"And your Thri-Kreen's name is...?"
"Manfred Hans Blütstein, but you can call him Manny...Manny Hans."
"*groan*"
Making campaign settings promote better roleplaying/character interaction
- Thread starter innerdude
- Start date
"And your Thri-Kreen's name is...?"
"Manfred Hans Blütstein, but you can call him Manny...Manny Hans."
"*groan*"
Stormonu
NeoGrognard
One of my favorite campaign worlds is Rokugan. It had a rich depth of character and culture. But, it can be somewhat difficult to convey those aspects in actual play to those who aren't somewhat familiar with the world.
Detail is nice, but player and DM involvement counts for a lot more.
Detail is nice, but player and DM involvement counts for a lot more.
Barastrondo
First Post
Group chemistry is so important. I kind of run the opposite sort of game that The Shaman does, with one of my weirdest takes on D&D being one that the players have gotten into the most. Now, it does have touchstones with inspiration like Gormenghast and Labyrinth, and my players are familiar with those sources, which helps. But it departs in many ways. I'm actually very curious about what I'm doing right (as opposed to what my players are doing right), and here are a few things I guess are important.
Names: I borrowed heavily from Gormenghast here in the sense that I wanted quirky names. Peake had Sepulcrave, Titus Groan, Flay, Swelter, Dr. Prunesquallor, Barquentine -- these are fantastic names, and you can see a pattern with them. The trouble with some fantasy naming conventions is that they're not intuitive for the players to anticipate. But if you read enough Forgotten Realms, you get a sense for how Greenwood likes to name characters (with lots of excess vowels). Bog-standard elves? Use soft sounds like "l" and "r" and "m" a lot. Bog-standard dwarves? Harsh consonants like "d" and "k" and "r." That's part of the reason elves and dwarves are so successful in gamer culture. You feel you can come up with a name that feels right on your own, without consulting a chart. In my case, I named characters stuff like "Spackleroot" and "Caddera Drupe" and "Sandgrief," names that didn't make a lot of sense -- but that hinted at the sideways, quirky logic that infuses the culture.
Seasons and weather: I always wonder why I don't use these more, because it means so much to describe the city as full of fog after a heavy rain, or with slick icy patches and bits of unmelted snow in the shadowy corners. It can be only a line here and there, but having weather show up in more ways than just a storm for dramatic effect helps showcase the setting. If it's pouring rain outside, then the PCs and the NPCs taking shelter in the tavern have one more thing in common: a desire not to have to go back out in the rain until it lets up. That can have some impact.
Colors: It never hurts to tint a color palette in some way. Yellow causes anxiety, so it's fun to have potentially threatening groups wear yellow. A city whose stones turn bluish in the twilight has a different feel than one that turns rich and red-gold from reflected sunlight. Like weather, it doesn't have to be used all that often, but take a look at a game like Assassin's Creed sometime: they do a fantastic job with making each city feel distinct with just a nod toward a different color palette.
Food: What do people eat and drink? It's a favorite question of mine. I've had tremendous luck with personalizing even the most generic of D&D campaigns with a few signature drinks and dishes.
Enemies: Humans and their ilk are, hands down, my favorite villains. And I love monsters, don't get me wrong. But who you're fighting does a lot to stress what's singular and fascinating about your setting. For instance, I just don't use beholders when I run D&D, heresy though it may be, because the first and foremost thing a beholder says is "You are playing D&D." I use goblinkin all the time, though, because they can take on great customization. Blue-skinned, white-furred bugbears in the frozen North. Spidery bakemono-like goblins in a Mythic China game. Distinctly Froudian wicked bastards with names like "Tanglegut" in a more Western European setting. Limiting the monster palette and figuring out what will showcase the local flavor most is one of my favorite tricks.
There are probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting, but really, these are some of my favorite factors of world design: presenting things in the context of examples players are already familiar with, and being consistent about feel. I love it when it goes well enough that the players buy in.
