Ralph Dula
Fighter of Fungi, Mortal Foe of 5E, Possibly a Cat
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2020
- Messages
- 1,823
- Reaction score
- 5,327
Last night I got to page through an RPG that my only interest in came from knowing one of the artists and having heard an amusing behind-the-scenes tale regarding it. As I expected, it isn’t my kind of game, but looking at the XP system it raised a question I have to ask.
The game has players set up goals for their characters, with XP earned based on achieving goals and the difficulty of them. My issue stems from the fact that the game has a setting very far removed from the real world, with example goals given that are complete nonsense to the reader unless they are intimately familiar with the made-up factions, religions and creatures of the game.
That got me to thinking, and I realized that over the last year or so I’ve seen a number of games that have such goal-based XP coupled with campaign settings so throughly alien to modern culture that it would require players to read the entire rulebook to have an understanding of the game world to understand those goals. I haven’t seen anything like this since 1996.
Over the decades almost every player I’ve had in a game had little to no knowledge of the setting we were playing in, expecting me to keep it very basic and spoon feed any lore to them as necessary, and again as basic as possible. Seeing games in recent years expecting such buy-in from players has me wondering if there has been a shift in recent years that I’ve missed, or if this is another example that I live in the mirror universe from other gamers, like when I found out in 3.X games casters don’t usually get curbstomped and the melee classes have to carry battles almost every time.
So, have players switched to becoming more engrossed in setting and I’ve missed that?
The game has players set up goals for their characters, with XP earned based on achieving goals and the difficulty of them. My issue stems from the fact that the game has a setting very far removed from the real world, with example goals given that are complete nonsense to the reader unless they are intimately familiar with the made-up factions, religions and creatures of the game.
That got me to thinking, and I realized that over the last year or so I’ve seen a number of games that have such goal-based XP coupled with campaign settings so throughly alien to modern culture that it would require players to read the entire rulebook to have an understanding of the game world to understand those goals. I haven’t seen anything like this since 1996.
Over the decades almost every player I’ve had in a game had little to no knowledge of the setting we were playing in, expecting me to keep it very basic and spoon feed any lore to them as necessary, and again as basic as possible. Seeing games in recent years expecting such buy-in from players has me wondering if there has been a shift in recent years that I’ve missed, or if this is another example that I live in the mirror universe from other gamers, like when I found out in 3.X games casters don’t usually get curbstomped and the melee classes have to carry battles almost every time.
So, have players switched to becoming more engrossed in setting and I’ve missed that?