Setting Design reconsidered

[Patrice]

*Takes a deep breath*

Okay. I don't really know where I'm threading (yes, threading) but I'll give it a try.

As far as I've read, it seems to me that the setting design in itself has been sort of leftover, or taken for granted in the few issues I've seen. Everyone seems to agree upon the fact that a system should be wholly consistant or at least, partly derivated with the game concept at large, but it very soon turns out that by "game concept" many people think about a setting. Saying "my game is about a post-apo world where modern science is considered as magic" isn't a concept, but a setting.

The only case in which setting and concept may be tightly connected up to the point of involving the game system is Simulationism. I won't get too much into theory because what I want to talk about is connected to the games I'm working upon and it's very practical. But I do need a few theory discussions beforehand. I've been thinking about "what is a game concept" and I came to the conclusion that the concept is what you play. What you actually play to in this game. That explains why in Simulationism concept might be adequated with setting, but that also explains why it isn't the case in other game models. That also stresses the need for a setting in some games, and its unusefulness in others.

So, to come to my point I'm trying to think about the way the settings are written and I've noticed that, regardless of the system or the system model, I've been actually using about 25% of the information provided in a setting during actual play. So, what's the use of the other pieces  of information? You've got history, climate, geographical issues, social groups, thousand places in a scratch and, to be honest, you don't use it. No one does. So why is all this stuff there for? To provide a possibility for users to define their own content in the given setting? If that's the main reason, why the settings designers didn't leave some parts of it shaded for user design instead of railroading them into unuseful pieces of information? I can tell why. It's because that's not the main reason. The main reason is to provide a backup for the GM illusionism in Simulationist games. I think many setting designers didn't want this to happen but barely designed their setting basing themselves upon what's been done before without giving it a second thought. There's no need for World of Greyhawk in D&D really. Designing it allows campaign play. Okay. Then why did they provide us with so much extra information the actual play will never use?

So here's my ideas for setting design. Setting should be derivated from the game concept. They should focus upon what will be played. What will be actually played. Let's take the example of a city. You will need adventure, or situation, or challenge hooks. You will need cool descriptions to flesh it. You will need pictures, art and a graphic atmosphere. You will need details about how the setting could change according to the players' actions, that would involve a few tiny bits of politics, or at least of statistics for the leaders and the guards, and maybe the factions and you would need some cool illusion for the flowing of time, maybe some bits of background to give verisimilitude to your neighborhoods and a few crunchy items for your game, something that would allow an in-game logics rendering of your exploration of the city. But you certainly wouldn't need more than that. No history section, no loads of flavored NPCs nobody will ever meet, no detailed building description and maybe... No map at all.

I'm dreaming of a setting in which every information would be instantly available and useful instead of fully developped unuseful gazetteers. Think about the way it feels when you buy a setting and try to get your players' characters in it, shuffling through the climate section to see how you should describe the day and going to the tiresome map to find what the houses around the PCs are and in which year they were built in order to check if you can describe them as ancient or not...

Any feedback?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Oh, yes, I've got feedback. You see, I'm currently writing a new edition of The Shadow of Yesterday, and it's basically the game you speculate about here. It's a coherent narrativist design with an intricate, wide setting, that is nevertheless written with utmost concern for playability. This is a topic I've been very interested for quite a while, actually - ever since my brother started obsessing about Exalted around the beginning of the decade, I've been wondering how the multitude of setting books could actually be integrated into play in a fruitful, comprehensive manner. I can't say that I'd have found any great answers to that, but I do have some slight understanding of how setting latches onto play in many situations.

Not much else to say at this point, though - I fully agree with your annoyance over undifferentiated setting mulch, I hate that stuff myself as well. As you say, the key to writing large settings without that sort of thing seems to be in always keeping actual play in mind, and being clear on the system that your game uses to swing that setting material into play. Whatever it is that your game needs a setting for, that's what the setting needs to be designed towards.

[Patrice]

Funny that you'd be mentionning it. People keep throwing The Shadow of Yesterday at my face every time I get in a new direction, or at least a direction that sounded new to me. I've been shuffling through The Shadow of Yesterday game because of your answer and I must say I'm quite abashed by this design. I think you must know how it feels to be thinking you're going in a somewhat new direction and suddenly come across something that is very close to what you've been thinking about... And well, I feel like this. I must confess I've never read TSoY before and maybe I did well because I would have abandoned my design options altogether and would have been content just to start playing it. This is awesome. Yet, I'm not aiming at a Narrativist design but at what I would call a Gamist one and that's a whole world of difference. Keys, Secrets and Abilities as such aren't specifically Narrativist.

