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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9677060" data-attributes="member: 18">I clicked the middle option but really I feel like you can separate games into two groups:1) Those heavily informed by their cosmology, where understanding it is key to understanding the setting, and liking the setting and liking the cosmology are one and the same.2) Those for whom the cosmology is mostly irrelevant for most of actual at-table time.And most games are the latter, today.Also, there seems to be an assumption in the options you provide that cosmology is an inherent value-add.I do not think that this is true.I think in quite a lot of cases, a game's setting is damaged or even ruined/rendered totally unattractive by cosmology-based choices. I don't want to get into a squabble about which exact settings I might be thinking of here, but there are definitely games I wouldn't want to play because there's something gross or weird (usually unintentionally/thoughtlessly so, if it's intentional it can be cool) about the cosmology. Like, maybe whoever wrote the cosmology is assuming faith in the gods is inherently virtuous and lack of faith is inherently malign or sinful, but has not consciously written the setting that way - so it's an assumption of the cosmology, but it's not intentionally designed to talk/think about that, it's just taken for granted.I will say I find Draw Steel!'s cosmology to be an example of a value minus proposition, I think Matt Colville is pretty cool and has cool ideas but I think he really wildly overestimates how popular Moorcock-ian Order vs. Chaos stuff is to literally anyone except him (including his players from the way he describes games he'd DM'd!!!), and him baking that into the setting, as well as setting some pretty awful or even monstrous-sounding gods as supposed "good guys" is perhaps... not going to be helpful to Draw Steel! in the longer term.I think that's a Type 2 game though - it doesn't really matter at the table where these powers are coming from and so on. You could certainly use a different cosmology in a way you couldn't really with say, Werewolf: The Apocalypse.</blockquote>

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