What does the "setting" mean to you?

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

A few things before I get started.

1) Yes, I posed a question that I wanted to answer. Yes, if you know me through discord you have probably read me making fun of people who do that. Yes, I am shameless. But I also really am curious as to what people think of when people mention the setting.

2) The inspiration for this post actually came from something Irongron said during his development stream over the weekend, where he mentioned that the strength of both Arelith and the Forgotten Realms actually stem from the vagueness of the setting (paraphrasing here), and I actually agree with him there. I think having flexibility in concepts is a huge part in why arelith enjoys such a large population.

But that also doesn't touch on what I mean when I have said Arelith needs to strengthen its setting. And that's a good jump off point into what I really wanted to say.

A setting in regard to a NWN server should be a collection of shared truths. They shouldn't be oppressive to the point of being daunting toward newer players or players who don't want to read a novel just to play the game, but they should be truths that become apparent to anyone with a little time in game.

Some easy examples, not suggestions (to me what the shared truths are doesn't really matter, only that they exist).

• Guldorand is a much more dangerous city than Cordor. Therefore, the pvp rules in Cordor are a lot stricter than they are in guldorand.

• Paladins need to follow the oaths, or risk losing their god's favor. Warlocks get similar treatment on the other end of the spectrum with their patron demon/devil, as well as a more befitting punishment.

• The Cordorian king actually hates elves and wants to steal the mythal for Cordor. The Zhenterim embassy rivals the church of ilmater when it comes to good works around the island while preaching through tyranny everyone is taken care of.

-Race specific quirks that represent the npc population of said race pertaining to their views. That doesn't mean that they have to be the trope, Arelith is bound to have a lot of unique perspectives thanks to geographics, and it doesn't mean that a character of that race needs to share all or any of said views. Just a little something that gives a player a choice, am I with or against the grain.

That pretty much touches the three pillars of what makes a good nwn setting I think, while adding a fourth that only works with a server that has race specific areas like arelith does. Variation from place to place, balancing certain classes/races with rp based downsides, and having npc agendas for a backdrop.

Anyways, that's my two cents on the setting. I've mentioned it a lot in passing under other topics, but those aren't good avenues to actually explain what I mean, and I feel like it was mistaken for "people need to know every nuance of forgotten realms lore or else" when that couldn't have been further from the truth. I'm the type of person that sees a guy running around naked with pink hair while yelling "I am Jackamo, king of assassins!" and thinks to myself "That guy is going to be a better rper than me in two years".

And with that I will just say if this inspires you to say something, have at it.

[DM Monkey]

Hi, it's me Jackamo. I've made it to the top and I'm here to give you a tip so that you can too: take the setting as seriously as you can. It's always going to be a different perspective to each player based on how their experiences have been, but over time things settle into "how it is". Shaking up "how it is" + being true to the setting = the most interesting outcomes.

[Hazard]

Respecting the setting, to me, means portraying characters as they would behave if we were to pretend that their world (3.5ed) was real and they knew the things they were expected to know but also did NOT know the things they were not expected to know.

Just one little example, because I just woke up and can't do thinkinz good, but ...

Fearing, or respecting death might be in the top 5 for me. This can manifest in a lot of ways, and even seemingly 'fearless' characters, could actually have quite a lot of fear going on if you take the time to understand how they react to it and how they behave when afraid. But overall, our characters shouldn't expect that everyone (including themselves) is brought back, and so the death of a friend should be a huge deal, going to enemy territory and losing even a single person to the fugue should be traumatic if you cared about them at all, and the risk of yourself dying should be something to consider heavily before starting any fight.

But there's an important reason I rank fearing death so highly, and it's because I believe that when death is respected in this setting it sets you up to be in the perfect position, whether good or evil, to want to favor RP even with an enemy rather than just hostiling and going to town. It also helps prevent endless conflict cycles, and what are imo annoying 'surface' or 'underdark' raids that are impactful when done with reason, but lose all meaning and impact when done with regularity, both sides ignoring their losses. It's very easy to get sucked into the us vs them mentality and we all do at times, I think, but reminding yourself how important death would be to your character can help you get back to a place where you don't want to fight too needlessly, you don't want to stand around posturing and bragging and drawing negative attentions, and you don't want to rush into things without thinking.

It's also a part of why I favor the old harsh death penalties of the old days.

Another thing worth mentioning is that when players get all bent out of shape, sometimes that's us respecting the setting in our own, nerdy way. People wouldn't get so emotional and upset about things if we didn't care about this server and the setting, and sometimes it can be very valuable to take a step back and realise that even if you disagree strongly with someone, the fact that someone is passionate about the server enough to complain or to get upset in the first place, is probably a blessing we're going to miss a lot one day when this is all over.

