Bringing it Into Focus

There are a lot of opinions about setting in rpgs and how much is the right amount or too much. Consequently, a lot has been written about it by a lot of people, me included. As readers of this blog likely know, I am pro-setting, in the sense that I personally like thinking of and writing about them, but one might also have intuited that I enjoy them as a player or GM. They are a major part of what gets me into a game, a fundamental part of supporting imagining the game world. I realize there are people who like their settings merely implied or at the least as light as possible, and that's their right, but to me that would reduce an rpg to the same sorts of pleasure I might get from a board or arcade game, and that would not have been enough to sustain my longterm interest.

As I have been working on the setting for my new campaign, I've talked with my players for the first time about how I feel about GM creation vs. player creation of setting material. It's not that it was a secret before, but it never game up in an explicit way. My personal observation is that while most players don't want to be given a lot of homework to play a game, they also don't tend to be told impromptu to imagine things for a world. A framework to inspire their character creation tends to be what most of my players are looking for, though how much they intend to flesh things out varies.

Encouraging this sort of engagement, though, means that the world is a bit out of focus until we get into the playing of it. I can have thought of a lot of things, but a lot of details I have in mind stay flexible on until the players get their hands on them. In the end, the worlds winds up being a collaborative process even if it mostly starts in my mind.

Here's an example. In creating Azurth, I clearly called out that despite a number of animal people in the setting, there were no cat people. Now, the fact that I noted that and didn't mention a whole list of other animal people that would never appeared in Azurth was meant to suggest "something's going on here." And it was. 

However, my friend Jim, in creating his bard Kully missed that. Jim did a very flavorful, brief character write-up, nailing the Ozian sort of vibe. The only problem was he mentioned Kully encountering a Cat Man at a pivotal moment.

I could have suggest a change to that detail and in some circumstances, I might have. Here though, because I had already intended something to be going on with that point, I used what Jim came up with. I told him that Kully had had that encounter, which was odd because there aren't supposed to be Cat-folk in Azurth, and so no one believes him. Jim was creating a little mystery in his characters backstory, which wound up tying into a minor mystery of the entire setting. Kully's backstory became setting material supporting a future reveal that at least one player was going to care out.

Not all instances of a player's view of the world and my own having a discrepency turn out so serendipitously, but I think it's worth looking for those opportunities and leaving things just a little fuzzy to facilitate those clarifications.