Examples of Good Setting Design as Game Design

#21

One of the things I found interesting about LBB Traveller was that it didn’t try to do Star Wars, with blasters and typical FTL spaceships. Coming out just after Star Wars IIRC, it didn’t match that or Star Trek or any other well established vision for space. Revolvers and Cutlasses on board spaceships? What is that?

Having said that, I loved the openness that it had as a setting… you had to just make up whatever you wanted (and I included a crazy-quilt of worlds plucked from FASA adventures, traveller ‘amber zone’ settings from the journal, and whatever else took my fancy :slight_smile:

It wasn’t until Firefly that I saw something that looked exactly like Traveller on the large or small screen!

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#22

This account of 3:16 sounds Amazing!

#23

I really want to mention Spire: The City Must Fall’s setting here, @juhanaonparas. It’s chock-full of charged situations and opposed factions that get you into the game’s weird headspace. (Like Unknown Armies, Spire runs on a very particular aesthetic.)

The game’s mile-high city (which is a huge metaphor for economic and cultural stratification) mechanizes your level of privilege: Want to lord it over the desperate denizens of Derelictus, near the base of Spire? That’s probably only D3 stress. Act the same way around your high elf overlords in Amaranth high above? You’re looking at D8 stress.

But after rereading your question, it feels like Spire is the inverse of what you’re looking for: It sinks its setting into its mechanics.

This comes out particularly in the way the classes are designed as deeply embedded in particular locations and organizations: If you want to know how the Blue Port actually functions as a market and a place, you’re better off reading the Azurite’s skill list than the entry in the book.

Delightful as the game’s setting is to read, it feels like a mess of loose threads that need the input of players and GMs to tense into something actionable. (This might also be a plus in relation to the reason you’re asking the question, because players have a lot of setting information right in front of them from character creation on).

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#24

John Harper’s earlier work on Ghost Lines is a good example of excellent setting design.

#25

Can you elaborate? I found Ghost Lines to be sortof frustrating, as it evoked a lot of stuff but didn’t feel like it gave me tools to grapple with any of it.

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#26

I’m not looking at the game at the moment, but just from memory, the random tables at the end of the game, really evoke a tightly drawn world. The little “badges” and “dodads” during character creation also help with that. Even the lore in the introduction helps. It’s a really small game, yet the text and art and random tables really evoke a particular world.

@Airk I think I might ask you what kind of tools you would be looking for from the setting design.

#27

I had totally forgotten the badges, but they’re exactly the sort of thing that doesn’t help me; They’re a “mechanical” process that evokes SOMETHING about the setting, but which doesn’t go the other way and ends up feeling like a weird mechanical dead end.

So I feel like Ghost Lines has good “setting design” insofar as it is very evocative for the VERY small amount of space it has, but unless you’re prepared to fill in A LOT OF STUFF about a world that is incredibly foreign, it’s not actually usable, and it’s definitely not, for me, an example of setting-design-as-game-design.

As for what kind of ‘tools’ I want, I think we’re wandering off topic here. I’m not looking for mechanical tools to enforce or evoke the setting, or is this thread about that. What I feel is missing from Ghost Lines is enough anything to allow me to understand how this world works. But that’s not a ‘setting design as game design’ issue either, so I don’t know that trying to unpack it (note: This is an area that I am not necessarily very good at quantifying) is even on-topic here.

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#28

What about games with flags like Lady Blackbird or Uncanny Echoes? This makes the mechanic a way to trigger the next part of the story, which the gamers you mentioned might want to use because they literally move the story alon.

#29

Ok, a few examples of setting design as game design:

  • In-world factions with niche protection such as Vampire clans in VTM with special clan specific powers, or Cults in RuneQuest that grant special role-relevant magic. Compare to classes, which are purely game mechanical constructs.

  • Reality rules. A sword is a sword in any setting, but what magic is available and how it works is part of the setting, but that can be whatever you like and affects gameplay a lot, so it’s both setting design and game design. The same goes for superpowers, psi, etc but also the technology in SF games.

  • Sources of Conflict. What’s the core activity for the characters? Who are the factions, allies, enemies, rivalries and activities for the characters? These are really important in generating action which feeds directly into what happens at the table. An example would be having an actual in world reason for having dungeons everywhere.

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#30

Revolvers and Cutlasses on board spaceships?

That’s from golden age SF, particularly the Flandry series by Poul Anderson. Traveller and it’s setting were already in development when Star Wars came out so it’s primary inspirations predate it.

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