PDA

View Full Version : What makes a setting exciting instead of bland



Yora
2018-10-12, 07:57 AM
I love to do a lot of worldbuilding but every so often I look back at what I just came up with and can't help but think that it's okay and well done, but not really that interesting. There are plenty of settings that look exciting and make you want to play in them (and of course many more that aren't), but I never can really tell what makes them seem exciting.

What things have you seen in settings that make them look like exciting places to be in and not just generic places that could easily be exchanged with others?

denthor
2018-10-12, 09:00 AM
Pure imagination

On the part of your players

DMThac0
2018-10-12, 09:23 AM
Almost every good setting has one thing in common; about 6 simple descriptions that make it unique.

Let's looks at the idea of being on an island for the setting. It's been done, it's been done a lot, and it's been done to varying degrees of success.

Island of Dr. Mad Scientist:
1) Dead volcano on the island
2) Tropical forest surrounds the island
3) No natural creatures exist on the island
4) Giant compound carved into the side of the volcano
5) Strange Abominations guard and roam the island
6) Always feels like somethings watching you

Island of Ill Omen:
1) Perpetual grey storm clouds
2) Dead/dying trees all over the island
3) Strange ziggaraut half buried deep into the island
4) The ground seems to sap strength from you
5) The faint smell of rot is everywhere
6) Parts of destroyed vehicles and buildings from random places scattered about

Island of Wonders:
1) Bright and vibrant colors everywhere
2) Perpetual light, but not uncomfortable
3) Strange and beautiful creatures everywhere
4) Unbelievable structures made of and from the local flora
5) Everything worn is made of silver and gold on silk
6) There never seems a need to eat or sleep

----

The setting is a way to set up the 5 senses for the players and then a bit about what to expect from the world around them. It's a framework and reference for them to gauge how to react and respond to the environment and situations presented. Imagine Trying to run Curse of Strahd which is dark, creepy, and dangerous, then stick that story into a setting like the Feywyld. It would be quite difficult for your players to buy in to it seeing as the Feywyld is a beautiful and enchanting place. This will also help to make the world consistent, which is also key to a good setting, and allow players to suspend themselves in the fantasy world you're giving them.

Hope this gives you something to work with!

Pleh
2018-10-12, 09:30 AM
I feel like this is a question for Max Killjoy, who has been very vocal about this topic in the past. In particular, interesting setting are first and foremost coherent, which is to say they make at least an internal logical sense, given the suspension of doubt due for fantasy.

For sufficiently industrious players looking for a sandbox, this alone may be sufficient.

The next important thing is that the setting be manageably elaborate. If you can hold the whole map accuratelt in your head, it's boring. If a local map of your immediate surroundings is convoluted and illegible, it's frustrating. This says there should be some intrigue and chance for failure when PCs attempt to interact with and manipulate elements of the setting, but they should be able to navigate it successfully even if they experience setbacks or failures. Elaborate to the point that the can strategize and predict consequences to their actions, but not perfectly always so.

So far as setting, this usually means NPCs and dungeons where there is ample information on the surface, usually more to find just under the surface, and intermittantly threats to their objectives hidden in the wealth of information, flagged by small clues the observant or paranoid player could discover.

Finally, if you've managed to make your setting both coherent and sufficiently elaborate, the last element is personal engagement. Why do the players or their characters care about the world they are interacting with? It can be relationships with NPCs (protecting allies and competing with antagonists or rivals), survival of the harsh elements, wealth seeking in a land full of opportunity, uncovering a great mystery, etc. It's about connecting the heroes to their role in the setting and what that means to them.

Cozzer
2018-10-12, 09:55 AM
I would say interesting conflicts are the skeleton upon which everything else needs to be hanged on, since they're what players will actually interact with and influence.

I'm not just talking about the main good-guys-vs-bad-guys scenario, an interesting setting is full of smaller conflicts that the main characters can influence (or choose not to influence) on a regular basis. Different guilds with different approaches to adventuring, different noble families, different gods if it's very high fantasy, various nations with various ways of ruling, even just a feud between the blacksmith and the innkeeper in the starting village...

Of course, the question then becomes "what makes a conflict exciting instead of bland?". :smalltongue:

gkathellar
2018-10-12, 10:23 AM
I would suggest there are three major elements: novelty, genre interest, and aesthetic sensibility. These all bleed into each other, but it's worth addressing each separately.

Novelty comprises the appearance of originality, be it material, tonal, or structural. Material originality involves the presentation of ideas that seem unfamiliar, either because they are genuinely new or because they are reinvigorated concepts that have fallen out of use. Nobilis has a setting that runs on the logic of emotion and intuition, defined by high weirdness and meant to invoke a degree of genuine wonder in the player. Tonal originality relates to how ideas are presented. Many elements of WH40k are almost painfully derivative, but a lot of its appeal lies in a tone that alternates madcap and satirical (soccer hooligan orcs) with deeply and sincerely influenced by Medieval and Romantic styles (https://1d4chan.org/images/d/dd/Horus_vs_The_Emperor.jpg). Structural originality involves the arrangement of familiar ideas into interesting new configurations. I'd argue that Eberron doesn't really do any one thing in particular that's new, but nobody had ever really taken D&D's unacknowledged tropes and played them to the hilt before, and that's arguably what Eberron does - with a dash of early 20th-century pulp for good measure.

Genre interest is pretty much what it sounds like, but it's worth taking a moment to remember just how much this matters to people. Within certain limits, people are attracted to things that are familiar, especially in TTRPGs, where part of the appeal is, "just like this thing you like - but now you tell the story!" Dark Sun drew on an existing subgenre of "fantasy on a dying world," that had been around for quite a while and gave people the opportunity to play it. A lot of non-D&D games are explicitly genre games: WoD, Legends of the Wulin, Eclipse Phase, and more have marketing pitches that begin and end with, "come play a game in this genre you like and/or want to like." Genre mashups are at least theoretically compelling because they take two things you like and make one thing that you'll hopefully like even more. Shadowrun is made of this: people like elves, and people like cyberpunk, so obviously people will like cyberpunk with elves, right? Ravenloft is pretty much D&D + Gothic horror, but hey, that's something people wanted.

What both of the aforementioned point to is a setting's aesthetic. At the surface level, this comprises how a setting looks, in terms of descriptive language but especially in terms of illustration, which admittedly puts us non-professionals at a bit of a disadvantage. In either case, it's ... I hate to use this term, but a lot of it is brand recognition. This can be achieved through the use of a particular artist or particular style of writing, and in either case Planescape approaches the ur-example: with its ubiquitous neo-Victorian street slang and Diterlizzi's willowy, linework-and-sepia illustrations, a Planescape book is immediately recognizable and immediately interesting. Eberron and Exalted have less consistent art direction, but draw the reader in with the steady use of comic book formats and visual conventions.

There's also a deeper aesthetic kind of aesthetic appeal, one which takes place at the level of content, and I would say is more immersive and more thematic. It emerges when a work knows what it is about, emotionally speaking, and knows how to build on that subtext and how not to detract from it. This, I think, is where excitement is maintained, rather than generated. Spelljammer, for instance, is silly and intentionally throws D&D tropes on their heads even at a glance - but once you dig into the material, you realize that the it's much sillier than you imagined, and that pervasive silliness gives it a lighthearted, freewheeling atmosphere that emerges out of no particular element.

I've actually browsed some of your setting-work on these boards, and I quite liked what I saw, but I think it's sometimes a little dry. You take an intelligible, quasi-sociological approach to your subject matter, working out how you want things to fit together and look like. Personally, I like that a lot, but it's not necessarily what people engage with. Whether that's a problem is up to you, but that's my 2cp.

LibraryOgre
2018-10-12, 10:41 AM
I think it's somewhat easy to feel that way about your own work, since you've gotten down into it and know it thoroughly, but I see two big things... Engagement and Hooky-ness.

Engagement is somewhat internal to the player... do your players buy into the setting? Are they willing to engage with it? This is part of what makes more generic settings difficult sells... why should I play this "Forgotten Realms" thing when I already have Greyhawk and it works just fine? They've engaged with Greyhawk, so they're more excited about it. They can talk about Frost and Wolf Barbarians and the Valley of the Mage and the Theocracy of the Pale and all of the potential these facets have. They've thought about the game they'd like to play in where they're all agents of the Scarlett Brotherhood and aren't the Zhentarim just a cheap rip-off of that?

A setting with significant differences can help with engagement, because they're not seeing it as just a retread of the before. Playing in Dark Sun is different than Greyhawk is different than Birthright is different from Spelljammer, and in ways more profound than Forgotten Realms is different from Greyhawk and either are different than Dragonlance.

In short, if the players engage with the setting, it seems exciting. If they don't, it's less exciting.

But there's also hooky-ness, beneath the general level of engagement... what hooks are there? What is there to DO? What's going on that has places for player characters to make a difference, or at least make some money? Dragonlance, IMO, largely suffered in hookyness, because the original setting cleaved so closely to Legends and Chronicles... too much was wrapped up in those books, and not enough was laid bare elsewhere to make up for it. Dark Sun had a different hookyness problem, in that it didn't feel like you could do much of anything important... most of the gears in the game were so overpowered that you couldn't hope to face them until you were similarly overpowered (which is why I actually appreciate the first two books of the Prism Pentad... the uncertainty created by a free Tyr destabilized the region, and made it feel a lot more open... before the next three books destroyed that uncertainty by creating a new equilibrium).

When I'm writing for an RPG setting, I think the key is something that novel writers should avoid... unresolved conflict. Setting up horrible dangers that haven't QUITE happened yet, so they will when the GM wants them to. What happens when that hag gets a wyrm? Or when the Spiderslayer finally defeats the Queen of the Webs? What are some inherently unstable situations that persist until some enterprising player characters come and mess everything up? That's hookyness. That's something you can write a backstory on, and have that backstory come up again.

Martin Greywolf
2018-10-12, 11:08 AM
Well, we're not discussing worldbuilding basics here, so I'll assume that all the 'how do you feed an army of one million' details are taken care of. What a setting needs to shine is... THE THING. And THE THING can be anything you want it to be. For example.

Discworld by Terry Pratchett as a whole has just one core idea as its THING, that being that belief shapes reality, and therefore, plot contrievances happen and one in a million chance does actually work out nine times out of ten. The rest of the setting is then essentially an exploration of these ideas - people believe in a certain way the day/night cycle works, so light has to have a comparatively tiny speed, so it is explained via the magic field etc.

This then leads to a lot of characters having some sort of relationdhip with it. Rincewind wants the plot to go away and leave him alone, Granny Weatherwax hates when stories interfere and often twists them to her purposes (which are, fortunately for the Disc at large, benevolent... mostly), Cohen relishes in the whole barbarian hero thing (well, at first, and he never quite stops, just admits to drawbacks) and so on.

Of course, every book then has its own THING, but the overriding Discworld THING is still always there. Some books are more directly related to the belief thing (Hogfather, Small Gods, Wyrd Sisters), others only relate to it tangentially (Guards, Guards; Men at Arms) but it is always there.

Another good study of this in practice is One Piece - the setting is made of islands, and every one of them has its own THING, which is IMO a large reason for why OP has such a staying power. You have a shipyard island, slavery island, horror island, cake island etc etc, and every one of these settings makes what that island is matter.

So, a quick fix to a somewhat meh setting is to pick a weird idea and apply it and think it through to its limits. Making a Witcher-esque world of low magic? Okay, but what if horses had acid spit (wait, is that how camels were created)? What is the reason Genghis Khan attacked west was that he was running away from a dragon? What if owning a sword (and ONLY a sword) automatically made you at least a decent swordsman?

Darth Ultron
2018-10-12, 01:46 PM
The only word that comes close to the concept in my mind is Love.

What makes a setting exciting is when you have a creator author who loves the setting and loves what they do. This love goes into every bit of the setting, and it shows.

After all, you can tell right away when a setting was made by someone who did not care about it at all, some one who was bored, someone who is trying to hard to be diff rent, and maybe most of all someone who was just writing stuff for a job and pay.

