Captain Anorak's
Guide to Gaming
World Background: The Feeling
of Involvement
A grave problem with many RPGs is the absence of a background that feels like a real place.
AD&D is particularly notorious for this; the problem results from AD&D being a system that
can theoretically be used for any world,
so many groups will simply start playing without bothering with a world in which
to play. Instead they find themselves in a land whose name they don't know and don't bother
to ask, meeting people who seem to have no life of their own but simply exist to interact
with the PCs. There is simply no feeling of life going on around and in the background.
One thing that happens again and again in games, which really
destroys the illusion of game reality for me, is a world where
there is one language called 'Common' spoken by everyone as a first
or second language. This is there because no-one wants to put up with
the annoyance of language barriers - it's the same reason why people
on every planet speak English in Stargate SG1 and original
Star Trek. But worse than that, no-one has even bothered to
give it the name of a language. English is today a common language
among educated people of all nationalities, and Latin was once a
common language among diverse linguistic groups throughout the Roman
Empire, but these languages have names - they're not just called
Common.
If you look at any period of history in any place you will find conflict in society,
you will find change going on, with some people trying to promote that change, some trying
to resist it, and some just trying to live with the conditions which they experience. You
will find people living lifestyles that involve doing things to the people and the things
around them: people living their lives affects the state of the world they live in. In a
roleplaying game, this kind of thing is a vast and rich source of action in the game, so
it's a shame that many GMs and writers don't bother with it.
In real life, any person living in a society will be pre-judged by people on the basis
of a number of factors: race, religion, social class, cultural background. To play in a
world where such considerations don't exist is an absurd mockery, yet many GMs don't bother
to think about such things. In many a bad gameworld, there is no idea of what races exist in
an area, what social classes they form, what religions they practice or how such different
groups as exist interact with each other. This is quite idiotic. Many gameworlds have
broad divisions of race like human/elf/dwarf, but there are no racial distinctions within
these groups, as though all humans are so similar that they never view themselves as
anything other than a single homogeneous racial and cultural group.
This is not just a question of seeing things going on in the background. The PCs themselves
are as much a part of any existing social groups as are all the NPCs, unless they are total
outsiders. If there are two races in an area, and the PCs come from that area, then each PC
must be a member of one race or the other, or of mixed blood. NPCs of either race will
react to the PCs on this basis. If a conflict between the races exists, then each PC will have
to choose between standing with his own race against the other, or refusing to do so and
risk being called a race traitor. The same considerations apply to social class, religion and
other such facets of cultural background. Thus the background world will not be like an
empty meaningless map through which the PCs wander, but it will be something in which the
characters are involved by virtue of the conditions under which they have lived their
whole lives.