Quote from: Greentongue on March 21, 2021, 05:11:42 PM
There are a number of settings that are great to read but when I go to play in them. they are like straight-jackets.
There is so much information available for them that I am second checking myself all the time.
Players have access to the information as well and have expectations on the setting that if not met them, they are disappointed.

How do you deal with this??

This is why I love Known World and dislike Mystara. Known World was a bare bones skeleton to make of it whatever you wanted. Mystara takes that, shoehorns it into a new world and tries to fill in every little space with something. Sane for Star frontiers vs Zebulon. SF is very bare skeleton while Zebulon is for all intents and purposes a new setting that uses a similar map and also tries to fill in as many spaces as it can. Just not as much as Mystara.

Greyhawk, least up to the boxed set, was probably the best balance. You had info on each kingdom. But not every little detail.

What to do with this or any other setting is A: find out if any players are interested in parts, and which ones. From experience the players with knowledge of a setting tend to know alot about whatever part interests them, and not so much, if any, outside that. Example: A player I know very much likes the Baldurs Gate area and not much else. Another knows Waterdeep and not much else.

Play off what the players know and do not know.

Also. What they know may be a liiiitle out of date. So feel free to wind the clock forward or back. This is especially true of Forgotten Realms which has had several time skips and major uphevals at each. The whole map has changed in some places and areas have appeared and others have vanishes, and thers have vanished and returned and so on.

Feel free to to hand out lots of reality checks. heh-heh.

Same with Star Wars and Star Trek and Middle Earth and whatever. Theres a thousand times more left unexplored than has been detailed.

Quote from: Omega on March 21, 2021, 11:13:06 PM
This is why I love Known World and dislike Mystara. Known World was a bare bones skeleton to make of it whatever you wanted. Mystara takes that, shoehorns it into a new world and tries to fill in every little space with something.

Same here, it's also why I like the Forgotten Realms of the Dragon magazine articles more than even the Forgotten Realms of the gray box. Once you start encyclopedically defining everything, there's a lot less room for new ideas because everything new has to fit in with all the previously defined elements. That integration quickly becomes a lot of work. There's less stuff to remember when I create the stuff on my own, because there's a lot less material-- I'm only going to design so far ahead, instead of trying to exhaustively cover every possibility. And even if the quantity of the material was the same, it's still a lot easier for me to remember stuff I came up with than someone else's ideas. The best settings give creative seeds that inspire new ideas, strong tone and themes, enough of a framework to work with (maps are useful), and then lots of tools that can be adopted and adapted for various purposes, instead of endless canon and official answers.

Quote from: Greentongue on March 21, 2021, 05:11:42 PM
There are a number of settings that are great to read but when I go to play in them. they are like straight-jackets.
There is so much information available for them that I am second checking myself all the time.
Players have access to the information as well and have expectations on the setting that if not met them, they are disappointed.

How do you deal with this??

I don't use them.

In my experience, trying to run such a setting where you ignore published "canon" or do things your own way is usually not worth the effort. It's very difficult to overcome that "canon inertia" -- maybe not for you as the GM, but for the players who are familiar with the setting. Can you do it? Yeah, possibly. Is it worth the effort? Usually not (again, in my experience).

Tell the players "I've read these three books.  You may rely on the information in them.  Anything else I'm making up as I go.  I'm not going to read the other thousand books unless y'all are going to pay me.  If you don't like it, we can play something else."

Quote from: hedgehobbit on March 21, 2021, 11:06:58 PM
From my experience, you are the exception. What I've found is that people that want to play a game in a specific setting are also the same people that want the setting to match the published material. (Otherwise, what is the point?)

The point of using the setting is a GM resource to make the game easier and more fun. Nothing to do with canon-wank.

FWIW I have one Faerun fan in my groups, he has never complained about deviations from canon. He likes to make long posts about his PCs' backstories, about the cultures of the Realms. I've never found this harmful to my game; usually it adds to the game. If something was different IMC I'd point it out, but I've never seen an issue. He did once refer to Gareth Dragonsbane being King of Damara, but for an outsider PC that would be an easy mistake for his PC to make IC.

I think GMs worry about canon far more than players do.

Quote from: HappyDaze on March 21, 2021, 05:54:05 PM
Some settings have so much stuff that it's hard to be sure you've got it all. And some have retcons (and retcons of retcons) and "alternate versions" that conflict (sometimes addressed and clarified, sometimes not).

Yes, published material rarely makes much effort to maintain continuity. Why should I worry? I pick the version I like best, or make my own.

I generally treat the 1987 FR Grey Box as canon, but the entry on Damara conflicts with the FR9 Bloodstone Lands that I'm using for the setting, and I take it FR9 has priority (they seem about 10 years out - Greenwood has the Ford of Goliad maybe 10 years in the past, 1347 DR, where in FR9 it (mostly) happened in 1357, the year of the Grey Box). Either Greenwood or Salvatore or both got confused around the timeline, not surprising when the Bloodstone Wars campaign wasn't initially part of FR.   