A perfect example is Ed Greenwood, there is no denying that he loves the Forgotten Realms. You can say the same with the '80's Dragonlance team. And even beyond RPGs, think of Stan Lee, George Lucas, or Gene Ronderberry. And companies like Marvel(movies only) and Disney. They all made characters and settings that go far, far, far beyond them just being ''a fictional thing".

And it really shows through in the Current Times. Like there is a D&D Setting that Shall Not Be Named, that on like page three of the book they have to tell you how cool the setting is because it is so diverse and has room for everything in D&D. That is not love right there.....

Rhedyn
2018-10-12, 02:41 PM
If a setting is telling me it is exciting, it isn't.

Novelty, good writing, and presentation (includes art) are why I like settings. Eclipse Phase is very novel, some of the writing is good and the art is fine. It's where the lore (aka writing) becomes inconsistent that pulls me out of that setting and just makes it not make any sense. Meanwhile it's sister Nova Praxis does a much better job for me.

In books, the Wheel of Time isn't terribly novel NOW but it has enough things different from newer work to maintain some novelty but what really carries the books and the reader through them is the writing. I feel the same way about the Expanse and other books.

Meanwhile I can't stand well writing settings or books about things I don't find interesting. It doesn't matter how "good" it is, your medieval historic OSR book with no magic is of no interest to me.

To ramble more, the web novel of "I'm a spider, So what?" is about a Japanese girl who reincarnates as a spider monster in a fantasy world and has to survive in the mega-dungeon labyrinth she is born into. Very Novel, solid story, the translation is weak though. It can make reading the chapters a chore merely because the English is bad even though the other elements of the writing are good and interesting.

Something to be careful about is the danger of trying to be too clear and thorough. For example, you could describe every brick of a castle, but that would be boring so you abstract it to keep the narrative flowing and interesting. Setting books are telling a story. They are not a history textbook, you have no ethical obligation to portray your fictional history as accurate as possible. The goal is to keep it interesting.The Bible gets away with chapters and books about lineage because it is religious text your setting shouldn't do that even if you take other things from the bible like Dragons, Sea Monsters, the Behemoth, Outergod angels, demons, sorcerers, magic items, and miracles.

Knaight
2018-10-12, 03:14 PM
This is a rough heuristic, but besides the things that are just competence (decent writing, thinking through a setting, so on and so forth) I find the general hooks to be settings being distinct in a way that gels with the personal aesthetic preferences of the readers. This characteristic of being distinct needs to hold through different zoom levels, where the setting is distinct at both an extremely high level summary and at a level that will show in use in the context of small parts of individual sessions.

This leads to a simple rule of thumb. You should be able to describe a setting in a one sentence elevator pitch without using any proper nouns or setting jargon - and people who know that setting should be able to identify it from that description.

Mastikator
2018-10-12, 04:07 PM
Hooks that lead somewhere. Something to grab onto that will take you places. Details that you can pick up and look at and touch and taste. And the hardest part: NPCs that feel like real people.

Thinker
2018-10-12, 04:35 PM
For me, speaking from an RPG standpoint, there are a few things. First is competing interests that might lead to conflict. It doesn't matter too much what the nature of the conflicts are, but I'd like them to be easily identifiable when reading about the setting - is there industry versus nature? Are these two religions at odds? Do these guilds hate each other? Give me something. Open wars are OK, but I really want to see a world that is a powder-keg. You can get fun, intrigue-fueled adventures, skirmishes, extractions, escort missions, and all sorts of things to do. I don't want them spelled out. I want my imagination to run wild about them. Next, I want mystery. I want to look at a map and say, "What's over there?" I don't want the answers spelled out for me, but I might want to go on an adventure to find out (as either the GM or the player). I want the information about factions and powerful NPCs to be incomplete and I want it to be open to interpretation. Sure, Doctor Von Stickenstien is collecting body parts, but I don't want to necessarily know why. Lastly, I want things to make logical sense. You don't have to show me the logic, but I want to be able to have a sense that things could work together somehow.

Yora
2018-10-13, 05:06 AM
Hooks that lead somewhere. Something to grab onto that will take you places. Details that you can pick up and look at and touch and taste.

This seems like the most condensed version of the most essential elements. A great setting is not about the things you expect to see. A great setting is about the things you expect to do. After all, it's a game. Not a book or a movie. It's not about hearing about and seeing amazing places and creatures, it's about doing things. When you see something in fiction and would love to play a game in that world, it's really because you want to do the things you see being done. What the setting does is facilitating situations and events that require a certain setup that is unique, or at least specific to this particular world.

Maybe a better approach to designing campaign settings is not to say "I want this, and this, and this thing to be in this world", but to say "I want to make these, and these, and these things to be possible in this world",

Quertus
2018-10-13, 07:48 AM
What an interesting question.

So, personally, I'm generally not interested in the setting per se, but in the adventure. So, for me, the setting needs to be conducive to the adventure.

For the setting to be conducive to the adventure, what does the setting need? Well, it needs to have sufficient breadth to cover the players' interests over time. It needs to have sufficient depth and internal consistency to be worth looking at, investing in. It needs to be sufficiently familiar to give the players a firm starting point, yet sufficiently novel to allow for new material rather than just be a rehash of previous experiences. It needs to have sufficient elements - conflicts, NPCs, Explorables, whatever - and sufficient diversity of elements to engage the players. And these elements need to be mutable, engagable.

So, to give an example or two...

If a low-level D&D party wanders and finds a hidden village, with a half a dozen interesting pre-made NPCs (and the GM ready to flesh out more as needed), and a local "off-limits" mysterious area of floating rocks (guarded by something unknown and barely CR appropriate)?

Well, that's a rather limited selection interesting things to engage (talk to NPCs, investigate why / how / when village became hidden and unknown, and investigate the forbidden floating rocks). If the party doesn't care about any of those, there response may well be, "we add the town to our map, resupply, and move on".

The village having made the floating stones off limits means that they haven't Explored the possibilities yet - that's something that the players get to do. OTOH, you could have the village have already explored the phenomenon, already created a new school of magic and a unique martial art, already integrate floating rock into their art, their industry, their culture. This has the advantage of giving the setting a unique feel, a unique and memorable culture.

I think that the key is to find a good balance of both.

Also, pay attention how approachable the elements are. If you've got a dozen cool plots / Explorables / whatever, that all require Epic level to actually have any impact on, the party may not enjoy being first level and catching rats.

Yora
2018-10-13, 08:24 AM
Finally, if you've managed to make your setting both coherent and sufficiently elaborate, the last element is personal engagement. Why do the players or their characters care about the world they are interacting with? It can be relationships with NPCs (protecting allies and competing with antagonists or rivals), survival of the harsh elements, wealth seeking in a land full of opportunity, uncovering a great mystery, etc. It's about connecting the heroes to their role in the setting and what that means to them.

I would say interesting conflicts are the skeleton upon which everything else needs to be hanged on, since they're what players will actually interact with and influence.

I'm not just talking about the main good-guys-vs-bad-guys scenario, an interesting setting is full of smaller conflicts that the main characters can influence (or choose not to influence) on a regular basis. Different guilds with different approaches to adventuring, different noble families, different gods if it's very high fantasy, various nations with various ways of ruling, even just a feud between the blacksmith and the innkeeper in the starting village...

But there's also hooky-ness, beneath the general level of engagement... what hooks are there? What is there to DO? What's going on that has places for player characters to make a difference, or at least make some money? Dragonlance, IMO, largely suffered in hookyness, because the original setting cleaved so closely to Legends and Chronicles... too much was wrapped up in those books, and not enough was laid bare elsewhere to make up for it. Dark Sun had a different hookyness problem, in that it didn't feel like you could do much of anything important... most of the gears in the game were so overpowered that you couldn't hope to face them until you were similarly overpowered

Something I've seen repeatedly hammmered in in discussions about adventure and campaign design by several different people is Factions, Factions, Factions. And designing a campaign setting very much overlaps with designing the basics for a specific campaign, except that you are designing the basics for multiple different campaigns. And working a lot of factions and their various conflicts into a setting certainly sounds like very solid advice.
But now that I think of it, in light of the other comments here, it's not just enough to have factions and conflicts, but to make them so that players can join them and become personally invested in them. Having a big conflict in which the players are doing various third party contractor work isn't really that exciting or engaging. The adventure of such a quest can of course be really fun and actually great, but it doesn't really utilize the setting.
When I look at Star Wars and think it would be a great setting to play in, I of course don't think that it would be thrilling to play an errand boy for the Jedi Order or play Blue 9 in the Battle of Endor. I want to play a Jedi Knight or Red Leader.

I have read a lot of adventures for D&D and Pathfinder over the years, and it lies in the nature of the medium that these adventures can easily be moved to different settings within the official world, or even any other possible world. It is no surprise that virtually all of these assume the PCs to be third party contractors hired specifically for the job, and usually assume the antagonists to exist in something of a vacuum. But I feel that internalizing this approach as the only way to do it is a mistake. It creates assumptions about how campaigns work that completely ignore things that should be obvious. There really isn't anything revolutionary or original about the idea that the players are heroic representatives of their factions.

LibraryOgre
2018-10-13, 09:04 AM
On the faction front, I think an important part is that you should seldom have just two factions in an area. Two factions may predominate, but there should be a bunch of other factions, each of whom want something, and whose goals will sometimes, but not always, align with another faction.

Something I did when expanding the civilian side of Rifts Coalition States (http://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2015/04/cs-civil-society.html) was talk about factions within the society. Sure, there's the big Pro-Emperor faction that the books talk about, but what about the other, smaller, factions who might have influence, or form alliances with each other?

And, if you use alignment, look at ways that groups of similar alignment will oppose each other. Not just good/evil or law/chaos clashes, but also good/good or good/neutral, or evil/evil and evil/neutral clashes.

Cluedrew
2018-10-13, 09:21 AM
A setting is exciting if you get excited about it, so I think that is one mostly about its initial hook. Staying power of course is also great, but I think that is a different issue.

So why do people get excited about settings? Because they want to play in them. This is where I stop doing the replace the word with its effective definition thing. Now I get to the question: "So why do people want to play in a setting after there initial look at it?" and requires more thought.

Maybe the novelty of it intrigues them. Maybe it has cool elements they want to explore. But for me those things just want to make me read more about them, not actually play in them. Not sure how much that generalizes, but I definitely feel that what makes a book or movie exciting is different than that of a game setting. There is overlap of course but still some important differences. As a prime example, books work quite well if there is a main conflict, because that is what the story will be about. Game settings seem to benefit from more than one source of conflict, you can pick and choose and bring different elements together in semi-unpredictable ways. And from an immediacy to it all, there have been stories I am not sure what they will be about, but in a game the chains of possible actions and reactions should be visible, just clear enough that you can guess at them but only guess so you have to play and find out. And these chains should start right out of the gate. Maybe they will be really long, but I don't think they should start late.

At least that is how it works for me. It is a little bit messy though, but I think I have a nice summation: Exciting settings make you want to do things in them.

Max_Killjoy
2018-10-13, 09:27 AM
I feel like this is a question for Max Killjoy, who has been very vocal about this topic in the past.


No pressure...

I'll dig into this later today when I'm back home.

Nifft
2018-10-13, 10:50 AM
An exciting setting...

- Allows character concepts that I find interesting.

- Permits / encourages conflicts that I find interesting -- that can be conflict types, conflict targets, or conflict results.

- Has some evocative / mysterious / wondrous elements which aren't fully explained, and yet I trust the GM to flesh them out in a way that I expect to find interesting.

Slipperychicken
2018-10-13, 11:18 AM
Stories are what make me interested, and setting is just one component of storytelling. Setting alone does not excite me unless someone has slipped one or more good stories into it.

When people claim to have found an "interesting setting" or "interesting character", I think what they're really interested by is one or more stories that either has already been told, or that they imagine could involve it.

Quertus
2018-10-13, 03:35 PM
Stories are what make me interested, and setting is just one component of storytelling. Setting alone does not excite me unless someone has slipped one or more good stories into it.

