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| gameinfo:setting_design_philosophy [2022/07/09 21:37] – restless | gameinfo:setting_design_philosophy [2022/07/11 18:06] (current) – [What (I hope) we get] restless |
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| ====== Setting design philosophy ====== | ====== Setting design philosophy ====== |
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| == Traditional options aren’t suitable to allow for me to run a game and lead my life, too. == | ==== What I wanted ==== |
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| Prepping the setting for gaming can often seem like a cliff you need to climb where you never reach the top. You have a lot choices to make that affect things like engagement, tone, amount of prep required, storylines that make sense in such a setting, how much of an outlet it will be for your creativity and just how much plain //work// it will be to run the setting. | Instead of focusing on the setting first, I instead made a list of requirements for a game I wanted to run. Each, in turn, has consequences for the setting: |
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| * Some people like to use a pre-made setting with a ton of details planned out for everything and tons of canon. It seems exhausting to me to have to carry the ideas of someone else's world around in my head and be able to pull answers out of my orifices at a moment's notice, so that's out. | <WRAP indent> |
| | == Ease of prep == |
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| * Others like to take a skeletal setting (like, say, Greyhawk, the "Known World" before it was Mystara or The Midlands) and make it their own. While I can see the advantages there and you can repaint and rearrange the furniture, you're still hanging your hat in someone else's house. | This is highest on my list of requirements. To be able to do preparation for gaming expeditiously is a necessary or there will be no game at all. Despite this... |
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| * So, that leaves me with homebrewing a world. That's probably the most expansive because then you have to do it all. You have to make all the places, players, connections and history. I see people online who are doing it, bleeding into hundreds or thousands of pages, worrying about things like weather patterns, plate tectonics and detailed world history of places that the players will likely never visit. | == Homebrewed setting == |
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| //None// of these are appetizing to me. Honestly, over the years the amount of preparation that is required has kept me from moving forward much at all, or led me to procrastinate by doing gaming-adjacent projects of all sorts. | ...I don't want to use a commercially-available setting. I don't mind liberally borrowing or adapting things, but the cognitive load of keeping the details of someone else's work is often a lot higher than just doing your own. |
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| == However, there’s another way. == | == A light setting == |
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| Take Fritz Leiber, author of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories. Over a period of time in a series of letters, he and a colleague spun together a few ideas for the protagonists, a few other characters, some places in the world of Nehwon and from there he took it to generate stories that became his greatest legacy. As he would write he would weave in a detail of a person, place or event for color, and over time some became fleshed out, some were just flavor that set the tone and were potential that could have happened, but adventure never led the pair there. | Much of the old pulp literature that OD&D was based on was written with the merest sketch of characters, locations and situations; as they wrote throwaway ideas were incorporated for depth and potential anchors for future growth if the stories become the root of a larger world. Gaming can be similar. |
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| Ideally, that's how I want to run this game. I have some ideas about places, situations in the world, and a few characters and antagonists and factions. Things will come to us over time. I might just have a name of a place, or what it looks like, or a couple pictures that I have saved that fill out a mood or what it should look like, and some day it might become more to me and become a location that is more important over time. Players might become interested in an idea, or someone suggests something or asks about something that I hadn't considered, and it may turn out that yes, such a thing //may// exist if you look. | == Open table game == |
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| The world isn't born fully-formed. We're shaping it through play and those parts that are important will make themselves known over time. We will discover it together, over time, like the pulp stories that inspired [[dict>old-school_gaming|old school gaming]]. | [[dict>open_table_game|I want the game to be available and approachable]] by people who want to play, be that every session, when their schedule allows or someone who just wants to try it out. That means that to facilitate engagement, the base setting needs to be closer to a fantasy //lingua franca// to get people immersed in the game more easily. |
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| {{tag>gameinfo reference}} | == West Marches-style play == |
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| | I want a game that has a [[gameinfo:west_marches|West Marches]] style play. I want players to be able to do the scheduling and control where they go, plan their own missions and chart their own courses. I want information sharing. I want competing playgroups and friendly rivalries. I want to be able to see the results of multiple groups changing the world. |
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| | == Beer-and-pretzels gaming == |
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| | [[wp>Beer_and_pretzels_game|Finally, I don't want the game to be too serious.]] No big plot, just some locations, some antagonists with some goals, some situations, and let it evolve. Gameplay can focus on that, or it can just be about kicking in doors and taking monsters' stuff, it's all good. |
| | </WRAP> |
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| | \\ |
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| | ==== What (I hope) we get ==== |
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| | From this I could basically say the setting is designed around these ideas as its touchstones: |
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| | <WRAP indent> |
| | == A sketchy homebrew to riff on and expand == |
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| | A sketchy homebrew world littered with the stubs of ideas can grow as needed and still be rich and engaging. This thrives on the prepping of locations, not plots. |
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| | == Sandbox drop-in game == |
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| | A sandbox-style game that is set up for such that players can drop-in or come and go as needed will build a larger player base or lend itself to more situations where the game can played. If players find a plot hook they want to pursue, then they are welcome to drive the direction of the game. |
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| | == Bog-standard “D&D Fantasy,” at least at the surface == |
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| | If you want new and occasional casual players to be oriented, then you need a common frame of reference. Almost everyone nowadays understands the idea of "D&D fantasy" to some degree, and gives them a familiar place to start, even if the similarity may only be skin deep; at least the //really// fantastic stuff will seem like actual fantasy then! |
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| | == Let's not take it too seriously! == |
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| | It's a game. Let's have fun and let the game world reveal itself through play itself. It can be deep or shallow, based on the desires of the players. |
| | </WRAP> |
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| | {{tag>gameinfo table}} |
