Unrelated rant about your game's theme

[Lago_AM3P]

I know people get feelings of joy when they go into ridiculous amounts of details for their setting, but seriously.

If you can't, to a new player, describe your setting in one page to the point where a complete newbie (albeit one with common sense) can make it around, you seriously need to rethink things.

Think of it like Final Fantasy X and the new players are Tidus. They're not stupid and they're not completely ignorant of constants like human nature, friendship, authority, monsters, and environmental danger. However, you could pretty much explain the state of things in one paragraph.

Civilization was and is currently being destroyed by a monster named Sin as punishment for using technology and letting cities get too big--right now the world (mostly) resembles a pre-industrial age version of Bizarro coastal Southeast Asia with a mentality to match. What's left of humanity live in rustic villages and their lives are dictated by a religious association called Yevon, who also unites the other forehead alien races of Guado and Ronso. Under the guidance of Yevon, people with the power to peacefully send away the spirits of the dead also call upon powerful undead spirits are known as summoners. These summoners travel with strong people known as guardians in one day gaining enough power to summon a creature that can defeat Sin. There's also a group of people we hate known as Al Bhed who we are pretty sure are pissing off Sin unnecessarily by using advanced technology. By the way, I hope you like Blitzball. A lot.

That way, it doesn't scare people new to the game who want to make complicated, intricate characters who also don't want to contradict the setting.

I mean, while there will probably always be a need for a 'veteran soldier who kills people with blades and hate', (which any moron can roleplay), researching someone with as much backstory as, say, Sephiroth can exist in your story requires a LOT of reading. And this amount of research can discourage people from doing anything too complicated. Because generally the people who care most about roleplaying are also the ones who care most about fitting into the setting.

I'm looking at YOU, Shadowrun and Exalted.

[josephbt]

Shadowrun? Er, I've read it(once, maybe twice), not played it, and i seems to me that it isn't that complicated. So here goes.

Earth in the near future. A massive plague has ravaged a good deal of it. The rest is mostly owned by multinational corporations. Existence is bleak. Then, suddenly, magic returns in the process of Awakening. Almost overnight, some humans begin physically changing into what will be called transhuman, but what we call now elves, dwarves, orks and trolls. Their minds soon folow. Other beings show an even greater degree of transformation so other mythical beings are born. After a couple of years of strife and unbeliving, people come to accept magic and all of its consequences. During that time, great leaps in technology happen, especcialy in the field of cybertech and cyberspace. The world now resembles a bizarre new feudal age with magic and hig tech. In such a world, you're a troubleshooter, just trying to make it till the next day.

Personally I would say it's all crap cause of mixing of magic and tech, but the I never played it, so what do I know?

Edit: On the other hand, I wouldn't go near Exalted witha 10' pole.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

If a GM makes his own highly detailed setting, it's his responsibility to help players make complex characters who fit into it. Of course, even if you've created the equivalent of FR or Middle Earth, you should be able to explain the major local conflicts (in the area the actual campaign is set in) in a short amount of text.

[PhoneLobster]

FR hey?

I can describe that one in a paragraph.

"Its a complete train wreck."

I think that should provide sufficient basis for character design right there.

[User3]

FR is for detail-freak gamers. Every single FR fan I've met or played with has definitely been on the far-end of the gaming intellect bell curve. They're the kind of people who revel in excruciating detail and minutae of their beloved game world. They don't play D&D Lite ... fluff-wise that is. And they don't want their game world "explained" in a one page summary either.

So to address Lago's initial point, not all game worlds need to fit your original criteria. There are different levels of campaign detail and intricacies in each game world. There's something to celebrate in dumbed-down gaming worlds as well as ones with so much information in them they make your head spin.

[RandomCasualty]

Well, honestly your setting is going to have a lot more detail than one paragraph, regardless of what setting you make. While it may be possible to give PCs the short side of the story, there are going to be lots of questions if your setting is at all detailed, especially if the setting isn't designed with a black and white good versus evil theme to it.

In depth complex characters generally require that you read up on your setting, I don't think that's even remotely avoidable.

[dbb]

Game worlds need to be sufficiently fractal.

