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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
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.
If you wanted to show off using the tools to support various settings then something like “Transmissions from Piper” might be the way to go, though using several different authors might attract more of an audience, as long as the settings were quite different.
ReplyDeleteShowing how the systems work with Piper’s Paratime setting was a great idea, because to me a game purportedly about interstellar empires is not an obvious fit for a solar-system-bound society that secretly exploits parallel timelines. As good as “The Last Enemy” is, it only involves two characters from that culture, so I would suggest a second edition use “Temple Trouble” or “Time Crimes” instead to provide a better sense of where PCs might fit into the setting.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a DM/GM, nor am I ever likely to be. Having said that, I have heard some (online) DM's state that the D&D 5e (2014) setting book "Eberron: Rising from the Last War" is pretty good and has enough DM-facing material (in addition to player facing material) to last for a long time. NB: The recently released "Eberron: Forge of the Artificer" is advertised as an (D&D 5e 2024) 'companion/update' book to the "Rising from the Last War" setting book.
ReplyDeleteSo even though the game mechanics of the different TTRPG rulesets are totally different, the "Rising from the Last War" book may still serve as a good example of how to create some setting material ?
YMMV.
By the way, same disclaimer as the previous comment: The D&D 5e (2024) DMG has an example section on how to go about creating a campaign setting (20 pages or so if I got it right). The example setting is 'Greyhawk'. As far as I understand it, the most detail on the setting is given to the main city, and then getting continuously more vague as it expands more and more beyond the main city.
ReplyDeleteTL;DR: Perhaps giving a more detailed description of a bite sized certain city/continent/planet would give people a good starting point, while giving a progressively lesser detailed description of the locations beyond that would give the potential DM/GM more room to fill things in for themselves ?
Again, YMMV. Sorry for the noise.