RPGaDAY 2019
21: VAST
Settings with a lot of material and a lot of options, kitchen sinks and more constrained premises.
When I followed my Buffy game The Watch House with a military SF game called The Stars On Fire I purposely focused on one serialised plot, future humanity as multiple nations in space making first contact with a single hostile alien species. And over the course of a year, I had a good dozen adventure ideas that just wouldn’t fit. So I wrote them down as prep for running a Star Trek game next.
I’m currently running Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition, taking into account some of the setting developments - one of the PCs is a Thin-Blood and another is a formerly rogue Tremere who is now basically ignored because the clan structure has fallen apart, one of the ongoing plots featured Thin-Bloods under threat and another involved refugees from the collapse of Sabbat leadership - while ignoring others - the Beckoning has only been mentioned in passing. And there are various chunks of the overall setting that aren’t being featured, some ideas I just don’t like and others that I do like but which don’t fit this particular setting. Over twenty-five years of publication history will do that. And that’s with no more than a couple of non-vampire supernatural manifestations in a year of sessions. I’m deliberately not using the whole kitchen sink. I could run another V5 game next year running on entirely different plot threads.
A constrained setting has advantages like consistency and being relatively safe from premise rejection, but I find it much easier to run a big kitchen sink setting where I can throw in a really random adventure idea from time to time, so my constrained premise games tend to be shorter and it’s one reason (along with most importantly player keenness) that The Watch House is the longest series I’ve ever run.
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