Your ideal setting

[FalcWP]

My ideal setting would probably be pretty close to Eberron - even more than various ideas I've come up with, that's always struck me as awesome. The things I love from it (and plan to incorporate in a homebrew I've been toying with):

1) PCs are heroes. I won't run a setting with tons of high-level uber characters (I'm glaring at you, Forgotten Realms). There might be people out there who are more powerful than the PCs, but very few, even fewer who are on their side. Any campaign should be the PC's story.

2) Alignment, if it exists, is not a hard and fast rule. I prefer having NPCs with a motivation rather than an alignment, anyway. Much more interesting. But even if alignment is in play, I don't want every Orc to be evil and every Elf to be good. Or even the *majority* of a race to be good or evil, and the ones who aren't are the notable exceptions. There's a range.

3) Intrigue. This actually ties in with motivation/alignment, above. I want various groups competing, openly and covertly, working together at one moment and against each other the next... or even at the same time. It makes the setting feel more real to me, particularly if each group has specific goals and preferred methods that they generally stick to - The Order of the Dark Blade wants to remove the nobility, and they use skilled assassins to do so. Why? Maybe they want a democracy; maybe their secret leader is fourteenth in line to the throne - but there's a motivation there, and a method, and that makes the world seem more real.

4) Room for a variety of adventures. Having a wide open world full of dungeons and ruins is great. So is having a number of intricately detailed cities. But there needs to be a balance - if I feel like running a city adventure after a series of dungeon crawls (or vice versa), I want to be able to without it being contrived or screwing up what I've established about my world. Looking again at Eberron, Xen'drik is good for this - any number of reasons to send the PCs there, tons of dungeons, and it leave Khorvaire open for other types of adventures (though there are more than a few dungeons to be inserted there, as well).

Just a few things I look for in choosing a setting and keep in mind when I try to design one.

 

[Cirex]

I was writing this very long post about what I like, and I noticed I can really simplify it.
Get Eberron, nuke it.

Done.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

Because building a world that's as realistic as ours, but much cooler, is fun.

And causes my brain to shut down.

My hang-up about "making sense" is that I (and I bet other people) go through life generally unaware of how things make sense except at certain moments (such as watching the History Channel). So when I design a world and try to make sense of it I'm confronted with a whole lot of possible information that somehow I'm supposed to sort through. And it gets very boring very easily. I actually have the same probably reading published settings.

So I prefer to just say: "Okay, these things exist. We can worry about why later."

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

My big draw as a DM is world building, and by that I mean detailing the way magic works, economics, racial politics, geography, etc. down to the finest detail I can. My players may never see all of it (and usually don't see a fraction of it) but I do it for myself, not for them, so that's fine.

Also, I hate stereotypes. Dwarves as scottish miners with axes? Elves with snooty outlooks and 300-year lifespans? Gone and gone. If I'm giving you a synopsis of my world, I mention a race, and you go "Oh yeah, [race], I know what those guys are like"...chances are you're wrong.

So, to get a bit more specific from those guidelines:

• Nothing is the same. Races have different cultures (including humans), there are several magic systems to choose from, and geography will probably be weird.
• Everything is mechanically consistent. If I let you do off-the-wall things with magic in a given campaign (potion miscibility, unique spell-turning interactions, etc.) and you get your hands on my 5-page "Theory and Working of Magic" document, you should be able to predict with absolute certainty what I'll rule a given spell combination will do.
• Everything is connected flavor-wise, too. Steal 5000 gp from a dwarven holding and you bet it'll have an effect on the economics of the nearest eladrin city-state for a few weeks at least.
• Custom things abound. There will most likely be 3 times the number of available classes and races as there are in the PHB, and PHB deities are nowhere to be seen.

I could put down more, but you probably get the idea.

 

[Set]

So I prefer to just say: "Okay, these things exist. We can worry about why later."

It's just a taste thing. Neither is wrong, really.

Most of the people who GM for me have no interest in the two pages of backstory that comes with my character, and any character goals or role-playing tips I provide invariably get in the way of whatever the plot intends, since stepping outside of the very straight path set before me just flusters and annoys the unprepared DM, who may say something like, "It's a freaking desert. There's nothing to the south. The adventure is to the north. You get lost and end up going north." They disinterestedly look at my character sheet, pick at the math, question some of my choices, and say, 'sure' or 'hell, no' and make me hand them one of the other six characters I've brought to the game.

And then, quite often, I sit bored as I am confronted with endless combat encounters and NPCs named 'Bob,' because they really didn't care enough to have a world constructed, even loosely, around the combat encounters. Right, rescue Bob's son, Bob, Jr. Return to the cheering masses of Bobville. Collect reward. Whatever. If the DM clearly doesn't give a rat's bum about the game he's running, then what compels me to give a rat's bum about the scenarios he's presenting?

If the DM seems to actually *care* about the world he's running (or perhaps even has created himself), then I'm going to be invested in playing in it. If he's giving me 10%, he's gonna get about 50% back from me, because I'll be skimming through game books making new characters, looking up to roll attack and damage and saves as necessary, since that's all the engagement that he *wants,* is dice-rolling and completing his script.

And if the other players just want to kill something, that's a fine way to spend an evening. I prefer playing Warhammer Quest for that sort of gaming, instead of bothering to whip out all of my D&D games to play a game with all the social complexity of Axis & Allies, but hey, to each their own.

Yeah, there are those who go too far in the other direction, I've heard, and end up reading descriptive text forever, but I've never actually seen such a game, never had to play one, and, in my experience, DMs who just breeze through descriptions and say, 'They're ghouls. Roll Initiative.' are way, way more common.

 

[Celebrim]

I really dislike 'trope worlds', where the entire world can be summed up by a single catch phrase.

