On Gameworlds and Campaign Frames

Been a while sing I've posted anything substantial on RPGs.

So let's look at settings. What is a setting? How much or how little setting does a game need? On Troy Costisick's Socratic Design, one of the better RPG theory blogs out there, Troy tries to define settings:

At the moment, I have identified nine aspects of Setting. They are:

-History
-Geography
-Authority (as in Government/Rulers/etc.)
-Social Situation
-Mythology/Religion
-Inhabitants
-Where the PCs Fit In
-Dynamic Forces
-The Mutables

ALL of these are important to a Setting, but not all of them are always present. The first five aspects I call Lesser Aspects. Not because they are unimportant (remember I said all aspects have importance) but because if they are absent, the game can still be quite functional.

I find it useful to make the distinction between the Gameworld and what I call the Campaign Frame. A given gameworld can include more that one possible campaign frame. To use a well known example, The World of Darkness is a gameworld, while Vampire is a campaign frame. 'Setting' is often used ambiguously to describe both, but in many cases they're really two different things.

What Troy calls the Lesser Aspects seem to me to be attributes of the Gameworld. The last three aspects are attributes of the Campaign Frame. 'Inhabitants' is probably a bit of both.

Published settings seem to emphasise one or the other. Call of Cthulhu or Dungeon-Crawling DnD are all about campaign frames. Games like HeroQuest/Glorantha and GURPS:Transhuman Space are primarily gameworlds; the former contains several potential campaign frames, while the great perceived weakness of the latter is that it doesn't provide any clear campaign frames.

Of course, 'Dynamic Forces' and 'Mutables' need definition; Troy defines them thus:

Dynamic Forces are forces that directly impact the characters. It can be anything from orcs to secret police to a terrorist organization. Where does the conflict in the Setting come from? What do the players play against? Finally, the mutables. These are things the PCs can change in the world. What can the player-characters impact? How do their actions matter in the context of the Setting?

So what about my Kalyr setting? I've got a lot of history, geography, mythology,social situation and authority; some of my players even claim to have read it all. One quite important element of Kalyr is that it can support a number of distinct campaign frames, which have different but overlapping sets of Dynamic Forces, Mutables, and where the PCs fit it.

For my online PBeM and PBmB games I didn't start with an explicit campaign frame. I began by throwing the whole gameworld background at the players and let them come back with just about any character concept that caught their imagination. Then I built the game around whatever they came up with. The end result was a diverse roster of PCs with very different allegiances and agendas. I never really have a 'party' as such in either game, and there have been an awful lot of one-to-one threads. But the games have been running for 10+ years, and it's been a lot of fun to GM (and presumably to play as well), so clearly I've been doing something right.

But for a face-to-face game that approach won't work well. All the face-to-face games I play nowadays are convention-style one-shots. Such games really need much more of a specific campaign frame on order to work at all, both to cut down the amount of background information that the players have to assimilate before play, and to be able to create a coherent group of PCs with a rational reason to stay together.

My Kalyr gameworld can support at least four different campaign frames, possibly more. What I think would be useful for a published game would be tools to create campaign frames out of the conflicts inherent in the game world.