People are free to like what they like, of course, but I don't agree with these complaints for the most part. Every setting or game excludes as many things (or more) as it includes in how it defines itself. Even kitchen sink or gonzo settings have parameters and boundaries. Game systems themselves constrain with their rules.
There is obviously some give and take here. A GM who wants to run a D&D setting with more than the usual restrictions on options should communicate that and probably the reasons for it before hand, but armed with that knowledge, players ought to trying to make up characters that would fit the setting and negotiating with the GM regarding parameters. Honestly, I feel like I've had just as much fun playing a well-defined pregen than making up my own character, at least for short-run games.
I'm hardly the first to note this, but it seems to me constraint can stimulate creativity. It's true on the player side, but I think it's also true on the GM/setting creation side. With an large number of worlds to play with, it should be a trivial matter coming up with interesting planets, but the Star Wars franchise seems to have a tough time showing us anything but the same three or four biomes over and over. And most of those are are one biome: deserts, but perhaps that's a different problem. I don't think Star Wars is the only franchise that lets quantity substitute for quality. It's easy to do.
But If you've got a smaller number of worlds like a solar system, you've got to make every one count, and you might well use each one to it's fullest. Maybe they aren't all single biome planets, but even if they are, you would tend to have them have different sorts of jungle or different sorts of deserts to get the most out of it. All of that is creativity you would never have been forced to exercise if you had a bunch of planets to spare.
Maybe its just me. Try it for yourself, by self-imposing some constraints you wouldn't normal give yourself in worldbuilding or adventure design and see how it turns out.
I ran a version of your Solar Trek setting (albeit modified - much more pulp than hard sci-fi) a few months ago, and my players enjoyed it precisely because it was relatively small. The joy of exploration is somewhat lessened when it's just one planet out of millions, whereas knowing that there were only so many places to explore and civilizations to contact on Venus and Mercury (we never made it out of the inner system, sadly) made every discovery feel more impactful.
ReplyDeleteBesides, if you handwave all the spherical, rocky bodies in the Solar System into habitable worlds, you have twenty-five of them in all. If I remember correctly there are less than ten visited in the Star Wars original trilogy, for example, and some of those can easily be condensed down. (E.g. put Cloud City in Venus' cloud layer, along with the the Yavin 4 base and swamps of Dagobah in the jungles below.)
In practice, there's always a limitation to how much "stuff" you can actually encounter in a campaign. It depends on how long your sessions are, how many sessions you play, and how much novelty your rules and style allow for (characters constantly dying lets you see more classes and occupations, for example, and quick overland travel plus small dungeons lets you visit a lot more spots).
ReplyDeleteThe really big campaign books from the major publishers give you a LOT of options to choose from, and you CAN experience all of it as a reader if you really want to, but how much of it you actually see at the table is going to be determined by the constraints of the campaign, not by the size of the setting.
All of which is to say that I agree with your goal of making smaller settings with more thematic unity. The players will get to see a higher proportion of the setting, and the parts that they see will be more coherent, and thus hopefully will do a better job communicating whatever themes, ideas, and inspirations you put into building he setting in the first place.
I think there can be such a thing as a too-small setting, but I think that would be more like a setting that's inspired by a single piece of media and doesn't include ANYTHING that wasn't in the original source. But there the setting is too small because of over familiarity and the lack of anything new, not because of the actual amount of stuff it contains.