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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 5631957" data-attributes="member: 17106">The point I'm making here is not that setting is completely irrelevant, but that to me, the only aspects of setting that matter are the ones that directly affect the characters. It also matters that the aspects that are used have an organic quality to them and feel real rather than contrived for a game.That said, I just ran a campaign where 95% of the world was never mapped, most of the major cultures and power centers were never explained, and even the character's own backgrounds were detailed only in a very limited fashion. The success of the campaign rested far more on the rules choices I made than on the setting aspects I established. I could have held it in a desert instead of a jungle or with dwarves in place of humans and it would have been the same, but if the rules for how characters die and how resurrection works were a little different, it would have failed. That's my model. I spend a lot more time writing houserules than writing specific NPCs or similar material, and I spend a lot more time writing specific NPCs then I do on general worldbuilding. I'd much rather improvise setting than rules.I also think that for the broader health of the hobby, it's very important that people run games that are diverse, so that the players who play them will be as well. If everyone, or even a large minority of people play in Greyhawk (or Golarion, Points of Light, et al.) the game stagnates. So I believe an rpg should be a strong rules-based core with a weak setting just to create examples to explain the rules (which is what Greyhawk was for 3e) and with a diverse set of optional settings for those who can't or won't (for various reasons) create their own. Despite my general support of Pathfinder, I think their "one setting fits all" approach may be good business, but it's creatively a problem. So in this sense, I think that setting is an important issue, but I don't think that a particular setting does (or should) define an rpg.</blockquote>

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