Keep It Simple

Yesterday, I was watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In it, the Enterprise crew had to learn to communicate with an alien species who was “unintelligible”. The problem was, rather than communicating with the standard “subject, verb, object” language, they communicated solely through reference to historical and mythological events. Without understanding the context of their culture, the Enterprise crew had no way of understanding their attempts at communication.

Ignoring the absurdity of this method of communication, the episode raised an interesting point: without at least some shared context, communication is impossible. This is a topic that is just as applicable to game masters as it is to galactic explorers.

Adrift in a Sea of Imagination

It is all-too tempting for a worldbuilder to make something new and wholly unique. A world that is actually a moon to a gas giant, sentient life being vegetable rather than animal, with cities built at the bottom of lakes, and a culture focused on aggressive humility. We strive to make something completely different from everything we've ever seen before, equating different with interesting.

This can be a fun thought exercise, but it will rarely equate to a fun game or a good story. The audience will struggle to find something, anything, to grab onto in an attempt to relate to the setting and characters, but with every aspect being alien, there is nothing familiar to serve as a foundation.

In many fantasy and science fiction stories the author includes a character who is unfamiliar with the setting, in order to serve as the audience surrogate. Harry Potter was raised by muggles; Philip J. Fry is from the year 1999; Frodo Baggins lived a life isolated from the wider world. By injecting a character who is as confused by everything around him as we are, we as an audience can latch onto that character and grow familiar with the setting alongside him.

This is much more difficult to accomplish an a tabletop RPG. In a novel or movie, only one of the characters need be a surrogate, with the others filling the role of teaching him about their world; at the game table, every main character belongs to a player, and thus will have as much (or as little) knowledge of the world as she does. With every character disconnected from the setting, it becomes much more difficult to bring them into the fold.

Compounding this problem, there is already plenty for the players to keep track of. While reading a book or watching a movie, the audience need only keep track of the events occurring in the story, passively absorbing information about the setting, characters, and plot. At the game table, players also have to track the game rules. They need to keep in mind their character's backstory, motivations, and personality in order to properly portray her. Players in a game are not only the audience, but also the actors portraying the roles in the story, and people playing a game besides.

The wider the gap between the game setting and the tropes with which the players have familiarity, the harder their job becomes.

Finding Solid Ground

It is important, therefore, to make the game setting feel familiar to everyone at the table. The world as close to our own as possible, with day-night cycle roughly 12 hours each in length, and relatively normal environments.

Where departing from reality, we employ the well-worn tropes of our chosen genre. Most everyone is familiar with elves and dwarves, so they become the standard for fantasy races. Magic is new and exciting, but its impact on the world is limited in comfortably familiar ways. Alien worlds in space operas are “desert world” and “arctic world”, with alien monocultures. We have seen these in countless stories, and it is easy to sink in and immerse ourselves.

This may all sound cliché, but things become clichés for a reason. Repetition breeds familiarity, familiarity creates comfort, and comfort fosters immersion.

Another option is to set your game in an established setting. Whether this be a setting created for games (such as Greyhawk, Eberron, or the Sixth World) or a setting from your favorite novel, video game, or television show, the important thing is that it is accessible to everyone at the table. Ideally, a majority of the players are aware of the setting so that they can play mentors to the “stranger in a strange land” players who are learning the setting as they play.

This is not to say that you should never mix things up a little.

One Big Change

Many game masters find joy in creating their own settings. This might be because they haven't yet found a world that does everything they want to do, or simply for the thrill of creating something all their own; whatever the reason, we all feel the itch to create, eventually.

The easiest way is to work with an existing setting. We begin with Greyhawk, and create our own city and surrounding area, populated with unique characters. This is fairly easy to do, while still providing an outlet for creativity and a means of control that worldbuilding brings.

Other times, we start from scratch. Maybe we want to create a mash-up of two genres (space opera western), or have an interesting idea for a magic system. Maybe we pose a question (what if the dark lord defeated the hero?) or maybe we are interested in exploring a different culture. Whatever reason guides us, we begin to create.

When all you're doing is tweaking an existing setting, you don't have to worry too much about losing shared context. The players can still learn most of what they need to know by studying the original setting. Unless you change things up too much, your setting remains relatable.

When building from scratch, you have to keep context in mind. It is often best to pick only one or two major changes from the standard for your genre. If you want your world to portray what impact resurrection magic would have on a society, maybe you should stick to the standard fantasy races. If you wish to explore the impact of life on the moon of a gas giant, perhaps keep the technology level relatively modern.

This not only ensures that the audience – your players – can relate to the setting on some level, it also keeps the focus on whatever you find most exciting about your setting. While too many changes can lead to confusion, one big change will cause people to gravitate towards it out of curiosity.

My World is a Unique Snowflake

As a creative individual, you may find it difficult to conform to the norm. Being told to color inside the lines, to follow the established tropes of your favored genre, just strengthens your resolve to create something utterly new. Yet, when we completely ignore the lines, often our pictures become unrecognizable; rather than an expression of our individual creativity, it becomes a mess. By using the lines as guidelines, those times we stray from the ordinary path become much more noticeable.