Static vs. Dynamic Setting

[lumpley]

Meguey's and Emily's and my Ars Magica game is setting-intensive.  180 named characters or so, twenty covenants (A covenant is a house of wizards, like a monastery), a history of 40 game years and 12 real ones, the work of fifteen or sixteen players all told.  Our current game is going on three years old and we've put a lot of time and work into the situation of the local tribunal.  Covenants in hard-negotiated balance, old oppositions, alliances, affairs, history, blood and sex and death and the whole bit.  

In my experience, this kind of stuff has enertia.  We've put 20 hours (say) into Kivont Karddal, our nearest neighbor covenant.  It's an investment.  We want it to last and have staying power, to pay off, right?  In the big fat Exploration of Situation, it's a fixture.  It's got creative mass.

So but then we played two and a half little sessions of by-gum Narrativism.  What's it like to found a covenant? is gone, pretty much, and now it's all about What will we do to protect our family?  Which is way cool, but my observation is that suddenly and unexpectedly the value of the setting changed.  It's like we set all that imaginary mass in motion.  Kivont Karddal went in ten minutes from being a fixture to being a force.  We burned it down (we the players, not our characters) and scattered its inhabitants, some of whom are going to come crashing into our characters.  We destabilized the whole tribunal, casually, like it was no thing.  It was cool and strange.

Four weeks ago, burning Kivot Karddal down would've meant debate, deliberation, careful consideration, how does the rest of the tribunal respond and what would happen?  We never woulda done it.  Now suddenly it's worthless as a static fixture, it only matters if it's in explosive motion.  Aimed at us.

That's all.  I was surprised.

-Vincent

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Vincent,

Well, my basic reaction is, Cool! But I decided to parse out some independent elements of Setting that people often confound into one thing. I'm not asking these of you regarding the Ars Magica setting, just laying them out a bit so we can have a shared vocabulary.

1) Stability - how much is it changing, or, can it change? And is the change mainly a GM thing (ie the procedure of the war in Glorantha) or a player-thing?

2) Detail - pretty straightforward, although I distinguish between detail on paper vs. detail in-play, as well as between pre-developed detail vs. improvisational detail (which isn't quite the same as the first comparison). And now that I think of it, the source of detail (GM/player) is also worth considering.

3) Significance - this is pretty much what you peg as having setting be a "force" or not. I want very much to emphasize that this issue is not the same as #1 - the setting can be a force without changing much, it can change wildly without being much of a force, and so on.

4) Extent - how much of "the world" is literally setting for play, in a given instance? Also, another variable in this category is, does play go any distance toward creating more setting?

Best.
Ron