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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6120095" data-attributes="member: 4937">Within the frame work of a play, because within the framework of the play, all the essential differences are trivialized.   Seriously, there is a big difference between scrubbing the proper nouns off of a story and reinserting new ones and changing the setting.   You can retell these stories with the plot unchanged, because fundamentally the setting is the same.   This is easiest to see in the Leonardo DiCaprio version of 'Romeo and Juliet' where the set the play in the context of modern day drug wars, and replace all the sword fights in the original with gun fights.  But, they don't actually alter the story at all to accomodate the guns.  Rather the play assumes that guns and swords serve the same functional purpose, so for the purposes of the play guns are swords.  The writer trivializes the differences in setting, and removes anything between the two settings that might cause descrepencies.   They don't even scrub the proper nouns off.   The modern city still has a 'Prince'.  There may be very significant differences between 14th century Italy and 20th century New York, but they don't show up in the play.   For the purposes of the play, all these differences are generally set aside and there is a one to one mapping of ideas, places, persons, and concepts in the original setting to the new setting.   But, that means it isn't really a new setting at all.   It's the old setting in a new costume.   It's essential character hasn't changed at all.   To the extent that you don't actually change the setting and you ignore any essential differences in culture, social structure, and setting between two different eras, you can tell the exact same story.  But then the setting isn't really 14th century Italy or 20th century New York.   Shakespeares plays are, regardless of the date on the play, told in his own present day or in a fantasy version of the same.But I find it interesting that you think this analogy good, because there are some fundamental differences here between the play and the RPG.   One is a bit obvious.   Not every story can be so easily moved.   In particular, many modern stories depend on technology as an essential plot point.   You can't tell the story of the Matrix by scrubbing the proper nouns off and setting it in say 14th century Verona.   Early modern Europe doesn't have a parallel for hacker culture, telephones, computers, AI, etc.   The story won't resonate and in some elements won't make sense.  I suppose you could have someone in 14th century Verona discover he doesn't live in 14th century Verona, but in the Matrix - which means that you haven't really changed the setting in its essential character.  You'd have to invent parallels for all the original setting elements in the new setting, which again would be really the old setting in a slightly different costume.   The problem with your analogy is that it is all well and good to imagine the original story being ported from 14th century Italy to 20th century New York by making some costume changes, but its impossible to imagine the original story being written with exactly the same structure if it was first concieved in 20th century New York by a writer living with knowledge of 20th century New York.  The original Romeo and Juliet actually has artifacts of its setting and of the setting that the original writer and audience lived in that enrich understanding of the play.   When you really begin to port the story to a new setting beyond scrubbing the proper nouns off, and you begin to tie the new story to the essential elements of the new setting, you pick up story not in the original.   Say you are writing 'West Side Story'.  At some level it's 'Romeo and Juliet'.  But suddenly, the new story deals with elements of racism that the original story just doesn't have.  The elements of poverty, disillusionment, alienation, and so forth that we as the modern reader know of from street gangs aren't really in the original story.  In 'West Side Story' the protagonist is a good kid trying to work his way off the streets.   In 'Romeo and Juliet', Romeo is a spoiled little rich boy.  The authors are dealing with completely different issues and evoking completely different responses from the audience.  Shakespeare gives a pretty scathing attack on upper class rakes.   Romeo is a pathetic.  He's a cry baby, with no real understanding that his sword is a murder weapon.   Tony on the other hand is on the edge of gang culture, working for a living, doesn't want violence, and would rather use fists if it came to that.  Where Romeo is meant to invoke criticism from the audience, Tony is meant to invoke sympathy - as are the Sharks.   The biting criticism of the story of the larger society is very different.  The story changed because the setting changed.   So Maria walks away at the end because if she committed suicide, then it would diminish her in the eyes of the viewer.But you miss an even bigger point, and that is that a play is a non-organic fiction with a fixed story arc and a single writer.   RPGs are collaborative fictions written in real time by multiple writers and where the outcome of essential plot elements is resolved using fortune mechanics.   The way these stories get created is entirely different especially in any case where the players have any sort of agency in the story.   Whatever approach we use here - 'my way', 'pemerton's way' - the setting plays a much bigger role in the formulation of a story than it often does in a play or short story.  Whether 'setting' in the RPG context means 'the stuff the player wrote in his backstory' or it means 'the intersection of the player backstory with the GM's invented world', its from setting and player choice that the RPG story proceeds.  The process is not congruent in its details to the creation of plays.Either way, plot is indelibly linked to setting.</blockquote>

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