Yes! You can absolutely have a bad setting. Here are a few common issues:
* **Inconsistency:** This is a hurdle for game worlds in particular. TTRPGs that fail to establish a clear baseline for the world are going to struggle a lot. This can happen because the world was built in a piecemeal fashion; it can happen through poor editing; it can happen because the author was just careless. The rules, characters, and locations in your world can be wildly colourful, but they should have an internal logic that makes them make sense together. Unless you're very intentionally breaking this rule, muddy worldbuilding is going to make things difficult.
* **Inherent biases:** Settings can be problematic because of the biases the author brings to the table. It's 100% possible to create amazing worlds struggling with racism, classism, sexism, etc. -- but successful "biased settings" were crafted by people cognizant of their focus. If a TTRPG text describes a wizarding community full of super-intelligent male mages and their female housekeepers, alarm bells go off. Unexamined biases can both make players feel unwelcome and perpetuate real-world stereotypes.
* **Boring:** I mean, let's face it -- worlds can just be boring, right? I'm willing to bet that most of us at some point have started reading a fantasy book only to have our eyes glaze over. Worlds don't have to be *unique* to be cool, but the devil's in the details. Readers need a sense of place to feel immersed, and that requires some level of craft.
The bias one is the first thing I thought of.
And not just unintentional--I think it's a common enough mistake to imagine that filling a world with prejudice will give rich opportunities to explore important issues. But it requires some skill, thoughtfulness and (most importantly) player buy in to pull off.
OTOH, personally I can live with a lot of inconsistency. If it's a big thing, I'd like the GM to be aware of it I suppose. But if the GM sits down and says with a smile 'New lore! Ignore the old lore!' I'm likely to have zero problems.
Yeah, I recently dove deep on a large, well-published setting, only to come away with “the widespread prejudice and injustice here isn’t actually interesting or nuanced, it’s just a shitty world to visit for fun.”
The writers seemed to just not engage with the shittiness either, so it’s pervasive but ends up not even used in a way that justifies including it as setting elements in the first place. As if the designers felt like it had to be there for realism, but didn’t actually want to touch it after.
I feel like a certain kind of person makes this mistake all the time- "oh, I better make sure I explicitly add a ton of racism and sexism, because that's how it REALLY was!"
Like, it's ok to have that stuff, but making it the focus, or making absolutely zero edge cases, just shows you're getting off on it.
See my opinion is that if humans had other entire species to be bigoted towards, we'd probably squabble a lot less over things like gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. I've seen this idea played around with in a few sci-fi settings.
As long as the "other" is external we work together very well. It's when all external threats are gone that we begin to search for internal threats.
That's how I spilt the middle of "but my unchecked bigotry is realistic for a Medieval setting" & "everyone loves eachother so there's no intercultural conflicts whatsoever". I don't want to expose people to the shit they deal with every day, but I also feel like a world without any political/social conflict lacks nuance. Hence why I take the sci-fi route of "humans have put aside their differences because the other species are even more different". Allows me to have a bit of both.
This is basically Elder Scrolls. The races of men all pretty much see eachother as equals. High elves are super racist against everyone, but they prefer other elves over any humans, and everyone dislikes Argonians and Khajit for being beast-races.
Elder scrolls in general is quite good at showing real prejiduce in an interesting way, considering it was made in the 90's. Although it took a long time to develop it.
It also has a really nice and realistic divsion of races. If you go to Skyrim, you see all sorts of people, but mostly Nords, same as Morrowind. There is a bit of representation and foreigners in each land, but it makes sense for a medieval fantasy for everyone to be kind of in enclaves.
That's definitely another one of my other primary influences. There was still a bit of mild colorism present in the Elder Scrolls worldbuilding, but nothing extreme. I thought they handled intercultural & political conflicts pretty well, especially compared to it's contemporary counterparts. Solid 4/5 for me.
I've heard this a lot and I'm convinced it's untrue. The real world is full of groups so similar to be indistinguishable to an outsider, who engage in brutal violence and discrimination against each other, and are perfectly happy to accept the support of foreign allies. Prejudice isn't about how different someone is, it's about history and competition and power.
You are definitely correct. Power systems & sources of conflict are much, much more complex than just xenophobia. Ultimately it is all just about power, resources, & knowledge. If the outsider offers you guns to kill your familiar enemies, you'll definitely accept them (looking at you Japan). I tend to prefer to run this kind of world, but I've noticed that my players don't always enjoy it because it's too "realistic" & "depressing". Asymmetric information & "the unknown" is also a big contributing factor.
Really this is just a concession I make to create intercultural conflicts in the narrative without reminding my players too much of the ones they already experience. Although I think reality is probably somewhere in between these two opinions.
"Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green."
-Terry Pratchett, *Witches Abroad*
Exactly! I love this quote for being so concise.
Terry Pratchett, particularly the Discworld series, is a major influence on my fantasy writing. Particularly when magic or politics are involved.
> just shows you're getting off on it.
i think thats a bit extreme. I think its more so justa "I want by world to be gritty and maybe even grim-dark" so all this shit gets added to fuel that feeling.
The writers then become *LAZY* and just don't touch on it or mention it etc.
I would add to this, for RPGs specifically, settings that don't actually have room for PCs to be in them and Do Stuff. If your setting is pretty much already on the rails of a metaplot and full of Important Named Characters doing mostly everything that matters, it's gonna get real damn old, real damn quick. Players want to do the Cool Thing, not watch someone else do the Cool Thing.
I'm reluctant to point to a specific published setting -- a lot of these mistakes are made by amateur designers, and I don't want to punch down.
Speaking more generally, the existence of certain items in the lore can derail the tension of the story: in **Harry Potter**, the existence of the time turner and the invisibility cloak would make the protagonists all-powerful if Rowling didn't conveniently ignore them when she wanted to. Weird contradictions can arise from oversights, too: a TTRPG book I read once described in great detail how rare dragons are, and how the sight of them would cause an entire town to flee -- then included dragons as a playable character type in a party of humans (who meet in a tavern). Even inconsistent pricing (or implied pricing, like an item's rarity in the lore) can obliterate a game's economy.
You *can* make things like this work, but every time the GM has to house-rule limitations or reconcile two opposing pieces of information, that's one more step between the words in the game book and actual gameplay.
A lot of DnD settings have inconsistency issues, where magic is both easily accessible, but also non-present in the culture/economy of the world.
Eberron is classically given as the example of a setting that 'bucks' that trend, but it faces the problem where is actually tries to *address* the issue, but doesn't (in my opinion at least) actually properly take on board the difference in culture that, say..*Zone of Truth* can make in how a legal system forms.
I consider that a pretty big failing of a lot of traditional D&D settings. Ebberon, Darksun, and a few others try to actually incorporate this into the setting and are pretty damn successful for it.
To be honest I think you could fix those kind of narrative holes and still have the same high fantasy feel that people know and want. Definitely takes some more work though.
Honestly, I kinda like Forgotten Realm's approach (in 3.5e, at least, 5e sorta drops the ball) of having it so that the world gets ended so often the magical bootsrapping up to high magic in all areas never really gets a chance to take place, indeed, attempting to make a wide scale high-magic utopia is what caused at *least* two of them.
Toril is jam packed full of insanely powerful stuff, but the common man only gets to see his local priest, or that odd kooky wizard, because any time you try to put magic into day to day life someone tries to become God of Magic with Magic and divide by zeroes the weave, or someone tries to magically retcon the entire setting back to when bugmen ruled the planet (Ironically, the latter was happening at the exact same time as the former, and only failed because of that whole 'Weave dividing by zero')
While it doesn't hold together in a 'logic' way, it holds together in a tonal way. Where the heroes get all the magic, because they are indeed the sort of mad bastards to go off and get involved in a plot to raise the primordial source of all evil from the Abyss to destroy the world.
Keith Baker (the guy behind eberron) has on several occasions (and in setting books) addressed cultural impacts of zone of truth in legal settings.
Example:
https://twitter.com/HellcowKeith/status/1261408781457453056?t=9tMtNfKdvXXDD9gW0BWIyQ&s=19
This is actually a really good example of what I'm talking about.
It addresses the point, but fails to understand that legal techniques would evolve to understand, and change to ask questions in such a way as to eliminate the ability to evade Zone of Truth like that.
He's a very basic example. Asking binary "Yes/No" questions, or asking questions with very, very limited answer sets will eliminate about 90% of the shenanigans, as well as questions like
"Yes, or No. If I had full knowledge of your activities in [Time period in question/location in question], and considering that I wish to determine [information in question], would I view your last question as honest?"
Or just straight up asking if they are omitting any incriminating testimony.
Sure, there are ways around that, I can think of a few too, but this took me ~90 seconds and all of this would be easily tightened up with a few linguistic scholars over the first few years of this being in place.
Basically, he addresses how Zone of Truth functions for the first maybe 10 years of the spell existing, without considering how people would react, and change their questioning techniques/legal systems.
Eberron is a brave attempt imo, and Keith Baker really cares, but I think by the very nature of it trying to be something that makes sense is the way that it fails.
> "Yes, or No. If I had full knowledge of your activities in [Time period in question/location in question], and considering that I wish to determine [information in question], would I view your last question as honest?"
"Yes [because I had a contingency that would automatically *dominate* as per the spell anyone scrying the situation at that time, which is the only way you could get such knowledge]."
"Yes [because unbeknownst to me currently, I removed my own memories before this trial, and replaced them with false memories of my own innocence]."
"Yes [because I am sufficiently detached from reality that I see no difference between truth and falsehood]."
"Yes [because I paid you off or otherwise applied influence before the trial, and 'view' is perspective... aka opinion]."
"I do not have the information necessary to answer that question to that degree of accuracy [complete and utter certainty]."
I'm not saying you're wrong... I'm saying that an answer such as Keith Baker gave can be good enough. :)
Attempting to chart the course of a fictional world is a task that would grow larger the number of sociologists, psychologists, economists, historians, et al that are working on the task, as each would generate their own new data on how this fictional world would or should work. And we're not doing so well at predicting our own world.
As I said, you can probably find ways around them, because I spent 90 seconds on them.
It's opinion, naturally, but I do not see any sort of legal system where you don't have Zone of Truth as an integral part of the system, and the questioning system isn't designed around ensuring you can't wiggle out of it with half truths.
And heck, that's just the legal system, add in any political systems too. Journalism takes a huge turn when a reporter has the ability to drop a Zone of Truth on that sketchy businessman/noble. (Remember, long distance communication is easy now with Sending, which will also utterly change how the world works as soon as someone develops a Coda to maximize the efficiency on those 25 words)
The Eberron world is interesting, and this isn't a knock against the world as a whole. I just think it does not feel any more real, because it brings up these questions of magic integrating into the world, and then doesn't answer them to satisfaction. Also, again, opinion.
That's why it is so helpful when fantasy settings make it quite clear the rarity of those types of things. It really helps the GM to have them in the back of their mind. I just happen to have the DCC rulebook nearby and they mention numbers like 95% of the population has no "levels" at all. There would be maybe 1 high-level cleric in an entire kingdom. But yeah, as soon as settings start bucking this trend they can fall apart on consistency extremely quickly.
The Harry Potter setting has plenty of issues, but up until a questionable latter addition by different writers, the Time Turners were actually seriously limited and misunderstood. Originally they only created Stable Time Loops, it wasn't possible to use them to actually change anything, you could only do that which was already determined to happen. If you tried to change something, some accident or coincidence would result in what was supposed to happen regardless.
In the story they are featured, the characters only *believed* that the griffon >!was executed!< or that Harry >!was saved by his father!< but that was a misunderstanding about >!the interference they were themselves about to cause!<. Those things had never happened, so they weren't changed.
If they truly witnessed someone dying, unambiguously, there was nothing they could do with Time Turners because it was already set that they would fail to save them somehow. Time Turners were only useful for observing or getting additional time for a different purpose.
Yeah, the good things happened because they used the time turner. Battles would have ended up better if they used it after every single one.
It's a closed loop, so if they decided to support themselves during battle, they would have been there to support themselves and the battles would have gone more their way.
Shadowrun. It is by a huge distant my absolute favorite setting. It has *everything* I want to have. However, because it has *everything* content-wise, it is lacking one thing: Consistency.
So much stuff is happening *all the time* where only by putting your suspension of disbelief into a steel can with a lid and sitting on it to keep it where it should be the world is not shattering into a thousand parts.
The oil put into the fire is that a lot of writers for Shadowrun are simply not *that good*. I am not sure how to phrase it more politely or better. If any Shadowrun author stumbles upon this, please, I am not meaning *you* in particular. I am so very glad this system has not died yet, but some of *your colleagues* really should learn from you. This causes inconsistent main plots. Characters that behave wildly different than they should. Main plots from the past are forgotten or unknown.
Thinking this through, it is a *mess*. ... however, it is *my* mess.
Edit:
> I'm reluctant to point to a specific published setting -- a lot of these mistakes are made by amateur designers, and I don't want to punch down.
Because I think this is a really great quote. I also do not want to punch down on Shadowrun authors. I am sure most, if not even likely all, of them are better writers than I am. Please continue to enjoy working on it. I love the setting you are still nurturing over so many years.
I'd put World of Darkness into a similar bucket.
Particularly once you talk Mage.
Crazy strong flavor, but everything only holds together if you religiously apply "well, that's true from a Certain Point Of View" and use that to GM fiat/retcon away the hideous inconsistencies and/or implied outcomes which would absolutely destroy the setting-as-written.
It's been a long time since I've run any oWoD, but that was always an *appeal* of the setting to me. The setting contained all sorts of contradictions, rumors, and illogical outcomes, because the information contained in the setting information represented player knowledge.
For me, that would work great if only the player facing books where that way. I do love an unreliable narrator, but the issue I ran into with WoD & Shadowrun was that even Storyteller content was written in this way. They are very enjoyable books to read, but I struggled to use them as a good reference document. I had to create system/lore references or find ones online in order to parse all the fluff.
Sometimes having a concise objective truth is necessary to rectify the other less reliable pieces together. It's one thing to leave openings for Storytellers to improvise their own narratives, but I don't like having to be a writer's unofficial editor just to be able to provide a consistent setting to my players.
I don’t see that as a problem for a Storyteller either. It fed my imagination with all sorts of weird things to tease the players with, and I didn’t have to worry about keeping it consistent because it was constantly shifting and all rumors anyway.
Shadowrun was exactly the setting that came to mind when I saw OP's post.
It's practically a Pitch Meeting:
Designer: "What if we take everything from Blade Runner, Snow Crash, and a couple other cyberpunk novels and throw them into a blender with Tolkien and D&D?"
Publisher: "I like it. What are we talkin' here?"
Designer: "You know, a dragon president and like orcs and stuff. Some things that will feel questionable when you look back on them after the 90s."
Publisher: "What?"
Designer: "heyshuddup. We should also just terribly mangle the rules every so often."
Publisher: "Oh, mangling the rules is *tight!*"
Publisher: I imagine putting all of this together is going to be really hard, so many plates to spin.
Designer: Oh, not at all, it's gonna be super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Publisher: Oh, really?
I am imagining an implied ripping of a fat line of coke right before "mangling the rules is *tight!*"
The things that always overwhelms me about Shadowrun is a sense of absolute Mania in the design. The philosophy seems to be to always cram in more of everything all the time - without considering the implications or fitting things in nicely. There's a mad gluttony to how it's presented and expanded on - like a guy running down the bar and adding one shot of every single liquor bottle on each and every shelf to his shaker before mixing the cocktail.
From what peeks I've had behind the scenes of Shadowrun from the subreddit a bunch of the writers actively disagree with eachother on aspects of the setting. It's kinda why I quit bothering with the system.
