Whose "property" are the PCs?

[fusangite]

So you granted tacit approval by accepting the background as-is. That pretty much agrees with what DannyAlcatraz wrote.

Nope. Almost none of the stuff in the background turned out to be true. The character's relationship to his society had to be totally redone.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Fusangite
What kind of GMs are these?

Damn good ones who know quality when they see it.

Fusangite
I can't imagine being a GM and not bothering to define the culture, economics or public morality of the civilizations in my world.

Who said they didn't define such things? Not me.

Fusangite
What kinds of background material do these GMs produce?

The typical fare- maps, NPCs, approved races & classes, cultures, politics, allies & foes, legends, gods, devils...and the ever-popular house rules.

Fusangite
How do campaigns cohere if they don't bother defining these highly necessary things when they build worlds?

They probably don't, but again- no one said they weren't defined. That was YOUR assumption.

Fusangite
Exactly; only certain kinds of worlds can be like this. You have to decide to make a highly earth-like world, culturally, historically and geographically to allow for apparently isolated yet highly predictable cultures like these. Furthermore, how the PCs will think about enthnicity and culture is also, to a fair extent, constrained by these requirements.

Unless your world is extremely tiny, geographic isolation is always a possibility- caves, islands, mountains, ravines, powerful rivers, deserts, seas- even human choices like xenophobia or an overdeveloped sense of superiority...any of these and more can isolate a population from frequent interaction with others.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I'm not sure I've seen anything more than semantically different. How is your world design anathema to cultures so remote they are unknown to the primary setting?

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Chalk me up for the Robert E. Howard school of "world-building". I don't have the patience or interest to create a fully detailed world before we get started. I prefer to create/discover it with the group as we play.

If the players want to be from a particular type of culture, I point to a big blank point on the map (which is like 80% of it) and say "How about over there?" Then we add some notes to the map and the campaign background.

If the game's not about sociopolitical issues, I don't care if they're defined beforehand or not. I figure if the players haven't seen it, it doesn't exist.

But that's for a play style that heavily focuses on the characters and their personal choices. If someone wanted to be involved in politics, we'd have to (together) come up with local political structures. Nothing matters to us except in how it relates to the PCs.

 

[Falkus]

So, all the campaign worlds you have ever seen are modernity in medieval drag. That sucks, man. You are missing out on some great gaming opportunities.

I have no idea how you got that from my statement.

Take my character Dyria from Heroes Inc. All there has to be is a culture that practices the slave trade in the campaign setting, and then I can just alter the place names, and she'll fit in.

 

[Grazzt]

yes.

if you aren't playing with that character under the same referee then it doesn't matter what happens to the NPCs.. they are NPCs now if the referee is controlling them.

Yep- that's how Ive played it in the past (ever since 1E...and probably will in the future should it ever come up again). And most DMs Ive gamed with or known do the same thing. We've seen plenty of players move on...their characters, if deemed interesting or important enough (or for whatever reason), are recycled and used as NPCs.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I think you are in the minority in that you play multiple versions of the same character. It doesn't make much sense to me, either. You act like its the same guy in multiple universes, so how can he meet himself without some kind of planar travel involved? In effect, you bypass the entire situation, since the character is never static. One day he can be evil, the next good, the next a barbarian, the next a sorceress. For most people, once something happens to a character you can't just go back and say that it never happened.

Well, he hasn't been extrordinarily different ever. In 2nd Edition when the character was passed on to me from its previous player (I was new to D&D, they didn't want to wait for me to make up a character, so I was given one already in the game), he was a half-elf fighter/thief. I played the same character in about 3 different 2nd Edition games pretty much exactly the same. One DM objected to his stats, so I was forced to reroll them for that game. Sometimes my level went up or down to match the average of the game. My equipment got changed a couple of times. In each game, he still WAS Majoru Oakheart, he just grew up in a different city, had never heard of his previous friends and didn't go on his previous adventures. But his personality and abilities were basically the same. Often, I even kept a couple notable things from his history that could be easily ported from one campaign world to another without getting in the way.

In 3rd Edition, I played a version of him that was Fighter/Rogue. Then I played his son, the half-drow Fighter/Rogue who took after his father. Recently, I played another game where I finally got to return him to his roots and be in Forgotten Realms again (where he was created). This time, however, I was a half-elf Fighter/Rogue/Nightsong Enforcer. Same concept, same personality...entirely different stats, equipment and abilities. Still, he was still Majoru Oakheart.

I mean, some of the things in his past might not be allowed by some DMs. They might say "no, you can't be married to a Drow", and I make a change to my background and it becomes "Majoru who just didn't marry a Drow".

I simply view it in the same way I do when I read a Star Wars novel that seems to have really bad writing of one of the characters. I think "Aha, this is an alternate Luke Skywalker who seems to have no powers at all for some reason. Well, it's an interesting story involving him at any rate."

I don't expect any of the Majoru's to ever run into each other, they are all in different universes. They can't possibly do so. In their universe, they are the only Majoru. Just as Majoru acted the way he did (and likely different than I'm playing him) before I took control of him from a previous player, he may act differently than I play him when the DM takes control of him. I accept that the character has a life beyond me. He is not MINE, he is himself. Sometimes he may make different decisions than I would make for him.

If you mess up the PCs, then you can't do that.

