thread: 2006-02-16 : Throwing It Open: Color
On 2006-02-17, Joshua BishopRoby wrote:
Color is in many ways the most important part of the game—it's the thing that engages the imagination. It's the essence of the game, distilled into specific details.
That said, I don't find it terribly useful to define a lot of color, and while FLFS has half the book dedicated to it, very little of it is defined. It's the difference between, say, a Star Trek sourcebook that attempts to list all of the planets in the Federation, their population numbers, what kind of star they orbit, what resources they produce, et cetera, exhaustively, and a book that sets a tone that attempts to inspire the players to fill in the details themselves. Actually, Dogs in the Vineyard presents its setting in a very similar way.
The thing of it is, your players are better equipped than you are to come up with color that they will like. My armchair, barely-informed opinion is that you should define 'why which situation is important' rather loosely—your players are more than capable to add in stuff that will make it bang for them (especially if you give them guidelines and procedures to do so).
