One more thing: I’ve got a big announcement coming soon, and
I think I may be relocating my blogging efforts to a new venue. So, keep your
eyes peeled!
Gaming: I’ve been
thinking about campaign setting books lately, specifically what they do right
and what they do wrong. I’ve been involved with several over my career,
including 2nd Edition Birthright, Alternity Star*Drive, 3rd
Edition Forgotten Realms, and 4th Edition Dark Sun. And I’m starting
to wonder about the conventional wisdom behind the “classic” campaign setting
organization.
The conventional wisdom is that the best settings lay out
vast narratives of history and lovingly detail dozens of important kingdoms. They
include large chapters dedicated to rules sets that customize your characters
to the setting, and hundreds of named NPCs arranged carefully in relational
webs, with scores of stories waiting to unfold as the DM picks a few dominoes
and knocks them over. Settings such as the Forgotten Realms or Golarion are
great examples: There’s enough material in either of those books to run your
next fifty D&D campaigns without playing in the same locale twice. But here’s
the problem: Most campaigns really run 4-8 months before the group hits a
switching point and moves on to something else. We professionals build these
settings as if we expect everyone who buys them to spend the rest of their
natural lives exploring one particular world, but few groups really do that.
In my opinion, a good setting book shouldn’t be an atlas or
a “frozen snapshot” of a living world. A campaign setting should instead be a
*toolkit*, a set of things that make it possible for a DM to easily create
great adventures in an interesting, memorable world. Ten thousand years of
history doesn’t make a setting inherently more suitable for gaming: What you
really need are a short set of fallen empires and ruined kingdoms to explain
where dungeons in your game come from. Unique NPCs with compelling narratives
are great, but what’s even better are ready-to-use monsters and villains the DM
can use to populate a dungeon. New character classes or feats are great, but
how about information on how existing characters fit in the world?
With that in mind, here are the components I think I’d want
to include in the next setting I work on…
-
A BIG chapter devoted to world-specific monsters
and villains. One of the most important ways you define a setting is by the
baddies you fight there, but many setting books skimp on providing ready-to-use
libraries of bad guys (usually because those are reserved for a separate
monster book). They ought to be included in the setting book from the start.
-
A long list of “known dungeons,” like the one in
the 3rd Edition FRCS. That 2-page spread does more to inspire DM
adventure-creation than 100 pages of atlas/gazetteer about all the countries in
the setting.
-
Scads of dungeon and site maps. The old Iron
Crown sourcebooks used to be great at providing these. Drawing interesting
dungeon maps is tough for a lot of DMs, and there’s no reason the setting book
can’t help out with that.
-
Player material that anchors the PCs in the
setting, but doesn’t make you throw out the Player’s Handbook. If you’re
running a 3e or a 4e campaign you have a hundred races and thirty classes to
choose from already; settings should focus on fitting those pieces together
instead of adding to the clutter. Dark Sun’s themes were pretty good, but I
think it could be done with a little less new crunch.
What do you wish your campaign setting books included? Where
are the publishers letting you down?
Politics/Current
Events: Well, there’s certainly a lot going on this week with the Benghazi
whistleblower testimony, the IRS scandal, and the AP record search. I’m just
going to poke at the IRS story for a moment. Either the IRS was directed to
bias itself against conservative groups, or its bias is institutional. The
former would be bad enough—Nixonian, really—but the latter troubles me even
more. Unfortunately, it makes all too much sense. When one party has
represented itself as the party of government for decades, it follows logically
that people *in* the government voting their own self-interest would naturally
come to support that party with their own votes. Anybody in the federal
government (well, outside the military) could reasonably conclude that their
odds of seeing pay raises, more generous benefits, more opportunities for
promotion, etc., would be improved by electing politicians who want to increase
the federal budget. That’s why public-sector unions such as AFSCME or AFGE are
such strident supporters of Democrat politicians and positions.
I’ve griped more than once about the conflicts of interest
inherent in public sector unions. However, most public sector employees don’t
have the power to directly suppress opposition. The IRS does. It has a special
responsibility to be absolutely impartial. If the bias at the IRS is
institutional, that is a gigantic mess, especially when you consider that the
IRS is about to become the primary enforcement arm for Obamacare. Bad enough if
the IRS has its thumb on the scales to suppress opposition speech. What happens
if they start putting their thumbs on the scale to penalize individuals or
businesses with opposing viewpoints once they’re wielding the powers they gain
under the ACA?
This isn’t a matter of “We don’t like the Tea Party, so of
course they should face extra scrutiny for tax exemption.” Equal treatment
under the law is the very foundation of the American social compact, and if
that principle is called into question, bad things can follow. We need to get
the politics out of the IRS, and pronto.
The Finer Things:
I ran into a nice amber the other day: Scuttlebutt Amber Ale, brewed by
Scuttlebutt up in Everett, Washington. Quite good! A little hoppier than most
other ambers, but not remotely into bitter or IPA land. I’m not a big hops fan,
I guess.
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