I find my tastes changing over time - I used to want authentick flavours, it didn't matter of what, really, but I wanted my Japan to be "really Japanese" and my medieval Europe to be "really medieval." Nowadays I've slid some distance from that position toward Xena - I want gonzo mashup more and find authentick a bit of a bore. Where do you find yourself on that scale?
The answer is: it depends. Slightly more detailed: I'm somewhere in the middle. Slightly more detailed yet: I can find virtues at various points of the spectrum, although too much gonzo makes me want to run for the hills.
I used to be more serious about setting. I actually put this down to lack of face-to-face game time. I'm not sure if this observation holds for everybody, but I think obsession with setting design is a kind of warped outgrowth from the mind of DMs who don't get the chance to actually play much. It was certainly true for me: I wasn't doing any face-to-face gaming (just lacklustre PBEMing and PBPing, which is generally quite lacklustre) and yet I wanted to - and I still enjoyed thinking about campaign worlds, drawing maps, creating bestiaries and NPCs, imagining trade routes and where resources would be found, dreaming up languages, and so on.
This also caused me to spend a lot of time and energy pursuing "authenticity"; the more time you have to think, the more you do think. I often thought about how to create a "really Japanese" game, for instance, given my experience living in the country and my interest in its history, and my utter loathing and disdain for the way in which RPG geeks approach the subject (which is either "samurai and ninja, cool!" or "anime, cool!"; there is not enough space in my head for my eyes to roll sufficiently far back to communicate how much I despise both Western anime fandom and samurai-wankery).
Now I'm gaming quite a lot, and I'm also really busy, so my thinking time has been drastically reduced. This has both removed the urge to pursue authenticity, and also the opportunity. So while my setting design does not lean so far to the gonzo, it certainly doesn't involve chasing after the pipe dream of realism either. My main priorities are, simply, "What will I actually use?" and "What will be good for the game?"
But that said, too much gonzo doesn't really do it for me either. At a certain stage, it all feels like trying too hard to be irreverant. This leads us back to a post about humour that I wrote a few weeks ago. There's a strand of geekdom that repels me really quite strongly, and which others seem to find unaccountably attractive; it is the kind of straining towards "gonzo" that leads to inquisitors in Warhammer 40,000 with names like "Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau" and religions surrounding vast floating puddings or called "The Church of the Lucid Shirt Button". That kind of thing is so unfunny and uninteresting to me that I can't put it into words: it makes me want to bite my own fist for want of punching it through the face of anybody who would suggest otherwise. If that's what "gonzo mashup" means then no, thankyou, you may keep it, and also please fuck off and die.
If, on the other hand, "gonzo mashup" stretches to "this is a pseudo-oriental setting so I am going to borrow heavily from Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Mongolian and whatever other mythology because hey, life's too short and really, who cares?", then I am all for it.
My setting, though pretty dang standard, is as detailed and overengineered as hell. Not quite to the level of things found here, but I did come across them because I was trying to make my monetary system work, and check their stuff regularly. So yeah, I'm a DM with not remotely enough game time who instead designs like a maniac.
ReplyDeleteBut I still like a bit o' the gonzo in my worlds.
I think the level of gonzo mashup that I'm aiming for, and what it means to me, now I've got over my realism obsession, is something along the lines of the D&D Known World (Mystara) / Fighting Fantasy's Titan - a world for built gaming (with adventure and variety everywhere), not one more suited to writing fiction or mock-scholarship about.
ReplyDeleteAs for 'humour' in games - what about, for example, Preseli the (pseudo Celtic) Bard, born from a liason between a fen witch and a demon?
What about a town where the Watch are loosely based on the characters in Dad's Army?
Thing is, I'd rather populate my [gaming] worlds with these kind of homages/knock offs than with Aragorns, Ned Starks, and Logen Ninefingers. Although versions of these guys these might well turn up too.
Yeah, a world built for gaming is a nice way of putting it. Fighting Fantasy's Titan is near perfect in that regard.
DeleteAs for Preseli or characters in Dad's Army... meh. I have a low appreciation level for stuff like that. It's just a matter of taste.
"Trying too hard" is a great way to put it. In retrospect, anytime I didn't like some goofy thing in RPG material, it was probably because I felt like it was trying too hard.
ReplyDeleteIf you're trying to be funny, it's usually a good sign you're not very funny, I think.
DeleteBut surely there's a difference between 'trying' and 'trying too hard'. I mean, we try to do lots of things, to build atmospheres of all different kinds, when we GM. Trying to raise wry smile, while settling for a groan, is surely no worse than a having a decent go at building a sense of horror, suspense, beauty, romance, pathos, etc. A lot of these will fall short of the fictions we are trying to ape/emulate, but we give them a go.
DeleteAs another student of East Asian history and culture, settings that conflate the various cultures bother me much more than wacky anime imaginings or samurai pastiches (these things are, after all, also authentically Japanese in their own way; the West learned anime fandom from the Japanese). The inability to distinguish between China and Japan in settings is particularly galling to me. But, as always, to each their own.
ReplyDeleteRegarding gonzo-ness, in general, I feel like settings don't need any goofy elements at all. I actually have no problem at all with things like churches of lucid shirt buttons, but I find that these things will naturally emerge during the course of the game. Assuming you are gaming with people you like, this usually works pretty well in my experience. As I have said before, a game will be as serious as the least serious person at the table.
