Does the game in question require massive amounts of information that needs to be consistent? If so, then how much of this is already established and known?
My point is that all of this depends on the game. .
Right! So much this!
This is what I was pointing to in my posts upthread both about whether or not I need to know the layout of a starport when GMing Classic Traveller, and in my ranking of campaigns by degree of starting prep. And also what I was not just pointing to but directly addressing in my post upthread asking
@Lanefan about the role of the
setting framework.
The setting framework includes its maps (work done: to show how things geographically relate on whatever scale is required at the time), history (work done: to show how things/places/nations within the setting got to be what they are), cultures and species (work done: detailing what exists here, what doesn't, etc.), cosmology and deities/pantheons (work done: giving religious-based characters something to work with, potentially setting up conflicts or wars etc.), nations, kingdoms, and realms (work done: giving names to some places, setting up potential for conflicts or wars etc.), a few key NPCs and their motives/relationships* (work done: making things much easier on myself later if-when the PCs ever interact with one).
That's just the high-level overview of the setting. For the intended "core" adventuring area there's a bit more detail on all of this.
There's no assumption that the PCs are necessarily going to ever interact with any given element presented; the mere potential for interaction with such, however, makes me want those elements somewhat in place ahead of time so I'm not floundering mid-session or talking myself into a corner via contradictions if the party pulls a sudden left turn on me.
Then, if the party in Torcha declares their next action is to travel to Karnos we can all look at the map and gauge roughly how long it'll take, what the general terrain is like, maybe how safe or risky the trip might be, and so forth.
* - and maybe stats, for any I ever think the PCs might want to fight one day.
Is this what you were after?
That sort of thing, yes. I'm not surprised to see
maps in there, and their use to resolve travel.
Picking up on a couple of the other things -
cosmology and deities to give religious PCs something to work with;
history to show how things got to be what they are - there seems to be a heavy emphasis here on not just
what there is but knowing, in advance,
how it got there.
To think about how a different approach might work, consider the following:
* In the real world, the way that we establish historical facts, and even more cosmological facts, is to look at what there is and to reason back from it to probably causes, with that reasoning informed and constrained by our best accounts of the relevant causal processes;
* Sometimes we don't know;
* Sometimes we discover new things that are and these force a revision of our historical conjectures, and perhaps even a revision of our accounts of the causal processes.
None of those facts about how humans work stuff out about the world they live in gives any reason to think that the world is inconsistent. It just means its complicated and we don't know everything about it that there is to know!
Now imagine adopting a similar sort of approach in establishing a RPG setting:
* Eg a player chooses a god for his/her religious PC, based on what s/he thinks is cool or genre appropriate or whatever - now we know that that god is party of the setting;
* Maybe another player writes up some backstory for his/her PC which refers to a time spent in exile in The Barrens, so now we know that place exists;
* Etc, etc.
From this information about
what is, we gradually build up a picture of
how it came to be. Our evidence base is pretty thin, and our reasoning isn't scientific, but these are actually complementary as the thinner the evidence base the less likely common sense is to deliver up contradictions!
JRRT did this with LotR. You can see this eg in Unfinished Tales, where we learn how he kept revising the story of Celeborn and Galadriel. That didn't stop him from writing the stuff about Lothlorien in LotR.
I'm not saying that anyone
should adopt this sort of approach in RPGing. I'm just pointing out how it is eminently possible.
Of course it won't work if
our processes for working out what happens now rely upon all that background/historical stuff
as an input. But they don't have to. Other processes are quite possible and can work quite well.
