Wrote a new blog today about how much setting should go in a rulebook. It’s different for every game, but I feel a lot of games put too much lore in with the rules.
I know it’s really hip to have your setting lean on your mechanics and vice versa, so neither works great without another, but I am more of a fan of rules that support tone and play patterns that reinforce genre more than specific settings. Probably mostly because I am not big on learning a lot about a setting before I feel good about running a game.
I also like to have lots of room to improv and make a setting my own. I know you can do that with any setting, but I just feel more confident doing that with less definition in the setting.
I could probably drop a little something more into my rulebook as a stinger to get people excited about what kind of fiction the game presents. I guess that could be interpreted as setting, or at least adjacent.
Curious about what other think about this topic.
https://infantofatocha.itch.io/chronomutants/devlog/572397/whats-a-paradox-war-anyway
I want rpg book to be complete and self supported. Rules are IMO less important than setting, so I expect rpg books to contain less rules than than lore.
I don’t want to use calculus to estimate damage, and realistically a big table of bonuses/maluses for an action is useless in real life as the GM has to set up a difficulty without breaking the game flow. But I want to know about that lady who rules her noble clan by poisoning her opponent, that cult of Eunuch monks who can see the future and the new religions who spread and is about to kick out the new God. These are the elements I need to create story.
Rules are an element to make the setting alive, and sometimes a whole part of that setting, for example D&D alignment and mage who forget their spell are a huge setting choice
“Rules are IMO less important than setting” that’s the hottest take I’ve gotten so far. I agree in spirit. I love it when the rules get out of the way of narrative and immersion. That’s probably why I love Electric Bastionland so much. It’s got a real solid simple foundation that I can use for any story about exploring a dangerous space.
Personally I always prefer when the rules of a system can stand alone and don’t make too many assumptions about the setting. One of the biggest adjustments I had to make when migrating my group from D&D 5e to Pathfinder 2e is that Pathfinder makes far more assumptions about setting compared to D&D.
In Pathfinder there are certain classes and game mechanics which are very tightly coupled to the setting of Golarion, particularly for the Cleric and the Champion. I personally am not a big fan of “loose Pantheon” and “interventionist gods” in my fantasy and spent a lot of time on my own custom setting for D&D which I’ve been porting into Pathfinder.
It’s surprising given how much better PF is in other ways that it tries to force its (IMO kinda dumb) setting on the game. Like Pathfinder Champions and Clerics literally say that you have to worship an individual god, not a Pantheon, and that your god directly gives you powers. Whereas D&D Clerics and Paladins just say that you need to dedicate yourself to an idea, and that the religion may or may not be involved. IMO this is much better as a setting-agnostic system.
I think part of the reason D&D wins out here despite the fact that Pathfinder is the (again IMO) better-designed system overall is that D&D has a legacy of multiple settings being used for its adventures, whereas my understanding is that PF has always used the same setting. So when WOTC was creating 5e they built in a certain degree of setting-agnosticism from the ground up.
5e rulebook has a very weird balance of lore/rules. There is so much lore, like pages for each race, but they are fairly vague. I have a hard time imagining anyone using the loosely Tolkien races strictly as presented in the rulebook. So I ask why so many pages dedicated to that?
I think that, like with so much else in 5e, they lean heavily on the DM to fill in the blanks. And while I’ve come to disagree with that philosophy for mechanics design, I actually really appreciate it for the fluff. It allows me to fill in the blanks with stuff about my own setting rather than have to use theirs. 5e gives you just enough fluff to explain why each race/class gets the features it gets, but then leaves a lot open to interpretation and to the DM’s world.
Almost every great 5e campaign I’ve ever played in or watched in an actual-play used a custom setting instead of Forgotten Realms. Whereas with PF2e, I was surprised when I first joined the community that virtually everyone in the online spaces seemed very familiar with all of the Golarion lore, which I suppose makes sense since it seems more “expected” for PF2e.
Please don’t self-promote the same link across multiple communities at once. 🫤 Feels super spammy.
Sure. I’m still trying to get the lay of the land over here. In my defense, I’m not selling anything and would really like to talk about lore in rulebooks.
I sort of agree, I have never played in a premade setting except for a 2-shot for city of mist and I’ve never GMd one at all, and I often spend a lot of time reading rulerooks for ideas for my own RPGs.
I’ve been trying to write my own collaborative storytelling game recently rewards players for taking on a storyteller role but doesn’t stop players who would prefer to remain as one character for the session, and when I read Ben Robbins’ blog post about Remember Tomorrow, I thought I could use a part of this and bought the pdf. I’m trying to build a royal court political thriller type system and I know that this was cyberpunk by default, but 3/4 of the page count is really guidance on how to make a specific tone of cyberpunk lore, with the rules interwoven between them.
I feel that if your system is novel and applicable to many tones and genres, it should be seperated from that genre any related setting in the rulebook, and similarly if you’re rules and genre are wrapped up, it’s a good idea to seperate setting slightly, which we commonly seen in fantasy RPGs.
I feel they should be in the same book, but unless your rules are absolutely dependent on your genre or your the two absolutely dependent on your settings, it’s wise to seperate them to make your book more easily usable by those wanting to work your ideas into their own.
That blog is a fascinating pitch. Thanks for the rec.