I remember some thread of this nature on these boards a while back. Recently I posted on a similar thread on the 4E boards, and I really liked what I said and wanted to post it here. Keep in mind that this is just a personal preference, I'm not doing this expecting everyone to bow to my will.
QuoteI'd like to see a setting which doesn't feel like you could torch the place and actually improve its tone.
Now to explain that bit of pyromania: I read the descriptions of so many published settings and I feel you could make them all by just plopping down a random map and splashing it liberally with "Here be Conflicts, or at they're going to be very, very soon". I don't object to their inclusion, I just object to the fact that they seem to be the only thing many settings are about. My guess is that it's an attempt by the setting designers to give DMs options for story hooks and adventure ideas, but it swamps the creativity of those of us who have a hard time not taking the whole setting as-is.
So what I'd like is a setting without all the pre-crafted powder kegs, or at least one where if they exist they are so minor that I could decide to focus on one without feeling like the others are going to sneak up on me.
/bow :P
Sounds interesting, could you provide a link to the thread?
Edit: That was a bit short.
Having conflicts be a major part or not is up to the individual I suppose and also what you want from a setting. If I am going to run a game in a setting which I now won't last too long or if I don't have time to prepare, it might be nice and easy to just pull out some of the conflicts that are already brewing. They are often player/character-knowledge as well, so you don't have to provide background for it.
With that said, I am not usually running games in a particular setting, but I think having more focus on the fluff, such as the culture and differences from nation to nation.
My setting is one big conflict. Sigh.
Well said.
I believe in having conflict -- but a lot of it. No matter where you go, there's the potential for conflict. There are subtle conflict ("Ethnicity X is being oppressed by leader Y, but have yet to do anything yet.") and more major conflicts ("Empire X is colonizing Region Y, but Nation Z is fighting valiantly against Empire X."). I like for DMs to have the choice to observe the conflicts or not. If I want to run a game entirely about, say, members of a rogue underworld, I know that I could pick out almost any city in my world and do it there without having to bother about war and politics.
That's why I am strongly opposed to one-trick campaign settings, because most of these have a looming war or intense conflict that they're all based around. These settings are the Middle Earth settings, where you would be forced to play a game against Sauron. Yawn.
Dragonlance does that. There's always a major war going on. One can play a campaign without war, but it'd have to be done within the 10 years between major world wars (they are devestated at least once a decade, right?) and it would always have the theme of recovering from the last war.
Forgotten Realms isn't too bad about this. They have a lot of conflict, but you can run a non-war game just about anywhere and be okay there.
I create the opportunity for conflict in the world, but I work hard to make it possible for the DM to ignore that conflict. I think that's the key.
I disagree, to an extent. If a setting is only its conflicts, it runs the risk of being one-trick and over if the PCs solve them. If the conflicts are unsolvable and that's all there is to the setting, all you might be able to get out of the game is a survival horror game.
Kindling's setting doesn't have these problems; it is simply a dark gritty setting. Sure, burning everything to the ground would make for a more peaceful world, but then all you'd have is ashes. In Kindling's setting, the conflict drives the story.
In my setting, there are a few pre-implied conflicts: The barriers between the planes have become thinner, and the world is having to deal with broader politics and the denizens of the Shadow Plane. Other conflicts are more story-related: recently, a war between the humans and elves (which would most assuredly escalated into a war between this plane and Avalon, the fey world) was recently averted, but the tension still hangs in the air.
Eberron had the Great War, but it shapes the tone of the setting.
So I agree that a setting which is only dark conflicts can be one-trick, but it is a flavor that many enjoy.
I, myself, want to play in a world that feels so real that I can suspend my disbelief and interact naturally with it. That's what I'm hoping to design with my world.
Are you referring to a setting like Eberron, or other homebrewed settings?
If other homebrewed, I would imagine that a setting with strong, overpowering conflicts are more for the individual designing the setting than other DM's. The problem with these types of settings is that once the major conflict has been resolved; what happens next?
Personally I think a setting like Eberron gets it right. There are conflicts all around, but not a single one has to be major, unless the DM wants it to be. Don't want to focus on the Lord of Blades or the Emerald Claw, then they are off elsewhere plotting.
Bleh. Sorry for dumping that on you guys. It's just a thing that really confuses me when people make and like settings with a lot of conflict.
@Poseidon: Most of it is published settings, I think.