If a setting can't be explained enough that you can get started with playing the game in a page worth of text, it sucks.

If a setting can't be explained in enough detail that you can still be playing in it and having fun with it ten years later, it also sucks. Most games that err do so on the former side, as exactly none of you will be surprised to hear.

For instance, I love Tekumel. I think it's a brilliant creation, one of the seminal achievements in the history of roleplaying. And I would never in a thousand years actually play in it. The volume of data is simply too overwhelming and undifferentiated. You practically need a degree in Tekumel Studies just to generate a character.

At the other end of the scale is the 3.x Core version of Greyhawk. Honestly, the core books might as well not bother pretending there's a default D&D setting at all.

--d.

[RandomCasualty]

1153429771[/unixtime]]
If a setting can't be explained enough that you can get started with playing the game in a page worth of text, it sucks.

The world's gods alone will take up a single page of text, if not more.

As far as simplicity goes, it really depends on the campaign. You can totally just play dungeon crawls and not care about the backstory of the world.

On the other hand if you're playing a high level political style mystery based game, you've just got to know your world's factions, kingdoms, etc. And that takes a bit of reading.

The main issue I have with worlds is not the actual volume of information but the way at which information is spread out. Forgotten Realms is the worst about this. You've got crap spread over lots of sourcebooks, and then buried in various novels.

[dbb]

The world's gods alone will take up a single page of text, if not more.

Nonsense. It might take that long if the setting has a truly ludicruous number of gods and wants to introduce all of them at once. But you know what? That's a failure of sufficient fractalness. Introducing six to ten of the setting's major, central gods is enough, and then you can have pointers to more detail about both the major gods and the profusion of minor deities.

Watch me introduce the Greek pantheon in a paragraph:

Zeus, storm and sky god, is the philandering ruler of the pantheon. Hera is his rightly suspicious and extremely jealous wife. His brothers are Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Hades, the grim, silent, god of the Underworld. Zeus also has a whole raft of sons and daughters, such as Apollo and Artemis, the twin deities of the Sun and the Moon; Aphrodite, the goddess of love; Athena, the warrior-goddess of wisdom and strategy; and Ares, the violent and blood-thirsty god of war.

There you go. Sure, it leaves out a ton of detail. It doesn't include some deities who, in various games, may be extremely major figures (Hephaestos, Hermes, and Pan all come to mind). But it's enough to get started on, and that's all you expect in a page's worth of summary.

You can't introduce every last detail in a setting in a page. But you can introduce enough to get started. If you can't, you've probably either made the summary too broad (if the game is set in a very small area, and the rest of the world doesn't matter much), or too detailed (if the game never stays in one place long enough for the minutiae of the lives of people in one city to matter).

--d.

[RandomCasualty]

1153431466[/unixtime]]
There you go. Sure, it leaves out a ton of detail. It doesn't include some deities who, in various games, may be extremely major figures (Hephaestos, Hermes, and Pan all come to mind). But it's enough to get started on, and that's all you expect in a page's worth of summary.

Well, honestly, that detail is important to a guy making a cleric. You're going to get a lot of follow up questions: "I want to make a lawful good cleric, what gods would fit with me?"

"What domains do these gods have?"

"What are the general goals and policies of the temples of Zeus?"

And so on.

Trying to give brief summaries just leads PCs to ask more questions. You'd honestly be better off just giving them a bigger packet of information they can read.

As far as deities go, you're going to need a full paragraph minimum per god if you want to get in all the specifics PCs care about. Even then you're probably lacking a lot.

Lets face it, creating a detailed background is more than just dropping names you have no clue about and then calling it a day. Hell, on the information you've given, I can't even define the mechanical effects of my god choice, let alone anything to fit into an in-depth setting.

Trying to fit a highly complex world into one page that's going to explain it all is ludicrous. You just can't do it. About all you can do is drop a ton of names that won't mean much to the PCs. You can be sure the PCs will be coming back to you with tons of questions like "Who are knights of the round table? Who is the ruler of this nation? Who are his enemies?" And so forth.

