Game Wish 41

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 41: Coherence

I've got seriously behind on these.

How coherent do you expect a game world to be? Is a game world merely a stage for the characters, or does it have a life of its own? How deep does it need to be to satisfy you? How do you contribute as a player or GM to making the game world more coherent, if you do?

I place a lot of importance on coherence. To me, internal consistancy matters far more than adherence to genre tropes, one reason why I don't particularly like either DnD-style generic fantasy or spandex'n capes superhero games.

My model for a game universe is definitely the book trilogy with 50 pages of appendices at the back rather than the generic Hollywood action movie with lots of kewl fight scenes but a backstory that doesn't make sense (The Matrix, anyone?). I like game worlds with a lot of detail, that give the characters some sort of context in which they exist.

Saying that, the world has to be accessible. Even if there are several hundred pages of notes describing nations, locations, personalities, religions and so on, it should still be possible to summarise in a paragraph or two. There are some very rich fantasy worlds, such as Glorantha where the density of internal references is so great that newcomers to the world can easily feel intimidated by the amount of information they're expected to assimilate. The publishers of Glorantha have countered this to some extent by focussing on just one culture within the wider world, at least for beginning scenarios.

My own world Kalyr suffers from this problem to some extent. I've tried running convention style scenarios focussing on just one organisation (The Karazthan, the secretive but powerful guild of technology), avoiding the need to dump a whole load of information on other guilds or organisations on the players heads. This approach seemed to me to be a success, if the game I ran at Gypsycon is anything to go by.