Post by etsmith on Oct 4, 2007 15:44:48 GMT -5
The following was culled from a discussion on RPG.net a few months ago, which I was so impressed with at the time I saved the choicest bits as an e-mail draft. I forgot about it till just now. I think it distills the essence of running a S&S setting perfectly, and nails the most common mistake made by published settings.
My point is that the setting serves the story, not the story the setting. What do you need to remember in a game? What your players want. Shift some of the world building responsibilities onto them. I'm totally confused because Hyboria never seemed like a place where you had to worry much about places and addresses. You've got a rough world analogue which is easy to remember (all you need is the map and to write the real world analogue under each region) and you are ready to go. Do what Howard did. You need a strange city in a jungle, give it a name, write it down, and let the players adventure in it. Strange city in the desert? You can rifle around in a book or you can make it up off the top of your head.
Intricate world building is great for things like Middle Earth, but it can be a liability in a frenzied pulp setting where the mystery of what is around the corner and what adventures may drop into the players' lap at any moment.
My approach, instead of spending hours reading some background books, spend twenty minutes asking the players what they want. "I want steaming jungles, dangerous drugs, and women with hypnotic snake eyes" and then you know what to give that player. If players want seductions and rooftop hijinks, whispers in the night and no honor among rogues, then give it to them. But having a reference book which tells you what the capital of Khitai is, isn't going to help those players.
Few settings are better developed "on the fly" than pulp, and with Howard's Hyboria, the setting detail is a bit thin. That's why so many of Howard's stories written in other settings were converted over to Hyboria with little fuss by Howard himself or others.
But taking a lean setting and burying it under hundreds of pages of detail isn't going to make your job any easier, or necessarily give the players what they want. You may learn the name of the King of Shem from the book, but that doesn't do you much good when they are carving out their own fief in the Border Kingdom.
***
this is exactly right.
That's what I did when I ran something like this, the players came to a new city, I mentioned in passing a tall tower in the distance, a player said "hah, we should raid it for it's bound to be full of jewels guarded by a giant snake god" and so it was.
Detailing Hyboria is like detailing Star Wars, it fundamentally misses the point. These are broad brush settings full of adventure and opportunities for the heroes to shine. In my Conan-esque game I made up each city or location the week before the players got there based on what they were finding cool, a city with a mad cult's tower, a slave merchant's caravan, a desert expanse with a lost city at its heart, I embraced the genre.
Pulp fantasy, sword and sorcery gaming, does not benefit from setting bibles, gazetteers and all that stuff. This ain't Tolkien, Howard never worried overly about detailed world building and if you want a Howard-esque game nor should you.
Similarly I've heard of Star Wars games where the GM had lever arch files detailing the various worlds, that misses the point so badly it makes baby Balbinus cry. It's about the fast moving adventure, not about the trade balance between Shem and Stygia.
***
Want pirates? Just say there's a area with a lot of pirates. Doesn't matter if it was never mentioned before. Want a jungle adventure. Okay, now there's a jungle to the south. The campaign and the setting evolve to fit the adventuring needs and desires of the players. If no one ever wants a desert adventure, there will never be a desert in the campaign world.
***
There are a lot of good arguments for this approach to pulp fantasy, especially if you are actually running a unique setting. However, one of things that attracts people to existing settings, like Conan's world, is the chance to visit places from the stories and do neat stuff there. How do you balance the "cool heroes making history" of the latter with the "tourism by character proxy" of the former?
***
Hmmmm... Good question. Good question. I suppose, and this is merely conjecture extrapolated from my own personal subjective experience... is that in the past at least, I wanted to play in other people's worlds merely for the reason that I wanted to capture the magic of the original experience. I rarely achieved it. It was typically at best a poor emulation. But... when I took the concept and the feel, tweaked it a bit and made it my own then the experience was much closer to the original, knowing that I am capable of creating something just as cool as what the others have created.
I go through and I think of my list of games and early on I bought things like MERP or Robotech and they never game me an experience exactly what I wanted, it tended towards the lame "tourism by character proxy". I don't think that approach is wrong, but I do think that people underestimate their own abilities to create an original setting which emulates those settings that inspire them.
So I would endorse taking that original inspiration, working with others and reshaping it until it is something similar yet creative and unique, reflecting your own groups vision for that genre and theme.
***
I say, dump the "Official Sourcebook" and go straight to the players first. I have boxes, boxes, boxes of game worlds I created. Maybe a quarter of them have made it to actual play, and of those, maybe 1/20th of each of those settings was roughly touched upon. Why bother? Now, sit down with the players, distill what they want out of a setting and go to work based upon their feedback and in conjunction with them.
Who knows what is better for my game? Myself and my players or some hobbled together pastiche book created by freelancers? And I save myself thirty bucks to spend on something else. I'd rather buy my players a copy of the Conan novels for them to read and be inspired by than The Road of Kings.
It's about going straight to the inspiration and developing something out of that in conjunction with the players. It's about empowering myself and my players to collaborate and shape something together. It's not about me blowing forty bucks, reading a book for six hours, and then pretending like it's somehow going to be more beneficial to that. Now, clearly I'm overstating the case as this discussion continues on and positions get polarized. I still sometimes buy books and read for pleasure or leisure, but I'm under no illusions anymore about the average game book being a contribution to my actual play.