[D4wN]

I'm with Hazard on the fear and respecting death thing. And everything else they're saying.

Respecting the setting to me is also being able to separate OOC and IC relationship and not hanging out with Abyssalists as a Paladin because they're your OOC buddies and you want to play with them. It means not -wanting- to be a slave and enjoying it, when it's really not something logically anyone would ever enjoy (especially not being an elf and being forced to literally live amongst your arch enemies). It's respecting that as a Drow or Monster you shouldn't wander into a large surface city filled with elite guards ignoring the fact that in reality they'd beat the beef cakes out of you.

I think for me a lot of it comes down to choosing to RP these sorts of things. To think about what your character would logically do, not what you as a player want to do. It's definitely okay not to be a FR junky, but I think some things are just logical to do or not to do.

[Eira]

I think for me a lot of it comes down to choosing to RP these sorts of things. To think about what your character would logically do, not what you as a player want to do. It's definitely okay not to be a FR junky, but I think some things are just logical to do or not to do.

Agreed on this. And with this, is also being able to match the wavelength of the majority of people you're roleplaying with. If nine people are clocked into the setting, the plot, the characters, and your reaction, as the tenth person, is to start memeing with tiktok references... it's very hard to want to play with that.

[Kuma]

Imagine we're playing a World War 2 roleplay scenario. The official server policy is that we're set just before D-Day. The Reich dominates Europe, and our focus is on the western front.

Now imagine playing with people who don't understand or respect that: trying to adhere to that 'lore' while you've got one guy claiming to still be trying to appease Germany CHamberlain-style, another claims Berlin has already fallen, and someone else as one of the last Japanese holdouts on some tropical island in the 60s.

It's ridiculous, right? Really hard to ground yourself or your play in that setting.

This is why setting is important to me. Everyone has to be on similar wavelengths, more or less, or else it doesn't make any sense.

[Amateur Hour]

For me, a lot of the setting is in understanding the social norms of our characters' societies.

We don't need to know every last detail of all the 1e-3e source books in order to respect the setting (and knowing everything leads to some of the problems Hazard mentioned: no character should know everything, not even a 40 INT wizard/LM), but we should know what our characters would consider to be typical, particularly when our characters don't agree with them. Being entirely honest, as an island in the middle of the Trackless Sea that's absurdly dangerous, it makes a lot of sense that it would attract the strange, the outliers, the outcasts, because ordinary well-adjusted people don't have much of a reason to go to Hell Island. But even our strange, outlier outcasts would be aware that they don't fit and would behave accordingly.

I have some very fond memories from my early Arelith days of a surface animator who knew very very well that animation was something most people thought wasn't good or cool, so he was extremely careful to make sure only people whose loyalty he was very sure of could track his animation activities back to him; he obviously didn't agree with the norm, but because he knew what the norm was he wasn't flouting it. I've seen several mechanically-obvious blackguards over the years coming through Myon who still understand the need to go "yes sirree Corellon is indeed my favorite and the Seldarine are the best yep mhm just don't look too closely at the altar in my room," and the ones whose stories I learned (which took a lot of trust-building to get in-character) had interesting reasons for why they decided to do something that would be considered abominable in the cultures they were raised in. I've seen some awesome Eilistraeeans who neatly acknowledge the server hard-lines with "I dream of the day drow can live on the surface, I have faith one day we will achieve it, but we have so far to go before that would be anything other than massive target for both surfacers and Lolthites, so we are not at that point yet." Everyone in a realistic setting is influenced by social norms.

You know the only group that isn't always influenced by social norms? Main characters in a Mary Sue style pulp adventure story.

Do you know what none of us are playing (or at least none of us should be playing)? Main characters in a Mary Sue style pulp adventure story.

[Griefmaker]

Imagine we're playing a World War 2 roleplay scenario. The official server policy is that we're set just before D-Day. The Reich dominates Europe, and our focus is on the western front.

Now imagine playing with people who don't understand or respect that: trying to adhere to that 'lore' while you've got one guy claiming to still be trying to appease Germany CHamberlain-style, another claims Berlin has already fallen, and someone else as one of the last Japanese holdouts on some tropical island in the 60s.

It's ridiculous, right? Really hard to ground yourself or your play in that setting.

This is why setting is important to me. Everyone has to be on similar wavelengths, more or less, or else it doesn't make any sense.

Perfectly stated.

[Anomandaris]

Others have articulated very well why having at least some version of shared truth regarding the setting is key to immersion and enabling rp.