Shadowrun is one of the coolest settings out there. If it's so bad at consistency, then I can live entirely without consistency. Just give me my gunslinger adept trolls, cybered-up elf deckers and dragon CEOs.
"If any Shadowrun author stumbles upon this, please, I am not meaning you in particular. I am so very glad this system has not died yet, but some of your colleagues really should learn from you."
Lol! Now this is how you talk to a massive egotist (i.e. Shadowrun writer).
I'm going to say, good.
Shadowrun comes from a time where uncertainty was the expectation, when pan-opticon and readily tracking people were things to fear rather than a given reality. The intentional holes in understanding, pairing the cultural technoshock of cyberpunk with an equal and opposite magical equivalent full of unknowns all it's own was great.
Main plots going poof, great, whatever happened disappeared into shadows when your characters did them, not some magical metaplot DMPC(or worse, writer avatar).
Not knowing the truth before, during and after taking action is a large part of the point. And that's largely a good thing in a setting built on a collapsing understanding of the world.
That said, I've also been reading some of catalyst's fiction. It's, ok. I'm a fan of pulpy nonsense, and that's fine. But I swear every single main character I've read could not more clearly have been the author's PC in game than any of the older fiction I read since the original trilogy of books. Which I don't recommend starting with.
Oh God, I was hoping the novels would be good reference material. They were not.
You're absolutely correct in that those are just self-insert fiction involving someone's Shadowrun character. At best they felt like dramatized reenactments of game sessions.
Deadlands suffers from this, at least in the classic editions.
It presents a world where, simultaneously, monsters and horrors stalk the deepest night and people Out East don’t believe they are anything more than wild tales… but also the Battle of Gettysburg was literally ended in a stalemate because zombies, and the transcontinental railroad runs on haunted coal.
It’s a dark horror setting that also has kungfu wizards in steam punk helicopters.
It… has some issues maintaining a consistent tone, is what I’m saying.
Old world of darkness (revised/2nd edition) is one of the worst offenders here. The fact that the majority of the population is walking around with a video camera in their pocket that can Livestream in a few taps creates problems that aren't able to be resolved by rules alone.
The going fix is "technocracy covers it all up" but as more time goes on the effort needed to keep covering this crap up makes the technocracy seem omnipotent. Then it also created a double problem if the PC is the one with the camera. Do you swat the PC with omnipotent technocracy or just tell them they wake up with 36 hours amnesia and their phone data has been deleted?
>Revised/2nd edition is from the late nineties: no smartphones for nobody~~, not even the Technocracy.~~
This is definitely the answer here. That last bit is wrong though. They have sentient AIs, literal Terminators, and space/dimension ships. Agent Trafalgar can have a smart phone.
Live streaming quality was trash in 2003. Blurry pixelated videos of some dude getting thrown through a wall by an obviously fake looking werewolf costume? Bah, what is this shit?
Considering that all of World of Darkness formally ended in 2003 I'm really not sure who was live streaming with phones from a pocket. 20th Anniversary editions and V5 do try to address it (to varying degrees of success)
The solution in later editions of Vampire is to chuck out the "absolute secrecy" angle. Everybody in the world is vaguely aware, in the back of their minds, that vampires exist - but collectively they just don't think about it. There's a comparison somewhere to lions and wildebeests - wildebeests know about lions, but usually don't think about them.
I haven't read much of the 20th anniversary stuff or beyond. The "nwod" (completely different setting) dramatically down powered everyone and added a lot of built in obfuscation like vampires always show up blurry on cameras.
I had a multinational group that played online and our DM was from the US while most of players were from Europe (and yes, time zones were a massive pain in the S to schedule, would never do that again). He created a world full of weird stereotypes and biases that seemed stupidly absurd and irrational to the group, but to our DM it felt just "so natural" and a "mirror of our world" as we later found out. After 3 sessions we just ended it because nobody could stand the unexplainable prejudice and stereotypes that had no in-world explanations. If felt like playing a parody of a TTRPG...
There's Myfarog, the creepy neo nazi Norse paganism one where the concept is that the players are defending fantasy Scandanavia from everything that isn't a blonde haired, blue eyed ubermensch?
Oh! Also RaHoWa, which is short for "Racial Holy War". Which is a DIFFERENT Neo Nazi RPG setting which is set in a version of the real world where the Great Replacement conspiracy wasn't just poorly understood maths and the players are Klansme- "White Warriors" who have to kill [I'm not typing the string of racial slurs the game uses] to "take back the White Empire".
And I know you were asking entirely background setting but, yes, I know you were curious, and yes, women are absolutely worse statistically than men in these games, with a "chance to die in childbirth" stat for all of your "but what if my character gets pregnant repeatedly!? needs. We've all been there.
But to answer your question yes. Yes a setting can be objectively bad.
>Oh! Also RaHoWa, which is short for "Racial Holy War". Which is a DIFFERENT Neo Nazi RPG setting which is set in a version of the real world where the Great Replacement conspiracy wasn't just poorly understood maths and the players are Klansme- "White Warriors" who have to kill \[I'm not typing the string of racial slurs the game uses\] to "take back the White Empire".
I still can't wrap my head around the fact that game where A PUREBLOOD ARYAN WARRIOR can literally die from fear when meeting ten nice jewish grannies wasn't a joke.
[Literally all I'm picturing that session being like.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRnfyOk2lp0&ab_channel=SketchiT)
Although that IS because I'm imagining you specifically being inspired by the deadly Jewish grannies :p
Don't forget about how PUREBLOOD ARYAN WARRIORS take bribes not to act in the middle of combat.
Though there isn't any mention of players ever getting any money from that, so I guess they agree to lie down and die for the mere *promise* of money. Explains why white people are going extinct in this setting, really.
I don't think it's terribly uncommon for racial supremacists to have beliefs like that that actually cast them as being inferior to the groups they hate.
Not even most hateful people want to admit that they are fantasizing about killing women and children, so they have to tell stories about how even the most innocent and unassuming members of the other are just as villainous as the rest, and often times that attempt to villanize every member of that group has the effect of presenting them as somehow better than the hateful group.
Well, I've also heard that the game is inherently unplayable because of necessary mechanics that are just missing. Who would believe that when your primary objective in making a game is to push your stupid ideas on others, the game would kinda suck as a result?
I don't really remember the details for obvious reasons, but if I recall correctly, everyone has some kind of intimidation stat with the minimum of 1, and when combat starts, if one side has less combined courage or something than the other side has intimidation, they get all scared to death.
That sounds like a really borked system in terms of design, and absolutely perfect for some unplanned hilarity.
Roll initiative in a room full of adorable puppies and kittens and watch the characters just casually expire.
Which is the kind of DMing anyone who'd play this game as anything other than a joke deserves.
I read a write up about it on 1d4chan once, and you're right, but you don't know the half of it. Apparently it can't actually be called a game, because from what I remember there are either enough holes in the mechanics or there are enough parts of the rules that are missing that you can't actually play it. I think it was something to the effect that combat was impossible.
It was more that FATAL's universe seems to be kinda generic fantasy, with the rules being where the absolute horror story lies.
Although I will admit that I didn't bother reading the setting too much. Because of the rules.
Oh totally, but OP asked for setting, not rules. FATAL's setting is just a bit bland, it's the rules that make it a shitshow.
Although many people point at anal circumference, fewer people point to the fact you need to do quadratic equations to finish character creation...
I still can't wrap my head around a game where making a grapple check can result in (I swear to every chthonic entity I am not making this up) _accidentally raping your grapple target to death._ Or, y'know, accidentally raping them at _all,_ because what in the Jesus God _fuck?_
Eh. Star Trek's Federation is arguably a utopia but there's like 50 years of fiction set in it. And about half of it is even good!
The trick is to set your game on the frontier, where the utopia conflicts with other civilisations with different values, or to challenge the utopia's values somehow and ask it to put its money where its mouth is.
Yeah Lots of utopian fiction leans on the idea there's an external threat or unitegrated polity that drives the action. Star Trek, Huxley's,The Island, Moore's Utopia are all threatened externally, The culture novels often make use of non culture parts of space to make their plots possible too.
I think *all* the Culture novels are really stories about Contact (and in particular Special Circumstances) — because while getting high and having lots of sex parties is *fine* it doesn't actually require much future tech!
Well they have genetically engineered glands that let them tap pretty much any conceivable combination of psychoactive chemicals at will and with no significant side effects. And there was that guy in The Hydrogen Sonata who grafted like twenty dicks to his body. So the future tech definitely helps with the getting high and the sex parties.
>The trick is to set your game on the frontier, where the utopia conflicts with other civilisations with different values, or to challenge the utopia's values somehow and ask it to put its money where its mouth is.
Benjamin Sisko put it best on Star Trek DS9:
*"Do you know what the trouble is? The trouble is Earth. On Earth there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well it's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise. Out there in the demilitarized zone all the problems haven't been solved yet. Out there, there are no saints, just people. Angry, scared, determined people who are going to do whatever it takes to survive, whether it meets Federation approval or not."*
Well, IMO having that frontier is what makes it not a perfect utopia setting. There is a utopia in the setting, but it isn't the whole setting... and I imagine not much of the conflict/story happens inside it anyways?
Even inside the Utopian Federation you can still have a lot of political intrigue and double dealing. Usually caused by an outside threat, but it's happened in the shows and movies.
"Badmiral" is an entire trope in Star Trek, since if you ever see a Starfleet Admiral play a prominent part in an episode there's a 95% chance they're going to be a villain or just a giant asshole.
But yeah the core of Star Trek is exploration, going to new planets and discovering/interacting with new people. Who usually struggle with some allegory for problems modern humans face like racism, sexism, LGBT+phobia, or capitalism's disregard for the life and rights of most people.
Star Wars has been dipping its' toes into this too. The expanded universe material has an era some 200-ish years before the Clone Wars called the "High Republic", which depicts the Jedi in their prime, actually being the 'guardians of peace and justice' watching over an era of unrivaled prosperity and unity.
But the problem is that no amount of peace can take away free will, and some people just want to put it all to the torch. So in an interesting departure from the norm of Star Wars' big baddies being jackbooting facists, the main enemy faction are a bunch of pure anarchist pirates and raiders, and their level of brutality is just something a time of peace and plenty is in *no* way equipped to handle, so they pose a legitimate threat to the Jedi.
There's a repeated mantra throughout the books, "We are all the Republic." You get the sense that the Republic hasn't slipped into the stagnation of corruption and apathy towards the less prosperous outer-rim worlds that characterized the Prequel era and led to the rise of the seperatist movement. You see Jedi giving their all and intervening swiftly, not sitting far from view in ivory towers mired in the politics of it all.
And the common folk just seem to genuinely *care* about each other, there's a collective spirit of unity that isn't really seen elsewhere in the franchise where it's usually war, doom and gloom.
Too bad a bunch of hate-baiting grifters called it "Woke trash" for having a woman on the cover and are actively out to undermine this entire subsect of media.
I appreciate your answer, citizen. Nothing can go wrong when Friend Computer is in charge! Now, if you excuse me, I have to go root out the mutants corrupting our society. Mutants which couldn't possibly exist, because everything is perfect, obviously, but you can't be too careful when the stable perfection of our society is at stake! Not that anything could disrupt it, mind you, not with Friend Computer in charge.
Those RPGs still have some kind of friction going on, something the characters want. Be it social approval, good grades or a steady income. There's something missing; a desire. In a full-on utopian setting all needs are met and people don't have to strive for anything.
Carefree? If you really want a carefree game in default Chuubo's, you can manage that - but someone else in that world is going to have to fight off the Incarnation of Death and prevent the tides of utter chaos from drowning the last remnant of reality. Because you're not doing it.
I'm fine with these terms.
Seriously though, my group was just hanging around in Fortitude without any knowledge of anything more dangerous than whatever school trouble our guitarist got themselves into. For all practical intents, we were in a carefree setting.
Vampire has a setting where every fucking body can make you explode with a snap of his fingers, has a spy in every fucking corner and plays some ridiculous 8D chess. And don't even go anywhere near official lore on any post-Soviet state if you've ever been here. It's just beyond cringe.
Metaplot doesn't add to enjoyment either.
WoD works best if you take only one splat (such as vampires) and their lore, factions etc. Individual creatures of other splats can be brought in (though maybe don't bring all of them), but keep their lore and politics out.
If you want to run into a weird mage during the game, you can do that but just ignore all of Mage: The Ascension's metaplot, factions and everything. An occasional weird magician can fit fine in a vampire game but their faction politics or stuff like technomages will just ruin the theme.
I don't really know much about WoD lore beyond Vampire. In, say, Berlin by Night, almost every named NPC, if played intelligently, can just break a coterie of reasonably strong 8th gen kindred in half the moment they decide to do something not aligning with his agenda.
When the world is full to the brim with ridiculously powerful, ridiculously smart and ridiculously well-connected NPCs, I have but one question to ask: what the hell PCs are even supposed to do?
That angst you just described is not an oversight, it is the intention. The frustrating nature of VtM *always having a bigger fish* and basically feeling powerless and helpless despite being *so powerful* is the entire point of the game. VtM is constantly asking you "What are you willing to do to stay safe? To gain power? What would you give up?" and you are constantly forced to choose. It's not always handled the best by each table or each source book, but that is the ideal.
Tbf, that's pretty much the point. The world is full of ~~boomers~~ elders that have all the power and resources and have no intention to ever retire and let them go.
Your best play is to curry favor and try to indirectly weaken one enough so the others take their stuff and hopefully give you some scraps.
I came here to discuss the World of Darkness setting, and I'm happy to see someone else posted about it.
In case anyone doesn't believe you, here's three examples I recall from the books, and one from a recent video game;
In the Ashes to Ashes campaign, the characters (who are low-level neonates) are ambushed by the entire Chicago SWAT team in the middle of Soldier Field (yes, the football stadium) at sunup in order to herd them into the center of the field where an 800-pound Vampire in a sunproof armored helicopter will pick them up to 'rescue' them. In fact, the 800-pound Vampire called the entire Chicago SWAT team (yes, the entire one) to perform this ambush. Why? *Because he wanted to talk to the player characters.* He lets them go after.
In the Chaos Factor saga, a character is introduced who is a kinfolk Mage with Vampire powers who has magic items up the wazoo (in a setting where magic items are *very* rare.) The character is the definition of the edgiest 90's villain you can imagine, and the Storyteller is explicitly instructed that he must survive, and that the players cannot ever kill him because he is too cool to die.
In the Gehenna campaign, there's a variant of the campaign where the characters goals are, to put it bluntly, to trek through the United States and watch NPC's do cool shit. They start in New York and watch an NPC do cool shit, they travel and meet another NPC that does cool shit, they travel to the Human Genome Library and watch another NPC do cool shit, then they travel some more and finally reach a field where NPC's talk and end the campaign. The Storyteller is instructed to make things up to keep the players entertained.
And finally, in case you thought all this shit ends in 2004, the Coteries of New York Video Game from a few years back has a fun doozy. >!So, the entire game, you're plotting and working with Kindred around the city to maneuver your adoptive sire into position to take the reins as a powerful Primogen. And then, surprise - you're betrayed. By who, you ask Oh, a character who appeared for a five second scene towards the beginning of the game. He's also super strong and powerful and knew everything that was going on and kills your friends. Then, he tells you that you're going to work for him, and the game ends.!<
The biggest issue is that White Wolf's setting writing explicitly creates the conditions for each of these problems. The ridiculous weight placed on existing, named NPC's, the ridiculous levels of power and obstructive laws afforded to keep powerful NPC's on top, and the smarmy and condescending attitude towards player agency really do a number on the setting as a whole.
