Designing a setting: part 4 - faction differences

Something that cropped up in the recording of an upcoming Meeples podcast: the difference between factions in settings.

There's kind of a scale: at one end we have most any war on Earth, to a greater or lesser extent. The factions are all fundamentally identical (like, duh, human!), and for the most part their technologies are identical or close to it. Sure, we can find counter-examples, such as (say) German tanks vs Polish cavalry, English longbows, but, to be fair, most of those are simply one side not catching up with the other, rather than anything deeper. At the other end, Spartan's Planetfall is a great example (and so, to a lesser extent, is 40K), where the factions are technologically vastly different to the point of having gone down completely divergent development lines (and races), and the core factions pretty much do not share any tech within the context of the game.

It's another design decision, I guess. How 'alien' are your factions to each other, both in terms of species, and almost as interestingly, technology? And you're not restricted to the endpoints of the line: for example, let's imagine a humanocentric setting where the raw materials to do anti-gravity and Battletech-like are artificial muscles ('myomer') are both rare. Divide the humans into two: one faction controls most of the AG raw material, one the myomer, and has for long enough that their technologies have evolved to match - one side uses grav-tanks, the other 'mech walkers.

Personally (and this is very much a personal opinion), I like to stray towards the 'same but different' end. This may be something to do with the fact that I'm fond of subtlety: I like the idea of being characterised by difference, rather than defined by it.

Anyway. That's today's pondering, brought on by running out of podcasts on the train back from London. Enjoy :D

Designing a setting: part 3 - technology, cheese, open-endedness and replay value

Way back when I started this series of thoughts, I got some very useful comments on the initial post, which I'm going to pick up on now that we've covered fluff as a key ingredient to a setting. Specifically, I'm thinking about open-endedness, and development/evolution, which means it's 'Mike waffles and ponders' time!

There's a tricky line to draw here. In an ideal world, story development is/should be a given. It's about the fluff - your setting moves along - much as (say) the VBCW setting does - so that there are always new things happening, but not so fast that people don't have time to play with what's available. If we look at the real-world setting of WW2 as an example, in six years an awful lot happens, factions rise and fall, technology advances...

Not all settings get this last bit right. Battletech (I quote this a lot, because as big, sweeping, SF settings go, it's one of the biggest and for the most part best) doesn't, in my opinion. The arrival of the Clans is a massive 'outside context problem', which isn't, in and of itself, an issue - it gives the existing factions new adversaries, the chance for new Alliances. But unfortunately at around about the same time, the Clans bring new tech with them, and the existing factions develop new tech, and it's game breaking tech, and they got that bit badly wrong. One of the core unwritten precepts of the original 3025/6 tech Battletech was that, to sum it up crudely, the only things that could blow a Mech's head off in one shot could only do so at short range. With the advent of the 3050-era tech, and extended range PPCs and Ultra AC-20s (for example), death from long range was suddenly much more likely. To be fair, this is actually a rather dumb piece of brokenness in the rules about the amount of armour and internal structure 'Mechs can have: the rules were originally designed around 3025-era balance, for which they work beautifully.

40K, of course, does this far worse, in that it doesn't really even pretend that what it's doing is advancing the setting - it's just pure 'cheese' - changes to the rules, because it can, and because it wants another pull on the direct line from little Johnny to daddy's plastic.

It's an interesting problem, though. You can make the argument that WW2 has this: bring a Tiger into an early war scenario, and it's massively unbalancing. And if you want to 'follow along' with WW2 as the campaign advances, you wind up replacing all your armies by the end of the war to keep with the story. But at least with any self-respecting set of rules, the game doesn't go out of whack if your forces are from the same period with the setting.

War, though, is a great driver for technology. You can't escape how much military technology advanced during both world wars and then slowed down a large amount thereafter. If your setting is at all high-tech, it's difficult to avoid (Moore's Law, anyone! :D) the fact that technology will and should get better over time unless you've hit some arbitrary, physical or scientific limit (the speed of light, the size of an atom of silicon, the strength/height of a normal human, etc).

