In your experience, is play enhanced by a well-developed setting?

In your experience, is play enhanced by a well-developed setting?

Naturally. The DMs I've known who do generic, bland worlds have campaigns that just don't last.

Definitely.

To my mind, the initial question is something akin to "Is a novel improved if the author is a good writer?"

Now a "well-developed setting" is, in and of itself, something of a fuzzy-bordered concept. You can have a very small scale setting that is well-developed or a very large one; you don't necessarily need published books for the setting to be developed; a few well-chose NPCs and settings can really get things going and you can certainly add elements as you go along that were not there originally.

For me, I like a semi-plausible setting (given the existence of magic and some monsters, though usually scaling way back on "intelligent races", etc.) with a real infrastructure to the normal folks lives. For some folks what is "well-developed" is a deep history; for others it is a map with lots of dungeons; for still others it is a dozen+ supplements produced by a single company along with supporting novels.

Eye of the beholder, neh?

Yes.
What gets me interested in playing a fantasy world is the setting. Playing in game in which the DM has not pre-established the setting elements (e.g., available races, the cultures, religion, some history (current and ancient) , some major locations, etc.) and how these affect my character (e.g., class choices, starting equipment, common knowledge, standard cultural beliefs (even if I choose to go against them and accept the consequences), expected behavior of divine characters), holds no interest to me.

In other words, I could care less how interesting your adventure is if the setting elements that both provide me with a feeling for the world, provide me with meaningful choices and help ground my PC in the world are not there.

I voted yes, but I thought I should explain.

a well-developed setting is not Forgotten Realms or Eberron straight out of the box. In my mind a well-developed setting is a DM having a firm grip on the world, either canned or homebrewed.

Straight out the box settings are just jump starts for the DM to having a well developed setting. The problem with them is information overload. Eventually there will be too much canon. To run a great game the DM needs a sense of the world and where to draw the line for his game.

My problem with campaign starters like Forgotten Realms and Eberron is the continual debate over canon. Even if I say X isn't in my version of Forgotten Realms because my Forgotten Realms has a Y theme, the debate will resurface the moment I get a new player or WotC publishes something that conflicts with my version.

I prefer homebrews because the DM is the sole source for the world and the players can help define it. It is easier for players to become the Elminster or Drizzt Do'Urden's of the world in a homebrew.

sckeener said:

I prefer homebrews because the DM is the sole source for the world and the players can help define it. It is easier for players to become the Elminster or Drizzt Do'Urden's of the world in a homebrew.

Click to expand...

I agree with you.

Yes. However, its also hindered by an overly developed setting. FR seems mired in minutia. Every inn has been named, and next year we'll probably see Barmaids of Faerun. Its fans seem rabid about adhering to canon, and there arent really any unknowns on the map. As a DM, to me, that seems somewhat stifling, and as a player it hinders collaborative worldbuilding through suggestion. I prefer a middle ground, with some areas less initially defined.

Hmmm. In theory, sure, a well-developed setting should make play better.

In my experience... I'm not so sure that's really been borne out.

I've been in games with very developed settings that were pretty mediocre, and others which virtually no setting at all that were great.

If it is a factor, I'm inclined to think it's a very minor one at best.

I think many DMs would be better served spending that extra hour working on something else other than developing the setting.


Cheers,
Roger

ehren37 said:

Yes. However, its also hindered by an overly developed setting. FR seems mired in minutia. Every inn has been named, and next year we'll probably see Barmaids of Faerun. Its fans seem rabid about adhering to canon, and there arent really any unknowns on the map...

Click to expand...

I'm a huge hater of FR. It's one of the lamest, most poorly thought out, most cheesy homebrews ever to make it to publication.

However, I take issue with the notions that there aren't really any unknowns on the map. One thing that strikes me about the published FR setting is that it assumes a certain style of play which boils down to, 'Leave a bar in a big city. Leave for a nearby dungeon in the howling wilderness just outside (or inside!) the gate. Return to the bar. Rince and repeat.' All the setting information consists of highly detailed bars, dungeons, and enough information about the big city to allow for a bit of political intrigue and to stamp on the players the fact that the NPC's in the big city will always be big and better than the PC's. In short, the entire game world is a tesselation on Keep on the Borderlands, only the Keep always has 25th level so and so's in it even in the rare case that its actually a village.

It's the 'Orc and Pie' world.

But to continue, anyone with the slighest knowledge of world building will immediately spot that the map is basically empty except for those 'mission critical' features of 'keep', 'inn', and 'caves of chaos'. And, if you wanted to do FR for some reason but wanted to run it as a more mature setting than it is published at, one place to start would be filling in those blank spots on the map. There are in fact alot of them. There are huge swaths of territory that can't be empty if those massive city states are to be supported (to say nothing of the industries they contain), but which are nothing but featureless voids in published content. So it is quite possible to run a complex FR campaign entirely in the blank spaces on the map where it reads 'here be dragons', and indeed find that there are more things than dragons out there.