Thus Spake Zaraborgstrom/EarththeSetting
On rpg.net Re: What's the best RPG setting ever published? Quote: Originally Posted by John Wick
This one. Not an alternate Earth. This very Earth. It's got the most splat books of any RPG world I know.
Seriously?
I've been thinking about Earth for some time. And I know that a lot of the people working for Earth are good people, dedicated crafters with a real interest in quality and verisimilitude. I have to respect their dedication to getting everything nailed down right down to the Planck level.
But.
Earth has one of the most egregious and intrusive metaplots out there. They make fun of it in the setting---even people who live there don't know what's coming next. If you're not living your life in the now, in one precise second, synchronized with their releases (give or take the difference in light cone between us), your life is essentially entirely unsupported by the Causality system. It's hard for the players, and the designers can barely keep up with the pace---sometimes, I think that most of the metaplot updates come from people just seeing random things happen, writing them down, and telling everyone about them.
For game mechanics, I can't help but notice that Earth is wildly inconsistent. Not only is the Relativity system entirely out of synch with the Quantum system, but it's pretty clear that the people behind them don't have a good grasp of genre. What are these rules intended to emulate? I mean, this is a setting where you can have a cat in a box that is either dead or alive. That's up there with hit points.
One of the things I try to avoid, as a setting writer, is closing doors. Don't tell us who won the Presidential election. Let each of us, individually, choose. I like the ambiguity of whether the moon landing or Roswell crash was real, but I'd much prefer it if there was a viable way to live a life where there's an ancient and glorious civilization on Mars. In Exalted, you just drop that in. "Oh, hey, Mars, you've got an ancient and glorious civilization living on you." "Oh," she says, nonplussed. But she's cool with that. In Earth, you pretty much have to toss out every bit of planetary data we have to make that work.
Worst yet, almost all the really good supplements on Earth aren't actually about Earth. They're not. They're about alternate versions of Earth defined by the writer's perspective. That's great flavor, but seriously, if you want to actually know something about the Earth, you have to flip through dozens of supplements and weigh the narrators' veracity. What's up with that?
Flying Cars appears to be vaporware, along with World Peace and the Age of Aquarius.
Earth fails as a gamist, narrativist, and most tellingly, as a simulationist game. On Earth, you can get shot point-blank and keep fighting without any penalties. Earth reliably fails to recognize the differences between the sexes with clear-cut penalties and bonuses, and you can legitimately design a rock star who has millions of dollars and enormous fame but no music skill.
Earth isn't an RPG setting. It's a grand experiment, a brilliant experiment, and I hope it keeps going for the billions of years we've been promised, but as an *experience*. Not as an RPG. As an RPG, I think its adherents will find that it's just another fantasy heartbreaker.
She waits for her magical animal companion to finish bagging the evidence. http://rebecca.hitherby.com Last edited by Rebecca Borgstrom : 11-03-2004 at 08:33 PM