To get back at the setting issue, I think it's even more narrower in a Gamist game than in a Narrativist one. You need a setting to produce Premises, I need it for Rewards, Flavor and... Challenges. Do I? That makes me think about the issue of the Bitterest Roleplayer in the World (see GNS upon Gamism, articles section) and questions the need of a setting in a Gamist design. What is the setting for if you're playing Gamist? Immersion? Flavor? Rewards? Challenges? If you say Immersion, you lean towards pretending playing Simulationist. Here comes Darksun, Al-Quadim and other settings designed with a lot of details and immersive items for Gamist systems. So, let's discard that. That leaves us with Flavor, Rewards and Challenge. My statement is that a setting in a Gamist design is useful for campaign play. You don't need a setting if you don't get involved in campaign play. And then why would you need it? You can't expect challenge to derivate from the setting, the setting would barely explain it, situation it,  but can't provide it spontaneously by itself. You can throw in a little bit of rewarding, but a setting isn't necessary for that. So what you have is just... Flavor and maybe, mostly though hidden under the cover of flavor, verisimilitude. And verisimilitude does matter for campaign play. So that delves a bit deeper into my first assumptions and explains further why we do have all these background and history sections in settings. Except that they are designed for the GM whereas they should be designed for all the players, GM included (that's why I was stating that this way of detailing a setting is a backup for GM illusionism).

So a setting is about Flavor and Verisimilitude only and should adress all the players. What now?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Heh, that was my exact reaction to TSoY when Clinton published it - I'd been working on a game of my own that did the same things in a fantasy Greece sort of setting, and even from my own biased viewpoint Clinton already got the thing something like 90% right in his game - so why bother? I scrapped the project I had and moved on to other things at that point.

As for gamist setting design, that's an interesting question. I've been doing some work in that direction myself in conjunction to the fantasy campaign Alder Gate I'm currently running. The theoretical basis of my approach is laid out in my challenge-based adventuring post - looking it over from the specific perspective of setting design, I'd say you have the right of it: what we want from the setting is potential challenges and rewards. Both of those have to be instantiated into play through specific situations, though. This is significant in that my Alder Gate campaign runs on an extremely small amount of predefined setting. I might even say that the whole campaign's setting can be phrased into one paragraph:

The campaign happens in a Howard-style sword & sorcery setting. The immediate area of the City is sort of like timeless Levant. We don't care of large scale geography or stuff. The City is ruled by merchant princes, an influential Church of Enkidu the Sun-beast and some high military officers who dictate things when war threatens the City. Think Sin City in a fantasy world. Typical challenges range from slavery to crazy cults to giant snakes. Typical reward range from exotic women to expensive living to friends to social position.

That's functionally what we know of the setting before going into the specific, individual situation of the adventure, and it's easily enough - the players can create their characters and give them appropriate skills, and I as the GM can just throw out all sorts of sword & sorcery shit to provoke them. From there the players can then maneuver into position to define which parts are challenges and which are consequences, and off we go.

[Patrice]

I wouldn't say that the setting provides the challenges by itself, nor that it does for rewards either. That's why I concluded by "the setting is for flavor and verisimilitude only". It's the backgroung that makes the out-of-the game rewards worthy. Out of the game because a living condition or an exotic girl won't make me better at swordplay or arcane arts, nor will gain me an extra move a round (hopefully).

When I look at your " challenge-based adventuring" post, I think I can guess what you're aiming at is a free-flowing exploration in which the players decide together what the challenges are. The idea is great but when I read the details, all I see is soft logic, there's no mechanism to ensure what the challenge is about nor what will define it, except relying upon the GM. So to my perception, it eventually adequates with "the GM defines the challenges", which is more or less a standard of many Gamist-Simulationist systems. And of course, it has no real connection with the setting, nor explains the need for it. So, the GM takes the setting into situations, taking into account the characters' moves and actions.