Well-detailed means a lot of reading, there's just no way around it. You're alot better getting the backstory done beforehand rather than having PCs ask a ton of questions in game and perform "stupid" actions cause they made assumptions off of limited information.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Gods are a special case. Clerics and possibly also Druids and Paladins care alot about what gods there are in the setting, but noone else needs detailed list of the gods and what they do upfront. For them, the list that dbb did works fine. The thunder-themed sorcerer worships Zeus, and the ranger worships Artemis, and so forth.

For characters with a closer, tighter connection to the gods, you make up a second sheet going into more detail. This sheet doesn't get handed out unless it's needed. And that's the important thing that Lago's saying. Don't muddy the water by giving out too much info too soon, but certainly do have more info ready upon request.

-Desdan

[Josh_Kablack]

Okay, watch this:

"The Forgotten Realms is an insanely detailed encylopedic setting chockablock full of absurdly high level characters. It has at least one copy of every monster, item, character, spell, idea, cosmology, philosophy, vehicle and location ever published in any official or unofficial D&D source somewhere within it, and gains more of these as more material is published."

There, that about covers it in a mere 2 sentences.

[dbb]

Desdan nailed it. Having a lot of information available is actually a good thing. It's having a lot of information that's disorganized and extremely badly structured that's a problem.

On a side note, Exalted: The Dragon-Blooded is one of my favorite RPG books E VAR, precisely because it has a ton of information on the one part of the setting I actually care about: what it's like to be a person in this setting. I like it ever so much more than I liked the original Exalted book. Also, it sure is awfully pretty.

--d., a sucker for that deep rose shade

[Josh_Kablack]

I'll pass that along to Geoff.

And keep that in mind when you see him hawking his current self-produced RPG project at conventions.

[Lago_AM3P]

I'm still disagreeing. Having too much information is still a bad thing.

dbb, you play on Tenebrae. I thought about picking up a character, but there are simply way too many fucking pages and files to read through before you can make a character. What the hell? This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Unfortunately, nearly all online tabletop MU*s are like this, so I'm SOL.

[dbb]

Having too much information is a bad thing, but that's tautological. If it weren't "too much", it wouldn't be "bad".

Tenebrae's problems are threefold:

1> Information noone gives a crap about. There are seriously pages and pages of text that deal with parts of history that happened tens of thousands of years ago and knowledge of which is pretty much confined to the gods. What the hell? This is like telling us what the villain's favorite color is or what kind of ice cream he prefers.

2> The actual writing; enough said.

3> Horribly bad organization that violates the Rule of Sufficient Fractalness (Fractality? Whatever) in ways that even Joe Ezterhas would be unwilling to depict.

The actual quantity of information is not a problem. Having it all sort of thrown together in one big lump is.

--d.

[RandomCasualty]

1153436432[/unixtime]]
For characters with a closer, tighter connection to the gods, you make up a second sheet going into more detail. This sheet doesn't get handed out unless it's needed. And that's the important thing that Lago's saying. Don't muddy the water by giving out too much info too soon, but certainly do have more info ready upon request.

Well personally I don't see any point in giving out information early when you know PCs will be asking about it. The religion of a world is pretty important in any kind of indepth roleplaying situation, since generally you'd want your character to have some kind of god he worships, even if he isn't a cleric.

I mean nobody is forcing the PCs to read about everything, so if they don't want to read ion the gods right away, nobody is holding a gun to their heads. But if they care they can read about it. I'm not really sure why this is such a big deal. Unless the setting entails some super secret uber mechanics that totally change how the game is played, then missing out on a little information isn't terrible.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

RC: Where are you disagreeing with me? I'm not seeing it. The point is having enough information about the world to squeak by character creation, but then having information organized in a presentable fashion for if and when they come asking for it.

In a greek setting you don't really need a ton of information about the gods, since most people who don't worship a god pointedly simply worship the entire pantheon as a whole and pray and sacrifice as needed. You can have the entire pantheon written up seperatly, but there's no reason to force everyone to read that wether they care or not.

-Desdan

[Crissa]

I preffer small chunks to ask questions about - then I can say, 'okay, I want to know what gods. Which can I choose? Then when I see them more, I'll narrow down te field.

