issue with rebooting rather than continuing the setting.

JAL_1138
2015-05-19, 11:59 PM
I don't see that approach gaining much support. First, by disposing of continuity, you're kinda obviating part of the appeal of settings. Second, if you're going to just rearrange the setting with each edition, you're going to get accusations of laziness, and frankly, it is rather lazy. You might very well be better off just developing an entirely new setting.

Edit: Now that I think about it, isn't this exactly what Nobilis has done...?

It's not necessarily lazier. You'd have to put out conversion guides for each one--detailed ones, not "double damage, 2/3 HP, etc." that takes a three-page document online. I mean a full, detailed, here's how to update every facet along with how to deal with rules the last one ran on that don't exist anymore, how to modify the current game to accommodate those rules if you'd rather use them than figure out how to go without, etc. You'd also have supplements for each popular fiction line, etc., and conversion guides for those, and keep them readily available.

Continuity has never been part of the appeal of RPG settings for me. I frankly don't care what Dzringl Zyfreanpf did in Book 14 of the Black Blood Dragon Gate War Faction Cycle. I'm interested in the worldbuilding. They're a place to go adventure in and use, a big resource kit with a lot of ready-made material and plenty of blank spaces left on the map at the same time, not things with which to try and track how the actions in the Flingenflügel's Saga novels (which I didn't care for) or the "Escort The Mighty Mary Sue Along The Railroads, 1-8" adventure paths (which were awful) or the "Gloriously Gygaxian Dungeon Delves 1-3" (which were fantastic but laid waste to several sizeable nations depending on which of the 37 incompatible branches you followed) five editions ago impacted history.

I haven't played Nobilis, I'm usually a fan of much lower-power games. I've heard it's great and I've heard it's completely unmitigatedly horrible, so no clue.

Grinner
2015-05-20, 12:59 AM
It's not necessarily lazier. You'd have to put out conversion guides for each one--detailed ones, not "double damage, 2/3 HP, etc." that takes a three-page document online. I mean a full, detailed, here's how to update every facet along with how to deal with rules the last one ran on that don't exist anymore, how to modify the current game to accommodate those rules if you'd rather use them than figure out how to go without, etc. You'd also have supplements for each popular fiction line, etc., and conversion guides for those, and keep them readily available.

Unless the writer really thinks they can do something genuinely interesting with a rehash of the setting, it strikes me as being a bit ludicrous to do anything other than gracefully retire it.

Even if you choose to pursue it simply for the sake of commercial interest though, why all the hubbub when you could just slap a fresh coat of names on it? Brand recognition?


I haven't played Nobilis, I'm usually a fan of much lower-power games. I've heard it's great and I've heard it's completely unmitigatedly horrible, so no clue.

I think the issue is the reliance on alternative modes of thought as a game mechanic.

To quote TVTropes:

Heart Is an Awesome Power: When compared to its siblings, the Powers of Chaos and Strife, being the Power of Borders seems underpowered. Then the Estate is explained as having the power over all boundaries, including metaphysical ones (like class boundaries), and tells of how the current Power plunged Cincinnati (whose Mayor offended it) into anarchy for forty days by erasing the distinction between citizen and criminal. Wow.

Edit: More to the issue at hand, the third edition of Nobilis diverged from the second if not also the first to a very noticeable degree. This reportedly caused a bit of a schism in the fanbase.

Yora
2015-05-20, 03:58 AM
Even if you choose to pursue it simply for the sake of commercial interest though, why all the hubbub when you could just slap a fresh coat of names on it? Brand recognition?
Quality of the product and commercial interest seem to be the major conflicting forces in this issue. If you want to sell more stuff, you have to come up with a justification why people need new books. And that almost always appears to go against the quality of the setting. If you want to minimize that effect, it probably works best to make a setting in which everything that happens is relativly small scale. Interestingly, the Drizzt novels (at least the older ones), do it pretty well by being mostly self contained without shaking anything up that might affect the campaigns of other people. No NPCs from the sourcebooks get killed, no city destroyed. Everything and everyone who gets affected are the series own creation.

If you start with a map that is big enough, you can add new dungeons, villages, and local villains pretty much forever, without interfering with the things that already exist.