When people claim to have found an "interesting setting" or "interesting character", I think what they're really interested by is one or more stories that either has already been told, or that they imagine could involve it.

So, let's say that I find a really bad group, with a really bad GM, playing fatal. I could join them, knowing that I'd gain some really amazing horror stories. But I walk away. Why?

My guess is, it's not just the stories, but the process one goes through to get to those stories, that matters. Kinda like the theory that the ends justify the means, but the means are part of the ends, too.

Kadzar
2018-10-13, 07:43 PM
Something I've seen repeatedly hammmered in in discussions about adventure and campaign design by several different people is Factions, Factions, Factions. And designing a campaign setting very much overlaps with designing the basics for a specific campaign, except that you are designing the basics for multiple different campaigns. And working a lot of factions and their various conflicts into a setting certainly sounds like very solid advice.
But now that I think of it, in light of the other comments here, it's not just enough to have factions and conflicts, but to make them so that players can join them and become personally invested in them. Having a big conflict in which the players are doing various third party contractor work isn't really that exciting or engaging. The adventure of such a quest can of course be really fun and actually great, but it doesn't really utilize the setting.
When I look at Star Wars and think it would be a great setting to play in, I of course don't think that it would be thrilling to play an errand boy for the Jedi Order or play Blue 9 in the Battle of Endor. I want to play a Jedi Knight or Red Leader.

I have read a lot of adventures for D&D and Pathfinder over the years, and it lies in the nature of the medium that these adventures can easily be moved to different settings within the official world, or even any other possible world. It is no surprise that virtually all of these assume the PCs to be third party contractors hired specifically for the job, and usually assume the antagonists to exist in something of a vacuum. But I feel that internalizing this approach as the only way to do it is a mistake. It creates assumptions about how campaigns work that completely ignore things that should be obvious. There really isn't anything revolutionary or original about the idea that the players are heroic representatives of their factions.

Yeah, the advice to put in factions is sort of close to a good idea, but it seems like people giving advice without knowing the reasoning behind it. I'd say it's close to a good idea because it can provide groups of people besides the PCs who want things. On the other hand, if done poorly, they can just end up one-dimensional NPCs who just dole out quests under the rationale that it will help their cause in some vague way.

So I'd say it's important for your NPCs (both as groups and individuals) to have goals and that your players be able to interact with those goals in some way, whether by thwarting them or doing something for them in exchange for some kind of favor. And then, what one faction wants to do, or wants the players to do, will likely conflict with another faction in some way, and if the players want something from both factions, they'll have to resolve that in some way.

Also, factions should be fractal, in a way. It should be possible to divide a faction down to several sub-factions (and possibly divide those sub-factions into sub-sub-factions, and so on down to the individual level) between people who have the same basic goals but with different priorities or opinions about how to approach things or their own ambitions. Not that you need to define these when coming up with factions, but they're something to keep in mind as possible problems, complications, or opportunities for players.

So, say they fail a mission for their patron; it's not likely such a thing will hurt their faction too much, but it could hurt their prestige and possibly give more power to their rival. Or maybe they're trying to get in with the local thieves' guild. There's no way they're going to be able to talk with the higher-ups, but perhaps, if they do some work for the local fence, maybe he could put in a good word for them?

Also, a nice thing about factions is that, even if the players manage to kill off the main villain, someone within the organization can rise up to take their place. I wouldn't do this too much, as overuse could make players feel like their actions have no real effect on the world, but sometimes it is appropriate for someone to step into a vacuum of power and take over, albeit likely with some change in priorities and/or methods. They may continue pursuit of their predecessor's plot, or, perhaps more menacingly, abandon it, thank the players for helping eliminate their competition, and leave them wondering whether they've actually made things better or worse.

Now, I'm not actually sure how much this has to do with setting, other than I guess to say you should put such things in your settings?

Pleh
2018-10-13, 09:25 PM
Factions, Factions, Factions.

Unless you're often wandering through untamed wilderness or a dungeon full of monsters (who may or may not be aligned with any factions).

Yes, in most concerns about Setting, you want to focus on the civilized world and that means Factions.

But it's not the end of the story either. Unless your setting is intended to never leave a mega metropolis, there should probably be some uncivilized wilderness (or dare I say, Savage) encounters to punctuate the social intrigue and break up the action.

Some of my favorite features about some of my hand crafted settings are about the world's natural geography and how it affects the inhabitants. For example, living between an enormous mountain range and the coast just south of the northern arctic causes water to constantly blow inland from the ocean only to be wrung out by the mountain slopes. The lowlands between are hyper hydrated so there is plenty of water for crops, but the minerals are washed out so the soil is poor. Most peasants are poor and rely more on hunting and river fishing than agriculture. The elves living just off the coast on their feylike island homes reap the benefits of all the rich lowland silt washing over their beaches. And so on.

Darth Ultron
2018-10-14, 05:41 PM
This seems like the most condensed version of the most essential elements. A great setting is not about the things you expect to see. A great setting is about the things you expect to do.

I think that is way too short sighted. You are talking more about a simple hook or gimmick. Like ''wow the setting has ninja pirates!". Sure it sounds cool, to some, and some people will like doing that.....for a while.

The problem is a setting should not rely on such a simple cheap hook gimmick. The setting should provide an exciting world you can make your own adventures in...not just a hook so you can do one cool thing. Like sure you run a ninja pirate game in the setting...maybe for a whole year.....but then people will be like...eh, ''can't we do something else, anything else?" And you look back at the setting, and all it has is ''wow, did you see the cool ninja pirates'"?



After all, it's a game. Not a book or a movie. It's not about hearing about and seeing amazing places and creatures, it's about doing things.

I don't think this is true. A story description gives a great feeling of being ''there" in the setting and does make people feel like they want to BE there, in the setting, doing those things.



For the setting to be conducive to the adventure, what does the setting need? Well, it needs to have sufficient breadth to cover the players' interests over time.

Very true.



It needs to have sufficient depth and internal consistency to be worth looking at, investing in.

True.



It needs to be sufficiently familiar to give the players a firm starting point, yet sufficiently novel to allow for new material rather than just be a rehash of previous experiences.

Disagree here. I think the ''firm starting point" is a bad idea. Familiar is mostly bad. You want to avoid, the ''we have x, but different".



It needs to have sufficient elements - conflicts, NPCs, Explorables, whatever - and sufficient diversity of elements to engage the players. And these elements need to be mutable, engagable.

Yes.

The Jack
2018-10-15, 11:18 AM
I think a big thing is, how did that fool say it... you want a 'dichotomy' of ideas. Factions with extremely different ways of looking at the world are great ways to grab player interest. You never want one side to be entirely wrong, but you don't want a side to be entirely right. Factions need compelling points to make and compelling flaws to go with them.
Great examples can be found with
The New California Republic and Ceasar's legion .
Andrew Ryan's Rapture.
Lex Luthor (writer dependent)
Traditions and Technocracy.


Or, y'know, they can have the exact same flaws and merits and be just as good and bad for it. The important thing is exploring ideas. Now, the problem with that is that you can get pretty unrealistic with it IE All elves should die, Klingons are doomed,WoD has misandrist-feminist vampires even though the vampiric condition itself would mostly eliminate sexism between vampires, only a child would want to weaponize dinosaurs for military applications, but some people aren't that smart, and can have fun with that kinda stuff.

Thinker
2018-10-15, 01:30 PM
This is sort of drifting into the territory not so much of "have factions", but of "have themes". Your themes should support ideas you want to explore with your world. Factions are one way to express that, but you can also have individual people, monsters, game mechanics, gods, and simple world mechanics that support your themes.

LibraryOgre
2018-10-16, 08:55 AM
I think a big thing is, how did that fool say it... you want a 'dichotomy' of ideas. Factions with extremely different ways of looking at the world are great ways to grab player interest. You never want one side to be entirely wrong, but you don't want a side to be entirely right. Factions need compelling points to make and compelling flaws to go with them.
Great examples can be found with
The New California Republic and Ceasar's legion .
Andrew Ryan's Rapture.
Lex Luthor (writer dependent)
Traditions and Technocracy.


Or, y'know, they can have the exact same flaws and merits and be just as good and bad for it. The important thing is exploring ideas. Now, the problem with that is that you can get pretty unrealistic with it IE All elves should die, Klingons are doomed,WoD has misandrist-feminist vampires even though the vampiric condition itself would mostly eliminate sexism between vampires, only a child would want to weaponize dinosaurs for military applications, but some people aren't that smart, and can have fun with that kinda stuff.

However, I'd say that the dichotomy is not enough... you need the factions between the big gears, too. Take NCR/Caesar's Legion, for example. Those are the big factions, sure, but you've also got House and the Families. You've got the Fiends, and Primm, and the Khans, and the Remnants, and the Super Mutants, and the Boomers, all of whom have stakes and interests in the big dichotomy. And if you present everything as being part of the big dichotomy, you wind up with a lot of untilled earth.

Mendicant
2018-10-16, 10:59 AM
Factions are more key than big themes, because factions are full of NPCs. I don't think I've ever had a player who was nearly as motivated by a theme or idea as a couple good NPCs, at least not once the game was actually running.

The Jack
2018-10-16, 11:21 AM
Were the fiends relevant at all for the narrative? They were just psycho raiders.

Yes, I agree. The little factions were very nice in that narrative because they were contrastable and comparable to everyone else.

Big themes and ideas you can get behind or oppose.
Then a few curveballs in there to skew with things and change your understanding of how things work.

Legion's a great example. Everyone says they're monsters, you likely get introduced to them after they butchered a town too, but when you meet the leader, he's not the edgelord/monster you expect, but a very reasonable dude. Meanwhile, the NCR is just full of more and more shortcommings as they close in on what america used to be before the war.

Thinker
2018-10-16, 12:33 PM
Factions are more key than big themes, because factions are full of NPCs. I don't think I've ever had a player who was nearly as motivated by a theme or idea as a couple good NPCs, at least not once the game was actually running.

You never call a theme by its name, but they are important. Themes give factions life. They connect ideas in a setting. They are the difference between a warrior who can go into combat and gain extra damage against his foes and a paragon of virtue who smites his enemies with holy fervor. They're the difference between a gang of smugglers that hangs around the docks and a rebel group who smuggles contraband into the city right under the nose of the dark overlord. It might seem like I'm just describing things with more detail in my examples. That is true to an extent, but my descriptions flow from the themes I have decided I want for my world. They tell the audience what this game is going to be about and invites exploration of the setting. A warrior fighting enemies is a common expectation and isn't all that interesting, but a holy warrior with a righteous fury is. Rebellion against a dark overlord might be interesting, whether we involve smugglers or not. Smugglers aren't interesting on their own.

LibraryOgre
2018-10-16, 12:45 PM
Were the fiends relevant at all for the narrative? They were just psycho raiders.

They were also an aspect of the NCR's war... they weren't just battling the Legion, they were dealing with what amounted to a native insurgency from several different groups... the Khans and the Fiends being two aspects of this. Given the barrier created by Fiend Territory, and their impact on NCR morale when they have to turn to face the Legion (I'm thinking of Cook-Cook), they are one of those lesser factions that work between the spaces left by the big ones.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-16, 01:43 PM
For me, it's possible to have too many moving parts, factions, etc. I've found that players really like to feel they can make a difference in the setting. If the setting feels so full of factions, NPCs, etc. that the players feel like they're inconsequential (or that nothing they do matters even at the small scale), it's easy to get disengaged.

I run a living-world setting where many groups run concurrently (and in serial). Each group that finishes a campaign and retires their character leaves their mark on the world. PCs become NPCs. Organizations they found persist. Often the players play new characters that may interact with or may hear the stories of other people interacting with them.

I've had characters participate in a cataclysm. I knew beforehand that the world as we knew it was going to end...but left it up to the players to decide exactly how it would end and what the new world would look like on several scales.

This seems to draw them in the most--the idea that their actions have consequences that go beyond the present day, beyond the current session.