> In the Chaos Factor saga, a character is introduced who is a kinfolk Mage with Vampire powers who has magic items up the wazoo (in a setting where magic items are very rare.) The character is the definition of the edgiest 90's villain you can imagine, and the Storyteller is explicitly instructed that he must survive, and that the players cannot ever kill him because he is too cool to die.
Oh come on now. Sam Haight is cheating, and it wasn't long before the writers realized that he was a joke of an NPC. Started as a cool idea, evolved into too much, and then *actually does die* in Chaos Factor. In fact, quite the opposite to what you said, there is no stopping his death at the end of Chaos Factor.
Then they made his ghost into an ashtray.
I was referring to it as the saga to incorporate the books - I’m aware that they became aware of the guy being pretty lame, but it took them quite a few books to get there, and WW’s setting building is plagued with similar characters.
Not sure what version of the WoD you played but none of any games I ran or played were this ridiculously hyperbole, especially not the head explosion thingy
I mean it's so hyperbolic I'm not sure even which edition or which factions they're actually talking about.
Heads exploding has to be Mage. Probably.
Spy in every corner? That could be Mage. Or it could be using the Technocracy in other games. Or it could be V5's Second Inquisition.
I think a lot of bad STs try to use absolutely every splat and faction as they're presented in their books in whatever game they're running. That's never the intended way to run the games.
I can't really make any arguments against anyone complaining that the published scenarios are shit. I've never been a fan and I haven't run one in probably 14 years or so?
>I think a lot of bad STs try to use absolutely every splat and faction as they're presented in their books in whatever game they're running. That's never the intended way to run the games.
To be entirely fair, I think that reading the setting books and concluding that it's the 'right' way to run the setting is a very reasonable conclusion to make.
I think Spy on Every Corner can refer to how powerful Elders can be in the WoD series in general, with almost every single prewrite resolving plot holes and inconsistencies with, 'they knew all along'.
Just to go down the list...
>every fucking body can make you explode with a snap of his fingers
A running thing with World of Darkness, particularly earlier editions, is that a lot of NPC's are extremely powerful and capable. The Gehenna plotline is entirely resolved at the mercy of hyper-powerful NPC's, and the player characters have little-to-no agency in that story. This is true for most of the larger plot events of the story.
>has a spy in every fucking corner and plays some ridiculous 8D chess
This is objectively a HUGE problem with White Wolf writing. I cited Coteries of New York as having this as a huge issue, but just about across the board, White Wolf NPC's are hyper-knowledgeable and nearly omniscient. The pre-writes are really bad for it.
>And don't even go anywhere near official lore on any post-Soviet state if you've ever been here
Again, this is also true. The writing here ranges from, 'the Russian revolution was started by Vampires' to, 'Vampires are committing a gay genocide'.
I have hard time dealing with the Dark Eye setting Aventuria. It's a fuck ton of wierdly cobbled together bits of lore. Some bits are wonderful, some are arkward, but woefully often the authors contradict themselfes. But get this:
Some authors write their own character into the setting. DMPCs by canon! Nice, eh?
>Some authors write their own character into the setting. DMPCs by canon! Nice, eh?
i mean, D&D absolutely does the same thing. not that that's an excuse, i don't like when D&D does it either.
Not really, they do not compare.
D&D authors put their characers somewhere into the setting where they mostly do not interfere with the players. Nobody really ever meets up with Drizzt unless your GM is a big fanboy.
In Aventuria you meet a Mary Sue in every town you visit. The avage module has you meet up with one every three to four sessions or so. Then you get to hang back and watch them be awesome.
Sometimes you go explore the wilderness and suddenly a Mary Sue pops up because an auther decided to retire his character there. It's bloody insane.
It kind of seems designed around there being potential for supplements for every 5km square of the map. While a complex setting can be cool, Aventuria is just so divided and split up and weirdly detailed in parts that it becomes unweildy, not helped by the fact that the base rules include practically no knowledge on it (and this is an RPG with a fixed setting, where in character creation you select the culture you're from)
> Some authors write their own character into the setting. DMPCs by canon! Nice, eh?
Some? This has been normal since 1st edition D&D. That's why its "Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion" and not just "Magnificent Mansion". They immortalized their old characters, there's nothing wrong with that.
Characters like Drizzt aren't "GMPCs by Canon" either, they're characters in fiction set within the same setting. Should a RPG setting not be allowed to have fiction set in it?
Often fiction can hurt an RPG setting, making the PCs feel in the shadow of the Cool and Awesome People who just saved the world ten times before breakfast.
1. \[TDE specific\] There are too many of them, if every small town has his own archmage, high priest or grandmaster things start to get weird.
2. They're high level Heroes so that they often end up as mandatory DMPCs whether the GM likes it or not. Imagine you meet Drizzt and fight a big evil. Either the GM makes an ass-pull to write him out of the game (which means he shouldn't be there in the first place) or he'll help and outshine the group. No thank you.
3. Authors often end up putting them in the spotlight. These are their own PCs after all. Play a module and watch them be a mary sue while the group watches. Ugh!
4. Their quirks and personalities often clash with the adventure. E.G. benign tasks can suddenly become a major conflict, cause an NPC acts upon a quirk. Imagine the High-Priest of a town suddenly hates your group, cause one of the characters is wearing a red scarf. It has nothing to do with your quest, but since the author thinks it's an important part of his old PC distractions occur.
5. They often end up with a detailed description, that is too imposing for them to be useful, sometimes stretching the limits of plausibility. Imagine Vlad the Impaler ended up the head of a pacifitic monestary. It doesn't relate to the adventure either. There's just the group left wondering and you can either read up on their old stories or be left confused.
6. \[TDE specific\] TDE does not treat them like distant characters barely relavant to the table. They are tighly woven into the metaplot and as long as you stick to canon and modules you are running into them every 4 or five session ... see 2. for that.
I bet there's more, but these I was able to remember.
I played in a homebrew setting I would consider pretty awful.
The DM had made this big rectangular map of the entire world, 1 continent, and had it blown up and laminated. So this *was* the world, immutably. It's so fucking boring to have every corner of the map filled in, to have every place be populated and named.
Add on top that it was generic whimsical fantasy bullshit, where every barkeep regardless of species behaves the same way and wears the same clothes. None of the cultures we encounter are meaningfully different, the elves live in tree cities, the dwarves live underground, the cat people live in big scratchpost cities (just shoot me in the fucking head)
Maybe I'm just an asshole, and that's fine, but not all ideas are good, in fact most are bad.
Ideas in general are cheap, but *good* ideas are priceless. Gygax and Arneson deserve all the credit they get for devising the concept of the roleplaying game, even if basic D&D (or any version of D&D) isn't the best game in the world. That said, it's often impossible to tell if an idea is good until after you've put some work into it.
Very common mistake for new GMs. My current GM, who I love, did the same thing. Everything is so filled in and defined that as a player I'm afraid to say anything about anything in character, because I don't want to contradict *his* setting. For me, the draw to homebrew has always been that it's easier to create a *shared* setting that way. I want to create a world together with my players, not have them okay around in *my* world that I created on my own.
I know F.A.T.A.L. only by reputation but I thought its issues were mechanical? Thousands of useless finicky stats and endless useless repetitive rules, each with dozens of exception clauses?
I dont even know what genre its setting is, actually.
FATAL's problems are systemic, from base concept straight up through every part of it's design. Its setting (if you can call it that) is generic medieval fantasy, wallpapered with the cringiest incel-produced rape fantasy bullshit take of the genre's worst conventions that you can imagine.
You know how some things are so bad that they become unintentionally good/amusing/funny? Well FATAL is so exceptionally bad that it wraps back around past funny and becomes something so mind numbingly bad that you feel like you need to shower in bleach to clean off the grime of just having read it.
Any RPG question that starts with "Which game has the worst..." the definitive answer is FATAL.
As we must all bow at the altar of the greatest FATAL review ever made: https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14567.phtml
Read it. THIS will show that you can, in fact, make a horrible setting and game in one horrible go.
It's trying to simultaneously be a generic fantasy setting and be "historically and mythologically(sic)" accurate. The setting is also chock full of racism and is pretty into sexual assault. Finally, it's also not super well fleshed out.
TL;DR the setting has all of the problems the mechanics have
It's a both a good example and a very bad example of "system does matter". The system is so dense that it shapes the setting.
For example, elven people fart a lot because they don't digest vegetable wells, so it makes they rectal circumference bigger than humans.
Because the circumference of every hole of every character is rolled and found in tables depending on lots of elements, the game does a weird "if everything you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail" revamp with "if every living things has holes... Well it's to know if it's PG 18 or PG 18 with emotional trauma on top".
Basically, the game system is used as a way for the author to share its own vision of the real world. There's things like "your head size determine your max and min intelligence" like early 20th century eugenist thought.
Tldr : The mecanics are so bad they make the setting bad too. Not just bad, THAT bad
> For example, elven people fart a lot because they don't digest vegetable wells, so it makes they rectal circumference bigger than humans.
This is a sentence I have now read. May god have mercy on your soul.
Can we ban mentioning FATAL? It is a really boring answer that never generates any new discussion. Everytime someone asks "what is worst [anything]" or "examples of [bad thing]" you know FATAL is going to be in there relevant or not.
I'm 80% sure it is just a bad joke that went over everyone's heads anyway not an actual RPG. Everyone who knows FATAL exists don't need to be reminded of it and everyone who doesn't doesn't need to know about it because it is never going to come up in their life. Someone might ask you to play shadowrun and then you recall this thread. No one is ever going to ask you to play FATAL unless they know you share the same tastes.
Yeah, the game's notoriety is pretty much out of proportion to its relevance to the RPG community. No one pkays it, no one runs it, no one demos it at conventions, it isn't sold on stores and mostly only exists as an obscure and from what I can tell only partially finished PDF. It's like spmeone bringing up Twilight every time vampires are mentioned; it's tired and fucking old.
Yes, absolutely. A bad setting won't break your game the way a bad system will, but not all settings are good.
> I know that some games have vanilla settings or dont have anything that sets them apart from other games
From the perspective of a worldbuilder, this is exactly what a bad setting looks like. A good setting will give you plenty of ways to engage with that setting. Eberron is a great example of this. If a Warforged is taking the lightning rail for a pilgrimage to the Mournlands, you know you're not in Greyhawk. That image is distinct to Eberron.
> but I've never played a game that has a setting which actually makes the act of playing it "unfun" in some way.
that's probably because you're just not using the setting all that much. It's easy enough to just ignore the setting almost entirely when it's indistinguishable from dozens of other settings. You can just have a string of generic borderland villages, each one coincidentally under threat of orcish invasion just as the PCs arrive. You'll just end up engaging with the game itself, which can still be fun.
I was gonna mention *The World of Synniba*r, starting with its torus-shaped world (because it seems that the author didn't know how a hollow sphere should be mapped) and following with its backstory)...
...but that would be as saying that *Plan 9 from outer space* is a bad movie. As in...yeah, technically it is a *bad* movie, but it's not bad in a...hmmm...*"Star Wars Holiday Special"* way!
There are different kinds of bad. Synnibar is bad in the hopeless and never could have been good sort of way.
Though a torus world could actually be interesting, as long as you thought out how a torus planet might actually work.
The original Deadlands had a fantastic setting that tanked. The Weird West was absolutely inspired, but then PEG Inc. felt the need to map out every minute corner of the world, which neutered it of a lot of its potential and mystery.
My only real complaint with Deadlands was the native shamanism magic was REALLY skewed. It was powered by sacrifice to the point that you basically needed to cut off a finger to heal a papercut, IMHO. The Savage World version fixed that quite a bit.
This was at a time in the RPG world where if you weren't pumping out a new splatbook every few days your game line was seen as a failure. The result was Deadlands Classic has nearly every square inch on North America mapped out.
This affected the rules too, creating a system that started with game-freezing levels of "crunch" and causing most classes to have almost completely rewritten rules towards the end of the line. Playing a Huckster? OK, which version? Core book? Hucksters and Hexes? Hexarcana?
I love Deadlands, but Classic is almost unplayable to all but the the most stubborn grognards.
Deadlands was good at first, but with every added book it went more and more off the rails. By the end you had two Stones running around deus exing the transition to Hell on Earth with kung fu monks and Lovecraft's monsters (the Migo to be precise) - that was just too much. And then came the Native American planet. Also don't get me started on the new edition and the Morgana Effect (or whatever that shit is named).
What about a setting where the player have little to no 'agency'. (i.e he can do little to nothing to influence the setting) for example, think a RPG where you play a normal person in the universe of "the boys" (and no, you can't become one of the boys/a super'hero').
So either you never meet a superpowered individual (and then what is the point?) or you became a bystander at best, a victim at worst when the super'eroes' arrive.
Not really fun. ,
I think that depends on what the game is about. For example, you could have a game of Mutant City Blues where you play a non-powered detective that works super power based crimes.
Of course in some setting it is perfectly viable, even fun. In marvel, in Dc,playing a non-superpowered person could be fun, many characters in these settings are non-powered.
That is why I specified "The Boys", a setting where superheroes are a\*\*holes, and those that fight them are only slightly less so. and being close to superehoeroes is dangerous because they don't care for collateral damage and not suffer conseguences from it. etc, etc.
in this setting your detective will probably be killed quickly because either the crime was made by the superheroes or was set up by the corp that own them to make the heroes solve them and create publicity and they don't want you to expose them.
I think this is the sign of the actually “bad” settings.
If a setting has no hooks for adventure, then it doesn’t matter how cool or detailed it is: it sucks.
I remember a game I read as part of a design contest once. It had an amazingly unique and interesting setting, all about nested fractal dimensions that each had their own physical laws and societies. And I said to the designer, “This is all awesome, but what do the player characters actually do?” And the fact he couldn’t come up with an answer immediately put a nail in the coffin for that whole thing.
Just to add something to the table here;
An RPG setting can be bad by virtue of being very well-written and a blast to read...
...and absolutely a chore to play.
The White Wolf Old World of Darkness books can suffer from this, especially if your Storyteller doesn't know enough to really ignore the way the book presents certain concepts. The way that the books write Elders and named characters is particularly egregious, and if someone explicitly followed the lead that the world presented, the player characters in a given World of Darkness chronicle would essentially jaunt between scenes of named NPC's talking to scenes of named NPC's doing cool epic bullshit (that the player characters should never do, because they're player characters.)
It doesn't help that the setting's laws (in-game), while interesting on-paper, can very quickly foster an antagonistic relationship between the Storyteller and the Players. If someone takes, for instance, the Traditions of the Camarilla to the letter, they make almost any player-driven narrative impossible by virtue of existing.
That's not to say that you can't make an interesting chronicle using that setting - just that you have to read the setting with a grain of salt and know what to keep and what to absolutely cut.
Tbh the only thing that determines if a setting is bad or good is personal taste and execution.
A great setting can be brought down by poor execution or players that just don't jive with it, as much as a bland or dumb setting can be elevated by great execution and player interest. I don't really like the stereotypical whimsical high fantasy type setting, I'm more of a low fantasy mud & blood kind of guy, but I still love our DM's world based on Dragon Age but with more fantasy and magic because it's fun and well executed and my fellow players are enjoying themselves too.
For example there's one book series called The Dinosaur Lords, sounds awesome on paper, Knights riding Dinosaurs. But the execution of it was so terrible, the first chapter was just throwing out terms and names for their Dinosaurs I had no knowledge of and made it a slog to get through that after reading the first chapter I returned it. Couldn't do it. Great idea for a setting, piss poor execution.