Here's the link: http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=996051 (http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=996051)
Anyway, the thing is that there's a certain amount of conflict in settings (any kind) where it just becomes distracting. In Eberron you can't have fun facing off against one evil without worrying about what all the others are doing while you're occupied. There's too many to keep track of, and unfortunately it actually breaks my suspension of disbelief to say "they aren't a problem right now". A different kind of think happens when there's a setting element like "Nation X is oppressing minority A": it makes all accomplishments other than stopping it feel hollow.
The thing about one-trick settings is that they allow you to focus, and if you complete the one trick then you actually feel like you've done something.
I see now...
For me, unless there are only a few towns/cities created for a campaign rather than a setting, then a one trick setting doesn't feel real.
Let's look at Eberron again, because like I said before I think Keith got it right. To me the conflicts seem real for the events that lead up to the present. The power groups don't have to be active (or if they are active openly engaged in anything). Keith also does a good job of making the power groups/conflicts mostly minor. I don't use psionics, so the Dreaming Dark don't rear their head in my campaign. The groups work mostly in secret, so even if they are plotting something it may never effect the PC's. For Example If the Emerald Claw is planning on stealing priceless relics in Breland, but the PC's are in the Mournland searching for the cause of the Day of Mourning the Emerald Claw's activities will not affect the PC's so they are not important. The Lord of Blades may be an active problem for them, but again Keith made so the DM can decide if he even exists.
Now let's counter that with a real world example. If looking at Earth as a setting, how many conflicts are there? How many power groups? How many of them directly effect my daily life, on a daily basis?
Now let's look at how that effects a quest in both D&D and Real Life:
If someone asks me to find "widgetA" for them, because they really want one. I accept the quest and being asking around and finding out where I can find a "widgetA". I am told that they can only be found in another state/nation. Now I could try to travel swiftly (In RL: plane, In D&D: Teleport) or I can go by ground. If I go by ground I might run into some theives or other encounters, but it would be cheaper. I decide to go by ground and I have a few encounters some friendly some not so friendly. Finally I make it to where "widgetA" resides and retrieve it. Then make my way back to my employer. During all that time a revolt happens in CountryA, where a power group has been trying to gain control of the country. This happens about 2000 miles away, so while I may hear about it, it does not affect my quest.
Simple enough, there are tons of conflicts in the world but they don't effect me during my quest. Do I care what they are doing? Sometimes, if I can catch it on the news.
As for accomplishing something, I've acquired "widgetA" so I've accomplished my quest. My quest could have easily been stop the revolt in CountryA. Then I could have either accomplished it and stopped the revolt and possibly broken up the power group trying to sieze control, or I fail, but the rest of the world doesn't matter much. Only the part of it that is important to the campaign, or quest.
I understand what you are saying (and I'm not saying it's wrong, just not for me), and hopefully I've pointed out how a conflict heavy world can still be similar to the one trick settings. Though it may just be rambling...
Deleted post.
I think the difference here is our definition of reality.
See, I don't believe for an instant that one person can solve all the problems in a world. If I'm over here in Thailand trying to help the refugees from Myanmar, I know very well that there is political strife and ethnic violence going on in Sudan. But I can't help them.
That doesn't suspend my sense of belief in Earth, does it?
And it's true, there is a connection, because China is drawing huge economic benefits off of both Sudan and Myanmar, because the rest of the world has put sanctions on them. So these two things are interconnected.
That sucks.
But that's reality.
So when I'm playing in my D&D world and my players are trying to bring some renegade mage into custody, they aren't worrying about the fact that, in the nearby nation of Zelhost the people there are living in fear of the tyrannical lich-king. They've talked about it a little bit, and every once in a while they meet a refugee from that nation, but they still focus on finding that renegade mage.
But maybe that renegade mage is a refugee from Zelhost, and he was unaware of the rules in the player's nation, so he was casting spells without realizing it's illegal. Wow! That conflict has really enriched my game play today. And boy, doesn't that just sound realistic?
I apologize for my snide tone.
But just like in real life, it is not your responsibility to solve every problem in the world. There are other entities out there that are just as powerful as the adventurers. There are entire governments and police forces. For example in Eberron, there are the Sentinel Marshals, which are not bound to any one nation and can make arrests across Eberron.
As a DM I don't have to worry about the other groups. They are there and working in the world, but unless I want them to be an active part of the campaign, they don't have to be. Again I turn to real life as an example. A coup in an African country is going to have little impact on what I am doing. It happened in the world, and it is not my responsibility to fix it, that's what the governments are for.