Cluedrew
2018-10-16, 09:36 PM
Factions? I don't get it.

I mean factions are kind of reducing the things you can fight for or try to be to an itemized list. If you want to go for choices in a video game sure. But why limit it to that in a table-top game? I mean groups of people who want to do things are fine, and should exist, but... I don't get defining a setting around them.

The biggest faction in my story is people who are trying to live safely and comfortably. There are a lot of them.

Pelle
2018-10-17, 05:29 AM
Factions? I don't get it.

I mean factions are kind of reducing the things you can fight for or try to be to an itemized list. If you want to go for choices in a video game sure. But why limit it to that in a table-top game? I mean groups of people who want to do things are fine, and should exist, but... I don't get defining a setting around them.

The biggest faction in my story is people who are trying to live safely and comfortably. There are a lot of them.

I think it's mostly about ensuring that there's lots of conflict potential in the setting, by having multiple parties with different agendas. Depending on the cause, there are always some that will support you and some that will work against you, and you can play them off against each other. Doesn't have to limit anything, but it's just something to check off that you have to ensure a minimum space for adventure. After all, if everyone agrees and tries to live safely and comfortably together without any conflicts whatsoever, it's going to be a pretty boring game. Just having different factions that agrees that this is the goal, but completely disagree about how to achieve it, is going to make it much more interesting. Just like real life politics.

LibraryOgre
2018-10-17, 11:08 AM
Factions? I don't get it.

I mean factions are kind of reducing the things you can fight for or try to be to an itemized list. If you want to go for choices in a video game sure. But why limit it to that in a table-top game? I mean groups of people who want to do things are fine, and should exist, but... I don't get defining a setting around them.

The biggest faction in my story is people who are trying to live safely and comfortably. There are a lot of them.

Which is a completely valid faction. But you've also got the band of thieves who want those people to be prosperous so they can rob them. You have the band of guards who want to stop those thieves. You have the leaders of those guards who have a separate agenda, in that they want the thieves pushed into a neighboring province so they'll be ripe for conquest. You have the bandits who prey upon the trade routes. You have the orcs who ALSO prey upon the trade routes, so the bandits might be in a war against the orcs for the right to steal things. You might have a red dragon who is a faction in and of himself, such is his power.

Factions are groups of people with a goal. They're the politics of a setting. Knowing those goals, their intersects, and their conflicts lets you sketch which way things are likely to move. When it comes to individuals, their goals may or may not completely mesh with those of any factions they are associated with... an individual thief may largely be on the "Rob Everyone" side, like the rest of her fellows, but have a particular interest in keeping this one little girl safe, and so will go against her faction if that girl is threatened. A raider boss may be religious and refuse to hit caravans of pilgrims, despite the money they carry. An orc boss may have a sense of honor and that guides how he treats captives. That doesn't make them less part of their factions, just individuals who wobble a little bit, even though they go the way everyone else goes.

kyoryu
2018-10-17, 01:50 PM
I think it's useful to look at two aspects of it - how do you sell the setting, and how do you keep people engaged with the setting?

To sell a setting, you need a hook - something that makes it stand out from the crowd, at least some key difference that makes people go "this is neat!" If I want Generic Fantasy Setting, there's enough of them that I don't really need yours. I don't care how much depth you've put into it, Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk and Glorantha exist, why wouldn't I just grab them? (If this is a setting for a home game, that's enough hook, because you're getting people to play your game, not adopt your setting as a separate entity).

To keep people engaged, it's all about NPCs and conflicts. That's what people really, truly care about. Over time, also, people will invest themselves emotionally in your setting, so getting them to do that, and feel they can leave their mark on the world in some way, helps keep people engaged. The first is more useful as a setting publisher, the second as a GM.

Nifft
2018-10-17, 03:43 PM
(If this is a setting for a home game, that's enough hook, because you're getting people to play your game, not adopt your setting as a separate entity). I think this is an important insight. What's necessary to sell books isn't necessarily what's important or even useful for a DM who wants to run a game.

Generic settings can be great for running real games. At that point, the DM is the sales pitch -- you trust that DM to run a good game, so you don't need the setting to hook your interest.


To keep people engaged, it's all about NPCs and conflicts. That's what people really, truly care about. Over time, also, people will invest themselves emotionally in your setting, so getting them to do that, and feel they can leave their mark on the world in some way, helps keep people engaged. The first is more useful as a setting publisher, the second as a GM. Mmm. Not sure about the NPCs thing.

When I look at Greyhawk, I think: "Hey, these guys got their names on the coolest spells & items in the setting. I want to do that, too." But it's up to a DM to allow PCs to do cool new things, and then incorporate those cool things into the setting going forward. Greyhawk is a good example of a setting where PCs were allowed to matter, but your individual DM needs to follow that example rather than keeping your Wizard forever inferior to legends like Mordenkeinen. The setting helps in that it sets precedent in a good way, but each DM needs to follow through.

In contrast, when I look at the Forgotten Realms, I think: "Hey, these guys are untouchable. The DM will need them all to live so they can give us quests or whatever going forward. These guys have books written about them, and the DM likes those books -- so maybe the DM likes these NPCs than my PC. Better not rock the boat." The DM could allow the PCs to be movers & shakers, but it's not the default -- world-shaking events occur regularly, and they're always independent of the PCs. The important, named things in the setting are usually elements from novels, not former PCs who survived 10 whole levels and retired. The setting sets a bad precedent in terms of PC agency -- though of course any DM could defy the setting, or ignore all the stuff from the books, but at that point why use the setting?

When I think about Eberron: "Oh right, there are probably NPCs. I could look them up when I need some. But before I bother doing that, let's figure out which layer of the setting this game will be about -- Urban investigation? Politics & espionage? Archeology & exploration? Piracy? Nation-building? Founding a new religion? Preventing a war in the face of Emerald Claw terrorism? Waging a war against the fiends / aberrations / dragons / elves / Inspired / Mournlanders?" When I've laid the groundwork for an Eberron game, the NPCs in the setting book are never vital to the high concept. If the game is going to be about a shadowy trade-war between actors on the level of Dragonmarked Houses or nation-states, then I can lay the foundations for the campaign without knowing any NPC names. Looking up NPC names later is useful, and the books have good NPCs with a lot of work-saving utility value, but the NPCs don't sell the setting for me. In a big way, this is what makes Eberron such a pleasure to play and run -- the fact that the game is about the PCs really permeates the books.

kyoryu
2018-10-17, 03:55 PM
Mmm. Not sure about the NPCs thing.

...

the fact that the game is about the PCs really permeates the books.

Godlike NPCs that cannot be messed with are a bad precedent, yes. But that's not what I mean.

What I mean is the NPCs that the players interact with on a regular basis, come to know and develop relationships with, and who change over time. These might be allies or foes, but they're the primary things that the players bounce off of either way. These might not be the NPCs from the setting books, but they're vitally important. In any of hte games you've described, you would still have these types of NPCs.

Nifft
2018-10-17, 04:04 PM
Godlike NPCs that cannot be messed with are a bad precedent, yes. But that's not what I mean.

What I mean is the NPCs that the players interact with on a regular basis, come to know and develop relationships with, and who change over time. These might be allies or foes, but they're the primary things that the players bounce off of either way. These might not be the NPCs from the setting books, but they're vitally important. In any of hte games you've described, you would still have these types of NPCs.

Sure, but the NPCs which the PCs meet and interact with are (almost?) never the NPCs which feature in the setting's books.

"Almost" in scare-parens because I can't remember using a famous NPC in that way... but it's possible that I did, briefly. Can't rule it out.

Anyway, my point is that in my experience the NPCs who sell the books aren't the NPCs who add value to the campaign -- except as adversaries, maybe? Using a famous NPC as an antagonist might be the exception.

gkathellar
2018-10-17, 05:32 PM
Factions? I don't get it.

I mean factions are kind of reducing the things you can fight for or try to be to an itemized list. If you want to go for choices in a video game sure. But why limit it to that in a table-top game? I mean groups of people who want to do things are fine, and should exist, but... I don't get defining a setting around them.

The biggest faction in my story is people who are trying to live safely and comfortably. There are a lot of them.

Well, compare and contrast Planescape, perhaps the ur-feuding factions setting: the Free League was probably the single largest group, and was carefully curated to have many of the psychological benefits of Faction membership to the player without actually requiring it. Each Faction was, among other things, a way for players to feel, “clued in,” to the setting - opinionated and aware of some deeper idea behind it. In the case of Indeps, that opinion was, “to hell with all this faction noise.” And if you didn’t even want that, you were perfectly able to be one of the masses of Clueless. Essentially, the factions were used to give non-membership a flavor.

Jay R
2018-10-17, 06:44 PM
Factions? I don't get it.

I mean factions are kind of reducing the things you can fight for or try to be to an itemized list. If you want to go for choices in a video game sure. But why limit it to that in a table-top game? I mean groups of people who want to do things are fine, and should exist, but... I don't get defining a setting around them.

The biggest faction in my story is people who are trying to live safely and comfortably. There are a lot of them.

In Dumas's Three Musketeers, much of the excitement comes from the Cardinal vs. King politics, played out through the musketeers and Cardinal's guards.

Much of the Harry Potter setting is defined by Slytherin vs Gryffindor, and then escalating to Hogwarts vs. Beauxbaton vs. Durmstrang, the Order of the Phoenix vs. the Death Eaters, etc.

Zorro defends the farmers from the Alcalde's men.

Old Narnia vs. the White Witch.
Telmarines vs. Narnians, and where should Caspian's loyalties lie?
Narnia vs. Calormen

Starks vs. Lannisters, with the conflicting loyalties of the Tyrells, Boltons, Freys, Targaryens, etc, and which side does Jon really belong to?

York vs. Lancaster, and how does each noble house respond?
Axis vs. Allies
Normans vs. Saxons, personified by the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood


What complex setting for adventure stories doesn't have pre-existing factions that affect character choices?

ExLibrisMortis
2018-10-17, 07:35 PM
Factions exist as a community of values (at least nominally), traditions, beliefs, etcetera, sustained by organizational intertia (which may cause it to drift). I'd say each faction should have a reasonably consistent and defensible set of values and beliefs (again, at least nominally) that the player can choose to side with. Essentially, by writing factions, you are providing the player with information on what beliefs their character can reasonably hold within the setting, which values would be rare to prioritize, and so on, from an argument-counterargument perspective.

Quertus
2018-10-18, 12:49 PM
So, is the existence of the Death Eaters and He Who Must Not Be Named what makes Harry Potter an exciting setting? Or them, plus the existence of factions that oppose them? I'd have to say no.

Personally, I'd love to play in a world of wanded magic, where Wizards and magical creatures live side by side with and somehow hidden from the mundane world. Where animated statues and people in paintings guard every-changing castles that are bigger on the inside. Where magical education is about as inefficient as possible, and probably more dangerous than D&D adventures (and, thus, clearly in need of reform). Where the Wizards are incomprehensibly ignorant of both their own magical world, and of the growing muggle world (and, thus, there's lots of room for PCs to do things, make improvements, etc). Where spell research is potentially fatal... OK, maybe not that last one.

I don't look at Harry Potter and say, "I'd love to play as a member of the Order the Phoenix fighting the Death Eaters". For a game say in that universe, I'd like to be a muggle-born teacher fighting for education reform, an aurer(sp?) using Mindrape (Obliviate) to make the world a better place, or a student at a better school than Hogwarts, learning to fight the supernatural.

Thinker
2018-10-18, 01:47 PM
In Dumas's Three Musketeers, much of the excitement comes from the Cardinal vs. King politics, played out through the musketeers and Cardinal's guards.

Much of the Harry Potter setting is defined by Slytherin vs Gryffindor, and then escalating to Hogwarts vs. Beauxbaton vs. Durmstrang, the Order of the Phoenix vs. the Death Eaters, etc.

Zorro defends the farmers from the Alcalde's men.

Old Narnia vs. the White Witch.
Telmarines vs. Narnians, and where should Caspian's loyalties lie?
Narnia vs. Calormen

Starks vs. Lannisters, with the conflicting loyalties of the Tyrells, Boltons, Freys, Targaryens, etc, and which side does Jon really belong to?