Names: I borrowed heavily from Gormenghast here in the sense that I wanted quirky names. Peake had Sepulcrave, Titus Groan, Flay, Swelter, Dr. Prunesquallor, Barquentine -- these are fantastic names, and you can see a pattern with them. The trouble with some fantasy naming conventions is that they're not intuitive for the players to anticipate. But if you read enough Forgotten Realms, you get a sense for how Greenwood likes to name characters (with lots of excess vowels). Bog-standard elves? Use soft sounds like "l" and "r" and "m" a lot. Bog-standard dwarves? Harsh consonants like "d" and "k" and "r." That's part of the reason elves and dwarves are so successful in gamer culture. You feel you can come up with a name that feels right on your own, without consulting a chart. In my case, I named characters stuff like "Spackleroot" and "Caddera Drupe" and "Sandgrief," names that didn't make a lot of sense -- but that hinted at the sideways, quirky logic that infuses the culture.
Seasons and weather: I always wonder why I don't use these more, because it means so much to describe the city as full of fog after a heavy rain, or with slick icy patches and bits of unmelted snow in the shadowy corners. It can be only a line here and there, but having weather show up in more ways than just a storm for dramatic effect helps showcase the setting. If it's pouring rain outside, then the PCs and the NPCs taking shelter in the tavern have one more thing in common: a desire not to have to go back out in the rain until it lets up. That can have some impact.
Colors: It never hurts to tint a color palette in some way. Yellow causes anxiety, so it's fun to have potentially threatening groups wear yellow. A city whose stones turn bluish in the twilight has a different feel than one that turns rich and red-gold from reflected sunlight. Like weather, it doesn't have to be used all that often, but take a look at a game like Assassin's Creed sometime: they do a fantastic job with making each city feel distinct with just a nod toward a different color palette.
Food: What do people eat and drink? It's a favorite question of mine. I've had tremendous luck with personalizing even the most generic of D&D campaigns with a few signature drinks and dishes.
Enemies: Humans and their ilk are, hands down, my favorite villains. And I love monsters, don't get me wrong. But who you're fighting does a lot to stress what's singular and fascinating about your setting. For instance, I just don't use beholders when I run D&D, heresy though it may be, because the first and foremost thing a beholder says is "You are playing D&D." I use goblinkin all the time, though, because they can take on great customization. Blue-skinned, white-furred bugbears in the frozen North. Spidery bakemono-like goblins in a Mythic China game. Distinctly Froudian wicked bastards with names like "Tanglegut" in a more Western European setting. Limiting the monster palette and figuring out what will showcase the local flavor most is one of my favorite tricks.
There are probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting, but really, these are some of my favorite factors of world design: presenting things in the context of examples players are already familiar with, and being consistent about feel. I love it when it goes well enough that the players buy in.
Thunderfoot
Hero
Where's the button to TAKE AWAY XP?
I wish I had a place to store files so I could link to them here. I ran a campaign for four years with a friend of mine as co-DMs. It started out with a mage and cleric being "sent on a mission" because the cleric was the only living relative of a now dead mage. She had claim her inheritance, a house.
The cleric's and wizard's back stories both made them a little unlikeable and pretentious, so we used that. When the summons was received by the cleric, she went to the head of her order to get the news and by the time she returned to her cell all of her gear was packed, her mattress was rolled up and the room had been cleaned. She was lead to a horse that had been saddled, harnessed, and had her gear neatly packed upon it. with food and water. At the gate an elvish mage handed off his mage apprentice to "protect" the cleric at all costs and don't come back until you are sure she is safe. Gates to the monastery/fortress closes and a faint cheer can be heard.
10 minutes of game time and the characters knew who they were - castaways. So every time they picked up a new party member, that became the running theme, without exception they were people who were either running away from or being thrown out of some society, organization or family.
