Implied setting or fleshed out?
Which do you prefer? Most PbtA games are implied settings. I think almost all of Vincent’s games are implied settings. But I’ve always loved the sort of early 90s games that had these big fleshed out settings. With the crazy success of 7th Sea, I think other people do as well. What are the plusses and minuses for you? Why don’t indie games have fleshed out settings?
I only have the patience to read involved setting material if it’s really well-written, which means most of the time I don’t have the patience. I much prefer the “fill in the gaps” approach of an implied setting, not least because it’s easier to remember stuff you’ve come up with yourself (or in collaboration with your players).
I enjoy reading RPG books with well developed setting, but at my table it’s always just implied. I do my best to keep the big pieces in place, and to inform my players when I won’t be, but if the setting isn’t serving the protaganists then it has no place at my table.
I’m with Jason. I can’t read setting material anymore unless it’s more like reading fiction, which then makes it fun.
The bigger problem with established setting in my eyes is that you have to a) have players read some of the setting too, or b) impart odd details to the players out of the blue (“The king’s brother you want to meet is named Zachary”). I much prefer to spit ball and collaborate on these things these days.
I lean toward the implied setting side of the scale (but not all the way). The less setting material I have to remember and uphold, the more bandwidth and degrees of freedom I have during play.
I find detailed setting material to be too restrictive, or else it gets ignored at the table anyway. If I want to follow the published material exactly, then all these NPCs and institutions are subject to a huge “plot immunity,” which takes power out of the hands of my players. If, on the other hand, I try to protect what’s written in the book, it’s like an iceberg: 90% of it is hidden. Who cares if the king is secretly a vampire if my game is about airship pirates?
I like teasers, threads, suggestions, names that don’t have more than a handful of contextual ideas. Those are all great. However, I also really love worlds with rich background and continuity. There’s room for both. I don’t think that PbtA works nearly as well for the latter as the former; I think D&D works well for both.
The only way you have a hope of getting me to read a bunch of setting background is if it’s real-world history. Even then, my mind wanders. I mean, a few paragraphs is fine — maybe 1000 words tops. After that, I don’t even pick up the book.
I like a rich setting, but only when most of the material presented is optional, for-inspiration.
Nobody wants to memorize or continuously refer to an encycleopedia. A setting should inspire, not constrain.
Or at least, constrain in interesting ways.
Yeah, it’s not a dichotomy, it’s a spectrum. I think it sounds like a lot of people are like me; they like to read the big settings books, but not play them.
7th Sea in particular is a great example of both sides of the coin for me. On the one hand, there’s so much inspiration written into the politics and characters of Theah that I generally stayed true to it so my players would feel they’re in a living world. The precurser races (and the secret societies obsession with them) on the other hand seemed like they were trying to take the focus away from the heroes. So far the 2nd Edition Kickstarter hasn’t made a lot of mention of them, so I’m hoping that the Lovecraftian monster threat has been scrubbed.
fleshed-out settings take longer to write
i mean chuubo’s has a fleshed-out setting, but also took like 20 years to write or whatever
Indie games tend to not have fleshed out settings I feel because the process for most of those games is to create your own.
Sure. For context, I’m working on a game right now that has certain setting needs to get across some ideas on religion and philosophy that I struggle with. The danger, it looks like, is going too far.
Dogs in the Vineyard needs there to be villages and the Faith and demons and Bridal Falls, etc. But should there be a named leader of Bridal Falls? Probably no.
From a “system = mechanics + setting” view, things get complicated quick.
This is an indie RPG forum, and the type of gamers you get here will gravitate to making their own settings. Since I do the absolute minimum prep for my games, I do not read setting books.
Maybe if you polled Pathfinder forums you would get a different answer…
I love both, so I refuse my vote, but I’m currently playing in a Star Wars campaign, and it’s a fresh relief to know I don’t have to pull everything out of my ass, that there are books and novels and wikis that I can go find out if such and such actually exists, and has more details than I could slough on the fly.
Personally, I prefer evocative over encyclopedic, but this is as much a matter of having grown up and gotten a life (and a family) as anything else–when I was a single guy in college with a less active social life, it was far easier to commit umpty-zillion pages of background to memory! Nowadays? Not so much. (laugh) There’s also the pleasure of being able to share creativity around the table.
A well-written and comprehensive setting can still be a joy to read, though, and if enough room has been left for the GM to do a little creative customization where required, that’s all to the better.
Instead of setting, I prefer premise. The handful of things that need to be true that are supported by the framework of the rules. The sorts of things that say “this is true, but what does it look like, to you?”
I like games with an established ‘canon’ that allows for collaborative design by all the players. I guess this means that they are implied with certain narrative ‘givens’ rather than a carte blanche acceptance. But games like Burning Empires, Streets of Marienburg, Technoir, Durance and FATE Star Wars have just enough accepted setting to get everyone on the same page.