This leads us to a further step: What if the setting were a way to bring forth Situations of Challenge? I can't think of any Gamist or Simulationist (obviously) setting designed that way, even if most settings include tiny bits of it. The setting would then become a game tool for Situation design. A setting could be written about situations only and this setting would be a common basis for GM and PCs alike, all the players knowing what could evolve into Challenges. The remainder would be flavor only. Does that help The Bitterest Roleplayer in the World? I think so. That would look like a collection of hooks and instances garbed in fancy descriptions and would include as well a way, a gaming mechanism way to involve the PCs in the situations. What I want here is to remove GM illusionism from the design. Does that sound to achieve this result?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Ah, we're getting to the nut of gamist settings. You see, calling setting just flavor and verisimitude is, I find, selling the influence of setting short, even for a Gamist game. This is a comparison I use often when explaining gamism: gamist play is about wanting to slay the dragon. If you don't care about slaying the dragon, why are you playing the dragon-slaying game? Go is a good game, go play that. No, trying to reduce the gamist game into the hard core (as Ron calls it) of person-against-person fight is just a disruption of the real complexity of the game. I don't want to beat the GM or the rules, I want to beat the dragon - and that's what I need the rules, the GM and the appreciative co-players for. If i weren't enchanted by the strategic and tactical issues of being the dragon-slaying hero, I'd be playing something else with less administrative overhead.

The setting comes in here as a powerful force, because it's the thing that defines what dragons are and why they need to be slain. Basically, without the setting we won't have the situations that become challenges, and we won't know how those challenges turn into consequences of action. For instance, take that setting description I gave earlier for my campaign: even in all its generality, I find this setting information crucial for actually playing the game, as it is the basis on which we see challenges and consequences during play. Were it not for the setting telling us what's what, we wouldn't have player characters who are lusty barbarians, greedy merchants and wily thieves - were it not for the setting, I would not have a specified range of genre-approved situations to introduce as matter of play. This is no mere color, the Setting provides a crucial framework that allows us to form Situation in play.

This comes back to that "challenge-based adventuring" post, by the way: it's not really freeform and GM fiat, you see; I just haven't gone into the rules that might be used for the exercise, simply because that wasn't the purpose of the post. What I'm doing right now in my fantasy adventure campaign is that I'm trying to figure out a set of rules that does this thing reliably. Perhaps I'll get something together in a couple of years.

Anyway - setting aside the nitpicking of details, I do agree with you on the basic issue: setting is properly understood as a tool for forming situations, just like Ron writes in one of his essays. The interesting bit in this, however, is whether this Setting that forms Situation is, in fact, the same setting we find in the setting chapter of your average roleplaying game. It seems to me that for the most part this equivalency is a distant dream. But then we also have the games where Setting is not even written down in the game book, but instead created through the actions of play. I'm specifically reminded of In a Wicked Age, the game where Situation comes first.

[tonyd]

I agree that setting, properly done, has a great deal to do with how challenges are framed. If you look at wargames, setting, situation, and mechanics are extremely closely entwined. Say you're playing a wargame about the Battle of the Bulge. The setting includes the details of the how the challenge is set up. It includes what units are available to each side, their objectives, their capabilities, and so on.

Where this comes first into role-playing games is through the dungeon. The setting is a world full of dungeons. It's no coincidence that the basic set D&D says "the adventure begins at the entrance to the dungeon". It's when you start seeing the world as an infinite scope of possibilities that I think it's suitability for delivering challenge is eroded. It's full of details, but those details don't translate into situation. Am I making sense here?

[Patrice]

Sure Tonyd, that's it. And a good example too, because it shows the uselessness of a setting one can't translate into situations. And I agree of course, with the statement that a setting is a frame designed to bring Situations (obviously).

Now, I think there's deeper psychological needs involved in playing RPG instead of Chess or Go. You can't subsume it into killing the dragon because it involves more than this. Actually, one always plays within a setting. That might be just one sentence, or 29 books of 300 pages each, it's just a setting all the same. I remember when we started playing D&D, we didn't have setting. Sometimes a player would ask about the world we were playing in and I would answer (come on, I was 12) "we play in the world of D&D". And hell, that was a setting! Elves, dragons, swords, medieval cities and princes and giant rats and magic rings. You don't really need more to play if you don't play campaign style, and even if you do. Just like the setting example you've been giving us. And during the course of the adventures our characters had love affairs (reminder: I was 12), built strongholds, carved guilds, etc. I don't necessary adequate setting with page length. But I say, it's not just about killing the dragon. But from what I'm reading I think we quite agree upon the basics actually: A setting provides a frame for Situations, and I say, gives them a color (flavor and verisimilitude). The thing is, and that's where we might slightly get in different directions, I don't think the setting will provide Situations just by itself. It doesn't. That's why we have adventures, or hooks, or mechanisms enabling the players to shape it into situations (or zoom it, or derivate it). I quite agree with you telling that this setting which forms Situations isn't the setting I find in my regular game book, hence this thread by the way.

