One of the most frequent types of questions I get asked is, “What do you come up with first, the setting or the system?” A question unique to game designers, I’m certain, which makes it an interesting one. Even if the place where the questions come from is overly simplistic. There’s a supposition within it, unspoken, that games are like cars on an assembly line. First, you make this part, and then you weld that part to it, and then affix this other part to that, etc. (It’s probably clear that I don’t have any idea how cars are built.)
But in my experience, an RPG is a messy, organic, confused mess…until it’s not. And when it’s not, you’re probably done designing it.
Obviously, sometimes the answer to the question is simple. If you’re making a setting for an existing game, or a new system for an existing setting—like a licensed property, for example—the nature of the product is the answer to the question. If you’re talking about a brand new setting and a brand new system, like those of Stealing Stories for the Devil (which I just finished working on), maybe the best answer you can give is to talk about which of the two inspired you first.
But even then, there’s this supposition that a game’s setting and system are independent entities, and I doubt that’s ever really true. In fact, I think that when people ask this question, some of them are actually asking another question, “Which is more important: system or setting?” You hear variations on this frequently. Someone will say, “system doesn’t matter.” Or they’ll say, “I don’t care about the story, I just want to roll some dice.” Those opinions are fine, but… well, they are what they are. Which is to say, I have fundamental problems with both, particularly the former. In my opinion, setting and system are not only concepts that are entwined, but each individual piece of both setting and system is intertwined with every other piece of both setting and system.
So then, we finally get to the difficult, complex, nuanced answer to the question: almost every time, it’s a little of both. You come up with an interesting way to handle task resolution, and then you get an idea for a centralized gladiator-style arena that seems cool, and that informs that it’s going to be a combat-heavy game, so you start noodling with a combat system, which might just be development of task resolution, but while you’re doing that you come up with some unique types of weapons and that suggests the culture or species that uses such weapons, and what they’re like, and so then… and it just goes like that.
Even in that example, though, an even more insightful answer to the larger question rears its head. Different parts of the world inform the system. And the system suggests developments in the setting. This, in fact, I might argue is the very essence of RPG design. It is the process that sets designing a tabletop RPG apart from any other creative endeavor. It’s the recognition that each bit relies on and is relied upon both the whole and all the other individual bits. Because the two aspects of the game aren’t just pieces that get welded together. It’s more like making a bespoke suit of clothes for an individual. You measure, then adjust, then try a fitting, give some options, adjust some more, and so on.
But what does it mean for one part of a game to “inform” another? At its heart, it means that the setting will suggest gameplay but mechanics drive gameplay. If you make a world full of ruins from ancient civilizations full of strange treasures, gameplay is going to involve exploring ruins. But rules make that possible.
Coming at it from the other side, though, gameplay arising from the system is going to suggest aspects of the setting. If the PCs are going to be discovering strange treasures in these ruins, they’re going to be bringing some of them to nearby towns, and so how are the people there going to react? The answer could be any number of things, and none of them are necessarily better than the others. You just need to have thought of it and designed it into the setting.
RPGs are bespoke creations. They’re paintings, where the painter gets done painting the sun’s reflection on the water and then realizes the water needs just a bit more green. They’re Rube Goldberg machines where each part only works because you design the part before it and you know exactly the position it will be in when the next one comes into play.
The game’s rules are the world’s laws of physics. They dictate how things work. If your setting is a low-magic fantasy world but your game contains list after list of magic spells and items, that’s going to ring false. But these are big, obvious examples of informing, and big obvious examples aren’t really what game design is about. The devil, as they say, is in the details. A designer needs to approach this issue in miniature.
If a certain alien species uses a particular type of interstellar drive, but the rules suggest that there are other, better, and more efficient FTL drives that should be available to them, you can look at that as a system flaw and fix it by changing some aspect of that drive in your space opera game. OR, you can look at it as a setting opportunity and explain that they use the inferior drive because their myths say that their god granted some important figure in their history the secrets of that drive. So now these aliens are clearly deeply devout and you hadn’t even considered that aspect of their culture before that point. You decide that they see the interstellar drive in their ships as holy, and conduct sacred rituals each time they activate it. The mechanics you were toying with regarding FTL spaceships just made the whole setting deeper and richer.
It’s difficult to discuss this topic without constantly referring to examples or analogies. That’s because the real, real answer to the question of “What do you come up with first, the setting or the system?” is that there is no real answer. There is no systemic, step-by-step process. There is no manual, or IKEA-style series of diagrams of how you assemble an RPG. It varies from game to game, and it varies within the process itself. Even if you think you’re starting with one aspect, you might not be. In fact, by the time you’re halfway through a design, your first idea for that task resolution system might get tossed in the trash because it no longer works at the greater whole that you’ve crafted.
Setting and system: it’s an eternal dance, with each adjusting to the movements of the other as well as adapting to the movements the other makes.
Brief Addendum: “But Monte,” you ask, “how can you have a universal system then? Including some that you yourself have designed?” Glad you asked., Most universal systems, in fact, showcase the interdependency of system and setting that I’m discussing in very overt, easy-to-see ways. Take the Cypher System for example. For each genre, there’s a discussion in the main rulebook of how that particular setting informs modifications to the system, as well as ways in which the setting needs to be shaped and molded to fit with the system. My team has published entire books on how to best use the general Cypher System rules for fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and more. Each book further elaborates changes and allowances that we suggest you make to the system, and provides a setting in that genre that is specifically informed by both the rules and the changes we suggest you make to the system. The eternal dance continues.
Very interesting, and informative.
I was wondering, how you envision the setting and worldbuilding to differ between RPG games and narrative fiction? In my head they are pretty similar/parallel processes until on the RPG side you need to derive the mechanics for how in universe things will work in game. Of course there is always some variation between game mechanics in a setting derived from novels, and novelizations set in worlds originally encountered as RPG settings. This has been a frustration of mine in the past with having cool ideas in the narrative fiction that don't work within the game mechanics, but I also play a lot of games with special mechanics for specific characters/factions/etc. that violate some of the core rules a player character are supposed to adhere to , but I also accept fairly easily
While I was reading this one, it reminded me of the feeling of elegance with which some systems intertwine with the particular narrative of the setting. I remembered -many years ago- when I played Alternity for the first time (this was before the d20 system, of course) and the feeling of combat rules allowing so much more cinematic narrative on combat scenes. Since then, I have sort of a bias towards systems that seem to evoke more naturally from the narrative of the game (e.g. some heavy storytelling games just don't cut it because their system seems so vague that it's hard to feel that the system's got your back as a GM). Hitting the spot seems so damn hard for most games. Maybe accepting the reduction of the game scope is the logical path (product differentiation)? Isn't that what Stealing Stories for the Devil is also about? Making the scope more specific in order to obtain game mechanics that are tightly designed to display the specific narrative context? Away with the universal or large pretentious game systems or settings. Maybe those were more for us 20th-Century-gamers and our long campaigns, steady characters, long-term goals, etc.