Campaign Settings: Buy-In

Somebody I know said that creating an RPG system is easy, but a good RPG campaign setting is much more difficult.

I'm fairly certain I've talked about the topic before, but player buy-in is a measure of how much work the player must put in up front to understand the setting.  Player buy-in for a game system isn't what I'm covering today but it still exists; it's generally referred to as system mastery instead.  Actually, for the sake of clarity let's call what I'm discussing today 'setting buy-in' since player buy-in can refer to several things.


The longer a campaign setting has been around and the more popular it is, the less time up front a player is going to need to understand the tropes and gross details of the campaign setting.  A very good example of an extremely low setting buy-in is Dungeons and Dragons.  While everybody has a different take on what D&D means to them, there are core conceits that people agree on; high fantasy adventures, a certain mixture of fantastic races for players to portray (elves, dwarves, halflings...), well known monsters (owlbears, rust monsters, beholders, mindflayers...), and (as of this writing) around forty-two years of media exposure to cement an identity in the minds of the public.  Dungeons and Dragons has become a short-hand phrase to describe itself at this point.  If I say to you "Let's play Dungeons and Dragons!", generally your mind is going to immediately conjure up imagery closely associated with the game.

But veterans of Dungeons and Dragons know that the game has had different campaign settings over the years.  The imagery associated with Dungeons and Dragons usually stems from about three campaign settings that have been produced over the years: The World of Greyhawk/Planescape, Forgotten Realms, and Mystara/The Known World.  These three settings are the kitchen-sink settings that featured heavily in the art and writing of the rulebooks over the years. Thus when people use D&D as a shorthand to describe a particular style of the fantasy genre, it is the works of Gary Gygax (Greyhawk), Jeff Grubb (the original Manual of the Planes), Ed Greenwood (Forgotten Realms), and a whole host of TSR alumni (Mystara and Planescape, among others) that people are thinking about.  Countless video games and MMORPGs are influenced by them; there would be no EverQuest or World of Warcraft without them.  They are the genre-defining works for D&D and fantasy gaming.  But not all of D&D's campaign settings are so easily referenced.

As I write this, I can look over to one side and see my copy of the Dark Sun boxed set for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition.  It is likely the most alien setting ever produced for D&D.  Even the setting that takes place on a darkly fictionalized version of Earth are more comprehensible; the Gothic Earth setting is Victorian-era Earth with the disturbing visions of Edgar Allen Poe and the like made real.  While most D&D takes heavy inspiration from Tolkien-esque fantasy, which has been in the public eye since 1937 (the first publication date for The Hobbit), Dark Sun has more in common with sword and sorcery stories that blended fantasy and science-fiction.  It departs from the orthodox D&D style in that psionics/mental abilities (not magic!) is omnipresent, the monsters and denizens of the world are alien enough to cause eyebrows to furrow in confusion, and society is barely even Iron Age in metallurgic knowledge.  Because it is not a particularly well-known setting among the D&D playing masses, coupled with the fact that it is vastly different than the self-genre that D&D defined, the setting buy-in bar is high for those unfamiliar with the setting.  Veterans of D&D who know the setting praise it for its originality and unique challenges, but they're not the majority of D&D players.

Setting buy-in is deeply affected by expectations.  If I said "We're going to play a D&D game set in Dark Sun." to you without explaining Dark Sun's core conceits, you are going to be very jarred when your expectations about a 'D&D game' are completely wrong.  This problem of expectations is vital to address and the RPG industry itself takes point on setting a few expectations within the rulebooks themselves.  If you start reading a variety of RPG rulebooks, you'll notice that many pattern themselves after D&D in that there is nearly always an implied setting of some kind baked into the rules.  When you do come across systems that are truly setting agnostic, they come across as toolboxes of rules with a 'Assembly Required' sticker.  I'm of the opinion that implied settings are not inherently a bad thing since it means anyone who reads the rules will have some idea of what to expect.  The important thing is that the expectations are being set, a new shorthand is created.  Telling somebody you want to play a mercenary campaign in Traveller immediately sets expectations about the conceits the rules support if the other person has read the rules.

Overcoming setting buy-in is daunting if the bar is high (I've yet to run a Dark Sun campaign even after all these years).  It relies heavily on knowing your fellow players, since there's a greater chance that somebody is just not going to enjoy whatever you sold them on.  Since we play these games to enjoy ourselves, it's a disservice to the hobby to cajole somebody into a campaign they're not going to like.  On the other hand, if you know some folks who play tabletop RPGs and enjoy the conceits of the setting you want to play a game in, play on!