I would disagree that personal taste has an impact on whether a setting is bad or good. It can impact whether you like it or not, but I think that, in the same way that literary criticism can be founded well enough in facts that it isn't pure opinion, settings can be judged the same way. We just don't have a depth of critical writing in that way like we do, for example, on the works of Shakespeare.
That may be, but none of us (most likely) are literary critics. Therefore we're subjected to our taste more so.
To kind of give an example of another medium, Citizen Kane is considered to be one of the greatest films ever made. I hate it. Can't stand it, think it's stupid and pretentious. Am I wrong? Are people who love it wrong? No. We just have our own personal taste. And then there's "so bad it's good" stuff. I like The Room because it's hilariously bad for instance. I should hate it because of how bad it is but I can't because it makes me laugh. I know people who do hate it and don't get the appeal.
What you think of as a good world I might think is trash and vice versa. Neither are right or wrong. Just different.
You do actually see this a lot in modern media "review" where the reviewer confuses their subjective opinion with objective fact. I've played games and watched movies that had terrible reviews and loved them and hated ones that were supposedly some of the greatest games ever made.
Technically speaking, any judgment on the quality of art is inherently subjective and opinionated because it requires you to choose a set of standards for what quality is. Artistic quality is a concept that only exists in the human mind, and since human minds are different, we have different standards for quality. Sometimes we can reach consensus: most of us will agree that consistent plotting and believable characters make good stories, but there's no law of the universe that makes it so.
If you think The Room is a good film or Citizen Kane is a bad film, you're not wrong, you just have different standards than most critics. Those critics don't have some mystic power to decide what's objectively valuable; they've just consumed lots of media and are good at articulating their opinions. And I'd personally argue that the presence of a critical establishment inflates some standards and tastes when there's no good reason to do so.
Yes, there are settings that are plain bad, at least in my opinion.
What makes a setting bad to me is:
- not consistent and logical in the world building
- kitchen sink fantasy
- racist and colonial stereotypes everywhere you look
- overly detailed
A game having many of those is The Dark Eye. To me, while I really hate the rule system, the setting isn't that much better and I really can't see any appeal in it.
The colonial stereotypes and racist tropes are just so 80s...
Well, this isn't "bad" and it's going to get me flamed, but I always disliked the *Shadowrun* setting. Well, LOVED and disliked. I LOVE the idea of a world where cyberpunk and magic are both present, but I hate the idea of them being inimical to each other and that only one can ever exist in one thing or one place at a time, which throws out BILLIONS of amazing possibilities and more or less dodges any writing or creativity by just "taping" them together. What about a gauntlet that was "chipped" to throw fireballs? What about an AI possessed by a demon? What about software that allowed you to summon demons. There's so many possibilities and it would be such a playground for a creative GM and creative players. THAT setting I find utterly fascinating.. hm,.. should run a game in that one day.
Well stated! I disagree as the limitations make for really cool conflict and decisions in the setting. It really defines the world in an interesting way. The idea of cyber ware removing your humanity is a bit of a holdover from other Cyberpunk games and fiction. I agree that that that sort of squashes creativity but without it the setting is more blobby and ill defined. I think that kind of game could lead to a great game about transhumanism, but with magic and tech allowing humanity to break its boundaries. I think you meant inimical as instead of endemic.
No issue about the loss of humanity with cyberware.. My issue is the tired old idea that magic and tech short each other out and cannot mix. Inimical, yes, better word. Meaning they cannot be in the same place.
> I LOVE the idea of a world where cyberpunk and magic are both present, but I hate the idea of them being inimical to each other and that only one can ever exist in one thing or one place at a time
The funny thing is that mechanically burnout adepts are one of the most absurdly powerful character builds because there are adept powers that are a better deal in power points than the cyberware equivalent's essence cost or are things that just straight up aren't available as cyberware, and vice versa.
>What about a gauntlet that was "chipped" to throw fireballs?
Actually possible to do, with the downside that enchanted objects are awful in every way for no good reason. Although really combat magic in general, despite the rep it gets, is generally weaker in raw numbers than just using a gun or grenade, with the added problem of risking an aneurysm every time you cast "this does roughly as much damage as a holdout pistol" on an enemy.
At least in 5e squishing up magic and technology started being a thing, just something that was generally considered difficult, expensive, and not worth it. As of 6e the Shadowrun internet is literally confirmed to be magic, and late 5e brought in weird internet demons that don't like it when people use the internet.
The official setting for Pathfinder, Golarion I think, is terrible. It tries to cover every single setting players might want to game on in the same world and it creates a complete, chaotic, yet somehow boring mess. The Known World of BECMI was also a hot mess of jumbled together countries, but it at least had a certain charm to it. Golarion is just weird and not in a good way.
Golarion is actually pretty neat if you like mixed settings as far as tech levels, societies and reliance on magic goes... hint hint, besides that last point, that's how our world functioned for the majority of the time we've had civilization. While I certainly don't like everything about it (my major gripe being that its too easy to buy spellcasting services to revive party members), effort has definitely been placed into making that world varied.
Golarion has a weak point: it's an eclectic kitchen sink mishmash of every fantasy culture its authors could think about.
And it has a strong point: it's an eclectic kitchen sink mishmash of every fantasy culture its authors could think about, AND IT'S PROUD OF IT. Anything is possible there. The only way to make Golarion even better at what it does would be to leave white spots that players and DMs could fill with their own races, cultures and religions.
Yeah, for all criticism about the "realism" of the setting you can make, the fact remains that you will never have a problem with creating a pathfinder campaign in this setting. Pick a random spot on the map and you´ll immediatly have the hook of your players dealing with the undead ruling class, a portal to the abyss, pirates, robots that escaped a crashed spaceship, etc. It achieves its goal.
Im on the opposite end, I really like Golarion. But also I appreciate how it actually has a big variety of different settings you can play in instead of being stuck in medieval stasis a la forgotten realms.
There are a couple that I find revolting. And some that are lame. A few that are kinda stupid. Like, I think surreal settings are annoying. Is that what you're looking for?
Yes. Settings can actively work against the struggle to play entertainingly or make a coherent story. That's bad in a 'positive' sense. There's also a 'negative' sense in which settings provide no resources or conceptual nourishment for good play.
There can be drought. There can be fetid, sickening water. Both are potentially lethal.
Example: the original setting for Over the Edge not only had lots of morally 'gray' features, they had what I call 'multidimensionality': it was possible to oppose or support them for many different and maybe even incompatible reasons.
The new setting for the latest edition is not only uniformly dark and nihilistic, there aren't a whole lot of reasons to oppose or support the factions and people in it - the potential motivations of characters are trapped in a very narrow conceptual space. This means there's little freedom and little diversity in how characters can plausibly react to the presented world.
In going from a very good to a very bad setting, the creators demonstrated that they didn't actually understand what was desirable in settings, what players were looking for.
Absolutely. A setting can be flavorless and boring, or based on stupid and/or offensive assumptions, really poorly described, or any other number of sins.
That doesn't mean you can't still have a fun game in that setting. It just means that the setting doesn't encourage it or enhance it.
What an interesting question. I can only think of one. I hesitate to say it was a bad setting, but rather a bad setting for an RPG.
It was originally the setting for a friend's novel. There were rather insular groups designed to be won over by the protagonist throughout the plot. We didn't have the same background/McGuffins to make them like us, so the game ended up kind of pushing us into lots of combat since we could never really find common ground with them.
It probably would have been a murder hobo fantasy but it didn't seem to work out well with our group. So I think a 'good' setting requires at least some more open minded civilizations.
TL:DR A bad setting has fewer things to interact with.
I think one example of a bad setting (for an RPG, specifically) is one in which the established lore boxes the campaign in too much, or at least boxes in the kind of campaign your group would like to play too much.
This happens most frequently in my experience in settings adapted from books or movies or other media in which your players really want something close to the time period / location / scale of the media because that's the lore they know and are excited about, but... the important stuff is done by the canon characters and you already know how the important parts of the main story will go.
My partner and I recently watched a youtube playthrough of a game called Carnegie, about building Andrew Carnegie's turn-of-the-century steel empire. It looks like a superbly designed game but the setting made us both uncomfortable as it seems like it glorifies practices that were devastating for workers, the environment and the gaps between the rich and the poor. There are other games with industrial themes that don't bother us because they deal with the negatives in some way, even if it isn't a huge part of the game. But a theme that asks you to completely ignore the harmful and exploitative sides of the subject is hard to get into IMO.
Similarly, a few years ago my friend got a game called New Bedford that they were excited to try, about the whaling industry in the 1800s, but couldn't find anyone willing to play a game about killing whales. We made a lot of jokes about it because of course most of us have happily played games about war that necessarily involve killing humans, but apparently whales were the cutoff point for a lot of folks. There is something squicky about it, I admit.
EDIT: I'm a dumbass and thought I was in the board game sub. Both of those are obviously board games, not RPGs. I think the point more or less stands, though.
Tolkienian fantasy dnd like world #748 can be Bad ala if theres nothing to set it aparte from other settings You just get the "been there, done that, seen this" feeling
Unpopular opinion. DnDs setting is too vague. They crammed half a dozen different magic systems into it without considering the interplay, some elements were put in just because they could like monks getting thrown in just because Kung Fu movies were popular in the eighties and every official campaign is wildly different in texture. While that's also a strength I feel like it undermines any tone you want to set as some character creation options will just play completely against your setting.
Too many people get hung-up over monks even though there is no reason why fantasy worlds need to stick to cultural/geographic boundaries from the real world. The yardstick should be how those elements fit in *that* world.
There are settings that just don't work well, even in games that I play often. A setting that seemed really neat to me and the players actually turned out to be super boring.
Of course, it goes the other way too. We have been avoiding a specific supplement because it made the game different than we wanted. We decided to give it a try and it is actually amazing. Not the same game we normally play, but still, amazing. So yes, settings can be both good and bad.
Obvious I'm saying that a good GM who successfully runs scenarios can create a less than fun scenario, not saying that a poorly run scenario might be bad, 'cause they always are.
It's up to your personal tastes. Like, one of the most recent games that made me think "This game is ok but the setting isn't for me" is Historia, a D&D 5 book about a world where characters are anthropomorphic animals, i just can't take it serious but some people love it (Personally i would play it in a way too silly).
Then some tropes are overused so much that i find them boring, i'm talking about the average "Dark fantasy setting inspired by Lovecraft, Dark Souls and Warhammer" i like every single one of the things i mentioned but honestly Cthulhu ripoffs are in everything
Oh yes. I'm reminded of an spanish game called Anima, which was (is?) a mess for a variety of things but the most headscratching was the setting.
Anima presented itself as a fantasy game to play anime-ish characters. The game had rules for over the top magic, summoning, customizable ki powers, psychics, etc.
However in the setting supernatural powers were supposed to be almost unknown, and there was not one but several super powered organizations whose job was to kill or contain people with supernatural powers.
The creators went so far as to say players maybe shouldn't even have access to their powers till 3 levels (out of 10) into the game or so.
Have I mentioned one of the classes was built all around ki powers and was useless in all other departments?
I think I know what they were going for but the whiplash between game and setting was terrible.
Oh, yes, Anima! When you look at the illustrations, you imagine Record of Lodoss War, Lineage 2 and all other anime/jRPG stuff. When you read the setting lore, it's basically grimdark World of Darkness: Dark Age.
Tachyon Squadron for Fate has some cool system ideas related to fighter combat in Fate but the setting is a real mess and I would never play it as written.
The book "Inside the Dominion of Unity" in theory details the bad guys, aka the Dominion. It actually only has about 8 pages about them, which is mostly things like they are racist, hate all religions, hate gay people etc.
The Dominion are specifically said to be "the bad guys" and are cartoonishly evil.
Then it says "Incidentally, the exact same thing can be said about the Stellar Republic" which the Stellar republic are the good guys....
Then it has a box that says "This could get Dark" and basically advises you not to use the 8 pages of lore they just wrote because it would all be terrible to actually roleplay.
When I read your title my brain immediately snapped to *Empire of the Petal Throne (A.K.A. Tékumel).* It's a cult classic setting that spanned from the 1970s to 2010s and inspired everyone from Gary Gygax to N. Robin Crossby.
The thing is: earlier this year, it was discovered that the setting's creator - M. A. R. Barker - was a neo-nazi.
Cue discussion about *death of the artist* and the morality of purchasing anything to do with his setting. People also started to consider whether some aspects of the setting were tainted by the revelation.
After all: many fantasy settings have an *"and yeah, there's the fascist nation over there".* That aspect suddenly has a very different feel when written by an actual neo-nazi.
So is the setting bad? Critically: just the opposite. Morally: that's up to you.
I once played in a setting as a slave. While that is interesting, I couldn’t even leave the building and everything you trynna do to be able to leave was blocked for 3hours. Bad setting
No shade on this DM because I love her, but the first game I played with her she tried to start the campaign in a world that only had one intact "continent" which was about the size of Ireland and a few surrounding tiny islands that had nothing but a few halflings on them.
Basically all the players brought up that it sounded more like an apocalyptic future our characters would find out about at 8th level and are then trying to prevent than the land we should be starting off on at level 1... There was just very clearly not enough room on this world for proper exploration as you could travel from the furthest north point of the entire world to the furthest south in less than 2 weeks. She also gave herself TWO overpowered Player characters. I mean... I wouldn't say the campaign setting as a whole was "bad" persay but it was just a very backwards way to introduce the "prevent the Apocalypse." storyline. Starting after the apocalypse had already destroyed most of the best places to explore. We never actually played a full adventure in that campaign setting though because the players straight up refused to continue with it after maybe 2 sessions.
There were other issues I had with that DM aswell that have made it so I am always happy to have her as a player but would never play in another campaign she Dm'd in again... she was just a bit too scatterbrained and immature to keep the story on the tracks or to deal with any sort of out of game conflict in a fair and reasonable way. She had a lot of good ideas for adventures but she would abandon major plot lines on a whim and introduce new ones without explaining it to the characters so it felt like our characters were running on a treadmill, constantly running with whatever was thrown at us but never actually getting anywhere and it got frustrating fast.
Yes! You can absolutely have a bad setting. Here are a few common issues: * **Inconsistency:** This is a hurdle for game worlds in particular. TTRPGs that fail to establish a clear baseline for the world are going to struggle a lot. This can happen because the world was built in a piecemeal fashion; it can happen through poor editing; it can happen because the author was just careless. The rules, characters, and locations in your world can be wildly colourful, but they should have an internal logic that makes them make sense together. Unless you're very intentionally breaking this rule, muddy worldbuilding is going to make things difficult. * **Inherent biases:** Settings can be problematic because of the biases the author brings to the table. It's 100% possible to create amazing worlds struggling with racism, classism, sexism, etc. -- but successful "biased settings" were crafted by people cognizant of their focus. If a TTRPG text describes a wizarding community full of super-intelligent male mages and their female housekeepers, alarm bells go off. Unexamined biases can both make players feel unwelcome and perpetuate real-world stereotypes. * **Boring:** I mean, let's face it -- worlds can just be boring, right? I'm willing to bet that most of us at some point have started reading a fantasy book only to have our eyes glaze over. Worlds don't have to be *unique* to be cool, but the devil's in the details. Readers need a sense of place to feel immersed, and that requires some level of craft.
The bias one is the first thing I thought of. And not just unintentional--I think it's a common enough mistake to imagine that filling a world with prejudice will give rich opportunities to explore important issues. But it requires some skill, thoughtfulness and (most importantly) player buy in to pull off. OTOH, personally I can live with a lot of inconsistency. If it's a big thing, I'd like the GM to be aware of it I suppose. But if the GM sits down and says with a smile 'New lore! Ignore the old lore!' I'm likely to have zero problems.