Kalmageddon
2015-05-20, 04:57 AM
I think Warhammer 40k doesn't belong with the other examples, because it's a bit of a special case.
See, the whole 40k setting is not progressing in any way. We have been stuck in the same era for multiple editions now, because in theoty the setting is on the verge of some big changes that never come to pass. The Astronomican is supposed to break down any moment now, Tyranids are about to arrive en masse, Chaos is always growing stronger and so on...

Obviously though, this would completely change a setting that exist first and foremost to sell miniatures for a tactical wargame, so unless GW wants to "do over", it will never happen.
However, at the same time, GW wants to keep on selling new models, armies and so on. So they update codexes to new editions, make new models, invent new events that take place at the same time as everything else.
This creates a lot of retcons, which is what a lot of people dislike about modern 40K lore. We are supposed to adjust and pretend that the new gamechanging unit or tactic was always there, when sometimes it obviously doesn't fit.

An example above all else would be the Centurion Warsuit. Basically, it's power armor for power armor. It's redundant with both the Terminator Armor and the Dreadnought, while also looking utterly stupid.
And we are supposed to accept that this doctrine-wrecking monstrosity always existed.
It is also a case of GW wanting to give new toys to their best selling army when it doesn't fit at all.
The Centurion Warsuit would have been perfect as a less refined, more bulky and heavy power armor for Imperial Guard Stormtroopers, for example. The lore wouldn't have been as problematic and it would have covered a niche that is not already occupied by anything else .

So basically, when people are pissed off at GW, it's because they are extremely unsublte in their marketing strategy and often don't care for the collateral damage that their newest toys will cause to the existing balance and setting.

Kurald Galain
2015-05-20, 05:00 AM
The 4e history stuff is basically "Mystra was backstabbed by Cyric, causing the Magepocalypse, and in the middle of all that, Kara-Tur was replaced by a continent from a parallel world, gripped in the fierce talons of its dragon tyrants."

Or, basically, Mystra dies again, causing the Magepocalypse again, and all the old characters are dead again except for Drizz'l and Elminster again :smallbiggrin:


Anyway, it's not just campaign settings. Essentially, any long-running series (from Spider-Man comic books to The Simpsons TV series to the Star Wars films) will go through so many writers and creative directors that at some point fans of the earlier episodes start hating it. This leads to all sorts of issues like the same bad guy is back again (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HijackedByGanon) to fanfic writers get promoted to running the actual plot (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RunningTheAsylum) to management demands sequels regardless of quality (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Sequelitis).

Yora
2015-05-20, 07:12 AM
Anyway, it's not just campaign settings. Essentially, any long-running series (from Spider-Man comic books to The Simpsons TV series to the Star Wars films) will go through so many writers and creative directors that at some point fans of the earlier episodes start hating it.
That certainly is one thing. But why do I, as someone who actually started with later versions, still prefer the older versions once I actually start looking into them? They are also different from what I was used to. Could be pure coincidence based on the small sample size and most of them falling into a pretty short period and are by the same company (basically AD&D 2nd edition). Or is there something to the idea that growth always ends in bloat and diffusion of the original creative ideas?
Or am I just a hipster snob? :smallcool:

Eldan
2015-05-20, 07:15 AM
I think Warhammer 40k doesn't belong with the other examples, because it's a bit of a special case.
See, the whole 40k setting is not progressing in any way. We have been stuck in the same era for multiple editions now, because in theoty the setting is on the verge of some big changes that never come to pass. The Astronomican is supposed to break down any moment now, Tyranids are about to arrive en masse, Chaos is always growing stronger and so on...

Obviously though, this would completely change a setting that exist first and foremost to sell miniatures for a tactical wargame, so unless GW wants to "do over", it will never happen.
However, at the same time, GW wants to keep on selling new models, armies and so on. So they update codexes to new editions, make new models, invent new events that take place at the same time as everything else.
This creates a lot of retcons, which is what a lot of people dislike about modern 40K lore. We are supposed to adjust and pretend that the new gamechanging unit or tactic was always there, when sometimes it obviously doesn't fit.

