How do you feel about worldbuilding and games made to explore settings?

[hawkeyefan]

Games with a baked-in setting live and die by that setting. Shadowrun and Warhammer Fantasy come to mind. Both are amazing settings, but the rules (depending on the edition) haven't always been as sharp as they could be. And as I get older, no matter how great the setting, I just don't have the tolerance for complicated, messy, or legacy rules systems.

An example of a game with the rules and world perfectly meshed for me would be The Spire. The world is fascinating, and the rules are easy to learn and help bring the world to life even more.

The Spire is a great example. As presented, playing a game must take place in the default setting. The classes/playbooks are all specific to that setting and everything revolves around the core expectation of revolution.

Yes, you could hack the game and make it take place in another setting or whatever, but it’d take some work to make it deliver any other kind of experience.

 

[Legatus Legionis]

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[Umbran]

I'm curious to see how people feel about games with settings baked into their package.

Anyway, how do you all feel about them?

I like having a mix of them.

Shadowrun, and Classic Deadlands, for example, are games where the setting is as much or more of the draw than the mechanics. These aren't just games with a setting baked in. They are, to a large extent, games built for the express purpose of supporting play within these really awesome settings, mechanics specifically designed to support the feeling of their genres.

When you take the Deadlands setting away from the classic rule set, you realize a bunch of it really isn't called for, and a lot of its baroque elements are really good in their setting of origin, but they get in the way elsewhere. And so you start tossing stuff out... and you end up with Savage Worlds. Literally.

This, however, has nothing to do with exploration of the setting as a goal of play.

 

[Blue]

I'm going to conflate setting and a hyper-specific genre for a moment so that I can pull out one of the old sayings:

Good mechanics allows you to play all of the archetypes of a genre.
Great mechanics encourages you to do so.

In other words, if a campaign is around something, the setting and the mechanics support that something. And the setting at the very least needs to make sense in the mechanics (unlike, say, medevial castles in worlds with magic and flying creatures). But when you end up wanting to play the archetypes that make up the setting because the mechanics not just support but encourage them, then you have a good blend.

So D&D is a fairly big tent. But think about rules changes for original DarkSun. It carved that down, added on uniqueness, and really encouraged the feel and themes of the setting.

So I'm fine with a game system that has rules and setting that work in tandem to provide the experience the designers want.

I am also fine with more general games, like D&D. Or very general games, like FATE.

Different tools for different campaigns.

 

[aramis erak]

This is something I'm curious about, but since I've never been part of a TRPG community before, I never got to ask.

I'm curious to see how people feel about games with settings baked into their package. [snip]

Anyway, how do you all feel about them?

I personally much prefer the system to be tweaked to the setting. I've used 6 or 7 different universal engines over the years (Hero 3e/4e/5e, GURPS 1e-3e, CORPS, EABA 1e, Simply Roleplaying (aka Plainlable), Theatrix, Masterbook), and several different games each of adapted core approaches (Palladium pre-Rifts, Hero up to 3E, BRP before 1990, GDW House Engine, RTG's Interlock, RTG's Fuzion, Fate, Cortex Plus, Cortex Classic)...

I've always had more fun running adapted cores over universals. And bespoke over adapted core.