There is really little need to tell the Druid about the Cleric gods or the Druid about the gods of undeath and their underlings when in character creation - I don't care and prolly can't use information on their domains yet.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

1153468706[/unixtime]]RC: Where are you disagreeing with me? I'm not seeing it. The point is having enough information about the world to squeak by character creation, but then having information organized in a presentable fashion for if and when they come asking for it.

Basically all I'm saying is that I think character creation info should entail a lot more than a simple page. I figure it's better to give them a booklet to read up on beforehand.

A lot of times you may deter or encourage someone from making a divine caster if they see a god they like or if they see a crappy pantheon. Sometimes just reading about the various organizations may spur someone to make a certain type of character.

I suppose the main difference is that I prefer if people don't "Squeak by" character design, but rather get a decent grasp of the world before they make their character. If you're doing an in depth roleplay game, I think that much is essential. All too often I've seen games become crap when characters develop character concepts essentially in a vacuum or under limited information and then try to "adapt" the concept to the game world. While this sort of thing is fine for beer and pretzels dungeon crawls, if you're running complex political plots, it tends to suck bad.

The entire point of in-depth roleplaying characters is for them to have some attachment to the world. They're not just random adventurers who hail from god knows where. They've got living breathing ties to the campaign world, and to do that, you've got to know about the world you're making the character.

Now while one can start with minimal information and have PCs ask questions, it's a lot simpler to try to preemptively answer questions when you type out your intiial campaign setting handout. Because that way you're printing out something for everyone rather than having to answer 6 people's questions individually.

[dbb]

RC, remember that the original standard was this:

If a setting can't be explained enough that you can get started with playing the game in a page worth of text, it sucks.

If your complaint is that a single page is probably not enough to run a game of complex politics and in-depth exploration of the setting's dominant culture ... is that really what you consider to be "get[ting] started with playing the game"?

The point of having a one-page setting is not to cover everything you need to run every kind of game imaginable in the setting -- that's obviously crazy. The point is to tell you enough about the setting that you, a) can make a determination about whether you think you like it or not, b) can explain it to your friends in enough detail that you can play a basic kill monsters, find treasure type of adventure; and c) can get pointers to find out more about the parts of the setting that you personally might require if you wanted to play a more complex campaign. I think that's entirely reasonable.

--d.

[RandomCasualty]

Well the purpose of the one page thing was so...

1153373132[/unixtime]]
That way, it doesn't scare people new to the game who want to make complicated, intricate characters who also don't want to contradict the setting.

Making complicated and intricate characters in a setting is going to take a lot of setting knowledge. No way you can do that with just one page. If you can, then your setting isn't all that complex.

[Crissa]

I thought the one-page was so people would look at you game and nod in understanding - and maybe want to join, or be able to at least know if they're watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica or Firefly?

-Crissa

[dbb]

Not being Lago, I am handicapped by an inability to tell exactly what he meant. Two basic interpretations occur to me:

1> Players who want to create complex and intricate characters must always be able to do so on the basis of a single page describing the setting.

2> Players who want to create complex and intricate characters need to not be "scare[d]" off by ridiculous quantities of data -- so a single-page introduction is a better place to start them off than a 200 page pdf file.

I'm going to assume that Lago meant something closer to #2 -- that a good single-page setting summary is more in the "necessary" than in the "sufficient" category when it comes to making complex and intricate characters.

--d.

[dbb]

On the other hand, it's entirely possible to create complex and intricate characters with a limited amount of data. For that to work, however, either the setting has to be very sparsely detailed (otherwise you'll end up colliding with the setting when you try to invent specific details for your character) or else the DM needs to be willing and able to play fast and loose with whatever material isn't in the information he gives out to the players.

Creating a deep and complex character on small amounts of setting material amounts to making yourself a co-author of the setting. Since I love to invent details about the world in the process of creating my characters -- whether they be famous family members, organizations, historical events, whatever -- I approve of this. So it's possible that Lago is demanding vaguer and less detailed settings -- which I think is fine, but I would disagree that it's the only way to write a setting that permits players to reasonably create well-integrated, complex characters. If Lago is saying that, which he might not be.

--d.