York vs. Lancaster, and how does each noble house respond?
Axis vs. Allies
Normans vs. Saxons, personified by the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood


What complex setting for adventure stories doesn't have pre-existing factions that affect character choices?

The factions aren't what make the stories interesting. It's the themes that they represent.
A major theme of Harry Potter is the struggle against tyranny and oppression. Tyranny and oppression are personified by the Death Eaters, Professor Umbridge, and Voldemort. The fact that they're part of factions has little to do with it.

The White Witch versus the Children are themes about wickedness versus righteousness and about the nature of legitimacy: might versus holiness.

The factions themselves aren't what make it interesting, it's what those factions represent. In Prince Caspian, you had members of the Prince's side try to summon the White Witch to aid their cause, which wasn't interesting because there was discord within the faction, but because the discord represented temptation to an easier, but more wicked path.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-18, 02:28 PM
The factions aren't what make the stories interesting. It's the themes that they represent.
A major theme of Harry Potter is the struggle against tyranny and oppression. Tyranny and oppression are personified by the Death Eaters, Professor Umbridge, and Voldemort. The fact that they're part of factions has little to do with it.

The White Witch versus the Children are themes about wickedness versus righteousness and about the nature of legitimacy: might versus holiness.

The factions themselves aren't what make it interesting, it's what those factions represent. In Prince Caspian, you had members of the Prince's side try to summon the White Witch to aid their cause, which wasn't interesting because there was discord within the faction, but because the discord represented temptation to an easier, but more wicked path.

Not to me. Themes are secondary, emergent properties. I don't care about analyzing the setting like literature--sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I put lots of things in the setting because it makes sense or because I like the aesthetic. Or maybe because I'm making a call-back to another game or piece of fiction (my portal network is shaped like Stargates with the DHD). There are no "themes" here, just aesthetics.

Quertus
2018-10-18, 04:24 PM
Not to me. Themes are secondary, emergent properties. I don't care about analyzing the setting like literature--sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I put lots of things in the setting because it makes sense or because I like the aesthetic. Or maybe because I'm making a call-back to another game or piece of fiction (my portal network is shaped like Stargates with the DHD). There are no "themes" here, just aesthetics.

One of the things I like about Dresden is that, if you look at it on the surface, it works; if you look at the underlying meaning / themes (or, at least, what I take them to be), it still works.

Something that has great, deep, meaningful themes beneath the surface, but doesn't work at the surface level? I have no tolerance for that.

kyoryu
2018-10-18, 04:52 PM
One of the things I like about Dresden is that, if you look at it on the surface, it works; if you look at the underlying meaning / themes (or, at least, what I take them to be), it still works.

Something that has great, deep, meaningful themes beneath the surface, but doesn't work at the surface level? I have no tolerance for that.

So much this.

I think that's about 90% of Zack Snyder's problem.

The Jack
2018-10-18, 05:09 PM
The thing with good themes is that you don't have to realise that they're there to go along with them. A lot of stuff just reinforces the things we already believe in, so we don't really pick up on it. For example
I spent many minutes watching a video essay guy whining about the line 'it's just business' and how businessmen are normally depicted as evil in fiction when he's all pro-business. But to me, business being often unpleasant was just my reality, so I didn't notice and only really had a problem with it when it was in mustache twirling territory.

Or, we could look at the song of ice and fire series.
Because the theme is, if you make mistakes, you die. That seems so powerful when we're so used to plot armour (I hear the show wears that a lot) But the SoiaF books are, with few exceptions, going for a reality where choices matter.
...And also it leans on the deconstruction of the knight too much. It's a little too pessimistic to really be realist some times. It ain't grimdark, but it seems worse than it should be.

Theoboldi
2018-10-18, 05:17 PM
Not to me. Themes are secondary, emergent properties. I don't care about analyzing the setting like literature--sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I put lots of things in the setting because it makes sense or because I like the aesthetic. Or maybe because I'm making a call-back to another game or piece of fiction (my portal network is shaped like Stargates with the DHD). There are no "themes" here, just aesthetics.

I don't think it's so much a matter of analysis, as it is a matter of the setting giving a specific kind of feeling.

At least for me, when I look for a setting, it is vastly more important that it has a strong identity and gives me a good idea of the kinds of stories it encourages. Factions I usually have little care for, unless they have a decent hook that lets me play out a story I would like to explore with them, or they add to the overall atmosphere of the setting. (Which is kinda funny cause when it comes to game systems I want the complete opposite of that. Something generic enough to fit any particular setting that strikes my fancy.

Can't have a grand good versus evil epic without an evil empire and some scrappy rebels, after all. :P

I guess you could say that themes are an emergent thing that comes about as a result of all the other parts, but that does not make them any less central and highly important to making a setting stand out, at least for me.

And that's very much a YMMV thing, I fully admit. There are plenty of well-written settings full of thought-out organisations that I find utterly boring because they feel directionless and generic to me, despite whatever uniqueness they may have in actual scenarios and aesthetics.

kyoryu
2018-10-18, 05:44 PM
Or, we could look at the song of ice and fire series.
Because the theme is, if you make mistakes, you die. That seems so powerful when we're so used to plot armour (I hear the show wears that a lot) But the SoiaF books are, with few exceptions, going for a reality where choices matter.
...And also it leans on the deconstruction of the knight too much. It's a little too pessimistic to really be realist some times. It ain't grimdark, but it seems worse than it should be.

Eh, dunno if I agree with the first bit. I think they pull a fast one with who the protagonists "really are". The people you think are the protagonists aren't - the ones that are have ridiculous levels of plot armor.

Max_Killjoy
2018-10-18, 05:44 PM
So, is the existence of the Death Eaters and He Who Must Not Be Named what makes Harry Potter an exciting setting? Or them, plus the existence of factions that oppose them? I'd have to say no.

Personally, I'd love to play in a world of wanded magic, where Wizards and magical creatures live side by side with and somehow hidden from the mundane world. Where animated statues and people in paintings guard every-changing castles that are bigger on the inside. Where magical education is about as inefficient as possible, and probably more dangerous than D&D adventures (and, thus, clearly in need of reform). Where the Wizards are incomprehensibly ignorant of both their own magical world, and of the growing muggle world (and, thus, there's lots of room for PCs to do things, make improvements, etc). Where spell research is potentially fatal... OK, maybe not that last one.

I don't look at Harry Potter and say, "I'd love to play as a member of the Order the Phoenix fighting the Death Eaters". For a game say in that universe, I'd like to be a muggle-born teacher fighting for education reform, an aurer(sp?) using Mindrape (Obliviate) to make the world a better place, or a student at a better school than Hogwarts, learning to fight the supernatural.

The post-"war" Potterverse gives the impression of being a really interesting setting to game in -- if some of the more jarring "worldbuilding takes a back seat to whimsy, fancy, and faerie tale" elements could be reconciled a touch.

After wars against would-be tyrants, there are almost certain to be allies, supporters, and servants of the nascent regime out there still, to be hunted down in some cases.

In the chaos that follows, do other, more "petty" bad actors make their bids for power or try to seize what they can while everyone is still distracted or reeling?

Are there Death Eaters who refuse to believe that their leader is dead, insisting that he'll rise yet again as he did before?

Does past association with Voldy's movement make one ineligible for Ministry service? Or other jobs?

Are families treated as guilty by association? Are friends?

What's it like the the ministry as people like Potter start taking positions of power (recall he becomes an Auror and moves up the ranks), and reformers vie with restorationists?

There seems to be an implication that the "war" is over and the recovery simply beings after Voldy is destroyed, and to me, that seems entirely too clean and neat... I'd think that there'd be lingering paranoia and recrimination and a very painful process of working through all the after-affects.

Max_Killjoy
2018-10-18, 05:48 PM
Not to me. Themes are secondary, emergent properties. I don't care about analyzing the setting like literature--sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I put lots of things in the setting because it makes sense or because I like the aesthetic. Or maybe because I'm making a call-back to another game or piece of fiction (my portal network is shaped like Stargates with the DHD). There are no "themes" here, just aesthetics.

Likewise.

I'm not concerned with themes, I'm just trying to make settings that make sense and have room for the players/PCs to move and have fun and so on.

Gnoman
2018-10-19, 12:11 AM
The key goal I look at when designing settings is to check off the scales. A setting should have interesting dynamics at every "scale" you can look at it from. This varies from setting to setting - a world without active deities doesn't need to be analyzed from a deific scale, for example -, but the general rule is that you need enough small-scale stuff to interest the players directly, while having enough larger-scale going-ons to give the small-scale stuff meaning and context.

If the players just fight off contextless orc raids or raid random dungeons, it doesn't matter how tactically interesting the battles are, or how involved exploring the dungeons gets. Eventually, the meaninglessness of the situation is going to bland-out the fun. This is a "large scale" failure.

Likewise, a full scale war between orcs and men will quickly become ho-hum if all the players can do is follow the army along and skirmish. This is a "small-scale" failure.


Now, put the two together - the players are parrying an attempt to widen the war into new areas, while securing vital artifacts and treasures to build up this area for a counter-attack. Now you have interesting small-scale gameplay that has large-scale context and repercussions.

This is, of course, an extremely simplified example, but illustrates the concept.

Lorsa
2018-10-19, 08:23 AM
I love to do a lot of worldbuilding but every so often I look back at what I just came up with and can't help but think that it's okay and well done, but not really that interesting. There are plenty of settings that look exciting and make you want to play in them (and of course many more that aren't), but I never can really tell what makes them seem exciting.

What things have you seen in settings that make them look like exciting places to be in and not just generic places that could easily be exchanged with others?

IF your question is simply "what makes a setting look exciting for me to play RPGs in", the answer is very simple.

The amount of adventures I can easily envision taking place inside it.

If I read a setting and easily get 10+ ideas for exciting adventures; it's a good setting.

If I read a setting and have to struggle to get even 3 exciting adventure ideas; it's not a good setting.

This means that a good setting for a book, TV-show or movie is not the same thing as a good RPG setting. For example, LotR has great setting for its books, but despite many tries, I've never managed to GM very good games in Middle Earth. So, when you design a setting, you need a very clear goal of what you are designing it for.

I've built many a settings from scratch for RPGs that worked great. I once started making a setting for a book I never started writing, and after making parts of the setting realized it wouldn't work very well for a RPG. A setting for a book is basically there to support one main story, whereas a RPG setting's purpose is to create inspiration for thousands of stories.

After thinking about it for a bit, I've found a few points that a RPG setting should strive for in order to be "exciting":

- Absence of strong status quo. The setting needs to be dynamic, and give a sense that the players have the ability to change things (at whatever power level they're at). Too rigid settings never sit right with me (this is actually a problem the World of Darkness line easily falls into).

- High danger factor. While not total chaos, it's always best if the setting has a feeling of being "unsafe". Especially if you travel outside of "civilization". This helps provide a feeling of it being an 'adventure rich' setting.

- Easyness of suspension of disbelief. Let's face it, almost all settings break apart if you inspect them too closely. For a RPG setting, it's very important that it is made in a way that makes it easier to suspend disbelief. While it's always good for a GM to have reasons for things happening, the setting shouldn't make this job harder. If random Orc raids, evil world-conquering wizards and highway thugs are part-and-parcel of the setting, you might not question those things as closely when they show up. This is one of things that differ MCU from DC-CU.

Another thing that makes a setting generally good is that it looks exciting no matter what level of "zoom" you look at it. A good setting is easily built in a way that you can move from the broad, overall strokes down to inter-nation level, down to intra-nation level, city/town level, neighborhood level and eventually individual level. If the setting has problems or glitches at any level, it will fail to feel "natural".

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-19, 08:26 AM
IF your question is simply "what makes a setting look exciting for me to play RPGs in", the answer is very simple.

The amount of adventures I can easily envision taking place inside it.

If I read a setting and easily get 10+ ideas for exciting adventures; it's a good setting.