For example: 'Arakis: Desert Planet' or 'Hoth: Ice World'. Those are perfectly fine for a literary visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

My ideal setting is diverse enough that regardless of the sort of campaign you wanted to run, you probably could find a place to put it.

So, the setting would need to have broad stretches of cultures at different technological levels: stone age, bronze age, iron age, steel age (feudal), and reinnaisance.

The setting would need to have varied climates of all sorts.

The setting would need to have cultures that are in a state of decline, cultures at the height of thier power, and cultures which are advancing toward a new golden age.

The setting would need to have large stretches where the culture and setting was in many ways conventional, familiar and easy for someone new to the setting to relate to given a few broad guidelines and a little background, and other broad stretches were the culture and setting were extremely alien and unique and could only be successfully RPed by someone emmersed in the minutia of the setting.

And despite this, the setting would need to be internally coherent with internal explanations for why this or that feature existed and why cultures hadn't dispersed so successfully as to homogenize the whole. The setting must be believable and make sense on its own terms. The setting should not be easily upset by anything PC's are able to do or imagine doing. It should have a history which makes sense based on its assumptions.

The setting should not be geared toward a single story or event. For example, Tolkien's 'Middle Earth' is IMO a pretty lousy setting for an RPG, whereas Iain M. Bank's 'Culture' setting is a pretty good one. There should be no single epic event immediately on the horizon. There should be lots of things to do for many heroes, and in parallel if necessary. The PC's should never fear being upstaged by the NPC's.

The setting should be filled with secrets. Many if not most of these secrets should be so cool that they should never be publishable. That is, no source book about the setting would ever reveal the big campaign secrets of the setting. Secrets should only be revealed in play. That means that each referees take on the setting would be largely unique, based on how they thought it most interesting to answer the settings big secrets and which ones that they thought to introduce. As a result, there would be no canonical setting.

Not directly analogous to any real world period or place. No nation that is obviously 'Egypt' or obviously 'England'. No land mass that is obviously 'The New World' or 'Arabia'. The whole setting shouldn't obviously be '13th Century Europe, only magical' or 'Earth, circa 1919, only magical'. It may take inspiration from Earth history, but it should not recreate it in detail and when necessary through culture in a blender to avoid direct analagies. For example, it might be ok to have a nation partly inspired by 11th Dynasty Egypt (pyramids and modes of dress), if in many ways it also equally resembled 16th century England as a maritime colonial merchantile power with shared power between the imperial ruler an elected legislature, and for example its great naval rival wasn't across a narrow channel of water but a 1/3rd of the world away and loosely resembled say the Mayan empire blended with China.

The cosmology should lend itself to serious philosophical, theological, or ethical inquiry for those so inclined. This doesn't mean necessarily one thing, as for example Tolkien's Middle Earth meets this criteria for me, but also so does Bujold's Chalion Universe (which would make a pretty good setting all round BTW).

The PCs should never outgrow the world, but at the same time the power level of the setting should not be so extreme that you wonder how normal people survive. This is probably the only thing I've said so far that implies a restriction on the rules employed. Either the PC's cannot advance too quickly in power, or thier must be some effective hard cap on the power level that they can attain and remain in the core setting.

 

[FrEeZiNgFiRe]

Oh, and I guess I'd like a really good alternate history Rome. I only know of two endeavors to produce such a thing, however -- one of which is wedded to a horribly broken system (FVLMINATA) and the other of which is wedded to two systems that I simply have no interest in (Roma Imperious).

Have you ever looked at Requiem for Rome? It's actually quite nice.

For myself, I like quite abit.

High fantasy - I just adore the Exalted setting, shame the rules are just not for me. I like Tolkien, but I can't stand all the elves in other places, and I wouln't like to play in something like M-E. Eberron is nice, and has a great setting.

Gritty - Alternate history(The WoD Dark ages line, or forementioned Requiem for Rome) I just love those. Midnight aswell.

For likes/dislikes:
- I like my settings mostly humancentric(Exception some of the settings, like Eberron). Not so much Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and other strange and equally weird races.
- Magic can be either way. In some I like it grand, big and powerful, while in others it should be a bit more darker.
- In my high fantasy I can handwave most things, cool things are more important. In my gritty fantasy I prefer it a bit more grounded in reality(believability).

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

[disinterest in lazy simplicity]

[setting should have a lot of detail that's carefully made up and not just borrowed]

Let me preface by saying: I know I've probably misinterpreted what both you said, but those summaries are what they sounded like to me.

My question is thus: So you don't think there's any point in a setting that's simple and derivative? I need to know, because I don't have a contrasting opinion to balance it.

 

[grickherder]

My preference is for worlds that are only fleshed out during play.

I generally function with the premise that only those things which have been introduced to the shared story during actual play is set or defined.

So I like to start with a concept, a short description, and then just take lots of notes during play.

"A fantastic underworld who's inhabitants are monsters spawned from darkness itself."

"On a once verdant world, life draining immortal dragon kings vie to become the first god."

"Relatively isolated towns, forts and castles surrounded by wild lands teeming with monsters and danger"

As you might imagine, the implied "points of light" setting of 4e really works for me.

 

[WereSteve]

At this point in time, I would have to say that when it comes to published settings ... I have stuck with Wilderlands of High Fantasy longer than any other setting due to its flexabiity and more open nature. No all powerful NPCs roaming the lands ... at least outside of a few of the larger city states and certainly none that would interfere with a group of PCs unless the outcome directly impacted them or their interests. Nothing quite like seeing a group of adventurers getting into trouble all on their own.

As far as a campaign setting that I might like to see something published for ... I would tend to lean towards the works of Dennis L McKiernan and his world of Mithgar.