Game WISH 93: Enough and Too Much
Does joining a game with a lot of background thrill or intimidate you? What do you do to try to learn the background, or to compensate for not having it? If you GM, how do you help newcomers to a background-heavy game? What has worked for you as a player/GM, and what hasn't?
I love games with rich, detailed settings. I remember the time I first joined the RPGAMES forum on CompuServe many years ago, and reading through the background files for the various games run on the message boards. Two of the first games I joined were the two with the greatest volume of background material: Hawiian Vacation, a GURPS cyberpunk game with a very detailed future history and long lists of megacorps, and Gensalorn, a game using the Runequest rules, with an equally detailed list of cultures and history. The first proved to be one of the most memorable games I have ever played in, the second unfortunately folded not long after I joined because several other players dropped out around the same time (nothing to do with me, I have to say!).
I think the reason like detailed settings as a player is because I like my characters to be grounded in some kind of context. Unless the game is set in some variant of the real world, in which case the real world can stand in as the setting, I have difficulty coming up with character concepts unless I have a clear idea of the character's place in the world. If so much of the world is unspecified, I then have to create bits of the world myself, which risks treading on the toes of both the GM and of other players, whose vision might be different from mine.
This isn't to everyone's taste, though. I know gaming groups and have heard of plenty of others that think a defined setting is an anathema, because it 'restricts what can happen'. That is a perfectly valid style of play, especially for campaigns that lean heavily on the tropes of Hollywood action movies; it's just not to my taste. I've heard such campaign styles described as "Truman Show Games" after the film, in which the PCs and the immediate plotline exist in a vacuum, and there is no wider world that either affects or is affected by events within the game.
Putting on my GM's hat, the problem with detailed complex settings is making them accessible to new players. It's a fact that many would-be players aren't prepared to wade through a hundred or more pages of closely-spaced text explaining weird cultural customs and the complex interrelationships of clans, cults, guilds and megacorps.
One approach to take is for the starting player characters to have as little knowledge of the gameworld as the players themselves. This was the approach, I believe, taken by Empire of the Petal Throne, in which the initial PCs are assumed to be crass barbarians newly arrived in the empire. I've tried taking a similar approach when I decided to add a couple of new players to my online Kalyr game. The existing characters encountered an ancient space/time portal, and I asked the two new players to generate characters from present-day earth, who then ended up falling through this portal, to land in a strange and exotic world.
Another is to narrow the focus, an approach I've also used for convention style one-shots for the Kalyr setting. Don't try to explain the whole world, just the bits necessary for the character's backgrounds. For my Kalyr one-shots I've made all characters agents for the same guild. Hero Quest takes a similar approach; rather than overload players with details of all the myriad races and cultures of Glorantha, focus on just one or two of them as the settings for beginning campaigns.