DF: Balancing genericism and depth/detail

[hari]

I got an idea from b-dogs thread about Drow that I thought to share.

B-dog raises the point that there is demand for DF to go into greater depth and detail. However, on the other hand, DF is meant to be generic. How do you preserve that generic quality if you decide to give DF more depth? Or, on the other hand, how long can you continue to make new supplements before you wake up one day to realize that, without intending to, you've all but fleshed out a new setting? It's a fine line to walk.

How can DF do more to encourage GMs to make DF their own, to write their own depth into, to stick bits and pieces from here and there together and make them into some kind of a makeshift setting all their own? And how can DF make this as simple as possible?

Others will probably have better answers than my own. But I'll share mine as well. Please be patient with me for a little bit as I refer back to b-dog's thread about Drow. I really liked Stone Dog's idea of shadow elves being nostalgic for their great past, and wanting to return to that past. Let's push the idea a little further and say that it has caught on with other nature loving folks, including other elves, fae and druids and rangers. Now we have the DF equivalent of an extranational terrorist conspiracy or international political ideology. We can ask a bunch of questions posed to get the GM to think about it and make it his or her own. Questions along the lines of, is this movement truly evil or only misunderstood? Did elves truly reign supreme in the past? And if not, are they delusional? Are they lying? What power or powers are possibly behind this whole thing? Now say we write up all that fluff with the added crunch of notes for using this group as both a patron and an enemy, and maybe stats for cultists or spiders or something. And then say we do that kind of a write up for a half dozen or dozen other groups. Does anyone else think this is a good idea? I do, enough so that it makes me want to get working on something.

What about the more basic question about balancing genericism and depth/detail in DF? Do you also feel like this is a concern? Do you think that this is something SJGames is concerned about? And if you thought that genericism and depth or detail had to be balanced, what would you suggest to do about it?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by hari

Or, on the other hand, how long can you continue to make new supplements before you wake up one day to realize that, without intending to, you've all but fleshed out a new setting?

From a publishing point of view, probably a long, long time. DF may run out of archetypes to make rules-heavy supplements about, but series of bestiaries, adventures, and low-context locations can be pretty open-ended without implying a setting.

Originally Posted by hari

What about the more basic question about balancing genericism and depth/detail in DF? Do you also feel like this is a concern? Do you think that this is something SJGames is concerned about?

I suspect that SJ Games regards deep detail as the province of the individual GM. That is, like the rest of GURPS, they provide a toolkit. Turning those tools into a desired campaign is up to us.

[Stone Dog]

As much as people can sometimes revile D&D 4e, the general 4e approach to a core setting is valid and applies here, albeit with a bit of alteration for my opinions.

Do not specify too much geography. Your customers can do that on their own. DF is supplying us with plenty of tools to make adventuring in any given setting work on a fundamental level. This is all we really need out of the rule books.

Don't just lay down the law on how the universe is constructed, but provide us with tools that make bits of cosmology function in a consistent and game-able manner. The Great Wheel was all well and good, but the Manual of the Planes chapters on how to put your own multiverse together were much more in line with the DF series.

Don't bog us down with politics and NPCs. Your customers can do THAT on their own too. We have a LOT of stuff to work with and an official DF setting just won't be as useful to as many players as the tools needed to put it together.

Do what a GURPS toolset does best. Give us options instead of answers. Give us kits instead of finished toys. For the love of god, please don't copy D&D in more than a superficial homage sort of way.

That being said, preconstructed settings can be a profane amount of awesome to play in. They make things easier to gather together new players and all sorts of wonderful things can happen and be explored in them. They just don't need to be part of the DF tool box.

We have Banestorm for our low fantasy needs and it works fairly well as far as I can see. It might be able to use a DF supplement like In Nomine had both a GURPS and an Anime supplement, but that is only because it has been published before there was a chance to put sidebars and an appendix for "DF Campaign Lenses."

What we really need that would sync up well with DF would be an over the top high fantasy campaign setting. Once again I will express my desire to give SJG money to produce Turhan Bey's Company's Wellspring of Creation, Which seems to bundle up many years of Pyramid articles into a nice little package for consumption WITHOUT having to slavishly devote itself to being yet another shallow copy of the Gygaxian classics.

I am entirely in favor and supportive of making the DF line as generic as possible, while still containing all the rules needed to address and define classic fantasy gaming tropes.

I am also in favor of GURPS having separate setting books to use all these tools on that have handy bits of advice for specific tool-sets.

I do not think that those two things contradict each other and I believe that taken together they will eventually provide all things to most GURPS gamers.

[nondescript handle]

The DF rule- and source books should, in my mind, be as setting independent as possible.

I would love generic but structured "GURPS Worldbuilding Toolkits" in the style of Expeditious Retreat's "A Magical Society" series or even the GURPS Space 4e world/system/alien generator.

But there is nevertheless, I think, a place (and demand?) for an easy to personalize and flexible "Official Example DF World". This would be a showcase of the DF toolkit, in a similar way as "Psionic Powers" is a showcase of the "Powers" toolkit.

I've said this before: I'm quite fond of the way the ICE Shadow World Master Atlases handled the "GM reserve" continents.

For example we've played a looong time in Falias. The only canon material for Falias consists of:

• two sentences describing the geology and climate
• a map
• a map legend of
• 12 "realms and regions" in the format "name, climate, race(s), economy type, government type, TL + 2-4 sentences description"
• 14 "places of note" in the format "name + 1-3 sentences description"

that's it. One and a half pages (44 and 45 in the 3rd Edition).

It provided a good starting point and framework for the GM, but was easy to tweak (e.g. I changed Tazarah-Bushuy from tribal backwater into a second rate naval republic) without rewriting a whole book of references and cross-references.

My ideal "generizised" DF setting book/pdf would be similar:

• five pages and a big map describing a large continent (the description in roughly the level of detail the continent in "Caravan to Ein Arris" was described),
• five pages or so sketching +25 realms in the manner described above (and maybe regional maps),
• one of two pages with one sentence locations usable as adventure hooks,
• and maybe two or three towns/cities described in two or three pages each usable as home bases.

That's around 20 pages and at least one continental map.

Additional world, regional, and city maps would be great (making good looking maps is hard). A nice idea would be to provide the maps as single files, preferably in a format that makes customization easy (layered xcf or psd, CC3 or FractalMapper).

This world should be a well balanced mix of "old school fantasy tropes" (to be familiar) with more original ideas (e.g. reuse the sketches from GURPS Fantasy 4e p.61-63)(to be interesting).