RPG Settings: Messiness Rules, Structure Drools

One of the things I’m playing with in Mage: The Dirty Version is a partial rebellion against highly structured RPG settings. Setting design took its lumps this decade, driven partly by genuine changes in what gamers want, and partly by non-playing hobbyists’ desire for easy meta-discussion that doesn’t have much to do with play. (Should you really give a shit about hidden supernatural population when you’ll only interact with a few small group yourself? Unless you’re playing in a big networked game, probably not.)

Evocative settings are pretty messy. In the case of licensed games, this is due to the effort required to open them up for RPG play (and beyond RPGs, books, comics and video games). Star Wars is gloriously disorganized now. A lot of it’s pretty bad, but some of it’s great — and that’s largely thanks to the work you need to do to get away from the Skywalker family drama. Purpose-build RPG settings like the old World of Darkness and the Forgotten realms gathered all kinds of strangeness to escape the strictures of their original designs. You’ve got to do all kinds of crazy shit to make three-eyed anime vampires work with the Cain(e) myth.

Why do you get good stuff out of this? It feels truthful because the original structure gets obscured enough that it’s up to you to draw the material into coherent threads — just like real life, which is notoriously plotless and bad at sticking to themes. Character types lose their firm connections to base ideas, because somewhere along the way somebody wrote about the Badass Wing of the Debating Society, and the Righteous Demagogues of the Badass Tribe.

But there’s more to it than creating a setting and waiting for material to build up. You need to loosen your grip on structure from the ground up. You’ve got to introduce certain imbalances. For example, in The Dirty Version some Spheres are more prevalent than others. Some folks got the niche, some folks didn’t. I did this on purpose, because it will encourage some specific behaviors in play (people are more likely to stack efforts with common Spheres) and imply that some types of magic are more common than others. It also lets me relax and go with what feels right for a character type instead of strictly worrying about niche. We’ve all seen classes or splats that feel half-assed because they needed a place to put the Bling power or whatever.

You can get some creative traction out of following a structure too (Vampire: The Requiem has a few clans that probably never would have been there under a looser regime, such as the Mekhet, and its Discipline breakdown gave us Nightmare and cooler Nosferatu) but working under a firm model right from the start can get stifling. Ultimately, your only refuge under a strict structure is to relegate anything off-kilter to toolkits. These can be good, but all too often they make the game as a whole feel weak and unfinished, or surrender the possibility of deep development. For example, Requiem’s VII book is fantastic. It’s full of evocative options. It also made it nigh-impossible to do anything else with VII in the line without alienating somebody. Bye bye, VII. Unfortunately, if you define VII you just stave off the problem until you’ve covered it in detail, hacked out some metaplot and run it into the ground.

Structure now, or a closed, “finished” game later? It’s tricky. But I think there’s room to maneuver in the middle . . . and sideways. Add ambiguities, imbalanced coverage and you’ll stuff a game full of messy ideas. For instance, I think the current World of Darkness got a hell of a lot more interesting with two Arcadias and a mysterious Hell floating around. Before that point, the cosmology was a bit too cut and dried. Fans have come up with a lot of cool ideas by groping for structure in the dark. I want to add weird, clashing, imbalanced structures to inspire that sort of thing. The Dirty Version is a no-risk lab for the idea. After that, who knows where I’ll take it?