Need advice for reining in ideas

[DaveYanakov]

So I haven't tried to assemble a campaign setting in about fifteen years and now that I have been asked to, I started with a kernel. Now everywhere I look it sparks some new idea or memory of an idea that the weight of years has added to my baggage. So far I've got enough material to spin off one of those genre specific shelves that are starting to show up at bookstores ala 'Teen Supernatural Romance' and my notes are getting out of hand.

How do I install a floodgate so that I can focus on one bit at a time long enough to get one cohesive story out of this?

[Ulfengaard]

Theme. Try to choose a theme for your world (a la, "Power corrupts" or "Right and wrong are ambiguous"). Then, when an idea pops, see if it fits with the theme.

Here is an example. In a setting where the theme is "Might equals Right", the idea of a democracy or even a republic state is really out of line. Despotism, monarchy, oligarchy: they can all work in the setting. A smaller detail might have to do with character class availability. In the same "Might equals Right" setting, magery could go to either extreme of power: mages might either be the most significant figures, both historically and presently, or they might have been stamped out at some point. In either case, mages should be few since, if they are powerful, they more closely guard their secrets and vie against one another politically and, if they are nearly extinct... well, that goes without saying.

Hope that helps, man. A few more specifics might make it clearer where you're having the flood. I have to say, though, that I would always rather have too many ideas than not enough. ;)

[DaveYanakov]

That's the problem, it all fits in thematically. It's difficult to sift through and figure out which are the bits I really need to get started with. I can't go into anything more specific without blowing spoilers for everything out there for the people who will be playing in this campaign that started everything. I'm looking for general advice more than something specific.

[Ulfengaard]

If theme won't do it, then don't toss anything out. Keep all the ideas. Instead, work out a timeline for your labor. Start with the core aspects of the world (geography, major [and only major] historical events, etc.). Do just the core. That way, you can be sure that your flood of ideas doesn't become a distraction which makes your campaign setting a year-long project prior to the first session. Create only what you need before each session, and any ideas which are extraneous get a brief description on a notepad before returning to work on the important stuff.

If you intend to publish the setting, you'll eventually need to fill in all the details, but if you can limit yourself to the core aspects for now, at least the flood can be diverted.

[Thorium-232]

Something that I've found helpful while writing, especially when I have a bumper crop of ideas to cover, is that not everything needs to be explained. This is a lot easier to do in a fantasy or soft sci-fi setting where hand-waving is more permissible, but the gist is that if you're reluctant to let enough ideas fall away that your setting/story becomes manageable, you can compress those concepts and make them fit if some of them don't need to be explained.

Take for instance Ulfengaard's example of powerful mages and their scarcity. You have two options: make that a large part of your theme, where there was some kind of "war of supremacy", where mages killed mages in a survival of the fittest slugfest that ravaged the world, or... maybe it was decided that the mages should self-limit themselves in a back door council meeting, for the safety of the world? Or even... nobody knows. There used to be a lot of mages, but these days you can't find one in a lifetime of searching. And nobody knows why.

End result is you get your rare, super-powerful magic users without the overhead of really needing to say why. The same idea goes for things like warp drives ("they were created XXXX years ago by Dr. X, when he..." vs. "we've always just had them"), cataclysms (see George R. R. Martin's Doom of Valyria, an important plot point carried over five books that has yet to be really explained, but still carries tremendous narrative weight), alien races, pretty much anything you can think of. It really works on the principle of "less is more", and if done well you can offload a lot of writing/theorizing onto your players, who will fill in the blanks themselves.

[Ulfengaard]

Or even... nobody knows. There used to be a lot of mages, but these days you can't find one in a lifetime of searching. And nobody knows why.

...offload a lot of writing/theorizing onto your players, who will fill in the blanks themselves.

I submit that, in a campaign setting for a game, this has the unique benefit of letting the players guide the construction of the world by watching for their guesses and assumptions. With a little intuition (and more than a little extemporaneous skill), you can detect the sort of setting that they are wanting through what they give away in their discussions and investigations. This provides options. You can follow their leanings, give their guesses an interesting twist, or even turn their assumptions entirely on their heads. It's an interplay and collaboration that straight fiction writers never get to engage in.

[FlowerChild]

The trick I use is to prioritize ideas into separate lists as I write them down. I write down almost all of them, as some may become less or more relevant depending on other decisions I make, but I keep highly mutable lists for things that are "must have", things I will do in the long term, and things I want to consider further.

As I work, items just naturally shift from one to the other depending on context. I find the important part is just to focus on one particular direction, quickly write down any ideas that come to me in the process as bullet points so that I don't forget them, and let things sort themselves out organically as I go.

I apply the above to pretty much any large project I undertake, the mod included, and without it, I likely wouldn't be as productive as I am because I'd keep getting distracted by my newest idea.