Now we stumble into another issue it seems. When you say "this game is about impersonating a warrior heading for dangerous quests in order to plunder hoards of riches and to kill monstruous foes" you actually have a setting enough to explain why you go and kill the dragon. So, to come back to my first statements, as I was wondering about the need for worlds, cities and setting or universe booklets, all I can say is that, apart from helping to design Situations, they are about flavor and verisimilitude. So do we get into another step? I think so. What if a detailed setting was about the game length?

[JoyWriter]

Gamist settings can be good for many things:
Allowing for superhero crossovers; where illusion and duplicity in the setting allow our two heroes to go after each other and then go "wait! I was tricked". So something that allows repeated "mistaken" conflicts that can then go back to zero.

"In chess, why do black and white keep fighting?" "Because grey tricked them both!"
More philosophically, such settings re-strengthen the abstraction layer between moral concerns and pure competition that has been weakened by adding more realism and depth (in the cause of tactical flexibility) into the game.

They also give you things to smash! If a certain sort of person hears "Garal is the greatest fighter in the land", they will immediately respond "Not for long!"

Every detail defined in the setting that is not a direct consequence of the rules, and even some that are, stick out as things to change to a certain sort of competitor.

What do you get when you mash these two? Via deception or "higher cause", the player character is excused from destroying and reforming every inch of the landscape. This is one very good reason for "doom and darkness" settings, as most people will be quite happy with ripping up the established history. This is where slaying dragons comes in, as you are enjoying morally sanctioned destruction as well as exerting a sort of narrative will as in "dragons should be dead"!


On another note, there is a great little theory I came across a while ago "The present is the only thing that effects what happens, the past is only relevant to the extent that it is embodied in the present." It's a big part of the basis of phase-space representations, and is one of those basic science heuristics that run around.

So why don't all those sourcebook goodies end up in play? Perhaps because they have nowhere to sit. There is nothing to embody the history in play apart from one player memorising it or actually reading aloud from the book! The better alternative would be if it coloured player characters actions, but in a conflicting situation that means it has to relate to the players objectives, either predefined or inspired.

Now some of sourcebook history is probably supposed to be inspirational material, and perhaps encode the authors narrative primitives (like how greek historian's morality is obvious in how they report events), but I suspect some of it is just there to fulfil the creators own love of detail, or perhaps give you "your money's worth" of setting. Now I don't want to get too cynical about this, as there are those who love to plug their own causalities into existing events (like lawyers finding precedents from case history), so it certainly can be valuable in one conflict style, but is often not made for this purpose.

[NN]

I think that Setting Design is a Red Herring.

Youve got the concept - the meta-setting,. eg" D&D [subtype #156]" -  and youve got the sandbox.

Everything inbetween is a waste of time except that which creates and populates sandboxes. And sandbox creation seems to me to be 1% inspiration-from-the-setting and the other 99% a mix of adapt-other-sandboxes / invent from scratch.

Id be really delighted to be wrong and see how a Setting can improve scenario creation.

[JoyWriter]

Everything inbetween is a waste of time except that which creates and populates sandboxes.

I agree, but I suspect I might disagree on when a sandbox is finished! I love to keep filling in details, mainly in the field of overlapping motivations and stuff, with their appropriate backgrounds. So depending on which characters I'm referring to I might go back months or weeks or centuries in a pretty haphazard way: "Oh yeah and their families have been in feud since the war of unification, it's mostly simmered down now but it colours their impressions of each other." When I get someone else's setting material I look for stuff like this, then change big stretches of it!

I'd say your probably still using setting, just not an explicit highbrow concept; you still have grounds to decide what is appropriate to cannibalise and what isn't. That gives the setting it's own identity, pulled from the bits of other settings identities.

Now there is this whole thing about logical consistency that many sim people love, but many settings don't have that at all!

In terms of making a useful addition out of this, what parts of "settings" (say published settings) do you find useless? As I bet I could find some way to use them. And make potential challenges out of them too hopefully.

[greyorm]

The only case in which setting and concept may be tightly connected up to the point of involving the game system is Simulationism.