I think it’s important to consider that all of our characters become part of the setting and influence it. This is why it’s so important that we don’t let OOC stuff skew our characters’ behavior; it starts to change the setting for the worse. It’s tempting to want to be the “main character,” and be “special” in some way. If we could instead realize that we’re all supporting characters in bringing the setting to life and telling other peoples’ stories, we’d get generally better outcomes for all.

Whether it’s Dawns example of paladins hanging out with abyssal ooc buddies and ignoring alignment or countless permutations of the same general issue, it creates a dynamic that is difficult to rp with, because the IC behavior is actually OOC masked as IC.

What do I tell a character in RP that is blatantly violating the setting? If my shadowmage is worshiping Tyr, betraying Shar and ignoring how the shadow weave is supposed to work, I’m effectively making an exception of myself in a way that degrades the setting for everyone and perpetuates/creates precedent for that behavior. I’d argue it is exploiting mechanics to do something that the setting would “never” allow for. This is actually quite a rampant problem on the server in my observation.

Respecting the setting is the first part of creating a shared narrative, because it establishes the social, political, cultural (etc etc) ground rules that we can all riff off. It effectively is the stage we all play upon.

I would love to see a firmer hand from the team in asserting the integrity of the setting through IC consequences and NPCs. That doesn’t have to be 100% forgotten realms, but it does need to be consistent. You betray Shar you just lost access to the shadow weave. You worship the trinity but did a bunch of unequivocally evil stuff, your divine spells lvl 7+ are not gonna work anymore; you’re a heretic and your patron cut you off. Sometimes the setting needs to “push back” a bit to preserve its integrity. PCs can be a part of reinforcing the setting through our own rp, but can’t/shouldn’t police setting adherence in other players. It’s a void that needs to be filled by the team which represent and are to some extent the setting.

[Richrd]

To me a "setting" is a baseline, a fundament, for any and all participants to agree on and respect before entering and interacting with the world around our characters.

It is something that I wish Arelith would sometimes just enforce harder, as others have stated here. Even if it is to the detriment of "somebody's fun". Rules, which a setting is at least in part, don't mean jack if they are not enforced to a degree.
(Little side note: Don't take this the way that I am saying that DMs don't do nothing. I am aware that I can't create a barbarian, name him Macho Man Randy Savage, walk into Cordor and shout UHHHHH YEAH BROTHERRRRRRR without getting pulled aside by a DM.)

Also gonna beat this dead horse again, but it's difficult for the setting to stay immersive all the time when you have players doing the type of stuff they do on Arelith.
Players pull off feats that would be legendary end-of-campaign narrative finales for tabletop DnD campaigns with epic level characters. Daily.
Example of a rather average level 30 Arelithian PC's day-to-day experiences.
"Hey, an adamantine node. Neat- Oh no, it's just zinc again..."
Just in-canon somehow slaughtered hundreds of Pit Fiends, by himself and very casually, on his way to the ore
Goes to Dis and is for some reason afraid of the guards there.
Proceeds to have a quick session of town plaza gossiping before heading out to the Red Dragon Isles to clear an island full of red giants and defeat an Elder Red Dragon.

[hugolino]

(Little side note: Don't take this the way that I am saying that DMs don't do nothing. I am aware that I can't create a barbarian, name him Macho Man Randy Savage, walk into Cordor and shout UHHHHH YEAH BROTHERRRRRRR without getting pulled aside by a DM.)

I've been so tempted for months to make a character named Baldur Gates III.

[Kuma]

Also gonna beat this dead horse again, but it's difficult for the setting to stay immersive all the time when you have players doing the type of stuff they do on Arelith.
Players pull off feats that would be legendary end-of-campaign narrative finales for tabletop DnD campaigns with epic level characters. Daily.

Please don't take this the wrong way when I say this, but this is quite literally a skill issue. That is to say, understanding how to suspend disbelief while still remaining wholly IC at all times is a skill that can be picked up and learned over time if approached in that way, and not as a failure of the server for not having us not fight anything narratively stronger than a goblin for 30 levels.

Perhaps it's something I could discuss at length if I gathered some thoughts about it, but I don't think the solution is either "nerf the monsters narrative impact (make the game less fun)" OR "stop discouraging people from ignoring the narrative impact of what they're fighting (be okay with people boasting about killing eighteen pit fiends at once)". The answer as ever lies somewhere in between.

[Seven Sons of Sin]

The setting is basically another section of the "rules."

It's a framework - a game system - that we all abide by. Things like deities and alignment are all aspects of 'setting' but also more directly linked to a character sheet (and subject to great debate).

Seeing folks breach the setting is no different than folks breaching any other kind of rule. Sure, you don't write them up and demean them, but you politely try to steer or suggest such towards something within the setting.