One thing I do is drill down a lot and make my campaign at a much smaller scale than the published material. My Damara campaign uses 2 miles/hex map



Which fits in a small box of the map of Damara from FR9 Bloodstone Lands


Never mind the published campaign setting maps which look more like


Since published US fantasy RPG maps tend to be ridiculously huge scale from a British perspective, there is always a ton of space to do this. I can add castles, baronies, towns, (many) dungeons etc within the official setting, no problem.

BTW last night I checked how my 2 mile/hex map above compared to the S John Ross Medieval Demographics Made Easy numbers. Even at a Highland Scotland type population level of ca 10/square mile I'm still well short on the number of villages I 'ought' to have. It's just not as silly as the typical fantasy map with 50-100 miles between each village, which you're not likely to see IRL outside maybe the Australian Outback.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament on March 21, 2021, 11:50:37 PM
I don't use them.

Same. And for the same reasons.

Quote from: Arkansan on March 21, 2021, 10:39:20 PM
Oh that's easy, I just ignore the shit I don't like.

THIS^^

I love Star Wars, but there are whole swaths of the canon setting (and EU) that I think are genre-breaking and game-breaking bullshit.

Quote from: S'mon on March 22, 2021, 05:14:18 AM
BTW last night I checked how my 2 mile/hex map above compared to the S John Ross Medieval Demographics Made Easy numbers.

The typical fantasy map is indeed silly, but bear in mind that most rpg settings are "the marches" - they're more like Dark Ages Britain than medieval Britain. 600, not 1200. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire, waves of plague, some climate change reducing crop yields, are all thought to have dropped Europe's population from 400-600, with it being more or less stable overall 600-1000, and growing from there.

It's not commonly-appreciated, but the setting of the world of Greyhawk is essentially like that, with a (former) Great Kingdom which has after many wars and plagues shrunk, leaving behind many smaller principalities ruled by - well, barbarians. With far fewer people, and much poorer.

Into Dark Ages Britain came waves of invaders and migrants - there was land to spare, and even when not spare it was poorly-defended. This was the time of Beowulf and Sigurd and the Rheingold, a time where an ambitious man who fought and led well could make himself a king - of a small kingdom, of course, only small - but a king nonetheless.

So while a population density like that of a typical rpg fantasy map makes sense, one lower than medieval Europe makes sense, too. War, plagues and barbarian invasions bringing about the destruction of many lives and the fall of a great king - D&D is commonly a postapocalyptic setting. It's Mad Max with swords.

Quote from: Greentongue on March 21, 2021, 06:05:23 PM
That doesn't solve much when the existing "anything written in real life" is all encompassing.

For an example take the Battletech universe. If I was to start a campaign set in it today in the in game year of 3025 then anything published after today no matter what year it was set in is not valid for the campaign. And anything that occurs in cannon after that starting date (clan invasion date, wars, weddings, etc) are all subject to change and can not be relied upon by the players.

I've found that if the players know this stuff going in it allows them to more freely engage with the campaign and they also don't bother you with cannon mistakes you make in regards to the material that is in use.

Quote from: jeff37923 on March 22, 2021, 06:25:54 AMI love Star Wars, but there are whole swaths of the canon setting (and EU) that I think are genre-breaking and game-breaking bullshit.

Star Wars is a good one because the vast majority of Star Wars fans don't like 100% of the canon anyway. Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are similar in that many fans prefer the older versions over the current ones.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on March 22, 2021, 07:34:58 AM

Quote from: S'mon on March 22, 2021, 05:14:18 AM
BTW last night I checked how my 2 mile/hex map above compared to the S John Ross Medieval Demographics Made Easy numbers.

The typical fantasy map is indeed silly, but bear in mind that most rpg settings are "the marches" - they're more like Dark Ages Britain than medieval Britain. 600, not 1200. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire, waves of plague, some climate change reducing crop yields, are all thought to have dropped Europe's population from 400-600, with it being more or less stable overall 600-1000, and growing from there.

Sci-fi settings have their degree of silly too. Star Wars more-or-less ignores anything less than a planet, turning homeworld into "hometown" and sector into "county/parish" when telling stories. An Imperial Moff is really little more than the Sheriff of Nottingham and Hutt Space is a gang territory that should be vast bsed on the galactic map, but comes off as just being the wrong side of the hypertracks. It works OK for Star Wars in big swipes, but it makes telling smaller scale stories feel awkward at times.

Then too you have fantasy that goes even beyond FR. I've been looking at Soulbound lately, and it takes the Warhammer Age of Sigmar setting as its base. You have a continent map of the Great Parch, which is itself only one continent on one world (of 8 major and potentially many more minor worlds) in a setting where travel between the worlds is a common thing (for heroes). They do a good job of not over-mapping it all though...for now.

Having to worry about players with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Empire of the Petal Thrones setting would be both wonderful and terrifying.

Quote from: S'mon on March 22, 2021, 05:01:08 AM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on March 21, 2021, 11:06:58 PM
From my experience, you are the exception. What I've found is that people that want to play a game in a specific setting are also the same people that want the setting to match the published material. (Otherwise, what is the point?)

I think GMs worry about canon far more than players do.

Very much this. I am struggling to think of a single example in 25+ years of GMing where deviating from canon intersected with superior player knowledge and it impacting the plot.

Changing rules to make an encounter run smoothly on the other hand...suddenly everyone has an opinion.