thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-07, Ninja Monkey J wrote:
See what happens when your computer dies? You get directly misquoted on a blog, then have to use your girlfriend's ancient iBook to post.The principles of that world were these, if I recall:
- Everyone's doing what they're doing because they think it's the right thing to do.
- No one is incorruptible because you can convince them that what they really want to do is really the right thing to do. That cuts every way it can.
- Imperial bureacracy is so vast that anyone who wants to get anything done just does it, because by the time the forms for their malfeasance have been properly processed, it will be decades later and the character will probably be dead anway.
There were a bunch of aesthetic decisions, too: Imperial vessels are huge, vertical rectangles (they always appeared that way, despite sticking to the uplessness of space). Guns shot bullets. Spacecraft were held together with tape. Stuff like that.
It's how I've run games ever since. Characters have motivations and anytime the protags do something, I ask myself what the NPCs would do in this situation, given their resources. Sometimes it's simple: "Queen Elizabeth's agents will never betray her because she's got something on them." "Jean-Renard is a coward and will funnel his resources into violence only as long as it will keep him out of danger." Along those lines.
I've found that you wind up with NPCs that seem really real because they're not prescripted. You have a world that seems real because, even when you don't know what's under every rock, you know the kind of thing that should be there.
