Setting Design: As Written, GM Homebrew, or Group Collaboration?

[payn]

I'm curious about people's experiences or preferences regarding the setting they choose to play in when they sit down to start a game.

Do you usually use the book's setting and tweak it to your liking?

Yes. This is my most common method. I work well with a foundation to build on. I like that there is some common knowledge amongst my players and the online community to spark interest.

Do you create your own setting whole-cloth, on your own, and present it to your players?

I tried it. Was too much work and players didnt care enough; or at all.

Does your table create a setting / lore together and make it a collaborative exercise?

Rarely. Right now im doing a Battletech campaign that is collaborative based on the lore. Really enjoying it so far.

Do you do this for campaigns? One-shots? Short sessions?

I like long, intricate, and nuanced campaigns. I put a lot of effort in those and usually springboard off of adventure paths.

For one shots I usually go for bespoke items like Bladerunner, Alien, Cthulhu. Its less about setting building and more about a simple adventure evening.

I am not familiar with short sessions or what exactly that means?

Why do you do what you do? And when you might consider world-building vs using what's already there?

Covered this a little above. I like that I have a common starting place to spring off of with my players in existing properties. I tried making stuff out of whole cloth and nobody, I mean nobody, cared to stick with it. I look to the players to tell me what they are interested in and I work on that for them.

I do quite a bit of my own work based off the Traveller universe third imperium. There is a ton of stuff to work with that isnt highly detailed allowing me to fill in the blanks. As close to both worlds as I get. With Golarion adventure paths coming in as a close second.

 

[Committed Hero]

The benefits of group collaboration on a setting outweigh any disadvantages. But the degree that a setting needs tinkering is always one of personal choices.

 

[Voadam]

Why do you do what you do? And when you might consider world-building vs using what's already there?

I do my mashup setting because I like a bunch of elements of multiple existing things and dislike a bunch of elements of a bunch of stuff and enjoy doing the syncretisms of multiple things I like to make it make sense for me and to allow using a bunch of diverse stuff fairly easily and incorporate new things easily. It also allows me to not deal with a lot of canon issues as I specifically do not use anything straight and whole.

I can easily riff on a lot of theme stuff without looking a lot up so it is easy for me to think how to run modules or classes with it as a backdrop or tie things in as they come up.

I really like Ptolus's theocratic declining hentotheistic empire engulfed in a civil succession war, it draws a lot of power players into the war so there is more room for the PCs in modules to be the biggest people around to deal with problems like monsters. The Lothian church being based on a martyred sun themed paladin allows a lot of familiar medieval christian church aspects to be culturally dominant, but Henotheism allows the typical D&D pantheism and other gods to be present, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in tension.

I hate Ptolus's closed cosmology and I am not a big fan of their moon stuff though so I do not use those, also I use a bit of a different timeline with the war being active.

I've built out a couple of the imperial factions and tied them into Eberron and its Last War as if the war were current.

I use a 3e inspired concept that all divine magic is a magical tradition that taps a specific source of magical power, not direct power from gods who oversee their clerics, so there are heresies and theologies and corrupt spellcasting priests and paladins who just work and nontheistic religions and multiple different pantheons and non theistic clerics and druids, and questions about what is and is not a god, such as dragon cults of specific living dragons.

I really like Golarion and a bunch of its stuff, so that is a big secondary theme with a bunch of Golarion nations being provinces of the Holy Lothian empire.

So when running the Pathfinder Carrion Crown adventure path the Golarion principality of Ustalav is part of the Lothian Empire with the prince pushing his claim for the throne, which also ties into Eberron Karrnathi themes and allows me to tie the Whispering Way and Blood of Vol stuff a bit together. With the Prince leading armies against other factions it means the AP ghost story is mostly up to the PCs to deal with, locally there is only an elderly cleric and a couple too-young for the war altar boys instead of a big resource of imperial lothian church crusaders to call on to deal with it.

I have run multiple campaigns in this setting with a bunch of Pathfinder adventure paths, the Freeport trilogy, and other modules all being slotted in fairly easily for me.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm curious about people's experiences or preferences regarding the setting they choose to play in when they sit down to start a game.

Do you usually use the book's setting and tweak it to your liking?
Do you create your own setting whole-cloth, on your own, and present it to your players?
Does your table create a setting / lore together and make it a collaborative exercise?

Do you do this for campaigns? One-shots? Short sessions?
Why do you do what you do? And when you might consider world-building vs using what's already there?

I'd love to do group collaboration, but if I try it, it's basically, me, my brother if he's there, and my wife working on it, and the other three or four (depending) in my main group just collapse and basically roll around on the floor, even though one of them is a published writer, and loves to add to settings whilst playing, just not formally, and is very capable of making things up on the fly when he DMs (which is extremely rarely, I admit, usually one-shots) and the other is an extremely creative DM who often comes up with setting stuff on the fly in his game! Drives me a little bit crazy. They never even say "no" either, they're just, like, hopeless about it - I've tried multiple tacks over the years - my brother has too, just doesn't seem to work.