I don't mind the China/Japan thing any more. I used to. Now I just think of it as no different to how 'Western' D&D mashes up Germanic, Finnish, Greek, Russian and Celtic myths.
Delete> What about a town where the Watch are loosely based on the characters in Dad's Army?
ReplyDeleteThis has a noble lineage in Dave Sim's Cerebus comic, where recognizable versions of Groucho Marx, Oscar Wilde and Margaret Thatcher among others pop up in the low-tech power struggles of Iest. I would say naming the bard "Preseli" though is going too far. Dry wit abhors a pun.
I guess I have developed quite a high tolerance for these kind of puns and importations, having been raised on a diet of Judge Dredd and other 2000AD strips, which always walked a fine line between grim and gritty, and parody.
DeleteI don't think that I'd ever have a 'Baron von Saponatheim', though, who is possibly the first named NPC that many players of WFRP ever hear of.
As far as gonzo in D&D games goes, I love this blog post:
ReplyDeletehttp://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2010/01/say-why-not-and-then-ask-why.html?zx=d80e5c3cf31c9ae5
The basic idea is that including silly stuff is fine as long as you then play it straight and see what its implications are.
That post is a great example of the gonzo I love, which is a very different thing than the stuff noisms is decrying here. For me, gonzo works when it's a group effort; calling it 'gonzo' allows a brainstorming vibe to pervade the table, assuring players for whom creating ideas on-the-spot is difficult that their ideas are going to get folded into this massive idea-cake we're all baking. In short, saying "yes, and" in place of "no."
DeleteI loathe geek 'comedy.' Loathe it. If we didn't make it up at the table, I'm not interested.
I don't find the amount of prep I do varies from when I'm playing to when I'm not playing - I put in enough to satisfy what I need to run the game the way I want to run it, and I tend to front-load as much of the prep as I can, before the actual campaign starts.
ReplyDeleteI run mostly historical games, so my 'gonzo' runs more toward Ruritania settings with a fair amount of handwaving of period detail, but for other settings I find that striving from some measure of authenticity helps write the campaign for me. Researching the period suggests so many ideas that my ability to run the game gets much easier.
And I don't think silly names are terribly gonzo, in and of themselves. Whimsical, perhaps, when they're not annoying. And I say that as someone who tends toward pun names.
Historical games are a different kettle of fish, I guess. I really like the idea of running historical games where the players are very into the setting and take it very seriously and contribute a lot of energy to making it seem real. But there are NO players like that in the world, I think.
DeleteI was part of a group rather like that in the late 80s/early 90s: we played a lot of CoC and GURPS in various historical periods and I for one learned a lot. The times I saw that group rebel against seriousness were when the material offered didn't seem serious enough - Vampire Dark Ages was a nadir: it was so clear that we were all supposed to be working in one narrow conception of the medieval that we all showed up with characters just adjacent to the expected - Jewish, Hussite, Morisco, Armenian etc.
DeleteSo, gonzo's maybe the wrong word. My idea of gonzo is Carcosa - a place I know from CoC which in McKinney's hands goes cavemen and Zardoz and deadly plant life and inexplicable crystal towers used as temporary shelters: it's composed from recognisable ingredients but you don't quite know going in what they're doing in this recipe. It might make sense but you have to work to figure it out. That's not puns and pop-culture self-conscious raillery (and god I hated Gygax's sense of humour) but it's also pushing the contrast a bit harder than having Hanuman show up in your Chinese ghost story. To me, anyway.
Maybe what I'm looking for is the wonder of the fantastical: that suspicion that the world is much richer and stranger than it seems on the surface, if you know how to look. I find Xena actually does the opposite of providing that, by flattening everything down to a common denominator, but I like its willingness to say "you thought you were in cod medieval Europe but look - here's Polynesia inside this cave."
...it's too bad I went and wrote an entire goddamn blog post here, because these two links off Zak's post, cited above, say it all better than I can.
DeleteI try to make a setting that I feel I myself would enjoy playing in (I have probably spend more time as a player than a DM over the years). This has had good results for me in the past. I suppose I prefer my settings to be authentic to themselves but usually they are pretty fantastical. I borrow freely from historical cultures, and from folklore because it's interesting to me. I'm not really interested in doing strict historic reenaction with a light veneer of the supernatural, but I also don't want my setting to be in-jokey nor do I want it to be a perfunctory "it's got the stuff that's in D&D because "it's all about what happens at the table anyway." I guess I go for "dreamlike, but concrete enough to be interacted with comprehensibly."
ReplyDeleteI think that's probably exactly the same approach I take, actually.
DeleteThere's are shades of difference between:
ReplyDelete-What I'd put in a game I was GMing
-What I think is fun or funny, and
-What I am capable of enjoying if the game is run well
Jeff Gameblog includes all kinds of gonzo stuff that works perfectly and feels exactly right when _he_ runs it. But if someone else was doing it and thought they were really clever for including Lenny and Squiggy vampires I'd probably just be like I Hear My Mom Calling Gotta Go
I find the type of gonzo you are decry as particularly abhorrent. I don't mind the game being silly and being there for a laugh, but if it's one thing to have an NPC played for comedy within the context of the setting, and it's entirely another thing to have it be based on puns and real world in jokes that takes me straight out of the game and giving a damn in general.
ReplyDeleteOn the otherhand, 'gonzo' mashups, or including sci-fi in your peanut butter...er fantasy, that works as long as it makes some kind of sense. I'm all for that.