Monday, December 1, 2025
Just Right: The Importance of Setting
As I continue to work on the new edition of Thousand Suns, I find myself grappling with questions I didn't anticipate. At the moment, for example, I'm struggling with the extent to which a roleplaying game needs a setting to succeed – and indeed what, in fact, constitutes a setting at all.
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Here is what I really would like to see. Take that for what it is worth:
ReplyDeleteA generic, open set of rules, with narrative illustrations of how those rules are processed within a highly detailed, consistent setting. Then, at the end, an appendix that provides a more traditional setting guide, complete with additional tables, calendars, hierarchies, etc.
For example:
Rule Section 30.0041
To fire a missile weapon roll a d6. A 5 or 6 hits and does 1 point of damage.
Section 30.0041 Illustration
Lt. Spazz Torpo, still afflicted with space madness, successfully commandeers the Red Dwarf 2.5 and fires a laser at the passing freighter. Rolling a 3 on a d6, Torpo fortunately misses the innocent passerby, while Captain John Bigbootay hastily draws his sidearm and snaps a shot at the mad Torpo. Rolling 1 5 on a d6, the Captain hits! A glancing blow off Torpo's forehead does 1 point of damage, and Torpo must roll for "stun" (Section 89.0013e, subsection III.)
Then the relevant section of the Appendix would be something like:
Optional Setting of GalaxoQuestria
In the cartoonish, mongo-space opera setting of GalaxoQuestria, all actions are dramatic and unrealistically unhinged. This is because the entire universe is slightly oxygen deficient. On the bad side, this means that living beings process things less efficiently mentally, but on the good side, the evolutionary changes necessary to survive an oxygen-depleted envrionment also make most creatures resistant to what we would consider dangerous or even deadly encounters. See table 14 for a list of random non-lethal effects common in GalaxoQuestria.