how else to introduce setting

[Emily Care]

In his thread The Components of Setting

To restate my problem with Setting in these new terms: Many RPGs provide a great deal of Potential Setting with no guidelines of how to turn it into Played Setting. As Neel and John have pointed out, many individual groups have created their own ways of doing this well. I know from experience that many groups have not.

In Ken Hite's latest Out of the Box, he describes the Forge as the site that asks "How else?" So, How else can we design games to enhance Played Setting?

Rules and mechanics that help play groups to enahance setting in play would have to make the setting relevant and responsive.

My Life with Master, Primetime Adventures and Dogs in the Vineyard are three games that do each of those things well.

MLwM provides a robust Situation with an iconic and easily understood, but very loose setting.  The group can pick a time and place that suits their preferences (from 18th century Bavarian village to 20th century Manhattan firm) as long as it fits with the trope of evil genius master with underlings in contact with an alienated society.  The Master, who is jointly created by the group is a central part of the game's setting.  Setting begins in the hands of the players, vesting them in it from the get go.  Joint world creation makes it much more likely that the setting will be relevant to everyone, since they helped create it.

The mechanics keep the setting relevant throughout play. The Minions invoke setting with each attempt to forge a connection (by sallying forth into the village etc, and by interacting with the townsfolk), making the setting immediately relevant to all of the players.  Who of the villagers their twisted troll of a servant have some contact with? Who might they possibly have some hope of making a pitiful connection with?  

And when the Master's grip on the Minions and Town begins to slip, the setting is responsive with a will.  In MLwM you create a setting balanced like a game of jenga--each connection the minions make pulls another block out, bringing you closer to the crash of the world in on the insane and insular universe the Master has created.


PtA's collaborative setting creation also gives immediate relevance to the setting.  Setting and Situation are up for grabs--they can be anything the group likes--but the setting will create a range of potential situations.  And then each character is created to fit into the setting by choosing from the stock set of types you'd find in the kind of TV show created.  

Each player creates a portion of the setting by making their character's set.  So setting arises from character and is guaranteed to be used again and again as the characters' plots are explored.  This promotes relevance, I'm not so sure just it might make setting responsive. Since scene framing rotates, everyone has to invoke parts of setting, creating a dynamic where the usefulness of setting is reinforced throughout.


DitV leaves the setting creation up to the GM, and introduces players to setting the standard way--through character creation.  However, it gives much more detailed guidelines to the GM for creating both setting and situation (the town creation rules) that would be a great model for other games that have a similar level of focus.As in MLwM and PtA, Dogs draws on popular culture for the setting. In this case it is the western that is the backdrop.  In each case, this makes setting much more accessible than if there were tomes of specific setting data to read through.  

In Dogs, characters are deeply embedded in setting--or rather the premise of the game is intertwined with character concept and setting.  Players are given a clear idea of what kinds of activities their characters will be doing (spreading justice with a gun), and they are immediately confronted with the setting by way of the town.  The game then consists of the GM throwing setting elements in the way of the players and asking them to make decisions about them.
 
The background is continually made relevant to the players because the predicaments they have to resolve are moral ones based on the society of the Faithful. The players' characters themselves are agents of the community order, and their in-character interactions consistently bring up aspects of the society and require the players to take some action about them.  

And the setting is incredibly responsive.  What the players decide to have their characters do both impacts the towns irrevocably, and also makes statements about what justice is in this world. How it is meted out and what it costs.  Fallout to the characters, as well as experiences by the players reflect the reverberations of the character-setting interactions.  Gms can continue this in the way they craft towns--addressing issues raised by characters. And as characters gain traits etc. the player can incorporate their interactions with the world right into their character.


So, major trends here: collaborative creation, feedback between situation/setting and characters/setting, strong consequences to characters that arise from setting/situation and mechanical elements that represent all of these things.  

How do other games successfully make setting relevant or responsive? Are there generalized principles for design that we can take away from them?

best,
Emily Care

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Those are good points, Emily. I think that many of the ideas given in Sorcerer and its supplements are aimed in that direction. I think it's fascinating that I have to hold so many people's hands in order to get them through the process, given their previous role-playing training (or mis-training).

HeroQuest is also worth a look, especially since it provides many useful tools and is working from an astoundingly elaborate and conceptually deep setting. There are lots of threads in the HeroQuest forum about this, especially lately.

Best,
Ron

[Keith Senkowski]

Hey,

With Conspiracy of Shadows I tried a few things to make setting relevant.  The setting is handed to you, but three things are in place to make it relevant to play.  

One is the character creation process.  The individual creation part is impacted by the setting by the character's Drive and Passion, in which the Players invent portions of the setting relevant to the individual character.  Also the choices of social station and ethnic origin impact the setting.  