I'm questioning the need of us gamers (myself included) to adhere to fanfic pastiche in the sake of world building in the thought that it may enhance play when actually communicating with our players and getting their feedback and input may be a more effective means of enhancing our shared experience.
Intricate world building is great for things like Middle Earth, but it can be a liability in a frenzied pulp setting where the mystery of what is around the corner and what adventures may drop into the players' lap at any moment.
My approach, instead of spending hours reading some background books, spend twenty minutes asking the players what they want. "I want steaming jungles, dangerous drugs, and women with hypnotic snake eyes" and then you know what to give that player. If players want seductions and rooftop hijinks, whispers in the night and no honor among rogues, then give it to them. But having a reference book which tells you what the capital of Khitai is, isn't going to help those players.
Few settings are better developed "on the fly" than pulp, and with Howard's Hyboria, the setting detail is a bit thin. That's why so many of Howard's stories written in other settings were converted over to Hyboria with little fuss by Howard himself or others.
But taking a lean setting and burying it under hundreds of pages of detail isn't going to make your job any easier, or necessarily give the players what they want. You may learn the name of the King of Shem from the book, but that doesn't do you much good when they are carving out their own fief in the Border Kingdom.
***
this is exactly right.
That's what I did when I ran something like this, the players came to a new city, I mentioned in passing a tall tower in the distance, a player said "hah, we should raid it for it's bound to be full of jewels guarded by a giant snake god" and so it was.
Detailing Hyboria is like detailing Star Wars, it fundamentally misses the point. These are broad brush settings full of adventure and opportunities for the heroes to shine. In my Conan-esque game I made up each city or location the week before the players got there based on what they were finding cool, a city with a mad cult's tower, a slave merchant's caravan, a desert expanse with a lost city at its heart, I embraced the genre.
Pulp fantasy, sword and sorcery gaming, does not benefit from setting bibles, gazetteers and all that stuff. This ain't Tolkien, Howard never worried overly about detailed world building and if you want a Howard-esque game nor should you.
Similarly I've heard of Star Wars games where the GM had lever arch files detailing the various worlds, that misses the point so badly it makes baby Balbinus cry. It's about the fast moving adventure, not about the trade balance between Shem and Stygia.
***
Want pirates? Just say there's a area with a lot of pirates. Doesn't matter if it was never mentioned before. Want a jungle adventure. Okay, now there's a jungle to the south. The campaign and the setting evolve to fit the adventuring needs and desires of the players. If no one ever wants a desert adventure, there will never be a desert in the campaign world.
***
There are a lot of good arguments for this approach to pulp fantasy, especially if you are actually running a unique setting. However, one of things that attracts people to existing settings, like Conan's world, is the chance to visit places from the stories and do neat stuff there. How do you balance the "cool heroes making history" of the latter with the "tourism by character proxy" of the former?
***
Hmmmm... Good question. Good question. I suppose, and this is merely conjecture extrapolated from my own personal subjective experience... is that in the past at least, I wanted to play in other people's worlds merely for the reason that I wanted to capture the magic of the original experience. I rarely achieved it. It was typically at best a poor emulation. But... when I took the concept and the feel, tweaked it a bit and made it my own then the experience was much closer to the original, knowing that I am capable of creating something just as cool as what the others have created.
I go through and I think of my list of games and early on I bought things like MERP or Robotech and they never game me an experience exactly what I wanted, it tended towards the lame "tourism by character proxy". I don't think that approach is wrong, but I do think that people underestimate their own abilities to create an original setting which emulates those settings that inspire them.
So I would endorse taking that original inspiration, working with others and reshaping it until it is something similar yet creative and unique, reflecting your own groups vision for that genre and theme.
***
I say, dump the "Official Sourcebook" and go straight to the players first. I have boxes, boxes, boxes of game worlds I created. Maybe a quarter of them have made it to actual play, and of those, maybe 1/20th of each of those settings was roughly touched upon. Why bother? Now, sit down with the players, distill what they want out of a setting and go to work based upon their feedback and in conjunction with them.
Who knows what is better for my game? Myself and my players or some hobbled together pastiche book created by freelancers? And I save myself thirty bucks to spend on something else. I'd rather buy my players a copy of the Conan novels for them to read and be inspired by than The Road of Kings.
It's about going straight to the inspiration and developing something out of that in conjunction with the players. It's about empowering myself and my players to collaborate and shape something together. It's not about me blowing forty bucks, reading a book for six hours, and then pretending like it's somehow going to be more beneficial to that. Now, clearly I'm overstating the case as this discussion continues on and positions get polarized. I still sometimes buy books and read for pleasure or leisure, but I'm under no illusions anymore about the average game book being a contribution to my actual play.
I'm questioning the need of us gamers (myself included) to adhere to fanfic pastiche in the sake of world building in the thought that it may enhance play when actually communicating with our players and getting their feedback and input may be a more effective means of enhancing our shared experience.