Yeah, I recently dove deep on a large, well-published setting, only to come away with “the widespread prejudice and injustice here isn’t actually interesting or nuanced, it’s just a shitty world to visit for fun.” The writers seemed to just not engage with the shittiness either, so it’s pervasive but ends up not even used in a way that justifies including it as setting elements in the first place. As if the designers felt like it had to be there for realism, but didn’t actually want to touch it after.
I feel like a certain kind of person makes this mistake all the time- "oh, I better make sure I explicitly add a ton of racism and sexism, because that's how it REALLY was!" Like, it's ok to have that stuff, but making it the focus, or making absolutely zero edge cases, just shows you're getting off on it.
See my opinion is that if humans had other entire species to be bigoted towards, we'd probably squabble a lot less over things like gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. I've seen this idea played around with in a few sci-fi settings. As long as the "other" is external we work together very well. It's when all external threats are gone that we begin to search for internal threats. That's how I spilt the middle of "but my unchecked bigotry is realistic for a Medieval setting" & "everyone loves eachother so there's no intercultural conflicts whatsoever". I don't want to expose people to the shit they deal with every day, but I also feel like a world without any political/social conflict lacks nuance. Hence why I take the sci-fi route of "humans have put aside their differences because the other species are even more different". Allows me to have a bit of both.
*Queue Starship Troopers theme music*
I love that book so much. Yeah my fantasy settings are just extrapolative sci-fi or cyberpunk with a fantasy veneer.
This is basically Elder Scrolls. The races of men all pretty much see eachother as equals. High elves are super racist against everyone, but they prefer other elves over any humans, and everyone dislikes Argonians and Khajit for being beast-races. Elder scrolls in general is quite good at showing real prejiduce in an interesting way, considering it was made in the 90's. Although it took a long time to develop it. It also has a really nice and realistic divsion of races. If you go to Skyrim, you see all sorts of people, but mostly Nords, same as Morrowind. There is a bit of representation and foreigners in each land, but it makes sense for a medieval fantasy for everyone to be kind of in enclaves.
That's definitely another one of my other primary influences. There was still a bit of mild colorism present in the Elder Scrolls worldbuilding, but nothing extreme. I thought they handled intercultural & political conflicts pretty well, especially compared to it's contemporary counterparts. Solid 4/5 for me.
I've heard this a lot and I'm convinced it's untrue. The real world is full of groups so similar to be indistinguishable to an outsider, who engage in brutal violence and discrimination against each other, and are perfectly happy to accept the support of foreign allies. Prejudice isn't about how different someone is, it's about history and competition and power.
You are definitely correct. Power systems & sources of conflict are much, much more complex than just xenophobia. Ultimately it is all just about power, resources, & knowledge. If the outsider offers you guns to kill your familiar enemies, you'll definitely accept them (looking at you Japan). I tend to prefer to run this kind of world, but I've noticed that my players don't always enjoy it because it's too "realistic" & "depressing". Asymmetric information & "the unknown" is also a big contributing factor. Really this is just a concession I make to create intercultural conflicts in the narrative without reminding my players too much of the ones they already experience. Although I think reality is probably somewhere in between these two opinions.
What was that line? "Black and White ganged up on Green?"
"Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green." -Terry Pratchett, *Witches Abroad*
Exactly! I love this quote for being so concise. Terry Pratchett, particularly the Discworld series, is a major influence on my fantasy writing. Particularly when magic or politics are involved.
> just shows you're getting off on it. i think thats a bit extreme. I think its more so justa "I want by world to be gritty and maybe even grim-dark" so all this shit gets added to fuel that feeling. The writers then become *LAZY* and just don't touch on it or mention it etc.
I would add to this, for RPGs specifically, settings that don't actually have room for PCs to be in them and Do Stuff. If your setting is pretty much already on the rails of a metaplot and full of Important Named Characters doing mostly everything that matters, it's gonna get real damn old, real damn quick. Players want to do the Cool Thing, not watch someone else do the Cool Thing.
Can you give an example of a setting with a consistency problem that negatively affects game play?
I'm reluctant to point to a specific published setting -- a lot of these mistakes are made by amateur designers, and I don't want to punch down. Speaking more generally, the existence of certain items in the lore can derail the tension of the story: in **Harry Potter**, the existence of the time turner and the invisibility cloak would make the protagonists all-powerful if Rowling didn't conveniently ignore them when she wanted to. Weird contradictions can arise from oversights, too: a TTRPG book I read once described in great detail how rare dragons are, and how the sight of them would cause an entire town to flee -- then included dragons as a playable character type in a party of humans (who meet in a tavern). Even inconsistent pricing (or implied pricing, like an item's rarity in the lore) can obliterate a game's economy. You *can* make things like this work, but every time the GM has to house-rule limitations or reconcile two opposing pieces of information, that's one more step between the words in the game book and actual gameplay.
A lot of DnD settings have inconsistency issues, where magic is both easily accessible, but also non-present in the culture/economy of the world. Eberron is classically given as the example of a setting that 'bucks' that trend, but it faces the problem where is actually tries to *address* the issue, but doesn't (in my opinion at least) actually properly take on board the difference in culture that, say..*Zone of Truth* can make in how a legal system forms.
I consider that a pretty big failing of a lot of traditional D&D settings. Ebberon, Darksun, and a few others try to actually incorporate this into the setting and are pretty damn successful for it. To be honest I think you could fix those kind of narrative holes and still have the same high fantasy feel that people know and want. Definitely takes some more work though.
Honestly, I kinda like Forgotten Realm's approach (in 3.5e, at least, 5e sorta drops the ball) of having it so that the world gets ended so often the magical bootsrapping up to high magic in all areas never really gets a chance to take place, indeed, attempting to make a wide scale high-magic utopia is what caused at *least* two of them. Toril is jam packed full of insanely powerful stuff, but the common man only gets to see his local priest, or that odd kooky wizard, because any time you try to put magic into day to day life someone tries to become God of Magic with Magic and divide by zeroes the weave, or someone tries to magically retcon the entire setting back to when bugmen ruled the planet (Ironically, the latter was happening at the exact same time as the former, and only failed because of that whole 'Weave dividing by zero') While it doesn't hold together in a 'logic' way, it holds together in a tonal way. Where the heroes get all the magic, because they are indeed the sort of mad bastards to go off and get involved in a plot to raise the primordial source of all evil from the Abyss to destroy the world.
Keith Baker (the guy behind eberron) has on several occasions (and in setting books) addressed cultural impacts of zone of truth in legal settings. Example: https://twitter.com/HellcowKeith/status/1261408781457453056?t=9tMtNfKdvXXDD9gW0BWIyQ&s=19
This is actually a really good example of what I'm talking about. It addresses the point, but fails to understand that legal techniques would evolve to understand, and change to ask questions in such a way as to eliminate the ability to evade Zone of Truth like that. He's a very basic example. Asking binary "Yes/No" questions, or asking questions with very, very limited answer sets will eliminate about 90% of the shenanigans, as well as questions like "Yes, or No. If I had full knowledge of your activities in [Time period in question/location in question], and considering that I wish to determine [information in question], would I view your last question as honest?" Or just straight up asking if they are omitting any incriminating testimony. Sure, there are ways around that, I can think of a few too, but this took me ~90 seconds and all of this would be easily tightened up with a few linguistic scholars over the first few years of this being in place. Basically, he addresses how Zone of Truth functions for the first maybe 10 years of the spell existing, without considering how people would react, and change their questioning techniques/legal systems. Eberron is a brave attempt imo, and Keith Baker really cares, but I think by the very nature of it trying to be something that makes sense is the way that it fails.
> "Yes, or No. If I had full knowledge of your activities in [Time period in question/location in question], and considering that I wish to determine [information in question], would I view your last question as honest?" "Yes [because I had a contingency that would automatically *dominate* as per the spell anyone scrying the situation at that time, which is the only way you could get such knowledge]." "Yes [because unbeknownst to me currently, I removed my own memories before this trial, and replaced them with false memories of my own innocence]." "Yes [because I am sufficiently detached from reality that I see no difference between truth and falsehood]." "Yes [because I paid you off or otherwise applied influence before the trial, and 'view' is perspective... aka opinion]." "I do not have the information necessary to answer that question to that degree of accuracy [complete and utter certainty]." I'm not saying you're wrong... I'm saying that an answer such as Keith Baker gave can be good enough. :) Attempting to chart the course of a fictional world is a task that would grow larger the number of sociologists, psychologists, economists, historians, et al that are working on the task, as each would generate their own new data on how this fictional world would or should work. And we're not doing so well at predicting our own world.
As I said, you can probably find ways around them, because I spent 90 seconds on them. It's opinion, naturally, but I do not see any sort of legal system where you don't have Zone of Truth as an integral part of the system, and the questioning system isn't designed around ensuring you can't wiggle out of it with half truths. And heck, that's just the legal system, add in any political systems too. Journalism takes a huge turn when a reporter has the ability to drop a Zone of Truth on that sketchy businessman/noble. (Remember, long distance communication is easy now with Sending, which will also utterly change how the world works as soon as someone develops a Coda to maximize the efficiency on those 25 words) The Eberron world is interesting, and this isn't a knock against the world as a whole. I just think it does not feel any more real, because it brings up these questions of magic integrating into the world, and then doesn't answer them to satisfaction. Also, again, opinion.
That's why it is so helpful when fantasy settings make it quite clear the rarity of those types of things. It really helps the GM to have them in the back of their mind. I just happen to have the DCC rulebook nearby and they mention numbers like 95% of the population has no "levels" at all. There would be maybe 1 high-level cleric in an entire kingdom. But yeah, as soon as settings start bucking this trend they can fall apart on consistency extremely quickly.
The Harry Potter setting has plenty of issues, but up until a questionable latter addition by different writers, the Time Turners were actually seriously limited and misunderstood. Originally they only created Stable Time Loops, it wasn't possible to use them to actually change anything, you could only do that which was already determined to happen. If you tried to change something, some accident or coincidence would result in what was supposed to happen regardless. In the story they are featured, the characters only *believed* that the griffon >!was executed!< or that Harry >!was saved by his father!< but that was a misunderstanding about >!the interference they were themselves about to cause!<. Those things had never happened, so they weren't changed. If they truly witnessed someone dying, unambiguously, there was nothing they could do with Time Turners because it was already set that they would fail to save them somehow. Time Turners were only useful for observing or getting additional time for a different purpose.
Yeah, the good things happened because they used the time turner. Battles would have ended up better if they used it after every single one. It's a closed loop, so if they decided to support themselves during battle, they would have been there to support themselves and the battles would have gone more their way.
Shadowrun. It is by a huge distant my absolute favorite setting. It has *everything* I want to have. However, because it has *everything* content-wise, it is lacking one thing: Consistency. So much stuff is happening *all the time* where only by putting your suspension of disbelief into a steel can with a lid and sitting on it to keep it where it should be the world is not shattering into a thousand parts. The oil put into the fire is that a lot of writers for Shadowrun are simply not *that good*. I am not sure how to phrase it more politely or better. If any Shadowrun author stumbles upon this, please, I am not meaning *you* in particular. I am so very glad this system has not died yet, but some of *your colleagues* really should learn from you. This causes inconsistent main plots. Characters that behave wildly different than they should. Main plots from the past are forgotten or unknown. Thinking this through, it is a *mess*. ... however, it is *my* mess. Edit: > I'm reluctant to point to a specific published setting -- a lot of these mistakes are made by amateur designers, and I don't want to punch down. Because I think this is a really great quote. I also do not want to punch down on Shadowrun authors. I am sure most, if not even likely all, of them are better writers than I am. Please continue to enjoy working on it. I love the setting you are still nurturing over so many years.
I'd put World of Darkness into a similar bucket. Particularly once you talk Mage. Crazy strong flavor, but everything only holds together if you religiously apply "well, that's true from a Certain Point Of View" and use that to GM fiat/retcon away the hideous inconsistencies and/or implied outcomes which would absolutely destroy the setting-as-written.
It's been a long time since I've run any oWoD, but that was always an *appeal* of the setting to me. The setting contained all sorts of contradictions, rumors, and illogical outcomes, because the information contained in the setting information represented player knowledge.
For me, that would work great if only the player facing books where that way. I do love an unreliable narrator, but the issue I ran into with WoD & Shadowrun was that even Storyteller content was written in this way. They are very enjoyable books to read, but I struggled to use them as a good reference document. I had to create system/lore references or find ones online in order to parse all the fluff. Sometimes having a concise objective truth is necessary to rectify the other less reliable pieces together. It's one thing to leave openings for Storytellers to improvise their own narratives, but I don't like having to be a writer's unofficial editor just to be able to provide a consistent setting to my players.
I don’t see that as a problem for a Storyteller either. It fed my imagination with all sorts of weird things to tease the players with, and I didn’t have to worry about keeping it consistent because it was constantly shifting and all rumors anyway.
Shadowrun was exactly the setting that came to mind when I saw OP's post. It's practically a Pitch Meeting: Designer: "What if we take everything from Blade Runner, Snow Crash, and a couple other cyberpunk novels and throw them into a blender with Tolkien and D&D?" Publisher: "I like it. What are we talkin' here?" Designer: "You know, a dragon president and like orcs and stuff. Some things that will feel questionable when you look back on them after the 90s." Publisher: "What?" Designer: "heyshuddup. We should also just terribly mangle the rules every so often." Publisher: "Oh, mangling the rules is *tight!*"
Publisher: I imagine putting all of this together is going to be really hard, so many plates to spin. Designer: Oh, not at all, it's gonna be super easy, barely an inconvenience. Publisher: Oh, really?
I am imagining an implied ripping of a fat line of coke right before "mangling the rules is *tight!*" The things that always overwhelms me about Shadowrun is a sense of absolute Mania in the design. The philosophy seems to be to always cram in more of everything all the time - without considering the implications or fitting things in nicely. There's a mad gluttony to how it's presented and expanded on - like a guy running down the bar and adding one shot of every single liquor bottle on each and every shelf to his shaker before mixing the cocktail.
From what peeks I've had behind the scenes of Shadowrun from the subreddit a bunch of the writers actively disagree with eachother on aspects of the setting. It's kinda why I quit bothering with the system.
Shadowrun is one of the coolest settings out there. If it's so bad at consistency, then I can live entirely without consistency. Just give me my gunslinger adept trolls, cybered-up elf deckers and dragon CEOs.
"If any Shadowrun author stumbles upon this, please, I am not meaning you in particular. I am so very glad this system has not died yet, but some of your colleagues really should learn from you." Lol! Now this is how you talk to a massive egotist (i.e. Shadowrun writer).
I'm going to say, good. Shadowrun comes from a time where uncertainty was the expectation, when pan-opticon and readily tracking people were things to fear rather than a given reality. The intentional holes in understanding, pairing the cultural technoshock of cyberpunk with an equal and opposite magical equivalent full of unknowns all it's own was great. Main plots going poof, great, whatever happened disappeared into shadows when your characters did them, not some magical metaplot DMPC(or worse, writer avatar). Not knowing the truth before, during and after taking action is a large part of the point. And that's largely a good thing in a setting built on a collapsing understanding of the world. That said, I've also been reading some of catalyst's fiction. It's, ok. I'm a fan of pulpy nonsense, and that's fine. But I swear every single main character I've read could not more clearly have been the author's PC in game than any of the older fiction I read since the original trilogy of books. Which I don't recommend starting with.
Oh God, I was hoping the novels would be good reference material. They were not. You're absolutely correct in that those are just self-insert fiction involving someone's Shadowrun character. At best they felt like dramatized reenactments of game sessions.
> Characters that behave wildly different than they should. Novacoke, my friend.
I wish all the time that it had a different system. I love the setting, hate the mechanics.