It gave them a weird sense of being that helped the campaign evolve around them. The Player's Guide to Rohn was the book I wrote about the various countries and organizations they inhabited. Very real, very role play oriented, and all we had to do was get rid of a cleric and a wizard.
BTW they later became respected member of their organizations, but it's a long road to learn how to grow up.
I believe that's a topic for Meta.
Players will do what they think they can do.
Using a familiar setting can cause the players to do things, because they know how to avoid the GM thwarting them.
Using an unfamiliar setting can cause players to not do things, because they don't know how to avoid the GM thwarting them.
That being said, I think the underlying issue is if the GM is stomping on players for being "wrong" or not. Often times GMs fall into the trap of having a world that is really nothing more than an elaborate game of Simon Says, instead of a basis for an interactive story.
If a player wants to do something, GMs will say to themselves "is the player being consistent with the world" and throw up roadblocks over every inconsistency. This causes the player to just stop trying to do anything. Especially because it is almost always the case that there is a massive body of things the GM knows to be true that has simply never been mentioned to the players.
Using a known world can alleviate this problem by reducing the mass of unknown information. That being said, it is possible to make the mass of unknown information not be as much of a hindering factor.
If the GM instead said "is there any reason why the world can't be consistent with what the player is trying to do?" and tear down any inconsistencies that would present roadblocks to what the player is trying to do. Once the player is allowed to just make an assumption about how the world works and the GM supports that assumption, then the entire group is now has shared knowledge about how that aspect of the world works and they can all be consistent about it in the future. They also know they can try to interact with the world and not be shot down.
So I think using a familiar setting like earth helps people interact because they are on the same page and the players know how to avoid the GM stomping on their attempts to interact, but I don't think that using a familiar setting is strictly needed to get players to interact if the GM is careful not to stomp on players when they attempt to interact with any setting.
Using a familiar setting can cause the players to do things, because they know how to avoid the GM thwarting them.
Using an unfamiliar setting can cause players to not do things, because they don't know how to avoid the GM thwarting them.
That being said, I think the underlying issue is if the GM is stomping on players for being "wrong" or not. Often times GMs fall into the trap of having a world that is really nothing more than an elaborate game of Simon Says, instead of a basis for an interactive story.
If a player wants to do something, GMs will say to themselves "is the player being consistent with the world" and throw up roadblocks over every inconsistency. This causes the player to just stop trying to do anything. Especially because it is almost always the case that there is a massive body of things the GM knows to be true that has simply never been mentioned to the players.
Using a known world can alleviate this problem by reducing the mass of unknown information. That being said, it is possible to make the mass of unknown information not be as much of a hindering factor.
If the GM instead said "is there any reason why the world can't be consistent with what the player is trying to do?" and tear down any inconsistencies that would present roadblocks to what the player is trying to do. Once the player is allowed to just make an assumption about how the world works and the GM supports that assumption, then the entire group is now has shared knowledge about how that aspect of the world works and they can all be consistent about it in the future. They also know they can try to interact with the world and not be shot down.
So I think using a familiar setting like earth helps people interact because they are on the same page and the players know how to avoid the GM stomping on their attempts to interact, but I don't think that using a familiar setting is strictly needed to get players to interact if the GM is careful not to stomp on players when they attempt to interact with any setting.
ExploderWizard
Hero
The setting can have a big influence on roleplaying but I believe it to be secondary to events and situations that the players can easily connect with.
As an example, I recently started playing in a 1E Earthdawn game. I had never played it before and was completely unfamiliar with both the setting and the system. The character sheet had just as little meaning to me as the the setting did. Once play began the only thing there was for me to engage with and really understand were the in-game interactions and events as they were experienced. I was as far from system and setting mastery as one could get and having more fun as a player than I had in a long time. I am learning a little more about the world and the mechanics slowly as we play. I have resisted the urge to buy books and read up on the setting because I prefer discovery through play better.
As a DM if you can get your players truly involved in the situations and events surrounding their characters then the game could be set in Rome, Greyhawk, or even Mars.
