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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8448510" data-attributes="member: 42582">Some recent thread took me back to Rolemaster's Campaign Law. I'm quoting from my 1989 version of Character Law & Campaign Law, but am pretty confident the text goes back to 1984 and the original release of Campaign Law.Here is some stuff about world building, under the heading Design the Campaign Setting (p 104):Design should flow from the general to the specific. Construct the general parameters first, and then build specific concepts using the general framework. The design of a world setting would progress as follows: 1. The Worlda. Gods, the Comsos, and the World b. Physical Landscape . . . 2. The Inhabitants . . .b (iii) Social Beings[/indnet] 3. The Cultures . . . 4. The Eventsa, The Dynamics of Politics and Culture b. Natural Events c. Political Events. 5. The Non-Player Characters . . .Not long after this, on pp 104-5, is the following, under the headings "Start the Players with a Rich Background" and "Start the Game with a Manageable Yet Challenging Adventure":A. Ask each player about their desires for their character. Maintaining reason and play balance, attempt to incorporate them into their PC background. B. Based on the player's wishes, game needs, and the PC's race and profession, help choose an appropriate cultural background for the PC.1. Give the PC (sic) a handout or talk about their cultural roots, and the manner of their folk. 2. Inform the PC of any overall goals or problems associated with their culture. C. Build a specific past for the PC.1. Discuss any family background, taking note of any adventures connected with family members. . . . 2.Discuss the early goals and activities of the PC.a. Adventures b.Schooling . . . 4. Be clear about things the player wishes to keep secret. . . . Get clear any long or short-term goals each PC may have at the time the game begins. . . . Allow for any common goal or goals that might keep them together. . . . Based on the area and the PC group’s desires and stated goals, construct a variety of adventure options with which to start the campaign.What is missing is how to reconcile these two sets of instructions. Hence the the tension I mention in the thread title. What if a player's idea for family background, or schooling, clashes with a GM's ideas about cultures and NPCs? What if a player's desire for his PC has a religious or cosmological aspect that contradicts the GM's ideas about the gods and the cosmos?There's also the practical problem of how to connect all the goals and secrets and the like the GM is invited to elicit from the players, with the variety of adventure options the GM is instructed to construct.The text is simply silent on all of this. A clear contrast can be drawn in this respect with, say, the Burning Wheel rulebook and even moreso the Adventure Burner supplement, reprinted in The Codex: they tackle this issue head-on, with lots of helpful advice for both players and GMs.My interest in this isn't purely theoretical. I GMed RM for 19 years straight. In that time it was my go-to game. So I had to try and reconcile these tensions myself. I think I did a passing job of it in my first campaign, and a good job in my second. But part of what helped me in my second campaign was reading more widely about RPGing techniques, including relationships between backstory/setting, characters, and scenarios/situation. In the end I realised that, for me, the stuff about "starting the players with a rich background" was good and the stuff about "designing a campaign setting" was less helpful.(A footnote: I promised [USER=7026617]@Thomas Shey[/USER] I would alert him to this thread.)</blockquote>

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