In the second half of character creation, Cell creation, the Players create their collective reality so to speak.  They define who they know, what they know, where they are, etc.  

The second thing is the conspiracy creation process has a very direct impact on the game.  Though it is driven by the Game Master, it is in many ways responsive to the choices made by the Players during the character creation process.

Finally, I make setting important to the game mechanically by offering rewards to Players for taking a vested interest and inventing parts of the setting.

Keith

[Roger]

I've been in a couple of long-running LARP games, and a couple of "d20 Modern" games, which use "the real world" as their setting.

It's one of those ideas which I keep expecting to work exceptionally well, but mostly it doesn't work, and I'm not entirely sure why.

It does solve some issues with respect to getting the setting out to the players and getting them all on the same page.  (But not really -- the real world, as such, does virtually nothing to help determine the tone of the game, which I would suggest is a major function of setting.)

I'll try to point out some of the other problems.

In terms of a deprotagonizing setting, it can be very, at least at most scales.

Emotionally, much of the best material can be the hardest for the players to use.  Everyone wants to save the elven princess kidnapped by goblins, but no one wants to roleplay in a game that features the little girl from down the block that was kidnapped two weeks ago.

It virtually hands every player a big hammer called "But that's not realistic!" and waits for them to start beating each other about the head.  Indeed, I suspect some groups favour fantastical settings purely to help disarm this sort of criticism.

The usual response to all of this is to generate some sort of alternate universe, which is mostly like ours, except not.  Again, in theory this would work fine, but in my experience, it all falls apart fairly rapidly.  I'm speaking particularly to ad hoc reality revision, and not settings which are real-world-like but still based on extensive extant canon, like Marvel Superheroes.

So, what's the problem?  As I've said, I'm not entirely sure.  I'm inclined to think it might be an issue of escapism.  These sorts of games can be not only non-escapist, but actively anti-escapist.  Any time a smidge of escapism shows its head, a big "realism" stick smacks it down.

There are probably ways it could work.  Using PtA to run something similar to "Law & Order", for example.  But I'm inclined to think that the last people who would be interested in such a game would be real-life lawyers.  Similarly with "E.R." and doctors.  If we're only allowed to play in those parts of the real-world that we don't know very well, there's hardly any point in using the real-world in the first place.


It's something I want to experiment with further.



Cheers,
Roger

[Matt Snyder]

Setting weighed heavily in my brain as I created Nine Worlds, a game with a specific, unique setting. I knew all along in creating it that I didn't want to present reams of nigh-useless setting info. I wanted to create the setting in such a way that instructed players how to explore the setting and find meaning from it. But, I faced the challenge of offering up a setting likely unfamiliar to anyone.

I tried a few approaches to make setting relevant to people actually playing the game. First, in the chapter explaining the backhistory and setting of Nine Worlds, I made a point to say overtly that the setting is in the hands of the players, not come-down-from-on-high in the book. Nothing special, there, but I thought it was a point worth making. Second, I wrote the backhistory less as a gospel of events, but more as a lesson theme. I wrote the backhistory of Nine Worlds to show people what kinds of conflicts mattered in the game (conflicts involving authority, creation, and control). Each stage of events was meant as subtle lesson in "what matters" and "what's interesting" in this universe in terms of the human beings playing the game. What should grab the players in a meaningful way? I tried to show-not-tell that in the history chapter. (I'm not sure that worked!)

But, without question, the most important part of connecting Nine Worlds' quirky setting to the people playing the game are Muses. Muses rules are inspired by both Kickers in Sorcerer and Spiritual Attributes in The Riddle of Steel. They are goals a player creates for his character. The completion of the goals is the main reward system in the game. Nine Worlds greatly rewards players who pursue and resolve their character Muses.

I included a section on writing good Muses, offering this advice:

Muses that involve relationships with mortal or immortal characters are optimal. The more players involve family, friends, fellow Archons, allies like the Eternals, and enemies like the Titans, the more likely the Muse will help create rewarding drama in play. Similarly, Muses that involve the events and places of the diverse Nine Worlds help make the game an exciting, drama-rich exploration. For more information on the game’s universe and events, see Cosmology ...

So, I explicity encourage players to consider the setting as a component of their characters' action and "motion" in the game.

So, yep, I'm seeing Emily's major trends:

* collaborative creation (I encourage players to create Muses togther, collaboratively in the text.)
* feedback between situation and setting (yep, that's what Muses are all about)
* strong consequences (yes, especially when Championing or Challenging Primarchs in the game)
* mechanical elements (e.g. Primarch attribute writes and their use of the worlds as Talismans).

I can't offer up any new generalized trends, but maybe my comments will help others.