If I read a setting and have to struggle to get even 3 exciting adventure ideas; it's not a good setting.

This means that a good setting for a book, TV-show or movie is not the same thing as a good RPG setting. For example, LotR has great setting for its books, but despite many tries, I've never managed to GM very good games in Middle Earth. So, when you design a setting, you need a very clear goal of what you are designing it for.


This is very true. There are a few settings that have wonderful stories set there, but where I can't figure out how to set my own story there. The Kencyrath books (PC Hodgell) are great and fun, with wild adventures. But so much of the power and narrative is bound up in the key figures that the bit players are somewhat marginalized. You could set a fun adventure in various parts, but it'd be a bit of a struggle to do bigger things with the setting.

Max_Killjoy
2018-10-19, 09:36 AM
This is very true. There are a few settings that have wonderful stories set there, but where I can't figure out how to set my own story there. The Kencyrath books (PC Hodgell) are great and fun, with wild adventures. But so much of the power and narrative is bound up in the key figures that the bit players are somewhat marginalized. You could set a fun adventure in various parts, but it'd be a bit of a struggle to do bigger things with the setting.

More than a few "IP based" game settings face that problem -- there's a tension between the canon characters the fans want to see presented, and leaving room for the PCs to "be the stars of their own lives".

The various Star Wars games have largely escaped this by virtue of having a HUGE canvas where 99% of the volume in space and time is untouched by the canon stories and characters.

Jay R
2018-10-19, 09:59 AM
The factions aren't what make the stories interesting. It's the themes that they represent.

Exactly backwards. The theme is what it's about, but personifying that theme into actual people taking actual actions is what makes it interesting.


A major theme of Harry Potter is the struggle against tyranny and oppression. Tyranny and oppression are personified by the Death Eaters, Professor Umbridge, and Voldemort. The fact that they're part of factions has little to do with it.

Tyranny and oppression are not real things that are "personified" by them. Tyranny and oppression only exist when there are tyrants and oppressors.

"Tyranny and oppression" have very little to do with a lot of the factions, anyway. The household rivalries, especially at Quidditch, Harry's loneliness when most of the students turn against him in the early part of Goblet of Fire, the attitudes of the centaurs, and the frustration of the Ministry's unwillingness to accept the truth, are all examples of faction-based points of interest having nothing to do with tyranny and oppression

And even the oppression is most interesting when dealing with the concrete examples. Umbridge's nasty punishments, Draco's being forced into the Death Eaters, Hagrid's trip to Azkaban, Harry's trial at the Wizengamot, etc. are the compelling points, not the generic theme of oppression.


The White Witch versus the Children are themes about wickedness versus righteousness and about the nature of legitimacy: might versus holiness.

And they are most compelling when they affect people directly.
Not "temptation", but Edmund's Turkish Delight.
Not "might", but Tumnus turned to stone.
Not "an oppressive police force", but this particular wolf pack.

You are right about the themes. But those themes only become an interesting part of the story with the actions of the characters on different sides -- which is to say, when brought out by factions.


The factions themselves aren't what make it interesting, it's what those factions represent.

Exactly backwards. What the factions represent is important, but those themes being acted out by real people is what makes it interesting.


In Prince Caspian, you had members of the Prince's side try to summon the White Witch to aid their cause, which wasn't interesting because there was discord within the faction, but because the discord represented temptation to an easier, but more wicked path.

No. Just no. It was fascinating because that was something you could believe Nikabrik would do. Because the White Witch is somebody we know and fear. Because Trumpkin's loyalty (even when he didn't agree) is set off in such sharp relief by the contrast of Nikabrik's fashion.

Interesting characters and groups are what will make the game interesting.

Knaight
2018-10-19, 10:17 AM
Exactly backwards. The theme is what it's about, but personifying that theme into actual people taking actual actions is what makes it interesting.

Actual people taking actual actions doesn't have to map to factions in any real way though - themes are routinely threaded through parallel narratives between disparate characters that don't necessarily even interact with each other, let alone represent some sort of cohesive whole faction. An ongoing theme in A Song of Ice and Fire is that the wars between the nobles predominantly harm the commoners. In the context of analyzing that theme you could identify two sides in the nobles and the commoners, but the idea that these warring nobles are a faction is flatly ludicrous - they're warring, after all. That theme is also expressed through a whole bunch of conflicts at best tangentially related, and it's strengthened because of that as just war and unjust war alike bring down pain to the peasantry, across two continents that barely interact.

This same thing can apply in RPGs. If you have a setting currently undergoing industrialization you might well have themes relevant to it. Maybe it's as simple as industrialization inherently upending existing social orders. Maybe it's themes about how existing social orders embracing industrialization is self destructive, but that they must do so or be collapsed from the outside by those that did. (Both of which sound negative phrased that way, so I will make a point of saying that said "existing social orders" are routinely deeply negative institutions who's destruction is long overdue). These will generally exist alongside other themes. Factions will generally exist, though potentially just factions of one for small enough scales, but the whole idea that factions represent themes explicitly is often a fairly shallow use. Not only does any individual theme tend to show up in faction after faction, but each individual faction tends to express theme after theme.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-19, 10:43 AM
A struggle I have with explicitly-set "themes" for RPGs is that it feels constricting. If the theme is "the war between good and evil", having adventures that don't revolve around that theme feels wrong. It limits the range of adventures you can have and still fit the setting. This can be great for books or movies (which only tell one story, really) but stink for more open-ended games.

Knaight
2018-10-19, 10:57 AM
A struggle I have with explicitly-set "themes" for RPGs is that it feels constricting. If the theme is "the war between good and evil", having adventures that don't revolve around that theme feels wrong. It limits the range of adventures you can have and still fit the setting. This can be great for books or movies (which only tell one story, really) but stink for more open-ended games.

The problem there is less the presence of a theme and more that there's only one of them. Take the themes I listed in my previous post, which are among the themes of a setting of mine - it's undergoing industrialization (technically an analog involving scholarly magic), that looks very different in very different places, and all of those themes work for a lot of different things. I've used that setting to run games about a noble house of the old order in a traditionalist society struggling for scraps as their country was left behind, I've used it to run games about merchants navigating emerging markets (the scholarly magic is very industrial), I've used it to run a globe spanning romantic comedy between a pair of adventurers, the list goes on. That's ignoring games I've run with it that tended to deemphasize the industrialization themes in favor of other ones (e.g. the struggles of tribal societies to fit in nation states without losing their identity, games focused far more on the academic side of change than anything, so on and so forth).

Robust themes allow a wide variety of characters doing a wide variety of things, is my point, especially if you have several of them.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-19, 11:14 AM
The problem there is less the presence of a theme and more that there's only one of them. Take the themes I listed in my previous post, which are among the themes of a setting of mine - it's undergoing industrialization (technically an analog involving scholarly magic), that looks very different in very different places, and all of those themes work for a lot of different things. I've used that setting to run games about a noble house of the old order in a traditionalist society struggling for scraps as their country was left behind, I've used it to run games about merchants navigating emerging markets (the scholarly magic is very industrial), I've used it to run a globe spanning romantic comedy between a pair of adventurers, the list goes on. That's ignoring games I've run with it that tended to deemphasize the industrialization themes in favor of other ones (e.g. the struggles of tribal societies to fit in nation states without losing their identity, games focused far more on the academic side of change than anything, so on and so forth).

Robust themes allow a wide variety of characters doing a wide variety of things, is my point, especially if you have several of them.

Having lots of interwoven themes can work, but it runs the risk of the themes running together.

For me, theme is a property of a campaign, not a setting. Settings have aesthetics or (possibly) metaplot, but the theme of a campaign comes out over time (or is agreed on by all the players in advance).

gkathellar
2018-10-19, 11:24 AM
A struggle I have with explicitly-set "themes" for RPGs is that it feels constricting. If the theme is "the war between good and evil", having adventures that don't revolve around that theme feels wrong. It limits the range of adventures you can have and still fit the setting. This can be great for books or movies (which only tell one story, really) but stink for more open-ended games.

That's just a completeness issue - a TTRPG setting intended for many different people to use in many different campaigns needs a variety of textual and especially subtextual themes to support a variety of different campaigns. There may be a "core thematic premise," as it were, but it needs to either be intrinsically flexible, or be something you can put aside for a moment in the interests of moment-to-moment engagement with the setting.

Eberron, for instance, is heavily informed by the notion that the anxieties, conflicts, and uncertainties of wars carry on well past their supposed ends. I would say that's the core thematic premise, and that in many ways it ties the disparate elements of the setting together. But if you don't want to engage with that, there's a lot of other stuff going on: you can focus on the two-fisted pulp colonialism, the explorations of religious conflict, the extensive invocation of the "what measure is a non-human" trope, the use of Lovecraftian horror, or the fixation on prophecy and ancient conspiracies, among other things. You can even forget all of that junk and go straight to the dungeonpunk aesthetic. And the core thematic premise can be found in every one of the aforementioned elements, if you want to deal with it, but it remains available subtext rather than the focus of any and all narratives.

Max_Killjoy
2018-10-19, 12:25 PM
That's just a completeness issue - a TTRPG setting intended for many different people to use in many different campaigns needs a variety of textual and especially subtextual themes to support a variety of different campaigns. There may be a "core thematic premise," as it were, but it needs to either be intrinsically flexible, or be something you can put aside for a moment in the interests of moment-to-moment engagement with the setting.

Eberron, for instance, is heavily informed by the notion that the anxieties, conflicts, and uncertainties of wars carry on well past their supposed ends. I would say that's the core thematic premise, and that in many ways it ties the disparate elements of the setting together. But if you don't want to engage with that, there's a lot of other stuff going on: you can focus on the two-fisted pulp colonialism, the explorations of religious conflict, the extensive invocation of the "what measure is a non-human" trope, the use of Lovecraftian horror, or the fixation on prophecy and ancient conspiracies, among other things. You can even forget all of that junk and go straight to the dungeonpunk aesthetic. And the core thematic premise can be found in every one of the aforementioned elements, if you want to deal with it, but it remains available subtext rather than the focus of any and all narratives.

And what if a worldbuilder/GM is like me, and doesn't bother with themes at all?

Knaight
2018-10-19, 12:30 PM
And what if a worldbuilder/GM is like me, and don't bother with themes at all?

Then you'll probably still end up hitting the same thing from a different approach (e.g. ongoing areas of conflict).

Nifft
2018-10-19, 12:38 PM
And what if a worldbuilder/GM is like me, and don't bother with themes at all?

You might not consciously use themes, but your game surely has some notion of conflict, and those conflicts will tend to be along the lines that you think are somehow important.

Some things that you think are somehow important will show up many times.

Those are your setting's themes.

gkathellar
2018-10-19, 01:25 PM
And what if a worldbuilder/GM is like me, and don't bother with themes at all?

There’s nothing wrong with that. Intentional inclusion of themes can help to shape a certain type of cohesion and engagement with the material, but is not a requirement for something to work. The main thing is that people have a variety of ways to emotionally interface with the material (when there’s only one, you end up with Dragonlance).

That said, I think your work is probably going to have themes whether you go out of your way to include them or not. “Theme” is a vague word we use to talk about a coherent pattern of elements in an art-object, and both the production and observation of that object will tend to see patterns arise that were not strictly intended. I suspect that a setting truly devoid of themes would be incoherent and uninteresting, because it would lack much of the connective tissue that gives us our ability (as producers and consumers of art) to care.

There’s nothing good or bad about the inadvertent emergence of themes. It happens to plenty of writers who go in with particular themes in mind, and it happens to plenty who don’t. Stories (and a setting is a very particular type of non-narrative story) frequently grow beyond their initial constraints, especially in the minds of audience members who see things differently than the creator does. To go back to the example of Eberron, Keith Baker started with the basic notion of a halfling dame walking into a Philip Marlowe But A Dwarf’s office, and ended up as this weird 3.5-played-straight pastiche of early-20th century pulp and post-World War anxiety. Some of that was probably intentional.