So I've 100% given up on that with my main group. Sadly.

Depending on the game, I either use a book's setting - yeah inevitably tweaked somewhat, I mean even if you don't intend to, your own understanding of the setting will come into play, or a whole-cloth setting, which may be extremely sketched in (for a one-shot, for example), or extremely detailed (though at some point you're mostly detailing stuff for your own satisfaction rather than practicality). If I'm doing my own setting it definitely narrows down the genres I'm willing to run, because I don't feel like I can come up with a good setting for some genres (like, I wouldn't feel confident coming up with an entire Noir-ish city, despite loving to play in such games - but I'd be fine coming up with numerous planets/systems for a harder-end SF game, or an entire post-apocalyptic fantasy setting - admitted post-apocalyptic settings are flatly easier than most settings, because there's just less, and it doesn't have to work as well or be as consistent).

The main reason I don't run Pathfinder 2E though is that I don't like Golarion (mostly it's just a little dull - I like the cultural diversity, but it's kind of an overdeveloped and somewhat toothless setting even compared to the FR, and just has an absolute joke number of intelligent races even by fantasy standards - not that I don't love some of them dearly, but there are way too many), and I don't feel like PF2E really supports running any other setting. Like, yeah, technically you can, if you're willing to make up a gigantic amount of mechanical content to replace what you're losing, but I'm not into that.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I'd love to do group collaboration, but if I try it, it's basically, me, my brother if he's there, and my wife working on it, and the other three or four (depending) in my main group just collapse and basically roll around on the floor, even though one of them is a published writer, and loves to add to settings whilst playing, just not formally, and is very capable of making things up on the fly when he DMs (which is extremely rarely, I admit, usually one-shots) and the other is an extremely creative DM who often comes up with setting stuff on the fly in his game! Drives me a little bit crazy. They never even say "no" either, they're just, like, hopeless about it - I've tried multiple tacks over the years - my brother has too, just doesn't seem to work.

They might be more comfortable to improvising based on their own ideas than on someone else's. Or possibly they don't like the ideas others have presented, but don't want to argue.

Personally I am not huge fan of collaborative world building. Sometimes it might be good to brainstorm stuff together, but I think it still works best if someone has the creative vision and is ultimately in charge of curating and combining stuff.

 

[overgeeked]

I've used official campaign settings a few times. Some of them I really love, like Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Marvel or DC, Sword World, etc. But mostly I homebrew the setting. I don't like the group designing the setting. I view the setting as my character to play in the game, so I want to design it. Letting the players define and describe and detail small, specific chunks of the world, like their hometown or such, is fine. But the table designing the whole setting? No thanks.

 

[aramis erak]

I'm curious about people's experiences or preferences regarding the setting they choose to play in when they sit down to start a game.

Do you usually use the book's setting and tweak it to your liking?
Do you create your own setting whole-cloth, on your own, and present it to your players?
Does your table create a setting / lore together and make it a collaborative exercise?

Do you do this for campaigns? One-shots? Short sessions?
Why do you do what you do? And when you might consider world-building vs using what's already there?

I've usually run official settings as written.
I've occasionally done homebrewed worlds - most especially in Fantasy Hero and D&D.

 

[Lanefan]

Even for the one campaign where I used a published setting (FR) as the backdrop, I took the part where the party started and the adventuring was most likely going to happen (the Sword Coast and inland from there) and rebuilt it from the ground up including re-mapping it.

Otherwise it's been homebrew all the way.

 

[MintRabbit]

I am not familiar with short sessions or what exactly that means?

What I mean when I say short sessions is a short run of games, somewhere between 4-6 sessions. I do this with games that I want to try out that I don't think I'd get the full experience from playing just a one-shot.

 

[MintRabbit]

They might be more comfortable to improvising based on their own ideas than on someone else's. Or possibly they don't like the ideas others have presented, but don't want to argue.

Personally I am not huge fan of collaborative world building. Sometimes it might be good to brainstorm stuff together, but I think it still works best if someone has the creative vision and is ultimately in charge of curating and combining stuff.

This is something I really like about Brinkwood. There are some things that are set in stone as part of the game's premise: there are vampires and they are villains and you are going to take them down. The game group can choose from one of three different Vampire Lords as the big bad, which helps determine the tone of the game (brutal warfare? decaying decadence? grotesque consumption?) and also comes with a list of lower-tier enemies to provide some starting obstacles.

But the group gets to go absolutely wild in designing the Fae that's your group patron. The game gives you guiding questions (My eyes look like... my heart breaks if... my hands will help you with...) but the answers are up to the group. And since it's a process by which you have to add on to answers provided by the rest of the players, the resulting fae is usually dripping with heavily thematic imagery and alien features.