Tinkering: Types of Worlds

[Superfluous Crow]

Hmm, it's the difference between a game where every small rodent can talk, teleport and glow in the dark, and an example of the other end of the spectrum could be a WoD-like campaign where the players take the roles of strange supernatural creatures in an otherwise normal world.

[Ghostman]

Divinity would be how the setting views the divine: do gods exist, do they grant powers, do people only believe in their ancestor spirits? (okay, the two first might be the most relevant)

Keep in mind that a single setting can include limitless number of different kinds of faiths. Defining what people believe in is getting a little too detailed IMO. Much better to stick to a vague concept of divinity and just measure it's 'realness' in the context of the setting. Like so:

Divinity refers to things that are beleived to be supernatural and religiously significant by the inhabitants of a setting.
* Non-religious: Religion is absent in the setting.
* Fake Divinity: Religion exists, but any divinities featured in it are either imaginary or simply mundane things that are wrongly elevated to status of divinity.
* Passive Divinity: Divine things are real but do not play an active role in the setting.
* Active Divinity: Divine things are real and actively influence the setting.
* Obscure Divinity: The realness of divinity in the setting is left unknown.

Realism would be a heading where you could fit cinematic in, as well as simulationist (settings meant to depict alternative worlds with excessive amounts of detail), game-ish (settings that intentionally take distance to reality; erfworld for example, most old pc-game settings, and perhaps some cyberpunk settings), or realistic (the less extreme version of simulationist).

I'm still confused about this. Do you mean realism in terms of what is realistic in the real world, or do you mean settings that have established sets of rules for what's realistic in that setting VS those that don't? Either way I'm not sure if this really needs it's own category.

I'm not sure I fully grasp the difference between Fantasticity and Fantasy Strength. So "Weak Absolute" would be a world that is "utterly fantastic," but where fantasy is of little consequence to the rest of the world?  What about a "Strong Rare" situation in which the setting "rests heavily" on fantasy elements, but those elements are "scarce" and seldom leave the backdrop?

I'll give you that neither the commonness nor the strength of fantasy elements should say anything about how much focus is given to the elements - because that really depends on both aspects, and can also vary wildly from story to story.

A world of "Weak Absolute fantasy" isn't very likely, but not inconceivable. Imagine a world that's just like ours, except that all shapes are deformed (like seen reflected by an amusement park mirror) and constantly changing colors. And that despite these deformations, everything still functions the same way as in reality (laws of physics being replaced by laws of oddness that MAKE it all work just so). This world is utterly fantastic because almost nothing in it is truly familiar or 'realistic'. Yet, all the differences to our reality are ultimately superficial, bearing no real influence on how the world works. A character in this world could live his life the same way as one in our world would, going through the same situations and events, meeting the same people and making the same choises. Granted, this example isn't very interesting, and probably the combination isn't useful for more than mental exercises.

A less extreme example could be a world where common everyday appliances are replaced by minor magical spells taught to people in school. These spells accomplish exactly the same things as the appliances would (and nothing more). So despite being all over the place, the magics don't result in huge consequences - just some minor savings in electricity and the like.

As for a world of "Strong Rare fantasy", imagine a handful of magical smurfs with godlike powers invaded through a dimensional portal and enslaved mankind. These smurfs are the only fantasy element around, yet their presense and actions are what defines the setting and drives the stories taking place in it.

[Nomadic]

I like this sort of categorization. Sure it could get bloated but so far I don't think it's too bad. As an example my setting would look like:

Name - Fantasticity - Fantasy Strength - Technology - Morality - Focus - Style - Divinity
Mare Eternus - Absolute Fantasy - Strong Fantasy - Steampunk/Magitech - Ambiguous - Mystery - Wonder/Weird - Obscure Divinity

[Superfluous Crow]

Although i find it far from bloated, i do fear that it comes off as a bit too complex. I'm not sure the fantasticity and fantasy strength will appeal to everybody, or even helps as such. We should perhaps just dump it.
Also, technology should perhaps be used to describe how advanced the culture is rather than what technology they utilize. None-Primitive-medieval-renaissance-industrial-modern-advanced-futuristic.
Steampunk could be industrial but it might as well be futuristic.
Also, just having a "misc." section seems somewhat low.

[Ghostman]

What alternatives are there to the fantasticity & fantasy strength division? We've already seen here that the "High Fantasy" and "Low Fantasy" stereotypes are just confusing people. But there should be some way to give an idea of how much a setting dabbles with fantasy elements.

And I see problems with the idea of replacing technology types with culture types. What if someone makes a setting that has technology similar to renaissance era (incl. gunpowder and all), but culture and society is mostly inspired by pharaonic Egypt?

[Elemental_Elf]

What alternatives are there to the fantasticity & fantasy strength division? We've already seen here that the "High Fantasy" and "Low Fantasy" stereotypes are just confusing people. But there should be some way to give an idea of how much a setting dabbles with fantasy elements.

And I see problems with the idea of replacing technology types with culture types. What if someone makes a setting that has technology similar to renaissance era (incl. gunpowder and all), but culture and society is mostly inspired by pharaonic Egypt?

Then its tech level would be listed as Renaissance. The tech level just gauges how advanced a setting is, not what culture derived the tech.

[Superfluous Crow]

Well, both fantasticity and fantasy strength both describe prevalence. One how often it is seen and one how often it is featured. They both describe a level of magic(-ity). a world where everything is twisted and a world where every player plays a vampire both have a high level of magicity, but in different ways. I'm not sure we need that division.

