Styles of setting

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by whswhs

It seems to me that Griffin Mountain, for example, represents a kind of third option. It offers a bunch of NPCs, monsters, treasures, places, and the like written up in great detail, but it doesn't prescribe the overall structure in anything like the same detail. Rather, it provides varied ways of linking one to another, and varied paths through them, almost like those model atoms that you can link together to form models of organic molecules. Perhaps it could be called a "mosaic" approach to campaign writing and running.

That to me is geographically constrained rather than plot-constrained. You can run any plot you like… as long as it takes place on Griffin Mountain. (Whereas in e.g. Achtung Cthulhu you are going to play occult investigators in WWII, but you could be doing that anywhere in the world.)

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by RyanW

You might use depth vs. breadth, if I'm reading the intent correctly. A setting with deep worldbuilding would be very little work for the GM as long as the game remained within the frame, but provides almost no support if stepping outside that narrow frame. A setting with broad worldbuilding puts the frame much farther afield, so the GM doesn't have to worry much about going completely out of the support of the source material, but has more work to do for any given thing.

It does result in a scale that can't be used completely on its own. A "deep" built Pyramid article will go into less depth than a "broad" built line of 15 full-length supplements.

I've used the personal terms "top-down design" versus "bottom-up design" that I stole from programming.

[Johan Larson]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Value-neutral words would be helpful here, and it'll be tricky not to show biases. "Underwritten" at one extreme, and "overwritten" at the other, perhaps; there's clearly a wide central area in which products are generally acceptable, though of course people may have preferences within it.

If we're looking for terminology, perhaps one end of the spectrum could be called "whole-world" and the other "scenario-only."

That said, the hobby does produce things that are even less detailed than scenario-only adventures. We have adventure seeds, which are paragraph-length ideas for adventures. And sometimes we publish fully-statted NPCs, with some notes about situations where they could be used.

[johndallman]

Another way to look at styles of setting is what one needs to prepare for each session. Any setting requires reading beforehand, but the amount of reading is usually least with the "sandbox" setting and most with the "supportive", to coin a term.

Session preparation has a lot to do with how well you know the setting IME. Once you've internalised it and got the feel of it, it's not too hard to work out what you'll need, and it doesn't make much difference if it was a sandbox or a supportive setting.

The point of the supportive setting, looked at this way, is that it's easier to internalise it, although not necessarily less time-consuming; the drawback is that the detail is rich along the characters' anticipated path through the setting, but gets sparse quite quickly once the party leaves that path.

Having worked out what you need is a different matter from having the material ready. That may need quite a lot of work, especially if characters need to be designed and equipped. The only superhero campaign I've ever played had a lot of fully-designed NPCs, because Hero System supers have to be designed in full detail or close to it before they can fight. Other systems aren't so demanding, and supportive settings may provide stock NPCs as well as major figures. This is especially valuable to the brand-new GM who isn't confident about designing a variety of characters.

Something we really ought to tell new GMs when they show up on these forums is that it's OK to occasionally say "Time out for five minutes while I figure out what happens because you did that" or "Could you go the way you were looking at last session, because I have that all prepped, and wasn't ready for this sudden change of plan." Insecurity about these things has probably caused a lot of RPG disasters.

[RogerBW]

Michael Cule has been known to call that thought-timeout the Strategic Toilet Break.

A setting that only supports a single campaign can have a random adventure generator, if at a fairly high level - "enemy faction X causes a problem" or "outbreak of monsters of type Y". The Day After Ragnarok did this quite effectively, with separate lists for the Hook, the Location, the Goal, the Villains and their Henchmen and Goals, the Victims, the Guest Star, the Obstacles and the Twist. But if when writing the book you don't know whether your PCs are going to be MI6's anti-occult-Nazi squad or a group of housewives under the Birmingham Blitz, it's hard to determine before the fact what sort of problems they should be facing.

But I find game-prep falls into two parts: (1) roughly what is going to be happening in this session, and (2) what details do I need to support that? In a long-running campaign, (1) can either become much more work (because a lot of things have been done already) or be replaced by a general sense of what's going on in the world, while (2) is pretty easy since if I know the world I can pretty much invent the stats on the spot.