Having waffled my way through that (*grin*) I think what I'm saying is that advancing the 'story' of a campaign is great: giving people new opponents and/or new contexts in which to fight enhances the odds they'll stick with your setting, that magic that is 'replay value'. And sure, everyone likes 'the new shiny': the trick is not to do new in-game tech and weaponry for the wrong reasons, not to make it so awesome that you can't, effectively, play the game without it. Introduce it slowly, make it scarce, make it have disadvantages - even if these boil down to 'it's so expensive you can only have 1', or 'you can have that Tech 3 energy weapon, but you need to mount it on a slow, massive chassis that can't use other tech because it needs all the power...'

In short - it's as much a game-design balance problem as anything else. If your developing story starts to lead you towards the new shiny, you need to consider long and hard what it does to the game.

Designing a setting: part 2 - Fluff

Finally making my way back to the series I started on the way to Seattle - designing a setting. Several people made very useful comments on the introductory post, and I'll pick up on those in the inevitable articles that happen after the one's I've planned :D

Not taking things in quite the order I listed them at the start, we'll begin with:

Fluff. Fluff is that stuff that isn't essential to your setting in terms of rules, army lists etc. The peripheral writing, the backstory, the art, you name it...You can play in your setting without it...

...well, actually you can't.

Ok. You can. But all you're doing at that point is pitting two sets of statted up miniatures against each other and having a battle.

The best settings, the ones that draw you in, are the ones where the fluff grabs you and draws you in, inspires you. It's the stuff that gets you immersed in the setting, wanting to be a part of it.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Like or loathe the business practices behind it, the Warhammer 40K universe absolutely rolls in fluff on an epic (see what I did there? :D) scale. It might not be your cup of tea, but I guarantee you that it wouldn't sell half as well if people didn't like the backstory.

On a more personal note - I adore the pre- and early Clans setting of Battletech, and all its history. Two particular bits of its story grabbed me - one was the character of "Snow Fire" (after which one of my character's[1] 'Mech's got named), the other the mercenary unit the 12th Vegan Rangers. The latter scored at least in part because it wasn't as well-fleshed out as the more 'famous' units in terms of having books written about it (See? whole books! Fluff! And THEN some!), while having enough tantalising hints dropped to draw me (and a number of other players) in and want to create more in the setting. (We'll come on to sub-creation and open-endedness later in the series.)

And a question: those of you who read this blog and play or intend to play Dux Brit. How much have Andy and my campaign narratives helped to draw you in? (Dux Brit has some other features, setting and campaign wise, that we'll discuss later, but for now... :D)

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[1] I'm 20 years the better writer since that story was written. Be gentle :D

Chain of Command meta points list

For those of you not on the TFL forums (or haven't been keeping up) and who have an interest in exploring CoC force list design, you will be very interested in one of Rich's latest posts, which basically produces a points list for designing force lists :D

It's pretty simple, and it's (I shouldn't have to say this to most readers, but just in case....) obviously only intended as a guideline and not a resource for gaming the system, but it does make it very easy to (say) figure out how much the Home Guard lists or perhaps a Falklands list might cost.

The thread's here. Enjoy!

Designing a setting: part 1 - Introduction

Greetings from my weekend detour to San Jose :D

As I'm doing some proofreading before breakfast, I've been pondering concepts around world and setting design for something I'm working on this week. I did have a bit of a think about this a while back, with specific reference to all the Kickstarters that were springing up at the time, in fact... Out of that came several desirables for a setting:

• Conflict (without which you don't have a game)
• Multiple factions (not necessarily, but...)
• Fluff (to draw your reader in - 'immersion' if you like)

I'm going to add one more to this, and skim it briefly in this post before I dedicate a post to each one

• Immediacy.

This is a topic I've covered before, in the one lone episode of my podcast (before Neil nabbed me), although in setting design it's a slightly different thing. Basically it's that core concept that makes you able to 'get stuck in' to a setting quickly, without having to do tons of prep work before you start. With it comes its counterpart and (often) opposite, flexibility: the less reading and prep work users of your ruleset and/or setting have to do, the more likely they are to pick it up.

So, with that in mind, I'm off to do some copy-editing, and then grab breakfast. Watch this space for the next part.