The Business: The Setting Bible Trap & The Question Of Agency

I think I have something to think about.

The strength of AD&D1e in particular, and D&D generally, is that the setting can be--should be, and the rules for 1e faciliates this--generated as you go.

You should start with a blank map, with the players in one corner or edge, and knowing nothing beyond that initial safe area. Real Time Strategy people know this as Fog of War, where exploration of the map matters and you (aside from the sliver of pro players) know nothing of what is out there until it's found.

This makes every campaign area unique and distinct, while having each campaign be governed under the exact same rules. Depending upon how the roles on the various tables go, some campaigns face major adversity from the start while others have some breathing room before things get difficult.

Compare this to competing games and products, many of which have settings baked in.

A setting is not an automatic detriment. Harn uses its setting properly; play because at the end of its timeline, never going forward, because players are expected to change everything on that map as a direct result of play. That's agency in action, and agency is why this hobby exists.

Others have done likewise, and for the same reason, but this is not the case for the biggest brands. Welcome to the Setting Bible Trap.

The Trap

The temptation to treat a setting for use with fantastic adventure wargames as "living" settings where changes can be dictated by the designer or publisher turns the setting into a Fiction Bible. Players, and this is a Known Issue as certain as players quitting editions as soon as successors are announced, shun anything that contradicts the canon of a setting- and that means that externally-imposed changes violate player agency.

Why?

Because the events published in a tie-in product attract a wider audience than the setting itself, those things take on greater weight in the scene surround the setting; the truth of this can be had with every single thread ever about encountering Darth Vader when playing Uncle George's Space Opera, Kirk in a Star Trek game, etc.- and this does extend now to the media that those properties comes from.

Publishers not getting this is always due to them falling into the Setting Bible Trap; by violating player agency to define the setting instead of letting players do it by themselves for themselves, they end up creating a setting for adaptation into a narrative medium--books, comics, animation, live-action TV/film, etc.--incrementally as what they produce calcifies into a canon that is more real than what players do.

Having a setting that does not exist until players encounter it solves the canon problem. Having a history is not the problem; having a present (and, therefore, a future) other than what the players make is the problem. The solution is always to maximize player agency. The means is to sit down, shut up, and never advance the timeline or further define what is presented.

All you, as designer or publisher, need to do it sell them a car. Then what they do with it is their problem, not yours. Again, if some bunch of shitposters can grok this and put it out as the core point of a two hour lore video about a machine that does not exist, you folks can do it too- just take your Artiste delusions behind the woodshed and mag-dump into it until it stops twitching.

But That Means-

There is an argument to be made that there is room for products that are not about this dynamic. Pendragon exists, and historical gaming has its fans- and nothing is more set in stone than the real thing.

There is a honest argument to be made that this is not the same thing as what AD&D1e in particular, and the hobby generally, is about. This is about working the margins, about the side stories, the things that go on while the things that matter go down, where players don't have agency--what they do cannot, and therefore does not, make those changes that other players have to deal with--but rather shares a superficial seeming but underneath is a very different machine altogether.

If the hobby generally is about the exercise of agency, then this is about the virtual experience of an alien paradigm; succeeding as a knight in Arthur's Britain is nothing like succeeding as a Fighter freshly arrived at the frontier. The problem? Other media do this MUCH better now, both as a Narrative experience and as a participatory one.

What a lot of naysayers have to grok is that Cargo Cult norms in this hobby carry a lot of unexamined assumptions, assumptions that are now being examined actively, and as a result changes are happening that are just beginning to reverberate outward towards the Normie end of things.

And this? This is just one of those assumptions that have gone unexamined for far too long. Does a product need an attached setting? It's looking like it doesn't.