Game Masters, Make Sure You Run The Setting Everyone Agreed To Play

This Monday I'd like to take a moment to address all the game masters out there. This applies to all of us, no matter which systems we prefer, or what settings we use. I want all of us to take a moment, and ask ourselves a simple question regarding our games.

"What is in the setting?"

"Whatever I say is in it," is not an appropriate answer.

This isn't a rhetorical question, either. Because I can tell you that the worst arguments I've had with game masters and storytellers across the board has been over what should be a simple, fundamental understanding. But there are a lot of us who bring our own preconceptions (and sometimes our misconceptions) to the game, and that can cause serious problems when the game you're trying to run is not the game everyone else showed up to play.

I'll give you some examples in a minute. Before that, though, take a second to sign up to my weekly newsletter so you don't miss any of my updates! And, as usual with discussions like this, those who completely make their own worlds and settings, you are mostly excused from this... provided, of course, your settings remain consistent once the game actually begins.

Magic, Technology, World Canon, and Tone

There is one example for what I'm talking about that I come across basically every other week due to the parts of the Internet in which I live, and it is game masters who are running Pathfinder games who seem to have confused Golarion for Middle Earth in terms of just exactly how rare spellcasters, magic items, non-humans, and other fantastical elements of the setting happen to be.

Because, in the minds of these game masters there should only be a few actual spellcasters in any given region of the world. Non-humans should be weird and unusual sights, often stoking panic, unless we're specifically in places where they are the dominant species. Magic items are rarities never seen by the common citizenry, and they are only to be wielded by those of great wealth or power.

And absolutely NONE of that describes Golarion as it's written. At all.

Seriously... it's all in the books.

You don't have to delve deep into the setting guide to realize these things, either. Golarion as a setting is a bubbling cauldron of high magic nonsense and insanity! Practically every nation of note has a mage's college of some variety (telling you there are enough students year after year to fill the ranks of an academy), there's an entire region that's filled with a semi-permanent gateway into the abyss (depending on if you completed Wrath of The Righteous yet or not), a fascist government literally propped up by the forces of hell, a nation of nearly-endless night watched over by a Hellraiser-style god, a meteorite that can allow someone to transcend mortality... you get the idea.

Golarion, as a setting, is meant to be a kitchen sink of nonsense and possibility. Your party might have a sorcerer birthed in a graveyard who wields the forces of death, a one-eyed gunslinging paladin, a barbarian with a great ax and a cybernetic arm he took from a robot he fought in a crashed spaceship, and a druid who has reincarnated for nearly a thousand years to maintain the eternal balance of nature... and none of that is outside the setting canon. It's all in the game, right there in black-and-white, often with specifically laid out paths and options for players to use.

It's not a low-fantasy setting, but if you approach it like one it will feel like you're trying to run a totally different game than the players agreed to if they're going off what's written in the book.

Oh don't worry, I've got more examples.

I see this sort of attitude in World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness games all the time, too. A storyteller is running a game set in the modern day (or even back in the late 1990s), but when players start tooling up with high-caliber weaponry and body armor instead of using diplomacy, stealth, or even a more magical route (for characters who have access to unique powers), suddenly the ST starts making all sorts of noises about how those options aren't available, or won't work. Rather than rewarding the players for using the options presented in the game, they instead want to get salty about how a riot shotgun or an incendiary grenade suddenly let the players dole out a lot more harshness than they'd anticipated, reducing a threat to ashes... even though it is precisely those modern advances that makes regular mortals the most dangerous things in the setting (in large enough numbers, anyway).

Shady arms deals and flying lead are as much a part of the setting as smoky backrooms and drippy sewers, and while there should be complications (illicit arms require time and resources to acquire, they tend to draw a lot of attentions, enemies will escalate the same way the players do, etc.), just denying that this is part of the setting doesn't make your game better. It just discourages players, and highlights what routes you will and won't accept for solving problems as the ST.

Perhaps the most common example of this that I come across, though, is when the person running the game changes the setting history and tone without checking with the players to be sure they're on board with that fundamental shift.

This can take all sorts of forms. From instituting new tribal social bands and customs for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, to declaring that the god Aroden isn't dead in Pathfinder (or in more extreme situations that Zon Kuthon was never corrupted to become what he is now), to cutting out all of the loss of humanity and horror elements from Vampire: The Masquerade so that it feels more like Assassin's Creed with fangs, I've seen this happen in a dozen different ways across a dozen different games.

Now, I'm not rendering judgment on these changes. If they're what you want to do to make your game more enjoyable for your table, shine on and do your thing... but talk to your players before you make changes that they're going to have to deal with.

Communication Really Is Key

The first rule of RPGs is that you can always change the game to suit your table... but that needs to be done with the approval and consent of your group. It's a fundamental aspect of the game that you all need to be on the same page about before you go forward, because if you're not it's going to lead to nothing but problems as surely as if you said you wanted to run a political thriller and your players rocked up to the table with the A-Team.

I can be diplomatic. When I want to be.

So before you change anything you should have a clear understanding of what's actually in the book. Then, once you understand the game, setting, lore, mechanics, etc. as they exist, you can discuss what you want to change, limit, alter, and tweak to make things work the way you want them to with the players around your table.

Just remember that it is your responsibility as the person in the big chair to communicate to your players what is going to be different... and what is going to be the same. Because if you ask someone, "Hey, want to join my Masquerade game?," but you don't tell them that you're running it more like a superheroes-with-fangs setting, then a player who showed up expecting body horror, angst, drama, and the dark midnight of the soul is going to be less than pleased.

My two cents, the more you're going to change, the better you need to understand the game, and the more communication there needs to be. Because just altering some notes in tone, or changing one or two minor details probably isn't going to be a big deal... but the more fundamental your changes are, and the wider the ripples go, the more important it is you have your players' full buy-in and support.

Trust me... it's better to check twice than to just assume people will go with it, "For the good of the game." Because players only have so much trust, and that's not a currency you want to spend casually.

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