I'm not sure I agree with that particular observation. Here's why: setting is bound up mechanically in Sorcerer and other games, but let's stick with Sorc. It isn't just Color or tacked on thoughtlessly, because it forms a core component of the rules in terms of what sorts of descriptions are available for scores, the definition of humanity, what demons are and how sorcery works, etc. and especially then in how all of that fits together as a whole, what actions would be appropriate, feasible, and realistic, and how the world itself acts and responds in play. Even using the same basic setting in terms of where, defining a different set of descriptions for scores creates a very different world.

So why is all this stuff there for? To provide a possibility for users to define their own content in the given setting? If that's the main reason, why the settings designers didn't leave some parts of it shaded for user design instead of railroading them into unuseful pieces of information? I can tell why. It's because that's not the main reason. The main reason is to provide a backup for the GM illusionism in Simulationist games.

But I DO agree, fully and without hesitation, with this observation.

Let's take the example of a city. You will need adventure, or situation, or challenge hooks. You will need cool descriptions to flesh it. You will need pictures, art and a graphic atmosphere. You will need details about how the setting could change according to the players' actions, that would involve a few tiny bits of politics, or at least of statistics for the leaders and the guards, and maybe the factions and you would need some cool illusion for the flowing of time, maybe some bits of background to give verisimilitude to your neighborhoods and a few crunchy items for your game, something that would allow an in-game logics rendering of your exploration of the city.

Yes! Having grown up on traditional Sim-style ultra-complete setting gazetteers and volumes and volumes of encyclopedia-style details of fantasy worlds, this is something I've struggled to develop myself: what's useful meat, and what's just unchewable fat? What parts can people use...or maybe the question is: how do you make what you provide for Setting into System parts?

(And now I'm wondering if this is part of what we're exploring over the in part 2 of the Color First thread?)

[David C]

I've been watching this thread (I've spent a great deal pondering my own setting, recently) and now I have an idea I want to throw out there.

System is basically the same thing as setting.  Story, on the other hand, is something else entirely.  Even in GURPs, you have an inherent setting, but it's basically "everything, minus whatever you don't want to use."

For example, take VtM.  If you look at the VtM system, you basically know what the setting is.  In this game, you belong to a "clan" and hunger for blood, which you use for supernatural powers.  That sounds a lot like setting to me, but I described the system as well. 

On the other hand, VtM also has story.  There's some vampires in the world with specific names and there's some meta plot going on. In a fantasy world, I think "Bars, cities, npcs" and the rest actually fall under story.

I might refine my thoughts further, if you guys think they have merit, but I'm a little tired now.

Thanks for the interesting reading!

[Callan S.]

Have a list of all the little bits of world information, with tick boxes next to them. Then when players want to heal hitpoints, they may express how some bit of world information ties into the current circumstance. The info they bring in is ticked off for the session and can't be used again. Hopefully with enough of a beating, they'll get through the list...

It's a rough idea - hope you can see how it can be adjusted and let out at the seams.

[David Berg]

Example technique for using Setting to generate Challenges:

Design a Setting with moving parts.  Agents of evil pursuing their agendas, catastrophic acts of nature, warring factions, the dead rising from their graves when a certain star passes behind the moon, etc.

Alert your players to these moving parts.  News-bringers announce that the Dragon of the North coming closer, the sea creatures have a dispute with the land-dwellers over fishing practices, the Dark Wizard is kidnapping virgins to use in his spell, hard rains are moving toward the main river, etc.

As the PCs go about doing whatever they've already decided to do, roll randomly at regular intervals for how these in-flux aspects evolve.  Update the players on the changes.

Let's say the dragon slows its advance and the sea creatures forge a tentative peace.  Okay, this part of the Setting is just like the rest of whatever you established pre-play: just Color, for now.  On the other hand, the wizard has his virgins and begins the process of his spell, which causes avalanches to bombard the town the PCs are in.  Meanwhile, the rains come and the river overflows, forcing the PCs to take the dangerous route out of town instead of going by boat, or giving them drowning villagers to rescue, or something.

The pattern of "we heard this piece of setting color before play" -> "we saw it evolving in the background" -> "it fucked with us and gave us a fun Challenge" is quite satisfying, IMO, especially if the color of the Setting as presented to the group pre-play meshes with their aesthetics.

Of course, "how to make a functional challenge" requires a whole other bag of tricks...