As an example, I recently started playing in a 1E Earthdawn game. I had never played it before and was completely unfamiliar with both the setting and the system. The character sheet had just as little meaning to me as the the setting did. Once play began the only thing there was for me to engage with and really understand were the in-game interactions and events as they were experienced. I was as far from system and setting mastery as one could get and having more fun as a player than I had in a long time. I am learning a little more about the world and the mechanics slowly as we play. I have resisted the urge to buy books and read up on the setting because I prefer discovery through play better.
As a DM if you can get your players truly involved in the situations and events surrounding their characters then the game could be set in Rome, Greyhawk, or even Mars.
The Shaman
First Post
. . . wait for it . . .
*DING!* There it is.
In the last three years I've been a player in two different Flashing Blades games as well as running one of my own. Most of the players in those games were fans of the system and the period, and not too surprisingly, there were, and are, some different takes on the culture and history of the period. However, it's never been disruptive to any of the games; it's understood that there are different interpretations on people, places, and practices, and everyone at the table has the good grace to accept that.
This concern about 'setting lawyers' comes up frequently in discussions about historical roleplaying games, and while I have no doubt that they are out there, I think the perception of their prevalence is way out of proportion to their actual incidence.
In my experience playing mostly historical roleplaying games, 'canon-nazis' are no more common in historical games than they are games with extensively developed fictional settings such as the Realms or the Third Imperium, and that they are much more a feature of the intrewebs than actual face-to-face games.
With respect to that last point, there's something else I've noticed with respect to on-line setting canon discussions. The Citizens of the Imperium forum for Traveller has one of the worst reputations for 'canon-nazis,' in my experience, but I don't think that's particularly fair. Here's how a discussion on CotI often plays out.
There's a difference between explaining, "This is what canon is," and, "You must use canon in your game or Imperial Marines will slag your house with fusion guns!" and that distinction tends to be lost sometimes in the back-and-forth of forum discussion.Poster the First: In the Third Imperium merchants with a jump-2 ships make more money because they can charge twice as much for cargo as a jump-1 ship.
Poster the Second: No, in canon, the cargo rates are per jump, not per parsec, so the rates are the same for a J-2 ship as they are for a J-1.
Poster the First: Don't tell me how to run my game!
Poster the Second:confused
Poster the First: Canon-nazi!
As for me, if I do encounter a historical canon-nazi, I'll simply poke him with the horns of my (a-historical) Viking hat until he shuts up.
TarionzCousin
Second Most Angelic Devil Ever
Some players will create copious backstory for their characters filled with adventure hooks, flaws to exploit, and fun NPC's to involve.
Others wont.--regardless of what you offer.
But some players will only "get into" the setting and roleplaying if you offer them a tangible/mechanical reward.
Example:
Everyone who writes up a page of background on their character (single-spaced, typed, at least 200 words, etc.) will get a level one magic item for free at the start of the game that is relevant to what they have written. This item will be chosen by the DM, not the player.
Alternately, you could reward "good roleplay" during the game by handing out a glass token (Fate point +/-). The player can spend that token at any point for a reroll, a +2 to a roll, -10 to damage taken, etc.
Others wont.--regardless of what you offer.
But some players will only "get into" the setting and roleplaying if you offer them a tangible/mechanical reward.
Example:
Everyone who writes up a page of background on their character (single-spaced, typed, at least 200 words, etc.) will get a level one magic item for free at the start of the game that is relevant to what they have written. This item will be chosen by the DM, not the player.
Alternately, you could reward "good roleplay" during the game by handing out a glass token (Fate point +/-). The player can spend that token at any point for a reroll, a +2 to a roll, -10 to damage taken, etc.
The Shaman
First Post
The point of a detailed setting, in my experience, is not detail for detail's sake, but specifically to create the kinds of situations and events with which players connect and to facilitate their involvement.
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