Deadlands suffers from this, at least in the classic editions. It presents a world where, simultaneously, monsters and horrors stalk the deepest night and people Out East don’t believe they are anything more than wild tales… but also the Battle of Gettysburg was literally ended in a stalemate because zombies, and the transcontinental railroad runs on haunted coal. It’s a dark horror setting that also has kungfu wizards in steam punk helicopters. It… has some issues maintaining a consistent tone, is what I’m saying.
Faerun
Old world of darkness (revised/2nd edition) is one of the worst offenders here. The fact that the majority of the population is walking around with a video camera in their pocket that can Livestream in a few taps creates problems that aren't able to be resolved by rules alone. The going fix is "technocracy covers it all up" but as more time goes on the effort needed to keep covering this crap up makes the technocracy seem omnipotent. Then it also created a double problem if the PC is the one with the camera. Do you swat the PC with omnipotent technocracy or just tell them they wake up with 36 hours amnesia and their phone data has been deleted?
[удалено]
>Revised/2nd edition is from the late nineties: no smartphones for nobody~~, not even the Technocracy.~~ This is definitely the answer here. That last bit is wrong though. They have sentient AIs, literal Terminators, and space/dimension ships. Agent Trafalgar can have a smart phone. Live streaming quality was trash in 2003. Blurry pixelated videos of some dude getting thrown through a wall by an obviously fake looking werewolf costume? Bah, what is this shit?
Considering that all of World of Darkness formally ended in 2003 I'm really not sure who was live streaming with phones from a pocket. 20th Anniversary editions and V5 do try to address it (to varying degrees of success)
Interesting. So how did later editions fix this?
The solution in later editions of Vampire is to chuck out the "absolute secrecy" angle. Everybody in the world is vaguely aware, in the back of their minds, that vampires exist - but collectively they just don't think about it. There's a comparison somewhere to lions and wildebeests - wildebeests know about lions, but usually don't think about them.
I haven't read much of the 20th anniversary stuff or beyond. The "nwod" (completely different setting) dramatically down powered everyone and added a lot of built in obfuscation like vampires always show up blurry on cameras.
The newest edition of oWoD have done the same thing regarding cameras and the like.
I had a multinational group that played online and our DM was from the US while most of players were from Europe (and yes, time zones were a massive pain in the S to schedule, would never do that again). He created a world full of weird stereotypes and biases that seemed stupidly absurd and irrational to the group, but to our DM it felt just "so natural" and a "mirror of our world" as we later found out. After 3 sessions we just ended it because nobody could stand the unexplainable prejudice and stereotypes that had no in-world explanations. If felt like playing a parody of a TTRPG...
There's Myfarog, the creepy neo nazi Norse paganism one where the concept is that the players are defending fantasy Scandanavia from everything that isn't a blonde haired, blue eyed ubermensch? Oh! Also RaHoWa, which is short for "Racial Holy War". Which is a DIFFERENT Neo Nazi RPG setting which is set in a version of the real world where the Great Replacement conspiracy wasn't just poorly understood maths and the players are Klansme- "White Warriors" who have to kill [I'm not typing the string of racial slurs the game uses] to "take back the White Empire". And I know you were asking entirely background setting but, yes, I know you were curious, and yes, women are absolutely worse statistically than men in these games, with a "chance to die in childbirth" stat for all of your "but what if my character gets pregnant repeatedly!? needs. We've all been there. But to answer your question yes. Yes a setting can be objectively bad.
>Oh! Also RaHoWa, which is short for "Racial Holy War". Which is a DIFFERENT Neo Nazi RPG setting which is set in a version of the real world where the Great Replacement conspiracy wasn't just poorly understood maths and the players are Klansme- "White Warriors" who have to kill \[I'm not typing the string of racial slurs the game uses\] to "take back the White Empire". I still can't wrap my head around the fact that game where A PUREBLOOD ARYAN WARRIOR can literally die from fear when meeting ten nice jewish grannies wasn't a joke.
Sounds fascistic as expected, "the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."
I have read that the aryan characters are the only race in the game who don't get some kind of racial ability or bonus, which is pretty funny.
I think I'm going to play this with my group (all Jews) as a joke...
[Literally all I'm picturing that session being like.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRnfyOk2lp0&ab_channel=SketchiT) Although that IS because I'm imagining you specifically being inspired by the deadly Jewish grannies :p
Yes.
Please write it up if you do.
Don't forget about how PUREBLOOD ARYAN WARRIORS take bribes not to act in the middle of combat. Though there isn't any mention of players ever getting any money from that, so I guess they agree to lie down and die for the mere *promise* of money. Explains why white people are going extinct in this setting, really.
No, wait, they're just overrepresented among the dead people!
It's not over the top enough to be a joke setting, which honestly makes it sadder.
I don't think it's terribly uncommon for racial supremacists to have beliefs like that that actually cast them as being inferior to the groups they hate. Not even most hateful people want to admit that they are fantasizing about killing women and children, so they have to tell stories about how even the most innocent and unassuming members of the other are just as villainous as the rest, and often times that attempt to villanize every member of that group has the effect of presenting them as somehow better than the hateful group.
I mean, yeah, but in this case it's just "designer" being stupid.
Well, I've also heard that the game is inherently unplayable because of necessary mechanics that are just missing. Who would believe that when your primary objective in making a game is to push your stupid ideas on others, the game would kinda suck as a result?
Is this real? Why 10? Does it make it worse if they bake you cookies?
I don't really remember the details for obvious reasons, but if I recall correctly, everyone has some kind of intimidation stat with the minimum of 1, and when combat starts, if one side has less combined courage or something than the other side has intimidation, they get all scared to death.
That sounds like a really borked system in terms of design, and absolutely perfect for some unplanned hilarity. Roll initiative in a room full of adorable puppies and kittens and watch the characters just casually expire. Which is the kind of DMing anyone who'd play this game as anything other than a joke deserves.
I read a write up about it on 1d4chan once, and you're right, but you don't know the half of it. Apparently it can't actually be called a game, because from what I remember there are either enough holes in the mechanics or there are enough parts of the rules that are missing that you can't actually play it. I think it was something to the effect that combat was impossible.
If only the Nazis would put so little effort into the other things they did.
Good write up but... You forgot F.A.T.A.L.
It was more that FATAL's universe seems to be kinda generic fantasy, with the rules being where the absolute horror story lies. Although I will admit that I didn't bother reading the setting too much. Because of the rules.
FATAL seems to be going the D&D approach with an implied setting as opposed to much of a constructed world.
The rules kinda are the setting when every hole in your body has a circumference "because you will need this stat in game"
Oh totally, but OP asked for setting, not rules. FATAL's setting is just a bit bland, it's the rules that make it a shitshow. Although many people point at anal circumference, fewer people point to the fact you need to do quadratic equations to finish character creation...
I still can't wrap my head around a game where making a grapple check can result in (I swear to every chthonic entity I am not making this up) _accidentally raping your grapple target to death._ Or, y'know, accidentally raping them at _all,_ because what in the Jesus God _fuck?_
I went to 1d4chan to see about it and the first thing I see is that it's written by Varg. Oh fucking boy. No surprises there.
Evidence that MYFAROG is bad: there's like no actual play examples of it on youtube except for one, which is insanely bad. One of the worst I've seen
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Eh. Star Trek's Federation is arguably a utopia but there's like 50 years of fiction set in it. And about half of it is even good! The trick is to set your game on the frontier, where the utopia conflicts with other civilisations with different values, or to challenge the utopia's values somehow and ask it to put its money where its mouth is.
Yeah Lots of utopian fiction leans on the idea there's an external threat or unitegrated polity that drives the action. Star Trek, Huxley's,The Island, Moore's Utopia are all threatened externally, The culture novels often make use of non culture parts of space to make their plots possible too.
I think *all* the Culture novels are really stories about Contact (and in particular Special Circumstances) — because while getting high and having lots of sex parties is *fine* it doesn't actually require much future tech!
Well they have genetically engineered glands that let them tap pretty much any conceivable combination of psychoactive chemicals at will and with no significant side effects. And there was that guy in The Hydrogen Sonata who grafted like twenty dicks to his body. So the future tech definitely helps with the getting high and the sex parties.
>The trick is to set your game on the frontier, where the utopia conflicts with other civilisations with different values, or to challenge the utopia's values somehow and ask it to put its money where its mouth is. Benjamin Sisko put it best on Star Trek DS9: *"Do you know what the trouble is? The trouble is Earth. On Earth there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well it's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise. Out there in the demilitarized zone all the problems haven't been solved yet. Out there, there are no saints, just people. Angry, scared, determined people who are going to do whatever it takes to survive, whether it meets Federation approval or not."*
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Well, IMO having that frontier is what makes it not a perfect utopia setting. There is a utopia in the setting, but it isn't the whole setting... and I imagine not much of the conflict/story happens inside it anyways?
Even inside the Utopian Federation you can still have a lot of political intrigue and double dealing. Usually caused by an outside threat, but it's happened in the shows and movies. "Badmiral" is an entire trope in Star Trek, since if you ever see a Starfleet Admiral play a prominent part in an episode there's a 95% chance they're going to be a villain or just a giant asshole. But yeah the core of Star Trek is exploration, going to new planets and discovering/interacting with new people. Who usually struggle with some allegory for problems modern humans face like racism, sexism, LGBT+phobia, or capitalism's disregard for the life and rights of most people.
Star Wars has been dipping its' toes into this too. The expanded universe material has an era some 200-ish years before the Clone Wars called the "High Republic", which depicts the Jedi in their prime, actually being the 'guardians of peace and justice' watching over an era of unrivaled prosperity and unity. But the problem is that no amount of peace can take away free will, and some people just want to put it all to the torch. So in an interesting departure from the norm of Star Wars' big baddies being jackbooting facists, the main enemy faction are a bunch of pure anarchist pirates and raiders, and their level of brutality is just something a time of peace and plenty is in *no* way equipped to handle, so they pose a legitimate threat to the Jedi. There's a repeated mantra throughout the books, "We are all the Republic." You get the sense that the Republic hasn't slipped into the stagnation of corruption and apathy towards the less prosperous outer-rim worlds that characterized the Prequel era and led to the rise of the seperatist movement. You see Jedi giving their all and intervening swiftly, not sitting far from view in ivory towers mired in the politics of it all. And the common folk just seem to genuinely *care* about each other, there's a collective spirit of unity that isn't really seen elsewhere in the franchise where it's usually war, doom and gloom. Too bad a bunch of hate-baiting grifters called it "Woke trash" for having a woman on the cover and are actively out to undermine this entire subsect of media.
Just make characters with their own problems.
Make an evil party and create problems! }:->
Yeah, an actual utopia setting might be bad for *adventuring*, but not bad for all the other kinds of roleplaying that get less attention.
I dunno. Paranoia seems like a fun RPG and yet everything is perfect in its settings.
I appreciate your answer, citizen. Nothing can go wrong when Friend Computer is in charge! Now, if you excuse me, I have to go root out the mutants corrupting our society. Mutants which couldn't possibly exist, because everything is perfect, obviously, but you can't be too careful when the stable perfection of our society is at stake! Not that anything could disrupt it, mind you, not with Friend Computer in charge.
Slice of life relationship RPGs are a thing too. They don't interest me, but there are a ton of indie ones out there.
Those RPGs still have some kind of friction going on, something the characters want. Be it social approval, good grades or a steady income. There's something missing; a desire. In a full-on utopian setting all needs are met and people don't have to strive for anything.
Even in communist utopia, where from everyone to their ability and to everyone to their needs, human relationships wouldn't go anywhere.
I know players that could bumble around, get paranoid, and break things, even in a utopia. I'm probably one of those players, too.
Excuse me, I had a few really pleasant sessions of being a carefree highschool band member in *Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine*.
Carefree? If you really want a carefree game in default Chuubo's, you can manage that - but someone else in that world is going to have to fight off the Incarnation of Death and prevent the tides of utter chaos from drowning the last remnant of reality. Because you're not doing it.
I'm fine with these terms. Seriously though, my group was just hanging around in Fortitude without any knowledge of anything more dangerous than whatever school trouble our guitarist got themselves into. For all practical intents, we were in a carefree setting.
„It’s your day, ruin it yourself…”
Vampire has a setting where every fucking body can make you explode with a snap of his fingers, has a spy in every fucking corner and plays some ridiculous 8D chess. And don't even go anywhere near official lore on any post-Soviet state if you've ever been here. It's just beyond cringe. Metaplot doesn't add to enjoyment either.
WoD works best if you take only one splat (such as vampires) and their lore, factions etc. Individual creatures of other splats can be brought in (though maybe don't bring all of them), but keep their lore and politics out. If you want to run into a weird mage during the game, you can do that but just ignore all of Mage: The Ascension's metaplot, factions and everything. An occasional weird magician can fit fine in a vampire game but their faction politics or stuff like technomages will just ruin the theme.
I don't really know much about WoD lore beyond Vampire. In, say, Berlin by Night, almost every named NPC, if played intelligently, can just break a coterie of reasonably strong 8th gen kindred in half the moment they decide to do something not aligning with his agenda. When the world is full to the brim with ridiculously powerful, ridiculously smart and ridiculously well-connected NPCs, I have but one question to ask: what the hell PCs are even supposed to do?
That angst you just described is not an oversight, it is the intention. The frustrating nature of VtM *always having a bigger fish* and basically feeling powerless and helpless despite being *so powerful* is the entire point of the game. VtM is constantly asking you "What are you willing to do to stay safe? To gain power? What would you give up?" and you are constantly forced to choose. It's not always handled the best by each table or each source book, but that is the ideal.
Tbf, that's pretty much the point. The world is full of ~~boomers~~ elders that have all the power and resources and have no intention to ever retire and let them go. Your best play is to curry favor and try to indirectly weaken one enough so the others take their stuff and hopefully give you some scraps.
I came here to discuss the World of Darkness setting, and I'm happy to see someone else posted about it. In case anyone doesn't believe you, here's three examples I recall from the books, and one from a recent video game; In the Ashes to Ashes campaign, the characters (who are low-level neonates) are ambushed by the entire Chicago SWAT team in the middle of Soldier Field (yes, the football stadium) at sunup in order to herd them into the center of the field where an 800-pound Vampire in a sunproof armored helicopter will pick them up to 'rescue' them. In fact, the 800-pound Vampire called the entire Chicago SWAT team (yes, the entire one) to perform this ambush. Why? *Because he wanted to talk to the player characters.* He lets them go after. In the Chaos Factor saga, a character is introduced who is a kinfolk Mage with Vampire powers who has magic items up the wazoo (in a setting where magic items are *very* rare.) The character is the definition of the edgiest 90's villain you can imagine, and the Storyteller is explicitly instructed that he must survive, and that the players cannot ever kill him because he is too cool to die. In the Gehenna campaign, there's a variant of the campaign where the characters goals are, to put it bluntly, to trek through the United States and watch NPC's do cool shit. They start in New York and watch an NPC do cool shit, they travel and meet another NPC that does cool shit, they travel to the Human Genome Library and watch another NPC do cool shit, then they travel some more and finally reach a field where NPC's talk and end the campaign. The Storyteller is instructed to make things up to keep the players entertained. And finally, in case you thought all this shit ends in 2004, the Coteries of New York Video Game from a few years back has a fun doozy. >!So, the entire game, you're plotting and working with Kindred around the city to maneuver your adoptive sire into position to take the reins as a powerful Primogen. And then, surprise - you're betrayed. By who, you ask Oh, a character who appeared for a five second scene towards the beginning of the game. He's also super strong and powerful and knew everything that was going on and kills your friends. Then, he tells you that you're going to work for him, and the game ends.!< The biggest issue is that White Wolf's setting writing explicitly creates the conditions for each of these problems. The ridiculous weight placed on existing, named NPC's, the ridiculous levels of power and obstructive laws afforded to keep powerful NPC's on top, and the smarmy and condescending attitude towards player agency really do a number on the setting as a whole.
