What do you like to see in a setting?'¦resurrected.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

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.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

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.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

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.

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. . .

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.

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!

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

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.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

huhwah??
Corben Dallas, multi-post.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

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. . .

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

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.