That said a ‘mash-up’ of two or more established settings to give context is perhaps my favourite way of creating a story together. Its the ‘elevator pitch’ part of group situation generation. This process in and of itself is coded into many RPGs now. In a sense replaces that ‘lonely GM fun’ pre-game prep and hands it over to the group as a whole, often taking up the whole first session and highlighted with a few key scenes. I LOVE this process.
I just want some themes, which I can pitch quickly, and which are then backed up with mechanics. All your setting stuff just gets in the way of our collaboration and our world building.
If you’ve got a game that is evocative, that is awesome, I can’t wait to create there. If you have a cool place you want to describe, please write a novel instead.
I’d say write the game itself with an implied setting, then if you have the ideas and wanting-to-do-it to write a fully fleshed-out setting, make that as a supplement. That way players of both preferences can get what they want, and it probably also means the game itself will get finished much sooner (writing a full setting can be a long and arduous process).
I prefer fleshed out, because I learned RPing on such settings (at least partially) and they inspire me. Implied is probably generally better, but sometines I find it hard to think in such setting.
However, for PbtA I think only implied setting works well. For more fleshed out settings we prefer to use the Fate Core system (and tweak it appropriately).
One can have both?
Do a implied one mechnical wise, than flesh it out so that lazy play groups got something to use,..
I’ve never really put my finger on it
i prefair to make a setting on the fly like dungeon world, just using my players answers
but i did really enjoy 13th age’s way of doing it, just these big characters and core locations, but not down the street maps etc..
let the gaps be filled in by the GM
I like games with a fleshed-out setting skeleton, but with lots of holes for the players imaginations to fill in the details. I haven’t seen any TRPG that says “Authors setting only, people: no edits allowed!” so I wonder if maybe this is too simplistic a view (to ask “implied or authors?”)
Which leads me to my answer: I like games which are the exception. Not so much, in the middle, as strongly part of both camps. It has author’s setting, but with lots of implied story opportunities. Numenera is an example of how this works well: maps with named cities, but also with blank location dots. Named NPCs fighting with unnamed ones.
The most interesting setting guides for me always contain lots of snippits about unsolved problems. They name some things, and let the players stake a claim in it, before letting them loose on the setting.
Mark Cleveland Massengale That’s exactly what I mean by “fleshed out setting”.
A setting you cannot change (especialyy during play, by in-game events) is not a valid RP setting, it’s some stupid museum exhibition.
I like well described settings and I love to see how my players flip them upside down. 😀
I would argue that a given setting can (and should) not only be changed but there is the option to remove aspects to create blanks.
Its worth nothing Katarzyna Matylla that I voted Implied, since I interpreted Author’s Setting as an more of an absolute, and further from the mix I actually want
There could be debate on just what is, or is not, fleshed-out vs. implied… as expansive as Faerun is, the majority of the details are above the level of the common adventure… such that, most of the time, the actions and scenes occurring in the dirty-dusty-streets and moldy-refuse-alleys, and all the extravagant festivities in secluded chambers and loose laundry in courtyard affairs, are implied.
Apocalypse world has a fairly discrete way of being fleshed-out… lots of canon exists, but it gets out of the way to make room for the very real property of the setting, the lack of say coherent reality consensus, in the wake of a dead (but strangely recognizable to the players) civilization… on a world that is basically well documented, and again, readily familiar to the players.
of course, you can say your AW game is being played on some other world, but, you can also use Elminster wholesale as an NPC the next time the Maestro’D looks for someone in the establishment to chat with… and just because you are using the Purple Dragon Knights, doesn’t mean you are playing on Abeir-Toril, it could be a CP2020 setting, with Space Marine Mammals and Rodin-Coil Vortex-GES Lifted Flying Machines aesthetically reminiscent of Colonial-Era Man’o’War built by eccentric industrial tycoons with a steampunk fetish, right before the aliens invaded… and using AW Playbooks… with Minds-Eye-Theater rules… in an abandoned urban ruin… with a bunch of second-gen native-terrestrial gypsies from Asgard …
Thing is, no mater where (or when) in the multiverse you might dream of being, or actually find yourself teleported to, you are going to find a universal constant:- the consensual reality of the contemporary zeitgeist never agrees with the historical account of the reality you are actually faced with surviving… and the larger — and/or more isolated the various segments within — the population of local residents, the less the diverse factions will agree with each other, about from which worldline or proto-dimension the members of other factions hail in ancestry…
:p
…In the long-and-short of it:- the reality of true reality IS experienced as implied by that which is perceptible relative to the known, acceptable, and believed, conditions of that reality; So how could any mirror — or series of tomes compiled of yesterday’s resolved composite experiences of a given reality — be expected to explicitly express an experience to the contrary, after the basis of yesterday’s consensus of nearly-forgotten nightmares, meets the cacophony of machinations in present whims, moving relentlessly toward the diversity of daydreams in an ever changing future?
But, to answer simply:- I admire and respect both, each for their own merits… like all the assorted flowers in a verdant field, each unique beauty is distinctly worthy of praise. (please be kind to the snakes as well as the unicorns, they each have a beatific purpose, also.)
