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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 7396075">I don't recall if I posted in this thread already, and unfortunately, the original article has been deleted (if it was recopied somewhere in this thread, great but I have no real desire to go searching for it.I suspect the writers point was not that you should write nothing, but that you shouldn't write everything and that you should avoid unnecessary detail.  Which is a fairly sound argument.  Some DM's have details for everything and that can be interesting, but it does present a boundary to engaging with the fiction.  Some DMs have no details for anything and that too presents a boundary to engaging with the fiction.If for some reason I'm wrong and the article is suggesting that you should come to the game with nothing more than a blank piece of paper, I think that's silly, for the same reason that you shouldn't come to the table with veritable volumes of world-lore.I'm going to go back to one of my all-time favorite phrases: A world should always have some known knowns.  What the kingdom you come from is called.  What sort of people live there.  If the world is highly explored or not.  - These are hard facts about the world.  They are known, and they are typically easily knowable.  The kind of things you wouldn't call for checks for.A world should also have some known unknowns.  What that kingdom over there is like.  What the total population of elves is.  - These are soft facts about the world.  They may be knowable, or they may not (but you can learn that you cannot learn it).  These elements are best when penciled in, subject to change if necessary, and not detailed in case the players never move in the direction of this information.A world should also have some unknown unknowns.  These can be player-authored elements, or some area of the world the DM hasn't really gotten around to yet.  These can be elements that exist only in limited time windows.  These can be precipitated elements derived from player engagement with the world.  The problem with sci-fi vs fantasy in the authors context is that sci-fi has a low bar for something being a "known known".  How a space-ship works can be readily derived from a diagram, which itself is readily available.  The general level of knowledge is high.  In the same sense that what the average person knows now is far beyond what even some of the smartest people knew 5000 years ago.  Access to new knowledge is easy and transmission of information is direct (say, on a flash drive), as opposed to rare and indirect (oral tradition).  It is difficult to create a hard sci-fi setting and then say "Well you can't know that!" or "Nobody knows that!" because that is so incredibly rare.Some settings try.  Star Wars tries.  But Star Wars has always sort of danced around between hard and soft sci-fantasy.  Star Wars attempts to have "unknown unknowns" with the (aptly named) Unknown Regions.  But educated guesses turn it into a "known unknown" fairly quickly.Star Trek simply says "We haven't learned that yet." but once they reach the information they can learn it.  Almost everything in Star Trek would be a "known unknown".  Largely for no other reason than the level of knowledge is high enough to assimilate (buh-dun tish!) the information quickly.Sci-fi in this regard does not really suffer from a plentiful level of available information, since in sci-fi settings the characters typically have the capacity to learn, absorb and generally understand greater quantities of information much faster.Fantasy on the other hand falls apart when too much is detailed in and too much of that detail is readily available to the players.  Questions start being raised about how, if they know of black powder, do they not have guns?  Or how we have such detailed knowledge of foreign kingdoms without readily available methods of information transmission (like even a newspaper!).  And because the characters themselves often lack the capacity to learn and absorb volumes of complex information.That all said, "detailing in" is a natural outcome of expanding the lore, which is why some older settings feel less approachable with how much information has already been detailed in.  Consider for example how much we know of the Star Trek universe from the Original Series, compared to how much we know about the universe from Voyager or Deep Space Nine.  Not to mention the copious volumes of books and comics and other lore materials that have detailed in this universe.  If the article's author is suggesting that when you come up with a new setting you leave a lot to be explored, that's great and true.  But that's not what you're going to end up with when you finish playing the setting.</blockquote>

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