An example above all else would be the Centurion Warsuit. Basically, it's power armor for power armor. It's redundant with both the Terminator Armor and the Dreadnought, while also looking utterly stupid.
And we are supposed to accept that this doctrine-wrecking monstrosity always existed.
It is also a case of GW wanting to give new toys to their best selling army when it doesn't fit at all.
The Centurion Warsuit would have been perfect as a less refined, more bulky and heavy power armor for Imperial Guard Stormtroopers, for example. The lore wouldn't have been as problematic and it would have covered a niche that is not already occupied by anything else .

So basically, when people are pissed off at GW, it's because they are extremely unsublte in their marketing strategy and often don't care for the collateral damage that their newest toys will cause to the existing balance and setting.

40k may not change in actual setting much, except for a few things (Newcrons, the odd world being blown up, some NPCs dying), but it also has the advantage of being a lot bigger. GW could easily double the current amount of factions without having to write much fluff. Just go back to the early books and bring in some peripherally mentioned aliens, or invent some new subdivisions of the Empire.

What 40k does, like Warhammer, is change tone a lot. The setting wavers around between "over the top and awesome" to "cynical and dark" to "black comedy" and back every so often. It started as a sort of parody, then became what it was parodying in an even more exaggerated way, then continued. Same for WHF.

JAL_1138
2015-05-20, 08:47 AM
Unless the writer really thinks they can do something genuinely interesting with a rehash of the setting, it strikes me as being a bit ludicrous to do anything other than gracefully retire it.

Even if you choose to pursue it simply for the sake of commercial interest though, why all the hubbub when you could just slap a fresh coat of names on it? Brand recognition?

I think the issue is the reliance on alternative modes of thought as a game mechanic.

To quote TVTropes:


Edit: More to the issue at hand, the third edition of Nobilis diverged from the second if not also the first to a very noticeable degree. This reportedly caused a bit of a schism in the fanbase.


Erase boundary between existing and nonexisting = campain broken! Better yet, the boundary between player and DM, or between game and RL :smalltongue:
....I probably should not play Nobilis :smalltongue:

As for the thought behind the idea of the reboots, pretty much familiarity and brand, same reason the D&D name got used for editions with rules and feel so vastly different as to arguably constitute entirely different games, and the reason they kept using FR (my dislike for it aside) since late 1e. Same reason Zelda games (which, now that I'm sober, is where I think the Wild Turkey got the idea) so often tend to be set in Hyrule (they did release a timeline, which is a mess, but up to that point there was a popular fan theory that each game was a different telling of the same story, direct sequels like Zelda 2, Majora's Mask, etc. aside).

I was trying for a way to keep that without schisms--or with schisms, but profiting from the branches. Say you were a huge fan of the 1e version, but didn't like the 2e version. Not only do they have a big conversion document (that essentially is a new rules, same everything else rewrite) to change the content over to the new edition, but the novel series you've been following doesn't have to update either. It can continue merrily along in the 1e version. Say you hated the novels instead and never want to read the protagonist's name again even in passing. Fine; the only reference to them is in the novel series' detailed setting supplement which shows you how to rework the setting to follow what happened in them (and provides maps, statblocks, etc.), but not the core setting.

Just a thought; I'm aware it's not terribly practical.

goto124
2015-05-20, 09:16 AM
Better yet, the boundary between player and DM, or between game and RL :smalltongue:

I don't think you need to give your character a superpower to do that :smallcool:

BWR
2015-05-20, 09:46 AM
That certainly is one thing. But why do I, as someone who actually started with later versions, still prefer the older versions once I actually start looking into them? They are also different from what I was used to. Could be pure coincidence based on the small sample size and most of them falling into a pretty short period and are by the same company (basically AD&D 2nd edition). Or is there something to the idea that growth always ends in bloat and diffusion of the original creative ideas?
Or am I just a hipster snob? :smallcool:

If you are publishing a story or setting, you need to do something new with each release or else there won't be any point or sales. Growth is change AND addition. To a certain degree you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Growth means changing things and some people will like changes more than others. Addition is its own problem. If you take existing stuff away you risk alienating those who liked that. If you just add, there's a limit to how much good stuff can be added. Some people like the blank spaces on the map, others need to see what lies outside what is known (and in my case, then complain about how it's not as good as what came before).