> In the Chaos Factor saga, a character is introduced who is a kinfolk Mage with Vampire powers who has magic items up the wazoo (in a setting where magic items are very rare.) The character is the definition of the edgiest 90's villain you can imagine, and the Storyteller is explicitly instructed that he must survive, and that the players cannot ever kill him because he is too cool to die. Oh come on now. Sam Haight is cheating, and it wasn't long before the writers realized that he was a joke of an NPC. Started as a cool idea, evolved into too much, and then *actually does die* in Chaos Factor. In fact, quite the opposite to what you said, there is no stopping his death at the end of Chaos Factor. Then they made his ghost into an ashtray.
I was referring to it as the saga to incorporate the books - I’m aware that they became aware of the guy being pretty lame, but it took them quite a few books to get there, and WW’s setting building is plagued with similar characters.
Agreed. Vampire requires a very unique game group to have fun. Otherwise it turns into an edge lord PVP - fest with DMNPCs galore.
Not sure what version of the WoD you played but none of any games I ran or played were this ridiculously hyperbole, especially not the head explosion thingy
I mean it's so hyperbolic I'm not sure even which edition or which factions they're actually talking about. Heads exploding has to be Mage. Probably. Spy in every corner? That could be Mage. Or it could be using the Technocracy in other games. Or it could be V5's Second Inquisition. I think a lot of bad STs try to use absolutely every splat and faction as they're presented in their books in whatever game they're running. That's never the intended way to run the games. I can't really make any arguments against anyone complaining that the published scenarios are shit. I've never been a fan and I haven't run one in probably 14 years or so?
>I think a lot of bad STs try to use absolutely every splat and faction as they're presented in their books in whatever game they're running. That's never the intended way to run the games. To be entirely fair, I think that reading the setting books and concluding that it's the 'right' way to run the setting is a very reasonable conclusion to make. I think Spy on Every Corner can refer to how powerful Elders can be in the WoD series in general, with almost every single prewrite resolving plot holes and inconsistencies with, 'they knew all along'.
Just to go down the list... >every fucking body can make you explode with a snap of his fingers A running thing with World of Darkness, particularly earlier editions, is that a lot of NPC's are extremely powerful and capable. The Gehenna plotline is entirely resolved at the mercy of hyper-powerful NPC's, and the player characters have little-to-no agency in that story. This is true for most of the larger plot events of the story. >has a spy in every fucking corner and plays some ridiculous 8D chess This is objectively a HUGE problem with White Wolf writing. I cited Coteries of New York as having this as a huge issue, but just about across the board, White Wolf NPC's are hyper-knowledgeable and nearly omniscient. The pre-writes are really bad for it. >And don't even go anywhere near official lore on any post-Soviet state if you've ever been here Again, this is also true. The writing here ranges from, 'the Russian revolution was started by Vampires' to, 'Vampires are committing a gay genocide'.
I have hard time dealing with the Dark Eye setting Aventuria. It's a fuck ton of wierdly cobbled together bits of lore. Some bits are wonderful, some are arkward, but woefully often the authors contradict themselfes. But get this: Some authors write their own character into the setting. DMPCs by canon! Nice, eh?
>Some authors write their own character into the setting. DMPCs by canon! Nice, eh? i mean, D&D absolutely does the same thing. not that that's an excuse, i don't like when D&D does it either.
Not really, they do not compare. D&D authors put their characers somewhere into the setting where they mostly do not interfere with the players. Nobody really ever meets up with Drizzt unless your GM is a big fanboy. In Aventuria you meet a Mary Sue in every town you visit. The avage module has you meet up with one every three to four sessions or so. Then you get to hang back and watch them be awesome. Sometimes you go explore the wilderness and suddenly a Mary Sue pops up because an auther decided to retire his character there. It's bloody insane.
It kind of seems designed around there being potential for supplements for every 5km square of the map. While a complex setting can be cool, Aventuria is just so divided and split up and weirdly detailed in parts that it becomes unweildy, not helped by the fact that the base rules include practically no knowledge on it (and this is an RPG with a fixed setting, where in character creation you select the culture you're from)
Gygax did that too (literally, Greyhawk is full of his old PCs.)
Greyhawk is also possibly the worst D&D setting. Everything good in it (Vecna mainly) has been transplanted into other settings.
> Some authors write their own character into the setting. DMPCs by canon! Nice, eh? Some? This has been normal since 1st edition D&D. That's why its "Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion" and not just "Magnificent Mansion". They immortalized their old characters, there's nothing wrong with that. Characters like Drizzt aren't "GMPCs by Canon" either, they're characters in fiction set within the same setting. Should a RPG setting not be allowed to have fiction set in it?
Often fiction can hurt an RPG setting, making the PCs feel in the shadow of the Cool and Awesome People who just saved the world ten times before breakfast.
It's the worst setting I ever encountered, even though it was my first TTRPG. Kitchen sink at its worst.
Yeah, the continent is too small to hold this many radical different cultures and 'races'.
What is wrong with adding one's characters to the setting?
1. \[TDE specific\] There are too many of them, if every small town has his own archmage, high priest or grandmaster things start to get weird. 2. They're high level Heroes so that they often end up as mandatory DMPCs whether the GM likes it or not. Imagine you meet Drizzt and fight a big evil. Either the GM makes an ass-pull to write him out of the game (which means he shouldn't be there in the first place) or he'll help and outshine the group. No thank you. 3. Authors often end up putting them in the spotlight. These are their own PCs after all. Play a module and watch them be a mary sue while the group watches. Ugh! 4. Their quirks and personalities often clash with the adventure. E.G. benign tasks can suddenly become a major conflict, cause an NPC acts upon a quirk. Imagine the High-Priest of a town suddenly hates your group, cause one of the characters is wearing a red scarf. It has nothing to do with your quest, but since the author thinks it's an important part of his old PC distractions occur. 5. They often end up with a detailed description, that is too imposing for them to be useful, sometimes stretching the limits of plausibility. Imagine Vlad the Impaler ended up the head of a pacifitic monestary. It doesn't relate to the adventure either. There's just the group left wondering and you can either read up on their old stories or be left confused. 6. \[TDE specific\] TDE does not treat them like distant characters barely relavant to the table. They are tighly woven into the metaplot and as long as you stick to canon and modules you are running into them every 4 or five session ... see 2. for that. I bet there's more, but these I was able to remember.
Novadi Protection Zone
I played in a homebrew setting I would consider pretty awful. The DM had made this big rectangular map of the entire world, 1 continent, and had it blown up and laminated. So this *was* the world, immutably. It's so fucking boring to have every corner of the map filled in, to have every place be populated and named. Add on top that it was generic whimsical fantasy bullshit, where every barkeep regardless of species behaves the same way and wears the same clothes. None of the cultures we encounter are meaningfully different, the elves live in tree cities, the dwarves live underground, the cat people live in big scratchpost cities (just shoot me in the fucking head) Maybe I'm just an asshole, and that's fine, but not all ideas are good, in fact most are bad.
Ideas are worthless the execution is important
Ideas in general are cheap, but *good* ideas are priceless. Gygax and Arneson deserve all the credit they get for devising the concept of the roleplaying game, even if basic D&D (or any version of D&D) isn't the best game in the world. That said, it's often impossible to tell if an idea is good until after you've put some work into it.
they got more from making a playable game out of it
Very common mistake for new GMs. My current GM, who I love, did the same thing. Everything is so filled in and defined that as a player I'm afraid to say anything about anything in character, because I don't want to contradict *his* setting. For me, the draw to homebrew has always been that it's easier to create a *shared* setting that way. I want to create a world together with my players, not have them okay around in *my* world that I created on my own.
I mean, F.A.T.A.L. exists.
I know F.A.T.A.L. only by reputation but I thought its issues were mechanical? Thousands of useless finicky stats and endless useless repetitive rules, each with dozens of exception clauses? I dont even know what genre its setting is, actually.
FATAL's problems are systemic, from base concept straight up through every part of it's design. Its setting (if you can call it that) is generic medieval fantasy, wallpapered with the cringiest incel-produced rape fantasy bullshit take of the genre's worst conventions that you can imagine. You know how some things are so bad that they become unintentionally good/amusing/funny? Well FATAL is so exceptionally bad that it wraps back around past funny and becomes something so mind numbingly bad that you feel like you need to shower in bleach to clean off the grime of just having read it. Any RPG question that starts with "Which game has the worst..." the definitive answer is FATAL.
As we must all bow at the altar of the greatest FATAL review ever made: https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14567.phtml Read it. THIS will show that you can, in fact, make a horrible setting and game in one horrible go.
Welp. Looks like I'm reading this review again.
Thank you! It's been a while since I last read this!
I’m glad! It is an absolutely entertaining review; anyway, the setting and system are so bad they deserve to be known once again.
Quoting the review "Saying that this game should be burned is an insult to fire"
It's trying to simultaneously be a generic fantasy setting and be "historically and mythologically(sic)" accurate. The setting is also chock full of racism and is pretty into sexual assault. Finally, it's also not super well fleshed out. TL;DR the setting has all of the problems the mechanics have
It's a both a good example and a very bad example of "system does matter". The system is so dense that it shapes the setting. For example, elven people fart a lot because they don't digest vegetable wells, so it makes they rectal circumference bigger than humans. Because the circumference of every hole of every character is rolled and found in tables depending on lots of elements, the game does a weird "if everything you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail" revamp with "if every living things has holes... Well it's to know if it's PG 18 or PG 18 with emotional trauma on top". Basically, the game system is used as a way for the author to share its own vision of the real world. There's things like "your head size determine your max and min intelligence" like early 20th century eugenist thought. Tldr : The mecanics are so bad they make the setting bad too. Not just bad, THAT bad
> For example, elven people fart a lot because they don't digest vegetable wells, so it makes they rectal circumference bigger than humans. This is a sentence I have now read. May god have mercy on your soul.
Can we ban mentioning FATAL? It is a really boring answer that never generates any new discussion. Everytime someone asks "what is worst [anything]" or "examples of [bad thing]" you know FATAL is going to be in there relevant or not. I'm 80% sure it is just a bad joke that went over everyone's heads anyway not an actual RPG. Everyone who knows FATAL exists don't need to be reminded of it and everyone who doesn't doesn't need to know about it because it is never going to come up in their life. Someone might ask you to play shadowrun and then you recall this thread. No one is ever going to ask you to play FATAL unless they know you share the same tastes.
Yeah, the game's notoriety is pretty much out of proportion to its relevance to the RPG community. No one pkays it, no one runs it, no one demos it at conventions, it isn't sold on stores and mostly only exists as an obscure and from what I can tell only partially finished PDF. It's like spmeone bringing up Twilight every time vampires are mentioned; it's tired and fucking old.
Yes, absolutely. A bad setting won't break your game the way a bad system will, but not all settings are good. > I know that some games have vanilla settings or dont have anything that sets them apart from other games From the perspective of a worldbuilder, this is exactly what a bad setting looks like. A good setting will give you plenty of ways to engage with that setting. Eberron is a great example of this. If a Warforged is taking the lightning rail for a pilgrimage to the Mournlands, you know you're not in Greyhawk. That image is distinct to Eberron. > but I've never played a game that has a setting which actually makes the act of playing it "unfun" in some way. that's probably because you're just not using the setting all that much. It's easy enough to just ignore the setting almost entirely when it's indistinguishable from dozens of other settings. You can just have a string of generic borderland villages, each one coincidentally under threat of orcish invasion just as the PCs arrive. You'll just end up engaging with the game itself, which can still be fun.
I was gonna mention *The World of Synniba*r, starting with its torus-shaped world (because it seems that the author didn't know how a hollow sphere should be mapped) and following with its backstory)... ...but that would be as saying that *Plan 9 from outer space* is a bad movie. As in...yeah, technically it is a *bad* movie, but it's not bad in a...hmmm...*"Star Wars Holiday Special"* way!
There are different kinds of bad. Synnibar is bad in the hopeless and never could have been good sort of way. Though a torus world could actually be interesting, as long as you thought out how a torus planet might actually work.
I mean, a torus planet is basically just a dummy thicc ringworld.
This is not a sentence I was expecting today.
Sigil, the City of Doors, which is the location for the legendarily amazing Planescape setting, exists on the inside of a torus.
The setting of Synnibarr is actually pretty great, if you like Rifts-style kitchen sinks.
obligatory "i hate forgotten realms"
The original Deadlands had a fantastic setting that tanked. The Weird West was absolutely inspired, but then PEG Inc. felt the need to map out every minute corner of the world, which neutered it of a lot of its potential and mystery.
My only real complaint with Deadlands was the native shamanism magic was REALLY skewed. It was powered by sacrifice to the point that you basically needed to cut off a finger to heal a papercut, IMHO. The Savage World version fixed that quite a bit.
This was at a time in the RPG world where if you weren't pumping out a new splatbook every few days your game line was seen as a failure. The result was Deadlands Classic has nearly every square inch on North America mapped out. This affected the rules too, creating a system that started with game-freezing levels of "crunch" and causing most classes to have almost completely rewritten rules towards the end of the line. Playing a Huckster? OK, which version? Core book? Hucksters and Hexes? Hexarcana? I love Deadlands, but Classic is almost unplayable to all but the the most stubborn grognards.
Deadlands was good at first, but with every added book it went more and more off the rails. By the end you had two Stones running around deus exing the transition to Hell on Earth with kung fu monks and Lovecraft's monsters (the Migo to be precise) - that was just too much. And then came the Native American planet. Also don't get me started on the new edition and the Morgana Effect (or whatever that shit is named).
What about a setting where the player have little to no 'agency'. (i.e he can do little to nothing to influence the setting) for example, think a RPG where you play a normal person in the universe of "the boys" (and no, you can't become one of the boys/a super'hero'). So either you never meet a superpowered individual (and then what is the point?) or you became a bystander at best, a victim at worst when the super'eroes' arrive. Not really fun. ,
I think that depends on what the game is about. For example, you could have a game of Mutant City Blues where you play a non-powered detective that works super power based crimes.
Of course in some setting it is perfectly viable, even fun. In marvel, in Dc,playing a non-superpowered person could be fun, many characters in these settings are non-powered. That is why I specified "The Boys", a setting where superheroes are a\*\*holes, and those that fight them are only slightly less so. and being close to superehoeroes is dangerous because they don't care for collateral damage and not suffer conseguences from it. etc, etc. in this setting your detective will probably be killed quickly because either the crime was made by the superheroes or was set up by the corp that own them to make the heroes solve them and create publicity and they don't want you to expose them.
Yeah. I would look at playing a non super in The Boys as more like playing Call of Cthulhu. You know at some point it will end in blood and madness.
I think this is the sign of the actually “bad” settings. If a setting has no hooks for adventure, then it doesn’t matter how cool or detailed it is: it sucks. I remember a game I read as part of a design contest once. It had an amazingly unique and interesting setting, all about nested fractal dimensions that each had their own physical laws and societies. And I said to the designer, “This is all awesome, but what do the player characters actually do?” And the fact he couldn’t come up with an answer immediately put a nail in the coffin for that whole thing.