If you can do it in real life, how does it break all sense of immersive reality?
Quote from: PoseidonIf you can do it in real life, how does it break all sense of immersive reality?
Because you can do it in real life. The game world isn't real, and the moment it starts to act too real there's no point to playing a
game. If I wanted something real I'd engage in real life.
Why would I want to do/experience something in a game that I could do/experience in real life?
I prefer a lot of variety in conflict and how it is conducted. Conflict in its broadest sense is an inherent element which drives story - that is, in the most immediate terms, whatever the PC's goals are, someone is opposed to their accomplishment. In any setting there will be numerous ongoing conflicts of varying scales and means - military conflicts between races, religions and/or nations in even the most warlike settings will constitute a small percentage of these when viewed as a whole. While as a DM I need to keep track of who is in conflict with whom over what and how these conflicts develop in the course of a game, which ones the PCs pay attention to and choose to involve themselves in are up to them. Barring PC intervention (direct or inadvertent) these various conflicts will simply develop along predetermined lines creating changes to certain details of the (dynamic) setting over time which the PCs will only become aware of should they encounter the results somehow - sometimes a matter simply of choosing to travel north or south. The fact that a particular group has managed to monopolize some significant commodity, resource or activity, or that one religion has succeeded in getting a rival church banned from operating an a particular kingdom may not actually matter to the PCs in terms of their personal values or priorities, it will still have affects upon their activities in some fashion. On the other hand, this can also create conflicts which do concern the PCs where none previously existed. Ultimately the setting then is an open-ended framework. If the religio-political conflict concerns them the monopolized resource may also be of significance in to how they deal with that conflict. (In one part of my game world the large scale sale of copper sheet used to sheath the hulls of naval vessels is only provided to one side of an ongoing conflict. Should the opposing naval power succeed in reversing this advantage it will have major and very far reaching consequences throughout a vast region. Only PCs with significant mercantile, maritime or local political interest will be aware of this, much less its implications until well after the fact, possibly far away from the locale of the initial conflict.)
Er, please ignore me. I was just having a bad day.
I like settings that aren't afraid of doing things that have already been done. There's actually nothing more boring than trying to be unique to the point of alienating the reader. You can change the way things work and the way certain races and the like may be, but there's a point where too much difference just ends up being uninteresting.
I can see your point there and at least if not uninteresting, often not worth the effort. Monte Cook's (Malhavoc) setting in Arcana Unearthed, while it looks like it could be very playable has never interested me enough to bother with. I think it better to accept that pretty much everything has been done in some manner and address the challenge of coming up with ways to make the "known" unpredictable from the standpoint of previous precedents. Your Haveneast setting is a good example of this and it is also the principal I try to follow when developing the racial descriptions for Panisadore.
The "known but unpredictable" thing bothers me a lot: there's only so many times it can be done before the only room left to make your setting unique in only a tiny increment different from all the others.
This is part of my objection to the ubiquitousness of conflict: it's been done. 1,000 settings have had to deal with war and 1,000 settings have had racial strife. There's no way left for it to be unpredictable. What's unpredictable now is going against these themes.
Quote from: SilvercatMoonpawThe "known but unpredictable" thing bothers me a lot: there's only so many times it can be done before the only room left to make your setting unique in only a tiny increment different from all the others.
In principal I would say this is true, tho' not so much in degree - imaginative possibility remains infinite -
but by now it takes considerably more effort! Once I get some racial descriptions into the wiki I'll be able to more clearly demonstrate what I mean. I think a key factor in doing so is to introduce variation at essentially "root" levels and then pursue and flesh out the implications of that difference - relatively minor details at the heart of a setting's rational can have broad and rather radical effects upon the final product. One of my primary criticisms of a lot of published game material arises from elements which haven't been "thought through" sufficiently. The presence and use of magic at the heart of most game systems (DnD in particular) often somehow still results in societies which function no differently from historical examples where this element was absent. Do no more than introduce healing magic as a capability of the church clergy in medieval Europe, consider how ubiquitous that clergy was and a public health care system becomes a blatantly obvious practical possibility. As such, the effects of either its implementation or its deliberate refusal (or even its partial implementation as accorded class privilege) would radically alter that society. To briefly explore one possible example: longevity changes population changes production and consumption of resources changes economics. . .
