Styles of setting

[johndallman]

Prompted by the discussions in the GURPS Forum about settings, I started doing some classification.

Generic adventures can work well for an RPG that has a clear theme and play style. As a fairly well-known example, the old-time G and D modules for AD&D achieved this, by leaving the background vague, but assuming that more-or-less heroic adventurers were interested in fighting off menaces to ordinary society, especially if there was loot to be had. A normally "balanced" adventuring party could do them if they were high enough level: just how high depended on how much magical equipment they had. But it wasn't too hard for a DM to read the module and assess if the likely party was capable of doing the job.

Generic adventures become less possible as the range of character types and motivations in a game becomes broader. I've played some of the classic RuneQuest scenario packs, and they tended to need a fair bit of GM surgery, even though they're well-designed, simply because experienced RQ parties don't have a predictable make-up. I've run a lot of Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu published scenarios, but PC capabilities don't matter so much in those, and building a party for the scenario is more acceptable, simply because Paranoia or CoC characters aren't expected to survive lots of play.

Settings are different from scenarios. At one end of the scale, they're descriptions of places and their inhabitants that a GM is expected to use as background, and incorporate into plots. It's definitely possible for them to be too big and complex: GURPS: WWII and Transhuman Space tend to overwhelm potential GMs, who can't decide what to use and what to leave out.

Moving along the scale, we have the White Wolf approach, which is cunning. By using the real world, through different-coloured lenses, plus some secret history, you can just describe the things that are different, and allow the GM to present the real world the way they see it. There are powerful beings hidden in the background, and their plans and actions allow the creation of sits a metaplot. You don't have to use the metaplot, or even much of the cosmology, if you don't want to; which way you go with that depends on which end of the scale you lean towards.

At the other end of the scale, we have the Dragonlance approach, where everything is done for the GM, if they like, and even the characterisations are provided for the players. This isn't at all attractive to me, but lots of people bought it, and the novelizations, and the calendars, and so on.

Writing a setting that covers the whole scale looks very hard. Clearly, you could try it in a modular style, with a pack of maps and gazetteer that describes the physical world, but the major NPCs of the setting will behave differently: is Wumfug the Great Mage someone who stays at home, runs a business, and sits on the town council, or is he someone with a complex fate tied to several other heroes? It's kind of hard to make him both, and the problem gets worse very rapidly when the rest of the surviving heroes of the Great Quest of the Past need to be described in their roles as kings, high priests, etc.

[whswhs]

For me, settings come in two primary flavors. There are those that give you a lot of worldbuilding background, while leaving you to make up most of the characters, encounters, and situations; and there are those that give lots and lots of ready-to-use foreground material, while sketching in the background rather more vaguely.

As an example of the first, I'd take Transhuman Space, the only setting I've ever liked well enough to use it twice. It gave me a brilliant first campaign and then an enjoyable, but less cohesive second one. It was so open-ended that it took me a long time to figure out how to run anything in it, but once I came up with a premise, there was an elaborate enough background so I could make up foreground material readily.

As an example of the second, I'd take Griffin Mountain, a RuneQuest campaign book, and the only such I've ever actually used. What made it brilliant, as far as I was concerned, was that it didn't have a story or a plot. It had a richly detailed wilderness area, with settlements, encounters, and possible quests; and it allowed the GM to combine them rather freely. So I never had to worry about how to railroad the players into following the plot; rather, they would choose what their characters were going to do, and I would look in the book, and likely there would be an NPC or a monster waiting for them.

I have offered to run Beyond the Mountains of Madness, a Call of Cthulhu campaign book that does have a linear plot; but my players didn't take me up, so I don't know if it would have worked well.

[RogerBW]

I think the usual modern trend in settings is to specialise in (not coincidentally the title of this month's podcast) "you are X who do Y", i.e. a specific campaign frame. You are warriors and wizards who kill monsters; you are investigators into the tentacular occult who will die horribly; you are troubleshooters who will also die horribly. There may well be other stuff that goes on in the world, but the campaign setting book and any published adventures assume this setup.

(And IMO when running a game in a setting that supports multiple campaign frames, e.g. Transhuman Space or WWII, it's particularly important to let the players know what they're in for.)

Traditional GURPS books tended to be broader than this, having a "Campaigns" chapter - see e.g. Age of Napoleon, the first book which came to hand, which gives eight basic approaches to a campaign (soldiers, sailors, spies, etc.) and then looks into crossovers too.

I rather like this setting > campaign frame > scenario division, because it's clear how it gets collapsed: The Mountain Witch is all three, Paranoia runs the first two together and spills over somewhat into the third (there is always a briefing, there is always the visit to R&D, etc.), and so on.

I'm not sure what an all-scale setting such as you propose might look like: surely one end demands just a brief description of each NPC, while the other end demands their full plots and plans?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I have offered to run Beyond the Mountains of Madness, a Call of Cthulhu campaign book that does have a linear plot; but my players didn't take me up, so I don't know if it would have worked well.

I ran it, and it doesn't have to be nearly as linear as it looks. But that's for another thread.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I'm not sure what an all-scale setting such as you propose might look like: surely one end demands just a brief description of each NPC, while the other end demands their full plots and plans?

The "dragonlance end" doesn't actually demand that the author records everything about them. It only really demands that the author describes their reactions to the pre-provided PCs, and their aims and needs.

We need some better terminology for this scale: any suggestions?

[RogerBW]

I'm not yet convinced that I understand what this scale is; is it detail versus flexibility? (The more detail, the more constrained the adventures you can run in accordance with it.)

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I'm not yet convinced that I understand what this scale is; is it detail versus flexibility? (The more detail, the more constrained the adventures you can run in accordance with it.)

It comes out rather like detail vs. flexibility, but what it actually measures is author's intent about what kinds of games can be run with the product. The detailed end is quite constraining, although the actual intention is to make the game easy to run; the flexible end is much less constraining, but gives the GM a lot more work to do.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by johndallman

It comes out rather like detail vs. flexibility, but what it actually measures is author's intent about what kinds of games can be run with the product. The detailed end is quite constraining, although the actual intention is to make the game easy to run; the flexible end is much less constraining, but gives the GM a lot more work to do.

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.

(The same sort of thinking could be applied to rules: the OSR people like to talk about the freedom of having most unusual actions being resolved by "the GM shall determine", while some games have a reputation for being over-prescriptive.)

[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.

White Wolf's Midnight Circus did something comparable, on the smaller scale of a scenario rather than a campaign, and it's the one published scenario book that I've actually used. I seem to be fine with massive detail on individual entities, as long as the overall structure's not a railroad.

I did a small gesture in that direction in Worminghall, but of course I didn't have the space to do a complete job. It would be interesting to write a larger version of it, say three to five times the word count, with a lot of encounters embedded in it. But I don't see GURPS going that way.

[RyanW]

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.

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.