Think of REH's "By this axe I rule" and "The phoenix on the sword". They are basically the same story. Phoenix is more polished and elaborate than Axe, but Axe has a vitality and to-the-pointness that makes it a better piece of work than Phoenix. It's the same with most long-running stories and settings. So much is added and elaborated and fixed that the tone and ideas of the original are dulled, softened or even buried by the mountains of new stuff. This isn't to say the new stuff is entirely useless because sometimes a creator will come up with something new or a new take on something old and do it well, but there is a lot more chance for bad or unnecessary stuff to creep in.

In my case, I got into L5R about half way through its current life. I became enamored with the player-driven story advancement and the setting. But I really grew to love it when I started reading the first edition supplements and the story then. It was a lot more brutal, raw and the politics and tone was just so much better than the later stuff. It's not that there weren't good things that came later or that there wasn't stupid stuff in the earliest version, it's just the first was all around the best. Eventually it changed so much I lost all respect for the efforts of those in charge of the setting that I gave up on it and focus only on my own personal games where I can ignore the mountains of offensive changes that accumulated over the years.

But there are cases where change and growth makes for a better story than the original, like Len Wein's Swamp Thing. Alan Moore did a much better job of writing the story and characters than Wein and changed a ton of things (then it got worse when other, less talented authors took over). You can even point out radical changes for the better, like the original boring Lobo changing into the Main Man we all know and love.

Yora
2015-05-20, 10:22 AM
One complaint that seems quite common is that settings appear to lose most of their edges and get softened up to become more generic and cliched, with much of the interesting conflicts and antagonists falling away without being replaced by something better. Forgotten Realms 2nd edition and Dark Sun revised edition are pretty bad examples of that And what I heard about Warhammer 40k, some popular factions did get lots of "improvements" so that they always do the right thing ans always win without trouble in the fiction.

If you have change for the sake of change (which is the case with any longrunning commercial medi franchise), it's inevitable that some people don't like the change. But is it necessary that the setting ends up losing its original appeal by gaining a new focus, or is that a deliberate descision to reach new customers?
Movies often make the mistake of noticing that they are popular with kids and then make the series more kids friendly, but kids already liked it as it was. Does a setting automatically lose contrast and texture when it gets expanded, or is there something creators can do to counter that?

Elderand
2015-05-20, 11:04 AM
I think one factor that's not been discussed yet is how the introduction of new mechanics can screw up a setting something fierce.

The classic exemple being sorcerer becoming part of 3rd edition core and dragonlance.

Tyrrell
2015-05-20, 11:30 AM
i think that the 40K example is good in that the changes don't happen in the story.

Similarly Ars Magica 5th edition has crunch that is generally preferred to all prior editions (House Criamon being the exception in being less popular, although i vastly prefer the fifth edition version). But once again, like 40K, the story isn't being pushed forward.

I think the wise thing to do for the holders of a property is to reinvent/ revise it rather than push the timeline forward. "Ultimates" rather than next generation. Exalted second edition had a big pile of built up setting issues. I think that the announced plans of the third edition developers (who speak of their creation in encouraging terms even if they often don't communicate well with others and still don't have the first book ready despite an extra year and a half) in rebooting the exalted setting is a good one.

My seven year old son likes Transformers prime so I've seen a bit of it and I've also, (regrettably), seen a transformers movie and you tube clips of other transformers cartoons. I can see that it makes a lot more sense to reinterpret Optimus Prim, Megatron and a collection of the other characters for each new series using a clean slate and characters inspired by the previous work than it would be to try and continue to tell one story.

I think that the transition of forgotten realms to 4th edition through timeline advancement rather than reimagining was a huge mistake. I can't think of any setting that did timeline jumps well. (Although I haven't heard many complaints about the Shadowrun timeline. Did it handle this well, or have I just not been listening?)

Jay R
2015-05-20, 12:14 PM
Is it just greed that makes companies churn out more material even though they don't have any ideas how to improve the setting anymore?

No more than it's just greed that makes me work and get paid on days I'm not at my absolute best.

