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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6174999" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sounds like a good game!In my earlier GMing days I think I was more influenced by ideas about the integrity of the gameworld, and the idea of the setting as a "vessel" in which the action took place.Now I'm much more influenced by an approach that I associate with The Forge and modern gaming trends - even though I'm not sure that I could pin it down to anything explicit in the Forge-y games - which sees the setting as a resource for the action to draw on, and that can't be expected to survive actual play as something pristine to be used again for new campaigns.Having said I can't pin it down, here's one idea <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">from Ron Edwards</a> that does inform my current thinking about settings:Pitfalls of Narrativist game design . . . Karaoke. This is a serious problem that arises from the need to sell thick books rather than to teach and develop powerful role-playing. Let's say you have a game that consists of some Premise-heavy characters and a few notes about Situation, and through play, the group generates a hellacious cool Setting as well as theme(s) regarding those characters. Then, publishing your great game, you present that very setting and theme in the text, in detail. . . [Quoting from Jonathan Tweet in Over the Edge: ] The first time I played OTE, I had a few pages of notes on the background and nothing on the specifics. I made it all up on the spot. Not having anything written as a guide (or crutch), I let my imagination loose. You have the mixed blessing of having many pages of background prepared for you. If you use the information in this book as a springboard for your own wild dreams, then it is a blessing. If you limit yourself to what I've dreamed up, it's a curse. All I see, I'm afraid, is the curse. The isolated phrases "mixed blessing" and "(or crutch)" don't hold a lot of water compared to the preceding 152 extraordinarily detailed pages of canonical setting. I'm not saying that improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play. I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play ... and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play ... then why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?I think quite a bit of RP setting, including in D&D (eg look at the actual history of how Greyhawk was developed) is presenting the result of one group's actual play as the starting point for another group's play. And I'm becoming a bigger fan of working out my setting in play with my own group, with these characters and these ideads in mind. Which tends to mean a new setting for a new campaign, but that's fine. We don't need to karaoke ourselves anymore than we need to karaoke the WotC designers.</blockquote>

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