Max_Killjoy
2018-10-19, 02:39 PM
It's almost like it takes us back to the same question of intentional vs emergent we've had on other subjects. Huh.

(What's the text color for total sincerity?)

kyoryu
2018-10-19, 03:20 PM
It's almost like it takes us back to the same question of intentional vs emergent we've had on other subjects. Huh.

(What's the text color for total sincerity?)

Yup! Having themes is almost inevitable, but that doesn't mean that you had intentional themes. It's just an inherent nature of creation that the things you think are important will pop up.

The Jack
2018-10-19, 07:15 PM
I

- Absence of strong status quo. The setting needs to be dynamic, and give a sense that the players have the ability to change things (at whatever power level they're at). Too rigid settings never sit right with me (this is actually a problem the World of Darkness line easily falls into).

- High danger factor. While not total chaos, it's always best if the setting has a feeling of being "unsafe". Especially if you travel outside of "civilization". This helps provide a feeling of it being an 'adventure rich' setting.
.

The strong status quo is the greatest thing about the World of Darkness, and one of V5's greatest problems is in trying to break that (That haphazard inversion of the tremere is a freaking insult)
It's about the struggle, and it's great for an ingenious player. The rules are there to abuse , that's fun, or to rail against, that's also fun.

Of course, you could get a ****e storyteller with an 'all stick' approach, but that's everygame. It's more likely with the world of darkness, but it's a universal anyway...

Max_Killjoy
2018-10-19, 09:25 PM
The strong status quo is the greatest thing about the World of Darkness, and one of V5's greatest problems is in trying to break that (That haphazard inversion of the tremere is a freaking insult)
It's about the struggle, and it's great for an ingenious player. The rules are there to abuse , that's fun, or to rail against, that's also fun.


That was, however, quite deliberate -- and not the same as a setting that's static because the worldbuilder didn't leave any loose pieces or wiggly parts... and made it all a sort of clockwork or "perfection".

Cluedrew
2018-10-19, 09:29 PM
To Pelle, Mark Hall, gkathellar & Jay R: Bit of a delay due a crazy week. But I read the stuff and I was thinking about it. I don't have anything against the idea of factions, but there was a rather dense cluster of posts talking about them and I was wondering what all the hupla was about. I think I figured out why I don't quite click with starting at factions. They are at the wrong scale. Unless you have Player Factions instead of Player Characters (and I am sure such systems exist) your core interactions are at the personal level.

Of course you can't express a whole setting at that level and even if you could that might fill it up too much. But I feel it has to come back down to that somehow. I'm still working on this.


IF your question is simply "what makes a setting look exciting for me to play RPGs in", the answer is very simple.

The amount of adventures I can easily envision taking place inside it.Not perfect, but this might be the best one line summation of the idea I think lies at the heart of the matter.

To Max_Killjoy: Could you elaborate on that? Perhaps provide some counter examples?

Max_Killjoy
2018-10-19, 10:10 PM
To Max_Killjoy: Could you elaborate on that? Perhaps provide some counter examples?


It's kinda like the difference between setting a stage, or painting a painting.

One's meant to have the actors come in and do things and move around and maybe move the furniture, it's meant to be alive as much as it can be.

The other is static. It can be beautiful, and well-crafted, and artistically brilliant, but it is exactly what it is and will never be anything more or less.

The WoD, at least as I remember it, was a stage, but with very heavy furniture and very stern rules about how it could be moved.

Lorsa
2018-10-20, 04:54 AM
This is very true. There are a few settings that have wonderful stories set there, but where I can't figure out how to set my own story there. The Kencyrath books (PC Hodgell) are great and fun, with wild adventures. But so much of the power and narrative is bound up in the key figures that the bit players are somewhat marginalized. You could set a fun adventure in various parts, but it'd be a bit of a struggle to do bigger things with the setting.

Especially when the setting gives you the feeling that apart from these very special characters, the rest of the people live rather peaceful lives.



Not perfect, but this might be the best one line summation of the idea I think lies at the heart of the matter.

No one line can be perfect, but if you are designing a setting, having the goal "a place where people can easily envision adventures" would bring you very far.



The strong status quo is the greatest thing about the World of Darkness, and one of V5's greatest problems is in trying to break that (That haphazard inversion of the tremere is a freaking insult)
It's about the struggle, and it's great for an ingenious player. The rules are there to abuse , that's fun, or to rail against, that's also fun.

Of course, you could get a ****e storyteller with an 'all stick' approach, but that's everygame. It's more likely with the world of darkness, but it's a universal anyway...

I didn't say that WoD was a bad setting - in fact I have played a lot of campaigns in it.

It's true that they deliberately aim for a status quo that the players can try to struggle against. However, since they aim for this, it is a very thin line to walk to prevent your setting from becoming too rigid. I think it is a problem the setting easily falls into - which is why you see this "all stick" storytellers more often in those games.

I could also say that settings based on those from books or movies also often falls into this rigidness problem. Since they strive to uphold the "original feeling" from the source material, a lot of the dynamic can easily be lost.

Yora
2018-10-20, 05:10 AM
Especially when the setting gives you the feeling that apart from these very special characters, the rest of the people live rather peaceful lives.
I've been having the later problem with a lot of my past campaigns. I have a strong desire to make the setting nice, to a point that it conflicts with being a good setting to play in. My current approach is to aim for a world that is generally pleasant, but with temporary localized hell holes draging the PCs into much more bleak adventures. It's a specific evil that can be exorcized or exterminated, after which the characters can return to the pleasant outside world that they helped to protect with their victory. And in case they fail, there's just a haunted valley or city that has been abandoned by the living. It doesn't overthrow the overall global status quo.

Pleh
2018-10-20, 05:26 AM
It's almost like it takes us back to the same question of intentional vs emergent we've had on other subjects. Huh.

(What's the text color for total sincerity?)

Yes, themes and narrative are always emergent effects, like how the smell of a cooked meal is an emergent effect of cooking the food. The question is less whether anything happened to emerge and more if the creator was conscious of it and took active steps to guide the creation's emergent properties.

Now, being conscious of emergent properties doesn't mean planning it out ahead of time. Sometimes you cook by feeling and all your changes you make are directly in response to the emergent qualities you detect. Kind of bland, add more salt. Kind of slow, toss in a random encounter.

Seasoning to taste isn't any less an expression of intent. It's just following your gut at every fork in the road rather than plotting a course before you leave.

And the main criticism of the "intent" side is constriction because so many people online have been hurt by DMs who (out of love for their craft) have been too rigid in following the recipe and never letting the game or the players diverge even when it was making the meal stink.

But that's not a problem inherent to being intentional and planning ahead. As we all know, having a plan can only help you be more prepared when the game or players throw a curveball. The key is to be informed enough to know how to still use the milk even after it's curdled (or how to go on without it).

Having a theme to your story doesn't have to be constricting at all. It means your game has a general direction of flow. Note that this is direction, not destination. You can't arrive at north. North is a direction, the north pole is a location.

And not all themes are pleasant. "We're going in circles" is a direction that often causes discomfort. In these cases, it allows the DM to set up a theme they intend the pcs to subvert. Or they can use a comfortable theme to make an important npc stand out. "I'm an orc who attended the bard college to learn about history and painting" is a subversion of theme to create a new combination of flavors.

Themes set an underlying standard for the players to use. Some themes are a subconscious handrail to help players simplify the setting. Others are meant to obstruct the players to prompt them to resist the theme. But even when you fly by the seat of your pants and avoid consciously creating a theme, themes tend to crop up because humans create patterns even when we're trying to be random (which is part of why we tend to use dice).

gkathellar
2018-10-20, 05:55 AM
I've been having the later problem with a lot of my past campaigns. I have a strong desire to make the setting nice, to a point that it conflicts with being a good setting to play in. My current approach is to aim for a world that is generally pleasant, but with temporary localized hell holes draging the PCs into much more bleak adventures. It's a specific evil that can be exorcized or exterminated, after which the characters can return to the pleasant outside world that they helped to protect with their victory. And in case they fail, there's just a haunted valley or city that has been abandoned by the living. It doesn't overthrow the overall global status quo.

I think the trouble that can (not necessarily does, but can) emerge there is that TTRPGs strongly reward engagement with conflict. A PC is first and foremost a representative of the player and a lens through which they act on the world presented to them. Conflict within the setting is generally rewarding to players because it gives them the experience of either choosing to act (and succeeding or failing) or choosing not to act on that source of conflict. It's involving, character-defining, and, to a degree, thrilling to see something in the setting and make a considered decision to react or not to react, and to know why and what you hope to achieve or don't hope to achieve.

I keep using Eberron as an example, so let's go for round three on that. The social, economic, and political of the Warforged in Eberron (mini-constructs with many humanoid attributes, for those who aren't familiar) is a minor point of conflict in the setting, as warforged were built to fight and now that they're free they don't receive fantastic treatment. If during the course of a game session the PCs encounter a clear indication of this conflict - say they pass through a warforged slum in the metropolis of Sharn - it becomes a prompt for the player to determine what their PC thinks about the treatment of warforged. Regardless of the actual decision they come to, unless the player is genuinely apathetic, the imperfection in the setting can become a part of their PC's identity and a source of engagement with the material.

Having conflict erupt periodically into an otherwise stable world should be compelling at least in theory, but it's much easier to do in fiction than on the tabletop because it's hard to get your players involved with stability in the first place. It's not impossible to build that kind of engagement with, "well, this is a nice place," but I think it's far more difficult, and requires players who are enthusiastic about building their own engagement via minimally-prompted roleplaying, sharing, and "slice-of-life" character-building moments. If things are boring and then, ooh, a fight, players may just coast by between the fights, which are more emotionally involving.


It's kinda like the difference between setting a stage, or painting a painting.

One's meant to have the actors come in and do things and move around and maybe move the furniture, it's meant to be alive as much as it can be.

The other is static. It can be beautiful, and well-crafted, and artistically brilliant, but it is exactly what it is and will never be anything more or less.

Unless you work for the Scene Painter's Guild. :P </completelymissingthepoint>

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-20, 06:34 AM
One thing for me is that conflicts don't have to be big. Some are, but most are not. Not all threats are world-ending, but all conflicts have consequences for the world and those consequences vary depending on how things are handled. And sometimes you have conflicts inside conflicts.

gkathellar
2018-10-20, 07:36 AM
One thing for me is that conflicts don't have to be big. Some are, but most are not. Not all threats are world-ending, but all conflicts have consequences for the world and those consequences vary depending on how things are handled. And sometimes you have conflicts inside conflicts.

Definitely. But at the level of setting design, larger conflicts are the norm for a variety of pretty good reasons. Focusing on the big stuff leaves smaller, specific conflicts up to the GM and their individual campaign. Larger conflicts are often also easier to work with, as a GM: "Morgan's marriage is an emotionally oppressive hell," requires an arguably lighter touch than, "this village is an oppressive hell." Finally, a cross-section of players just aren't going to be interested in the little stuff because it's irrelevant to why they roleplay.

That's not to say settings can't include personal-scale conflicts with success, but again, there are reasons to contemplate avoiding them.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-20, 07:53 AM
Definitely. But at the level of setting design, larger conflicts are the norm for a variety of pretty good reasons. Focusing on the big stuff leaves smaller, specific conflicts up to the GM and their individual campaign. Larger conflicts are often also easier to work with, as a GM: "Morgan's marriage is an emotionally oppressive hell," requires an arguably lighter touch than, "this village is an oppressive hell." Finally, a cross-section of players just aren't going to be interested in the little stuff because it's irrelevant to why they roleplay.

That's not to say settings can't include personal-scale conflicts with success, but again, there are reasons to contemplate avoiding them.

I wasn't even getting at personal-scale conflicts. I think of things as happening at a few scales based on the potential consequences:

1. Planar-scale
2. World-scale
3. Nation-scale
4. Locality-scale
5. Personal-scale

I play a lot of low-level games, so most of what I do is a mix of 3-5. There are a few 1 and 2-scale conflicts going on, but those aren't "Tuesday" even at high levels.