As a player, I love richly detailed settings with lots of names and places everywhere I turn in two modes:
when I have a hand in making them as in Ars Magica and Dogs in the Vineyard and Pendragon and Prime Time Adventures and most PbtA.
when the GM is the only one who knows everything at the start and we players are figuring it out as in a particularly epic game of Cyberpunk where the GM (Vincent Baker ) had detailed not only clubs in the city, but what kind of music played in them, what the bands were, what the album titles were and a couple songs off each album. We were in college. We had time for that sort of stuff.
Here’s my experience with that as a designer:
-if you are not writing a novel, don’t. 1001 Nights has a very clear setting to build in, so does Murderous Ghosts. If I had wanted to tell all the stories too, name everyone and detail everything, and describe the factions and the action, I should have written a novel.
-if you find yourself building a world with all the details colored in, you may find you have left no room for your players to add to it or to interpret it in order tell their stories and have their adventures. If you get excited at the idea of knowing obscure things and it matters little to you if anyone else knows, like having beautiful paper lining your sock drawer, then build that world as the GM but don’t expect others to find everything.
20+ years ago I was part of writing an amazingly detailed setting. It has things I still think are extremely beautiful and interesting, but when we tried to play in that world, it was basically a mcguffin quest, because the players had no way to engage creatively and connect meaningfully with the richly detailed setting we knew intimately. We’re still mining it for parts in various ways, but it’s not a setting for any of the games that we’ve actually made, because we’d taken up all the available room. I find this to be the case with any game that wants me to read the novel(s) first so I’m “doing it right” and know the backstory on the king’s brother Jeffery.
For my part, and for the hack that I’m working on, I prefer implied settings because it gives the players and the MC the opportunity to make the world their own. For what I’m doing building where the game takes place is a critical part of the set up, every bit as much as the playbook choices made by the players.
Reading a setting is fun. Learning about a new details of a setting, and then thinking about how to apply those details to the events affecting the PCs is awesome. You can learn about those details from a game designer, attempt to convey that to the players, and then maybe get buy in and interest. Alternately you can learn about those details from the players, and definitely have buy in and interest, because they’re the ones that came up with it.
Also, worldbuilding is a lot of fun for me. I like to do worldbuilding in collaboration with the other players. In something like 7th Sea, the worldbuilding is done for us, so a lot of my fun removed from play before it even starts.
If you’re someone that thinks of worldbuilding as a chore to get through before you get to the fun of playing the game, instead, then 7th Sea would definitely be preferable, of course. 🙂
Even novels as richly detailed as SoI&F or LotR, leave a lot of content implied… relying on the reader to fill in the gaps or ignore the ‘inconsequential’ omissions:- Just think of the long list of questions fans have presented to both authors, and each other, that have yet to be answered to anyone’s satisfaction, within the fiction.
7th Sea and Forgotten Realms+Wildspace… still seem incredibly open, and dynamically changing; rather difficult for me to see them the way others have presented.. as too crowded for new exploration, characters, and fictions, to blossom.
But, novels are also often presented like most PbtA games… set in a much more familiar world than say, Hairy Potter, or even Xanth, might be to some muggles and mundanes… both of which have a considerable amount of exposition and explanation to cover what the authors of those titles expected a reader to be unfamiliar with, even if the occurrences are frequently obfuscated and worked into the plot with reasonably decent word-smythery.
Kingdom For Sale… also, requires a considerable frequency of asides and academic lessons from the court scholar — and yet still, so much is left open to implied…
All these examples are also fairly terrestrial settings, and one could say; the amount of exposition and detail to cover, goes up exponentially with the square root of the distance from the base reality expected to be familiar for an audience… Vulcan Novels likely spend very little time attempting to convey the ‘aliennesses’ of Vulcan most Vulacans would consider common to the experience of their homeworld, and a lot of words attempting to convey the ‘other-minded cultural-curiosities’ of earth natives… and interesting rationalizations about the strangeness of the natural-world and chances of architectural novelty, that shaped these unusual customs and tendencies.
So, how much setting needs to be explained, and how much can be implied, makes a difference too.
Do you have a Japanese designed game about rebellious shamanic-gangsters and government-magi technocrats struggling for dominion over Denver or Detroit, an American designed game about oni-kids and obake-kami exploring slice-of-life tales in Kumagaya and Kasukabe… or is it a Russian game of super-heroes and mutant animals expected to operate out of Minsk, Moscow, Magadan, or Makhachkala?
How much expository detail and setting explanation is required to target these games to Brazilian audiences, and how much can you get away with merely implying for Denobula-Triaxan and Caprican markets?
These days I find myself wanting to run in an implied setting or a fictional setting that I really love. By that I mean, I have games for Marvel, Middle Earth, and Star Wars. I love those settings and most have an idea about what makes those settings tick. Outside of that sort of thing, I prefer an implied setting.
hmmm…. as a mash-up, oh what an epic tale one could spin!