Great material isn't the norm; it's the exception. The fact that they produced exceptional material last year does not mean that they could produce exceptional material this year. They produce the best that they can come out with, year in and year out, but some of it's better than the rest.


Quite often the production quality of the later material is very high, but the content doesn't seem to match the older stuff. Or do the creators think they actually make the setting better?

Mostly, I suspect that the creators think they have a fan base demanding more material now.

Production schedules can account for it. Somebody slowly produces a background out of his or her love of the idea, and doesn't publish until it's ready.

The fans love it, work through it quickly, and demand more. So the company tries to provide more, as quickly as they can. But now they are working under a deadline. That's a very different situation.

Yora
2015-05-20, 12:59 PM
I think that the transition of forgotten realms to 4th edition through timeline advancement rather than reimagining was a huge mistake. I can't think of any setting that did timeline jumps well. (Although I haven't heard many complaints about the Shadowrun timeline. Did it handle this well, or have I just not been listening?)

If you feel you have to make a timeline advance, make it a big one. Long enough for everyone who lived in the old setting to have died of old age and then not telling what exactly happened in the meantime. That way people who liked the old setting don't feel like their setting got spoiled.
Forgotten Realms 4th edition did the worst possible thing and first nuked the setting and then advanced the timeline by a hundred years. That's the opposite. First spoiling the setting and then not making any use of it. Set the Spellplague a hundred years later, and I think more people would have just responded with an unimpressed meh. But telling people "sure, you can keep playing at the old date of the timeline, but please know that canonically all the stuff you see around you is going to be flattened in half a year. That's just stupid.
When they did the Knights of the Old Republic comics for Star Wars, they did it smart and went back 4,000 years. That way they could play around with pretty much anything they wanted, but it was so far back that nothing would have to spill over into the classic era. Korriban is the only thing I remember that did. Anything else has long since crumbled to dust and been forgotten and doesn't affect anything in the regular timeline.

TheCountAlucard
2015-05-20, 08:09 PM
Although I haven't heard many complaints about the Shadowrun timeline. Did it handle this well, or have I just not been listening?I complained plenty. :smalltongue:

Kami2awa
2015-05-21, 11:25 AM
40k may not change in actual setting much, except for a few things (Newcrons, the odd world being blown up, some NPCs dying), but it also has the advantage of being a lot bigger. GW could easily double the current amount of factions without having to write much fluff. Just go back to the early books and bring in some peripherally mentioned aliens, or invent some new subdivisions of the Empire.

What 40k does, like Warhammer, is change tone a lot. The setting wavers around between "over the top and awesome" to "cynical and dark" to "black comedy" and back every so often. It started as a sort of parody, then became what it was parodying in an even more exaggerated way, then continued. Same for WHF.

40K also has the advantage/get-out-clause that any published information can be viewed as in-universe propaganda or inaccurate religious dogma by one of the many, many factions. It's been acknowledged by White Dwarf for example that the fluff descriptions of Space Marines suggest they are far, far more dangerous than their in-game stats would suggest - they produced a (very) optional rules set called "Movie Marines" that lived up to the propaganda :D

erikun
2015-05-21, 12:15 PM
Note: I have not read the thread at the point of this response.

I think that taking a look at the comic book industry would give as answer to the original question. Comic have been around for a long time, and a number of them have been running continuously throughout that time. Two of my favorite Hulk stories have been Planet Hulk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Hulk) and The End (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk:_The_End)/The Last Titan. Now these were obviously not the first comics which established some high quality writing which then decayed from there; these two came out after decades of various forms of Hulk comics. The key difference, I think, is in writing and objective. Comics have been around long enough to cycle through different authors and interpretations of their subject matter, and so you'll end up seeing some good writing along with some bad. It isn't just a fantastic start than inevitably gets worse.

I think that, if someone were to go through every Star Wars story out there, there would be similar ups and downs.

The problem with RPG settings is that they are all quite new any young, and so haven't gone through similar changes. Forgotten Realms is about the only setting I can think of which has been under continuous revision since its creation. Also, there is the desire among fans for settings to mostly stay the way they are, rather than switch things up and change. This probably hasn't helped anything in allowing a setting to change for the better, as most potentially good or original changes were likely spun off into their own setting instead.