It's also not an easy skill at all, to know when and how much and why to suspend your belief/disbelief while playing on Arelith. Understating something can lead to triviality, and overstating can lead to self-centeredness. It's not easy to thread, and why it's often easy to try to focus character concepts on singular aspects of the server (or "setting") and try to get a clear sense of setting within that aspect, and then just defer to other characters/players as "experts" of their own corner of the archipelago.

One of the worst things a player/character can do is try to show "mastery" over the entirety of the setting (or server) in terms of what is canonical or proper and what is not. There's just Too Much to make sense of, and it can often come across smug and self-righteous rather than collaborative and cooperative.

[Irongron]

Also gonna beat this dead horse again, but it's difficult for the setting to stay immersive all the time when you have players doing the type of stuff they do on Arelith.
Players pull off feats that would be legendary end-of-campaign narrative finales for tabletop DnD campaigns with epic level characters. Daily.
Example of a rather average level 30 Arelithian PC's day-to-day experiences.
"Hey, an adamantine node. Neat- Oh no, it's just zinc again..."
Just in-canon somehow slaughtered hundreds of Pit Fiends, by himself and very casually, on his way to the ore
Goes to Dis and is for some reason afraid of the guards there.
Proceeds to have a quick session of town plaza gossiping before heading out to the Red Dragon Isles to clear an island full of red giants and defeat an Elder Red Dragon.

I think this is why many servers go strictly the low level route, as you are right; it is absolutely absurd within the setting of the Forgotten Realms.

For a video game? Not so much. I decided long ago that I wasn't going to ignore over 75% of the actual game - its feats, its spells, its creatures and so on, just so I could stay 'realistic' to a Dungeons & Dragons fantasy world. Even as it is we cap at 30, rather than the 40 the game normally allows.

Running a PW that sticks strictly with low level content, and only rolls out the higher stuff for specific events isn't necessarily a bad choice though, it's just not the game I want to develop, as I would find the lack of variety just really very dull, and I suspect many of our players would also. As I've stated before though, I do wish characters were low level for more than a few hours. As it stands we just don't get the time to tell stories or build low level narratives, as players or as DMs.

More broadly I like our setting, and find it was extraordinarily prescient that Arelith was created on its own homebrew island within the Forgotten Realms, rather than trying to make a version of an existing location, as it really does enable a lot of the above silliness.

[Android Sufferer]

If it looks like a balor, sounds like a balor and fights worse than your buddy Carl who's been training in the cordor guard for a couple of years; maybe you're seeing things and you were insane long before stepping into that portal throwing chunks of bone and viscera - wait, you did that?

skill issue.

[Irongron]

So all of this reminds of the time I genuinely wanted to use futuristic mods and make sci-fi area with a VR machine. Idea was I do this to just one random character (like just one, ever). When their dwarf/elf etc died they'd go there instead of the Fugue, a futuristic Forgotten Realms.

The NPCs would explaiin the machine was glitching, and that they shouldn't worry, their 'real world' memories would take a few minutes to reimprint. After the respawn timer the Arelith machine would be working again and they could go back in, OR they could choose take the door out of the room to the Medsec Bay and return to their future life, whereupon the character would be deleted.

I would then flatly deny that any of this happened, and purge the logs of all proof.

[Amnesy]

So all of this reminds of the time I genuinely wanted to use futuristic mods and make sci-fi area with a VR machine. Idea was I do this to just one random character (like just one, ever). When their dwarf/elf etc died they'd go there instead of the Fugue, a futuristic Forgotten Realms.

The NPCs would explaiin the machine was glitching, and that they shouldn't worry, their 'real world' memories would take a few minutes to reimprint. After the respawn timer the Arelith machine would be working again and they could go back in, OR they could choose take the door out of the room to the Medsec Bay and return to their future life, whereupon the character would be deleted.

I would then flatly deny that any of this happened, and purge the logs of all proof.

I used something similar in a Nuroshima campaign prelude.
Moloch used hostage people trapped within a game simulation to achieve artificial intelligence. Many choices PCs made in the fantasy adventure could have been traced to the 'real world'.

[Lass is Class]

Integrity. Inspiration. Game rules.

Belief that characters' actions remain within the laws of the setting's world, and trust that the setting's world can explain itself without failure.

With the setting being inspiring, having its laws and integrity.
As long as one is loyal to the setting, the characters' actions will be believable, and therefore - atmospheric, and therefore - interesting, and therefore - fun.

[LurkingShadow]

Every setting has its own setting-realism. I think that needs to be followed, so that Half Orcs do not fly and Demons do not turn good because someone think its cool and should be more common than it is, and common it sure as hell isn't.