Quote from: SilvercatMoonpawThis is part of my objection to the ubiquitousness of conflict: it's been done. 1,000 settings have had to deal with war and 1,000 settings have had racial strife. There's no way left for it to be unpredictable. What's unpredictable now is going against these themes.
I would have to agree with you that utterly war-ravaged settings are rather boring and predictable - I love BattleTech as a tactical wargame, but have little interest in trying to play in a MechWarrior RPG. If you are referring solely to armed military conflict then a setting in which war has been eradicated would be somewhat different - but begs the question of what stories within that setting are about. Sci-fi novels have already done this - and invariably are concerned with some other form of conflict. Utopia is always flawed - or else too boring to tell any stories about. "Once upon a time they lived happily ever after," simply has nothing to offer as an RPG setting. In the broader sense of the word, conflict is a crucial element of narrative. A setting in which the full spectrum of conflict is present, in terms of causes, participants, methods of conducting it, arenas, etc. can be very unpredictable - in the same sense that a game of chess is even though it can only have a couple of different outcomes and an inherent aspect of strategy is the attempt to predict the opponents responses and the outcomes thereof. Only now we're playing 3 (or 4) D chess and the pieces constantly change in number, abilities, where and when they can be played and often even sides!
Maybe I don't mean conflict in the sense of any sort of struggle between two or more entities. I think I mean that I'm bored with rather impersonal conflicts (I could be inexact, I have a hard time reading myself): war and persecution, just anything where your opponent is so large a group or problem that a small group of heroes can't come face-to-face with it. Maybe I'm a bit too romantic, but I like the idea that I can have a personal (or at least semi-personal) duel with whatever it is.
huhwah??
Corben Dallas, multi-post.
So I think you're referring to settings which focus play on large scale conflicts. PCs may have a personal interest (say, not wanting to be enslaved along with the rest of their race/country/extra-crispy vs. traditional style fried chicken preference) but essentially the other side of the conflict has no direct interest in the PCs or even make note of them as significant opposing individuals (until they eventually reach some status of international fame as innovative lvl 20+ fast-food chefs). . . Essentially why I find MechWarrior RPG uninteresting. Actually, I've gotten the impression over the years that while RPG's can incorporate/generate/spin-off good tactical/strategic war games (The various incarnations of DnD BattleSystem, skirmishes, etc. were quite playable minis games on their own), tactical/strategic war games generally do not lend themselves to good RPGs. The former can go on for a long time and only include the occasional large-scale pitched battle (say once a year if at all) while the latter is simply rather fluffy continuity filler between battles - which is really what the game was all about to begin with.
Still, in terms of DnD and similar games, I think this is usually more a matter of DM handling than setting. If large-scale impersonal conflicts are merely a backdrop (e.g., the reason why weapons are scarce and extremely expensive) then the PCs can direct their efforts to things that matter to them specifically - of a scale in which they can make a direct, distinct difference. If those conflicts are the game's raison d'etre, then playing just another private in the army would suck almost as much actually being that private. (On the other hand, if you're playing the avatar of the god of lawyers then I suppose you can duel the evil lich-king who is taking over the known world in anti-trust court and establish Linux as a commercially viable OS while having his slimy minions dis-barred. . .)
Last night I was skimming an older thread about how much PCs are permitted to affect their game worlds and was considering adding to that. In this context I think that question has a great deal of relevance. Ultimately it becomes a question of whether or not you're PCs can really do anything about it (or, more precisely, feel like they can). They need to be able to affect their world (defined as to the extent to which they perceive and interact with the world as a whole). A game in which the characters don't make any difference is either boring or a comedy. There's no such thing as a hero who didn't matter. . .
I think it's what I said earlier: the backdrop concept is distracting.
"Woohoo, we defeated the evil spider-demon and saved the village!"
"That's great. By the way, the war has created a flood of refugees to the region and are sapping the resources. Highly likely a fight's going to break out."
"WTF?! We just finished saving the place from a potential demonic invasion!"
I said it before: problems that can affect you in any way, if ignored, will just create more problems. I don't want to waste my time fixing things just to have some far-off cause screw up what I've just done.
Now if it's just purely a background thing, like the foreign dress of the new shop owner is because he and his family fled a far-off war, or one of the PCs is a soldier who deserted after being ordered to kill defenseless people, then it's probably okay. But if my part of the world is going to be constantly affected by what a bunch of sword-happy idiots in some other place are doing then I'm either going to have to go over there and bust some heads or it's not going to be worth my time to do anything at all.