Well, true. I've never really felt the need to change to much to an ex-PCs character. Then again, there's been very few characters in our games worth actually keeping in the game after they are gone. We don't remember most of the names of the characters we've played in the past since there's been so many of them.

For instance, one of my players retired a character named Mark the Red (yes, I know, I tried to talk him out of the name). Mark the Red ran into 2 women that he rescued in a dungeon and then the player decided he was bored of the character, so he had him chase them back to their home town and attempt to seduce them. I told him he wasn't having good luck. Last we mentioned the character he was stalking them and trying to convince them to have sex with him. We haven't really had need of Mark for a while, although I did use him as an introduction for a new character. I mentioned that Mark told him where to find the party.

I doubt I would change him too much, but there doesn't appear to be a story reason to change him at all. If I needed a villian that had intimate knowledge of the group and did a lot of damage, I could see him being converted to evil or at least duped into evil. Mark's not so smart, and he's....obsessive. If one of the women said he had to kill everyone in the world to have sex with her...he'd do it, not really caring. Or, at least...that's how *I* see his character. I might be completely wrong about it and the original player might say "he'd never do that". But without consulting the player every time I make any decision as Mark, there is no way I'd know for sure. Since the ex-player of Mark is still in our group, if I wanted to use him as a villian, I wouldn't ruin the surprise by asking him in advance. I also think he'd be fine with it. If he wasn't, he'd shrug and say "really, you can do whatever you want with it, I don't play him anymore, but he wouldn't do that."

 

[fusangite]

Chalk me up for the Robert E. Howard school of "world-building". I don't have the patience or interest to create a fully detailed world before we get started. I prefer to create/discover it with the group as we play.

Whoa! False dichotemy. My world building style has little in common with either approach. Moving around my worlds is like moving around the Mandelbrot Set; when you move off the detailed area, the central world "equation" calculates the pixels in the place to which you have just moved. You are assuming world creation is like photorealist painting; my world creation is more like the process of programming a fractal generator.

For another math/computer metaphor, my worlds are moer like .jpg files than .bmp files. Local detail is the entailment of a larger pattern; it does not have to be sketched out pixel by pixel.

If the players want to be from a particular type of culture, I point to a big blank point on the map (which is like 80% of it) and say "How about over there?" Then we add some notes to the map and the campaign background.

But the nature of the world itself could predict a bunch of things about this culture.

What you and danny are doing here is coming up with a set of ways that a world can be predictable and ordered and a set of ways it cannot be predictable and ordered. Once you change which things are in which sets, world building can take on a very different shape. I guess this goes back to my problem with the presence of oxygen in so many D&D worlds; we make all kinds of irrational assumptions about what ways a fantasy world must be similar to our own contemporary worldview. As someone who uses these games to try and find the borderlands around that, I find that these sorts of assumptions get in the way.

If someone wanted to be involved in politics, we'd have to (together) come up with local political structures. Nothing matters to us except in how it relates to the PCs.

If there are any universals in RPG play, this is probably one. But if you generate worlds the way I do, the important things in them are going to be meaningfully signifying things to the PCs about the nature of the world itself.

 

[fusangite]

I have no idea how you got that from my statement.

Take my character Dyria from Heroes Inc. All there has to be is a culture that practices the slave trade in the campaign setting, and then I can just alter the place names, and she'll fit in.

What kind of slave trade? One in which the slaves are persons or one in which they are property? If it doesn't matter to you which kind of slave trade it is, this might indicate a problem with character depth.

 

[fusangite]

I'm not sure I've seen anything more than semantically different. How is your world design anathema to cultures so remote they are unknown to the primary setting?

If I create a world based on certain principles and a player unilaterally creates a piece of it that violates those principles, then the central plot, theme, etc. of the world can easily fall apart. Because I don't tell my PCs what the big universe-building equation behind my world is, we have to work a little differently. The player has to ask "If I wanted to play someone from over there, what would they be like?" Now, plenty of things about "over there" are up for grabs but some portion of them has been predefined because they inhere in the structure of the world itself.

Let's say you had a bunch of ancient Hellenistic players gaming in a particular world and you were working on character background with them for a campaign set in this world. "Well my character is from some Brahmin-like culture," one might say, "but he's a Platonist (or Stoic or Pythagorean or whatever) and worships Poseidon." Because of the way people in the Classical world understood the world, they assumed that philosophy inhered and gods inhered in the very structure of the world and that no matter where you went, there would be Pythagoreans and temples to Poseidon everywhere. You can see that there is a basic conflict between two worldviews about what is local and particular and what is universal and entailed by the structure of the world itself. In this case, the inherent structure of the world you have built (this one) says that culture, philosophy and gods are local and particular and cannot be deduced from non-local data. Conversely, your player might say, "Well, my character will be very surprised by how travel works around here given that where he's from, water usually flows up hill and the sea is often burning." Here, he believes that the properties of water can vary at the local level based on regional particularities, whereas you know that the properties of water are universal in your world.

Every world has a structure that implies that certain things can vary locally and individually and certain things are universal. Many people who play RPGs seem to like putting new things in the the "local and individual" column but rarely take anything out of that column and slot it into the "universal" category. I find the most vibrant and interesting worlds are ones that switch a few (not too many) between the two columns.