[TheGatesofLogic]

....I likely wouldn't be as productive as I am because I'd keep getting distracted by my newest idea.

Wait... FlowerChild doesn't get distracted by his 'latest and greatest' ideas? hmmm.... If I recall correctly, HC Movement and Hardcore Silverfish were both exactly that kind of thing... Nah, i'm just messing with you those things actually did have significant an immediately valuable effects that were beneficial towards the mod's development. Flowerchild's method is actually very effective and efficient.

I am a rather successful author whenever I begin pulling a world together the first thing I do is gather the VERY BEST (often the most vague/abstract too) of my ideas and build up a fraction of the setting VERY GRADUALLY connecting them. Often I shift some of the ideas backwards such that characters develop that idea rather than it existing from the start (tricky but honestly gives the best results). If you simply take the idea and work backwards to slowly influence the setting then you can make the reader/player feel like they are following the story because they want to follow it, and not because the story forces them to do so. tricky but when done well it leads to amazing results.

specifically related to game setting design i don't have a whole lot of experience. I hope you manage your project well and with efficiency, good luck!

[FlowerChild]

Wait... FlowerChild doesn't get distracted by his 'latest and greatest' ideas? hmmm.... If I recall correctly, HC Movement and Hardcore Silverfish were both exactly that kind of thing...

Oh, I do. What I described just limits the impact of that. Some ideas are just so good they trump your previous priorities.

What you guys don't see are the pages of notes that I tend to produce with each and every release, and which I tend to go back through periodically (I just did that this morning actually) to consolidate them, trim out the ones that have found their way into the mod since or which are no longer relevant (or which are just plain bad), or to bump in priority those which have become more pertinent due to my other changes. Often times I wind up being pleasantly surprised in the process by some of the ideas I had and which I then largely forgot about, or wind up seeing connections between what I thought were previously individual ideas that create a greater whole, or wind up seeing things that are now super-simple to do because of work I've done in other areas since.

To give you an example, I found this morning that different types of wood having variable hardness pops up in several places in my notes (just to give a little more 'texture' to the world and further differentiate the wood types), but I always put it aside in the past because it would have taken a fairly extensive reworking of the tool code for relatively little gain. However, the reworking of the tool code I just did to accommodate variable hardness in different strata of stone now makes that almost trivial to implement, so I bumped that one up to the list of things that I'll take care of in the near future, and removed it from where it appeared in the other lists.

There are definitely still those "eureka!" moments that occur and change your whole direction in an instant, but I find maintaining such lists keeps the mental storm down to a dull roar whereas if I didn't acknowledge the individual ideas by writing them down somewhere, my mind would be going off on huge tangents with them on a continual basis.

It's almost a way of managing the internal debate that goes on about such things. When I think of something new, I start having an inner dialogue about the pros and cons of such an idea. Writing it down schedules that debate for a later date, and thus my mind can comfortably move on to something else.

[johnt]

If the point of this is to tell a story, then character matters more than anything else. Look at Game Of Thrones, for example. It's basically a soap opera, and the world exists mostly as a way to test the characters.

Focus on answering these questions: What do the characters want? Why can't they have it? Should they want something else instead? Anything about the world that doesn't directly help you answer those questions can be out in the background.

[Thorium-232]

If the point of this is to tell a story, then character matters more than anything else.

This can't be stressed enough, really. I just watched The Amazing Spiderman again the other day, and right at the end there's this scene (relevant until the 50sec mark) which really tells you all you need to know. Storytelling is about the characters, and how they interact with, and are changed by, the characters around them and the world itself. This is why your standard action flick feels empty, and why Best Picture always seems to go to dramatic films. As my 12th grade English teacher said, "it's about the people, stupid!".

In a tabletop RPG, this takes on the form of "will this matter to my PCs? Like, at all?" If it doesn't, you can probably safely axe it. The things that make a great world are the things that will affect your players the most; the rest is details. This dovetails into what I said before, in that if you don't need to explain something to make it fantastic, don't. It could very well serve you better as a mystery.

Also important is to keep your audience in mind; not just what they like, but what they'll be able to keep track of. If something gets too complicated and you start to lose people who aren't as familiar with the content as you are (and you will be the gold medal lorekeeper at the table by default) then suddenly your story is fighting itself. Be sure to get two to four main themes and stick with them (FC's list of "must haves", for example) and use the other ideas to flesh those out when you can. I once ran a campaign with a buddy of mine that fell victim to this. He had so much crammed in that we at one point forgot who we were actually fighting against and had to break character for a short roundtable to get our imagined plot lines straightened out.

Finally, be sure to strive for internal consistency where you can. Do that and soon enough you'll find a plot and setting that begins to write itself for you.