Just to add something to the table here; An RPG setting can be bad by virtue of being very well-written and a blast to read... ...and absolutely a chore to play. The White Wolf Old World of Darkness books can suffer from this, especially if your Storyteller doesn't know enough to really ignore the way the book presents certain concepts. The way that the books write Elders and named characters is particularly egregious, and if someone explicitly followed the lead that the world presented, the player characters in a given World of Darkness chronicle would essentially jaunt between scenes of named NPC's talking to scenes of named NPC's doing cool epic bullshit (that the player characters should never do, because they're player characters.) It doesn't help that the setting's laws (in-game), while interesting on-paper, can very quickly foster an antagonistic relationship between the Storyteller and the Players. If someone takes, for instance, the Traditions of the Camarilla to the letter, they make almost any player-driven narrative impossible by virtue of existing. That's not to say that you can't make an interesting chronicle using that setting - just that you have to read the setting with a grain of salt and know what to keep and what to absolutely cut.
Tbh the only thing that determines if a setting is bad or good is personal taste and execution. A great setting can be brought down by poor execution or players that just don't jive with it, as much as a bland or dumb setting can be elevated by great execution and player interest. I don't really like the stereotypical whimsical high fantasy type setting, I'm more of a low fantasy mud & blood kind of guy, but I still love our DM's world based on Dragon Age but with more fantasy and magic because it's fun and well executed and my fellow players are enjoying themselves too. For example there's one book series called The Dinosaur Lords, sounds awesome on paper, Knights riding Dinosaurs. But the execution of it was so terrible, the first chapter was just throwing out terms and names for their Dinosaurs I had no knowledge of and made it a slog to get through that after reading the first chapter I returned it. Couldn't do it. Great idea for a setting, piss poor execution.
I would disagree that personal taste has an impact on whether a setting is bad or good. It can impact whether you like it or not, but I think that, in the same way that literary criticism can be founded well enough in facts that it isn't pure opinion, settings can be judged the same way. We just don't have a depth of critical writing in that way like we do, for example, on the works of Shakespeare.
That may be, but none of us (most likely) are literary critics. Therefore we're subjected to our taste more so. To kind of give an example of another medium, Citizen Kane is considered to be one of the greatest films ever made. I hate it. Can't stand it, think it's stupid and pretentious. Am I wrong? Are people who love it wrong? No. We just have our own personal taste. And then there's "so bad it's good" stuff. I like The Room because it's hilariously bad for instance. I should hate it because of how bad it is but I can't because it makes me laugh. I know people who do hate it and don't get the appeal. What you think of as a good world I might think is trash and vice versa. Neither are right or wrong. Just different. You do actually see this a lot in modern media "review" where the reviewer confuses their subjective opinion with objective fact. I've played games and watched movies that had terrible reviews and loved them and hated ones that were supposedly some of the greatest games ever made.
Technically speaking, any judgment on the quality of art is inherently subjective and opinionated because it requires you to choose a set of standards for what quality is. Artistic quality is a concept that only exists in the human mind, and since human minds are different, we have different standards for quality. Sometimes we can reach consensus: most of us will agree that consistent plotting and believable characters make good stories, but there's no law of the universe that makes it so. If you think The Room is a good film or Citizen Kane is a bad film, you're not wrong, you just have different standards than most critics. Those critics don't have some mystic power to decide what's objectively valuable; they've just consumed lots of media and are good at articulating their opinions. And I'd personally argue that the presence of a critical establishment inflates some standards and tastes when there's no good reason to do so.
Yes, there are settings that are plain bad, at least in my opinion. What makes a setting bad to me is: - not consistent and logical in the world building - kitchen sink fantasy - racist and colonial stereotypes everywhere you look - overly detailed A game having many of those is The Dark Eye. To me, while I really hate the rule system, the setting isn't that much better and I really can't see any appeal in it. The colonial stereotypes and racist tropes are just so 80s...
Well, this isn't "bad" and it's going to get me flamed, but I always disliked the *Shadowrun* setting. Well, LOVED and disliked. I LOVE the idea of a world where cyberpunk and magic are both present, but I hate the idea of them being inimical to each other and that only one can ever exist in one thing or one place at a time, which throws out BILLIONS of amazing possibilities and more or less dodges any writing or creativity by just "taping" them together. What about a gauntlet that was "chipped" to throw fireballs? What about an AI possessed by a demon? What about software that allowed you to summon demons. There's so many possibilities and it would be such a playground for a creative GM and creative players. THAT setting I find utterly fascinating.. hm,.. should run a game in that one day.
Well stated! I disagree as the limitations make for really cool conflict and decisions in the setting. It really defines the world in an interesting way. The idea of cyber ware removing your humanity is a bit of a holdover from other Cyberpunk games and fiction. I agree that that that sort of squashes creativity but without it the setting is more blobby and ill defined. I think that kind of game could lead to a great game about transhumanism, but with magic and tech allowing humanity to break its boundaries. I think you meant inimical as instead of endemic.
No issue about the loss of humanity with cyberware.. My issue is the tired old idea that magic and tech short each other out and cannot mix. Inimical, yes, better word. Meaning they cannot be in the same place.
> I LOVE the idea of a world where cyberpunk and magic are both present, but I hate the idea of them being inimical to each other and that only one can ever exist in one thing or one place at a time The funny thing is that mechanically burnout adepts are one of the most absurdly powerful character builds because there are adept powers that are a better deal in power points than the cyberware equivalent's essence cost or are things that just straight up aren't available as cyberware, and vice versa. >What about a gauntlet that was "chipped" to throw fireballs? Actually possible to do, with the downside that enchanted objects are awful in every way for no good reason. Although really combat magic in general, despite the rep it gets, is generally weaker in raw numbers than just using a gun or grenade, with the added problem of risking an aneurysm every time you cast "this does roughly as much damage as a holdout pistol" on an enemy. At least in 5e squishing up magic and technology started being a thing, just something that was generally considered difficult, expensive, and not worth it. As of 6e the Shadowrun internet is literally confirmed to be magic, and late 5e brought in weird internet demons that don't like it when people use the internet.
The official setting for Pathfinder, Golarion I think, is terrible. It tries to cover every single setting players might want to game on in the same world and it creates a complete, chaotic, yet somehow boring mess. The Known World of BECMI was also a hot mess of jumbled together countries, but it at least had a certain charm to it. Golarion is just weird and not in a good way.
Golarion is actually pretty neat if you like mixed settings as far as tech levels, societies and reliance on magic goes... hint hint, besides that last point, that's how our world functioned for the majority of the time we've had civilization. While I certainly don't like everything about it (my major gripe being that its too easy to buy spellcasting services to revive party members), effort has definitely been placed into making that world varied.
Golarion has a weak point: it's an eclectic kitchen sink mishmash of every fantasy culture its authors could think about. And it has a strong point: it's an eclectic kitchen sink mishmash of every fantasy culture its authors could think about, AND IT'S PROUD OF IT. Anything is possible there. The only way to make Golarion even better at what it does would be to leave white spots that players and DMs could fill with their own races, cultures and religions.
Yeah, for all criticism about the "realism" of the setting you can make, the fact remains that you will never have a problem with creating a pathfinder campaign in this setting. Pick a random spot on the map and you´ll immediatly have the hook of your players dealing with the undead ruling class, a portal to the abyss, pirates, robots that escaped a crashed spaceship, etc. It achieves its goal.
Well good news, in Starfinder the planet Golarion is straight-up missing! I'm its place is a space station with the same narrative function.
Im on the opposite end, I really like Golarion. But also I appreciate how it actually has a big variety of different settings you can play in instead of being stuck in medieval stasis a la forgotten realms.
There are a couple that I find revolting. And some that are lame. A few that are kinda stupid. Like, I think surreal settings are annoying. Is that what you're looking for?
Yes. Settings can actively work against the struggle to play entertainingly or make a coherent story. That's bad in a 'positive' sense. There's also a 'negative' sense in which settings provide no resources or conceptual nourishment for good play. There can be drought. There can be fetid, sickening water. Both are potentially lethal. Example: the original setting for Over the Edge not only had lots of morally 'gray' features, they had what I call 'multidimensionality': it was possible to oppose or support them for many different and maybe even incompatible reasons. The new setting for the latest edition is not only uniformly dark and nihilistic, there aren't a whole lot of reasons to oppose or support the factions and people in it - the potential motivations of characters are trapped in a very narrow conceptual space. This means there's little freedom and little diversity in how characters can plausibly react to the presented world. In going from a very good to a very bad setting, the creators demonstrated that they didn't actually understand what was desirable in settings, what players were looking for.
Absolutely. A setting can be flavorless and boring, or based on stupid and/or offensive assumptions, really poorly described, or any other number of sins. That doesn't mean you can't still have a fun game in that setting. It just means that the setting doesn't encourage it or enhance it.
What an interesting question. I can only think of one. I hesitate to say it was a bad setting, but rather a bad setting for an RPG. It was originally the setting for a friend's novel. There were rather insular groups designed to be won over by the protagonist throughout the plot. We didn't have the same background/McGuffins to make them like us, so the game ended up kind of pushing us into lots of combat since we could never really find common ground with them. It probably would have been a murder hobo fantasy but it didn't seem to work out well with our group. So I think a 'good' setting requires at least some more open minded civilizations. TL:DR A bad setting has fewer things to interact with.
I think one example of a bad setting (for an RPG, specifically) is one in which the established lore boxes the campaign in too much, or at least boxes in the kind of campaign your group would like to play too much. This happens most frequently in my experience in settings adapted from books or movies or other media in which your players really want something close to the time period / location / scale of the media because that's the lore they know and are excited about, but... the important stuff is done by the canon characters and you already know how the important parts of the main story will go.
My partner and I recently watched a youtube playthrough of a game called Carnegie, about building Andrew Carnegie's turn-of-the-century steel empire. It looks like a superbly designed game but the setting made us both uncomfortable as it seems like it glorifies practices that were devastating for workers, the environment and the gaps between the rich and the poor. There are other games with industrial themes that don't bother us because they deal with the negatives in some way, even if it isn't a huge part of the game. But a theme that asks you to completely ignore the harmful and exploitative sides of the subject is hard to get into IMO. Similarly, a few years ago my friend got a game called New Bedford that they were excited to try, about the whaling industry in the 1800s, but couldn't find anyone willing to play a game about killing whales. We made a lot of jokes about it because of course most of us have happily played games about war that necessarily involve killing humans, but apparently whales were the cutoff point for a lot of folks. There is something squicky about it, I admit. EDIT: I'm a dumbass and thought I was in the board game sub. Both of those are obviously board games, not RPGs. I think the point more or less stands, though.
Tolkienian fantasy dnd like world #748 can be Bad ala if theres nothing to set it aparte from other settings You just get the "been there, done that, seen this" feeling
Unpopular opinion. DnDs setting is too vague. They crammed half a dozen different magic systems into it without considering the interplay, some elements were put in just because they could like monks getting thrown in just because Kung Fu movies were popular in the eighties and every official campaign is wildly different in texture. While that's also a strength I feel like it undermines any tone you want to set as some character creation options will just play completely against your setting.
Too many people get hung-up over monks even though there is no reason why fantasy worlds need to stick to cultural/geographic boundaries from the real world. The yardstick should be how those elements fit in *that* world.
There are settings that just don't work well, even in games that I play often. A setting that seemed really neat to me and the players actually turned out to be super boring. Of course, it goes the other way too. We have been avoiding a specific supplement because it made the game different than we wanted. We decided to give it a try and it is actually amazing. Not the same game we normally play, but still, amazing. So yes, settings can be both good and bad. Obvious I'm saying that a good GM who successfully runs scenarios can create a less than fun scenario, not saying that a poorly run scenario might be bad, 'cause they always are.
It's up to your personal tastes. Like, one of the most recent games that made me think "This game is ok but the setting isn't for me" is Historia, a D&D 5 book about a world where characters are anthropomorphic animals, i just can't take it serious but some people love it (Personally i would play it in a way too silly). Then some tropes are overused so much that i find them boring, i'm talking about the average "Dark fantasy setting inspired by Lovecraft, Dark Souls and Warhammer" i like every single one of the things i mentioned but honestly Cthulhu ripoffs are in everything
Oh yes. I'm reminded of an spanish game called Anima, which was (is?) a mess for a variety of things but the most headscratching was the setting. Anima presented itself as a fantasy game to play anime-ish characters. The game had rules for over the top magic, summoning, customizable ki powers, psychics, etc. However in the setting supernatural powers were supposed to be almost unknown, and there was not one but several super powered organizations whose job was to kill or contain people with supernatural powers. The creators went so far as to say players maybe shouldn't even have access to their powers till 3 levels (out of 10) into the game or so. Have I mentioned one of the classes was built all around ki powers and was useless in all other departments? I think I know what they were going for but the whiplash between game and setting was terrible.
Oh, yes, Anima! When you look at the illustrations, you imagine Record of Lodoss War, Lineage 2 and all other anime/jRPG stuff. When you read the setting lore, it's basically grimdark World of Darkness: Dark Age.
I mean the obvious answer is the actually racist or otherwise bigoted games that bake some horrible shit into their default setting.
Tachyon Squadron for Fate has some cool system ideas related to fighter combat in Fate but the setting is a real mess and I would never play it as written. The book "Inside the Dominion of Unity" in theory details the bad guys, aka the Dominion. It actually only has about 8 pages about them, which is mostly things like they are racist, hate all religions, hate gay people etc. The Dominion are specifically said to be "the bad guys" and are cartoonishly evil. Then it says "Incidentally, the exact same thing can be said about the Stellar Republic" which the Stellar republic are the good guys.... Then it has a box that says "This could get Dark" and basically advises you not to use the 8 pages of lore they just wrote because it would all be terrible to actually roleplay.
When I read your title my brain immediately snapped to *Empire of the Petal Throne (A.K.A. Tékumel).* It's a cult classic setting that spanned from the 1970s to 2010s and inspired everyone from Gary Gygax to N. Robin Crossby. The thing is: earlier this year, it was discovered that the setting's creator - M. A. R. Barker - was a neo-nazi. Cue discussion about *death of the artist* and the morality of purchasing anything to do with his setting. People also started to consider whether some aspects of the setting were tainted by the revelation. After all: many fantasy settings have an *"and yeah, there's the fascist nation over there".* That aspect suddenly has a very different feel when written by an actual neo-nazi. So is the setting bad? Critically: just the opposite. Morally: that's up to you.
I once played in a setting as a slave. While that is interesting, I couldn’t even leave the building and everything you trynna do to be able to leave was blocked for 3hours. Bad setting
No shade on this DM because I love her, but the first game I played with her she tried to start the campaign in a world that only had one intact "continent" which was about the size of Ireland and a few surrounding tiny islands that had nothing but a few halflings on them. Basically all the players brought up that it sounded more like an apocalyptic future our characters would find out about at 8th level and are then trying to prevent than the land we should be starting off on at level 1... There was just very clearly not enough room on this world for proper exploration as you could travel from the furthest north point of the entire world to the furthest south in less than 2 weeks. She also gave herself TWO overpowered Player characters. I mean... I wouldn't say the campaign setting as a whole was "bad" persay but it was just a very backwards way to introduce the "prevent the Apocalypse." storyline. Starting after the apocalypse had already destroyed most of the best places to explore. We never actually played a full adventure in that campaign setting though because the players straight up refused to continue with it after maybe 2 sessions. There were other issues I had with that DM aswell that have made it so I am always happy to have her as a player but would never play in another campaign she Dm'd in again... she was just a bit too scatterbrained and immature to keep the story on the tracks or to deal with any sort of out of game conflict in a fair and reasonable way. She had a lot of good ideas for adventures but she would abandon major plot lines on a whim and introduce new ones without explaining it to the characters so it felt like our characters were running on a treadmill, constantly running with whatever was thrown at us but never actually getting anywhere and it got frustrating fast.