For examples ([#] indicates the scale):

A current campaign involves investigating a village that went out of contact [4]. On the way, they talked to a woman whose partner went to the lost village and didn't return; she asked them to find out what happened to her [5]. When they arrived at the lost village, they found people acting weird (as if possessed)[4] and a few unaffected but pretending (since the possessed ones are paranoid). They also found a bunch of strange things going on, including feuds between individuals [5] and a house that everyone (the possessed folk anyway) couldn't perceive [4].

They haven't learned this yet, but the reason the village is having issues is a combination of a hag playing political games[3] (trying to entrap the local ruler and make them and the Adventurer's Guild look like fools) as well as a group of would-be rebels[3] in the area digging up artifacts of an ancient war, some of which, if mishandled, might cause larger-scale problems [2.5, continent rather than whole world issues].

I've run campaigns involving stopping extra-dimensional threats from eating everything [1] as well as deciding what to do with an artifact of unimaginable power (it literally rewrites the laws of nature at the cost of a single person's existence)[1-2 depending on their choices]. That campaign involved one character's quest to return to his "wife" (a Far Realms-equivalent nautiloid god-thing) [5]. Etc.

I've also run an adventure where the goal was to fetch a sample of a mushroom from a forest [4-5].

So having a range of scales all in play makes for engaging gameplay. Not just "WAR!" or "Demon Invasion!"

As for actual setting material, I publish a list of "quest seeds"--starting mysteries or dramatic questions for campaigns. My current list (some of these are being handled) is https://www.admiralbenbo.org/index.php/117-open-adventuring-requests. They're all simple things that have potential to grow tremendously. Because I'm most interested in seeing what people do with the materials I provide, not running through a known story. I want to see the story that evolves as they play. I've had some go in completely different directions than planned (an Indiana Jones-style "raid a lost city for artifacts" campaign turned into "convince the locals to ally in order to take back the lost city") and those are the campaigns I'm most fascinated by. The ones where I don't know how they'll twist the setting.

gkathellar
2018-10-20, 09:36 AM
That's an interesting way of modeling the question. Using that approach, I would suggest that most of the conflicts a setting presents should be at the [3] and [4] level, with various non-critical suggestions for [1] or [2] where useful and necessary, and some [5]s that specifically relate to setting elements to provide examples and immersion.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-20, 10:09 AM
That's an interesting way of modeling the question. Using that approach, I would suggest that most of the conflicts a setting presents should be at the [3] and [4] level, with various non-critical suggestions for [1] or [2] where useful and necessary, and some [5]s that specifically relate to setting elements to provide examples and immersion.

I agree. I have some [1] and [2]-type conflicts, but they're more long-running warfare things (the Angels fighting the Awakeners from beyond reality, demons trying to corrupt various areas). Almost all the ones I actually run are [3] and [4], with [5] as supporting elements to give the campaign life.

And what those conflicts are depends strongly on the setting. My setting has no "international" conflicts between the core nations because the nations are really not competing for resources yet (it's a post-apocalypse scenario). It has lots of man vs wild or savage vs civilized and intra national conflicts, all at the [3] and [4] level. [5]s come in in specific adventures. In part, that's because it's a living world where the campaigns focus more on exploring the unknown rather than politics. The baseline premise is that the PCs are Sanctioned Adventurers, working for and supported by an international mutual-defense treaty organization (the Adventurer's Guild). As such, they're from all the various nations and work together to help various parts out. So having international conflict wouldn't support that well.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-20, 10:41 AM
Thinking about it, here are some properties good setting conflicts should have IMO:

Player Accessible: The conflicts stressed by the setting should be at a level where PCs should be able to play a significant role. So in a Demigod-level system, the conflicts might be between fundamental concepts. In a slice-of-life game, they're more at the personal level.

Other conflicts can exist, but they're scene-dressing and verisimilitude-enhancers, not central facts of the setting.

The bigger the (relative) scale, the rarer: Setting-defining conflicts should be few and far between, unless the setting is built around that premise. Smaller conflicts can be more common within the setting.

Open-ended conflicts are better than strongly-fixed conflicts: Not only should the PCs be able to be significantly involved, their actions have to matter. So a fore-gone conclusion conflict (the world will end, your task is to figure out how your story ends) works best as scene-dressing/background. On the other hand, most conflicts that the PCs actively take part in should be up for grabs, so the players feel their actions have consequences.

Conflicts have to have internal logic: My nations aren't in competition for anything (yet). And none of them have traditions of standing armies. So "large-scale international war" doesn't make sense. Invasions from forces outside make sense, skull-and-dagger things make sense, but huge armies don't.

I'm sure there are other principles, but these I could think of readily.

Lorsa
2018-10-20, 11:23 AM
I've been having the later problem with a lot of my past campaigns. I have a strong desire to make the setting nice, to a point that it conflicts with being a good setting to play in. My current approach is to aim for a world that is generally pleasant, but with temporary localized hell holes draging the PCs into much more bleak adventures. It's a specific evil that can be exorcized or exterminated, after which the characters can return to the pleasant outside world that they helped to protect with their victory. And in case they fail, there's just a haunted valley or city that has been abandoned by the living. It doesn't overthrow the overall global status quo.

I would like to write a longer reply, but I am rather short on time.

The approach you want to take runs into the problem with suspension of disbelief. Either these "adventure-generating" events are so rare that the setting can only plausible contain one or maybe two campaigns, or they happen often enough that people should talk about them. And localized hell holes appearing on a semi-regular basis is definitely something that would affect people's view. Fear would be a much stronger emotion than it would be in your "pleasant world".

Basically, either your idea of the world being "nice and pleasant" doesn't really work, or these localized hell hole events are so rare that players would get suspicious that they always "just happened to occur wherever they live". In either case, suspension of disbelief will be difficult.

gkathellar
2018-10-20, 12:33 PM
I would like to write a longer reply, but I am rather short on time.

The approach you want to take runs into the problem with suspension of disbelief. Either these "adventure-generating" events are so rare that the setting can only plausible contain one or maybe two campaigns, or they happen often enough that people should talk about them. And localized hell holes appearing on a semi-regular basis is definitely something that would affect people's view. Fear would be a much stronger emotion than it would be in your "pleasant world".

Basically, either your idea of the world being "nice and pleasant" doesn't really work, or these localized hell hole events are so rare that players would get suspicious that they always "just happened to occur wherever they live". In either case, suspension of disbelief will be difficult.

I can think of fiction that makes it work - the excellent manga series Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer springs to mind - by having destructive, potentially world-shaking events take place under a masquerade, with a slice-of-life atmosphere prevailing beyond those bounds. But it's harder to do in TTRPGs, where an alternating slice-of-life/action format is difficult to implement.

Honest Tiefling
2018-10-20, 02:17 PM
Eh, maybe I'm unique, but I want the setting's gimmicks to actually matter in play and world building. I play a lot of wizards, which means looking at the magic a lot. If there is a cool thematic story behind the magic, I want it to actually matter to my character, even if my character is a level 1 hedge wizard. I'll take Forgotten Realms as an example, as it has the weave and a goddess of magic...Which you can promptly ignore entirely when building a wizard. The Weave really only comes into play if you wander into a dead magic zone or a wild magic zone, which isn't good mechanics as it can neutralize spellcasters entirely, depending on edition. They are also highly rare, so won't be coming up anyway. But everywhere else? You don't really have to pay attention to those bits, just wait for Mystra to keel over again.

Gods are often another issue, as many settings present flawed gods without a whole lot of reason to follow them. Many times, religions come across as inconsequential as the gods (or their sects) don't really present much of a dogma outside of '[X] bad, [Y] Good'. I wouldn't mind this if it was actually addressed that followers aren't really given much advice or guidance and priests can treat their gods like divine favor ATMs where they just insert a few prayers to get the goodies. Gods that can manifest and stomp around a setting should have an impact on the cultures, and how the gods can interact with mortals should do SOMETHING. What did these religions do to influence the culture, and how did the culture influence the religion? And what does this mean for a PC?

I would mention technology level and cultural ideas such as clans, feuds, honor, but...Yeah. I've read your posts, I don't really think that's an issue with a certain OP. But it is often something worth mentioning as life a hundred years ago was incredibly different, let along in the iron or bronze age. Focusing on this would be very interesting I think, if only for the amusement factor of informing people that no, they cannot write down street names. So perhaps focus on helping players get into the right mindset for the era?

Perhaps one idea is that life APPEARS nice and pleasant, but isn't really. Or someone is working very hard in the background to keep things that way for a tiny little region, and the facade of a cheery happy little settlement that is entirely 100% stable can come crashing down in an instant once the delicate balance of power is upset. All it'll take is a tiny little nudge and then it'll all come crashing down like a house of cards. You have your call to adventure, as well as the hometown adventures to use at first to establish the setting and get people introduced to one another without being in immediate mortal peril.

Kitten Champion
2018-10-20, 05:21 PM
I would say, a good setting is one that best enables your character fantasy, or the elements that make a character appealing and emotionally satisfying to inhabit either directly as a player or vicariously as an observer. With the setting identifying what that fantasy is and offering ways it can play out.

For instance, I had to develop a setting based around the world of Pokemon. Pokemon is very thin as a universe, I have no idea how its politics or economics work and even fairly relevant questions with regards to Pokemon and Pokemon training are hazy at best. You can't even really make a world map because adding new regions is part of the formula and where everything is relative to one another is pretty secondary. You also have contradictions throughout, because as a game developing consistent lore wasn't and for the most part isn't valued while the anime adaptation has to do its own thing because the games are so story-lite that you only use them as a very basic framework when you're making a show that runs for hundreds of episodes -- so, things are messy.

My point, though, is that doesn't really matter. The setting is based around childhood interactions with animals, and the unique kind of bond you can form with your pets and the natural world. A relationship which isn't premised on economics - you don't sell or slaughter your Pokemon - and ignores the more difficult elements of rearing animals like the ongoing expenses and labour involved in their maintenance. It also glosses over any real consequences to making animals fight pretty heavily. All of those are obstacles to the fantasy of exploring the world freely without real responsibilities like a kid on summer break, only to discover a Miyazaki-esque world of adorable, cool, and interesting creatures who you can just stuff in a proverbial box and take with you as loyal friends and protectors. Everything about the world is designed to enable that fantasy and while you can extrapolate roles outside of that, the overriding logic to how the world should work is still premised on that of an elementary school student sense of wonder and innocence.

People want to experience that, have paid multiple times to return to that kind of feeling, and when you're me making a setting for a table-top adaptation with players who love those games I have to get that basic fantasy before I begin introducing my own elements which I think are potentially interesting.

You need to understand the core appeal of it and once you know what that is you can subvert, avert, or expand creatively upon without undermining your efforts of enabling this fantasy for others.

Erloas
2018-10-20, 07:00 PM
This will cover a few things already stated but not a direct response to any other post in particular.

I'll take the idea of consistence as a given, but expand that a bit more to cover that the world must be believable. Some parts might of the working world might be easy to miss from an overview perspective but there must at least be some thoughts as to how the world survives when you zoom in a little bit.

Example: If you've got a country that refuses to deal with anyone else, so no trading, but is also in an inhospitipal desert with no possible way to raise food. Clearly they'll all starve to death in short order. You can make that work with some effort, but you've got to be ready with the how beforehand.
That is true of all scales, if it is nations, cities, factions, or individuals they should make sense. They should also have some nuance to them, even if a country is generally "like X" there should be some that are better or worse.
 


To keep it from being bland though, while you can have your themes and genres or tropes, you had better do something interesting with them too. It is rare for something to be evil simply for the sake of being evil, there should be some reason behind it.

If you poke the setting a bit it shouldn't collapse like a house of cards but it also shouldn't be built of concrete where nothing is going to change.

People want something they can relate to, they don't want to look at a setting and think the entire thing is alien and they're going to have to invest heavily into it before it even starts to make sense or see where they fit in. At the same time they don't want to get into a setting and be able to tell right away exactly how everything is going to play out. Like the mystery movie where the only mystery is why you even bothered finishing watching it.