[Nomadic]

What alternatives are there to the fantasticity & fantasy strength division? We've already seen here that the "High Fantasy" and "Low Fantasy" stereotypes are just confusing people. But there should be some way to give an idea of how much a setting dabbles with fantasy elements.

And I see problems with the idea of replacing technology types with culture types. What if someone makes a setting that has technology similar to renaissance era (incl. gunpowder and all), but culture and society is mostly inspired by pharaonic Egypt?

Then its tech level would be listed as Renaissance. The tech level just gauges how advanced a setting is, not what culture derived the tech.

What about a tech that is both low and high at the same time (like steampunk). You might need a separate category for that.

[Llum]

I believe that separate category IS called steampunk :p

For simplicity sake, I prefer some kind of matrix style thing. Its good, its intuitive, nice too look at. Even if there has to be 2-3 matrix, while a lot of work. I think its better then having each setting with a bunch of labels under it.

[Polycarp]

What about a tech that is both low and high at the same time (like steampunk). You might need a separate category for that.

I thought about this, because my own campaign setting mixes very primitive and fairly advanced technology.  A type like "varied" sounds good, but it doesn't actually describe anything except that the technology is varied (thus, a steampunk setting and a setting that has lasers but is otherwise bronze age would have the same descriptor).  A better solution is to simply state what the blend is; in the Clockwork Jungle's case, I'd probably just put "Ancient-Renaissance" because technology ranges between these two extremes depending on what kind of technology you're talking about.

[Superfluous Crow]

yeah, we can use slashes if necessary, but steampunk usually describes a specific period and can apply to any setting from industrial and up that involves steam. If you have steam FTL travel, then it's still future technology no matter whether it runs on steam or not.

[Kaptn'Lath]

What if we give each entry a "rank" from 1-10 on how much/strong/prevalent/rich the setting is in the Catagory, that way we can argue if Dark Sun is 2 or a 4 in tech level instead of the definitions of the terms we are using to describe. Lemmy see if i can wing an example of what i mean..

Tu'loras
Magic - 6 Tech - 3 Morality - 6 Heroics - 8 Realistic - 8
Divine Influence - 4 Plot - 8

You would have define (give examples) of what a 10 in magic setting is; a 5, and 1. 0 = no magic/supernatural (Prachett's Discworld, LOTR, Earth History (Myth only) respectively???)

Tech 10 - Ancients of Stargate
5 - modern earth
1 - bronze age/agriculture
0 = Hunter/gatherer

one set of examples for 10,5,1 (if in a matrix the examples would be the "other well known works" that we were adding to the matrix at the beginning)

Columns of the table being the categories, and then the rows across representing 1-10. Each world put in the matrix would show up once on each column.

[Nomadic]

Technically steampunk isn't a setting where tech runs on steam (that's industrial revolution tech level). Steampunk is a flavor born from the clunky yet elegant feel of brass, glass, chugging gears, pumping pistons, and all the rest of that good stuff that gives it that particular feel.

[Elemental_Elf]

What about a tech that is both low and high at the same time (like steampunk). You might need a separate category for that.

I thought about this, because my own campaign setting mixes very primitive and fairly advanced technology.  A type like "varied" sounds good, but it doesn't actually describe anything except that the technology is varied (thus, a steampunk setting and a setting that has lasers but is otherwise bronze age would have the same descriptor).  A better solution is to simply state what the blend is; in the Clockwork Jungle's case, I'd probably just put "Ancient-Renaissance" because technology ranges between these two extremes depending on what kind of technology you're talking about.

The problem with that is that most settings have a mix bag of tech levels, even our own world suffered from this problem. While Europe was beginning a massive technological upheval, there were still large swaths of the world that did not know how to make iron, or even mastered rudimentary farming. The point is that if you cast your net too widely, multiple campaigns can be had in any world.

Personally, I think steampunk is a viable term for tech level since it codifies a lot of themes.

However I'd say we should have a set number of words that can be put in teh tech slot. A setting's tech can be defined by any combination of those terms.

[Ghostman]

What if we give each entry a "rank" from 1-10 on how much/strong/prevalent/rich the setting is in the Catagory

This might work with some aspects, but there's a risk of dumbing things down if you try to express qualities with numbers. I'd rather stick to descriptive words.

Well, both fantasticity and fantasy strength both describe prevalence. One how often it is seen and one how often it is featured. They both describe a level of magic(-ity). a world where everything is twisted and a world where every player plays a vampire both have a high level of magicity, but in different ways. I'm not sure we need that division.

Fantasy Strength doesn't describe how often something is featured, it describes how significant the fantasy elements are. I think the division is needed, because you can have worlds that are chock full of fantasy but where most of it is superficial, and worlds where there's very little fantasy but those few bits count for much. It's kind of like the difference between a world where everyone is a weak magic user, and another where only a few people can use magic at all but they are extremely powerful - just that we're talking about fantasy elements in general, not only magic. If we only had one term describing the prevalence of fantasy elements, we would not be able to represent this difference.

I'd say we should have a set number of words that can be put in teh tech slot. A setting's tech can be defined by any combination of those terms.

That sounds good to me. In fact, we could make most of the terms work in this way. We could even roll the Fantasticity and Fantasy Strength into a single column by filling each slot under it with two words, eg. 'Rare-Strong', 'Common-Weak', 'Common-Strong' and so on.

The downside is that the slots will have more stuff inside them. But even so this should be less of a problem than with the other matrix form, where settings go into the slots (could could potentially end up with lots of settings in one slot) since the number of words will be limited.