The Components of Setting

[John Kim]

Some players think that's fun; others don't.  Given that "tinkering with the setting" is an end-in-itself for some players, I think that it is either a CA, or a subset of the Sim CA.

Well, tying this into GNS is a can of worms unto itself.  In my experience, people will vary not only in whether they enjoy this sort of detail -- but also which details are important to them.  For example, some people may not blink twice at extended description of things like a character's hair, clothing, and other cosmetic features -- even though it's not "important" information.  The same person might react badly to, say, description of the architecture of a building or weather patterns as "useless".  

Personally, I've never more than glanced at the weather maps for Harn, but I've spent a while looking over the language map and language relation chart.  The latter was important to me because it showed cultural relations in the larger world, such as the clash between Pharic and Jarinese traditions.

[M. J. Young]

The weather charts are there. Somebody thought they were important enough to research them and write them. I don't naturally see how they're important, but I want someone to tell me how & why they're important. I think this should apply across Setting.

Decades back I was playing a Yazirian male in a Star Frontiers game. He was a cadet in the space force training academy, and there was a yazirian female that the refere (my wife) played with particular attention to making her attractive to me. I responded favorably. Then I wrote up an analysis of how I thought yazirian courtship/mating rituals might work, given that they are viviparous mammalian arboreal and probably nocturnal and certainly highly developed (probably indicating longer gestation period and more highly developed infants, likely in single births). I presented this to the referee to get clarification on whether my understanding fit with hers. After all, the cultural and biological realities of what a yazirian is will impact how I should play him. A dralasite (amorphous protoplasmic blob capable of shifting genders over the course of a life cycle and reproducing by budding in response to spores picked up in the air) isn't going to have any sort of mating or courtship ritual at all, and males and females will have no particular interest in each other that distinguishes them.

Weather patterns are going to impact people, practices, attitudes, cultural norms, and more. In a country where it rains almost every day, picnics are not going to be a popular pasttime, and suntans will be the proof of foreign citizenship. Having lived in northern Massachusetts and in southern New Jersey, I'm very much aware that the amount of snow one gets on a regular basis impacts the way one regards snow. My father came from Mississippi, where everything will shut down for a quantity of snow which in Massachusetts wouldn't be noticed.

I don't know a thing about Harn, but I know that when I introduced weather to my D&D games the players became interested in planning their efforts in relation to the forecast.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

Weather for Harn does appear superfluous.  It's true that weather, of course, makes a difference to what sort of lives people live, but is an actual weather TABLE necessary or helpful seems to me the the question, not just whether weather informs play and SIS.

I think the interesting part about Harn in this regard is its relentless physical realism, which I find rather at odds with FRPG myself.  I would hazard that the reason such tables exist is that the designers intended this weather to be externalised from the local game and into the world so that it carried an air (nyuk nyuk) of objectivity and imposed externality.

But how would we use it?  I had this problem with the AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide.  It's all very fine knowing what the current wind chill factor is but in many ways its not framed to be useful in play.  Yes I could determine the weather of every day in a week long journey from town A to town B but would that actually be a worthwhile use of our play time?

I fully agree with ever less likely points like tectonic plates.  Just about the only reasoj I can imagine for this is to help map drawing (put volcanoes along this line type thing) but this simultaneously undermines a magical origin for such geography, which is a pity for a fantasy game.

It does seem to me that this is detail for its own sake, detail according to a standard of otaku-like comprehensiveness that seems irrelevant to the likely action of play.

I'd specifiy "quality" in this sense, as the ease with which Potential Setting is able to transition through Character/Situation/System/Color in order to become Played Setting. Does that seem right to you?

I'd agree with that.  This is what bugs me about the tectonic plates - I simply cannot imagine, ever, that one player will remark to another "aha, I see now that two tectonic plates are colliding in this region, now it all makes sense!".  Is there any conceivable way that the tectonic plates can enter play in a useful manner?  IMO this is data that would have been better ommitted in favour of something that would have been more directly usefull.

[ffilz]

Some thoughts:

If you want an air of realism, knowing where the tectonic plates are would allow you to place an earthquake or new volcanic activity "realistically". Is this useful? I admit I've never used such a detail before, but to me it feels like useful detail about the world. World creators also use such detail, and once you've created it, there is a certain urge to share it. So perhaps the most important reason to include the tectonic plate information is to increase the believability of your geography ("See, the volcanoes are all along the tectonic plate boundary so my geography is realistic."), basically proof that you did your background research.

I have used weather charts occaisionally. They are a decent way to document how the weather changes in an area by season, so even if you choose not to roll on the chart, it can help inform your decision about weather (hmm, summer is the dry period, so I can't just have a thundershower, oh, but wait, there actually is a 1% chance of one, so I can, but we will all know that it is an unusual occurrence [you would actually need more resolution than d100 to get a rare occurence since a 1% chance on average will give you about 1 such event a year]). Of course a few paragraphs might serve the same, but a really well thought out random chart (that has a way to represent probabilities as low as 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000) might be a more compact way of communicating the types of weather possible.

Frank

[M. J. Young]

It's all very fine knowing what the current wind chill factor is but in many ways its not framed to be useful in play.  Yes I could determine the weather of every day in a week long journey from town A to town B but would that actually be a worthwhile use of our play time?

I absolutely agree, and I speak from experience.

Before the WSG appeared, I devised a complicated weather system which tracked temperature change through the day, amounts and types of precipitation, wind speed and direction, flood conditions, and snow accumulation--all factors I thought would be worthwhile for overland adventures. I could tell you not merely whether it would rain, but what time it would rain, what time it would stop, how much rain would fall in that time, and whether that was enough to cause local flooding.

The problem was that I spent a lot of time out of game rolling dice and recording the results, so that my system would work. I tried converting it to a BASIC computer program, but working with a C-64 I quickly overflowed the memory even with the expansion.

By the time I had a computer that might have been able to handle such a program, I had long realized it was a lot of unnecessary detail for what I wanted to accomplish. In Multiverser, because players aren't merely traveling long distances, they're moving between worlds, such complex weather systems were far too much bother. If I need to know the weather in Multiverser, I roll a General Effects Roll to see whether it's favorable or unfavorable for the player's wishes, and to what degree, and create the current conditions from that. If the weather matters, it will be specified in the situation description.

But I clearly understand the desire to have an objective weather system which provides that kind of detail, and if I'd been able to program it back then I'd have used it a lot longer than I did. It's a bad use of my time if I'm doing it by hand, but a useful tool if I can shift the work elsewhere.

--M. J. Young