It broke my heart to discover that the story about Betty Crocker cake mix and leaving out the egg is probably apocryphal. It’s one of those stories that’s so good that you want it to be true. Short form, the story goes that Betty Crocker’s cake mixes were doing poorly until they changed the formulation and instructions to require the baker to add the egg themselves. Doing so made it feel more like cooking, and invested them in the product.

I love this story because I love this idea as applied to RPGs. They are a product which relies on the customer adding their own ingredients and making the end result their own. I should have known the metaphor was just too perfect.

This has been freshly on my mind as I’ve been thinking about settings. This train of thought was kicked off by the ways that Daggerheart presents their campaign frames, and a conversation with myself about how I would change that model[1]. The DH model is pretty efficient, and it made some reasonable tradeoffs in order to deliver a lot of content in a small amount of space by skipping over the usual setting and jumping instead into frames. This worked really well, though it was not always quite as successful jumping down to situations.

Since I can’t assume you have the book in front of you of you, I’m going to unpack this model a bit outside of the Daggeherheart context, since it’s really more of a general topic anyway.

At heart, this is a three tier model of setting, frame and situation. Setting is, as the name suggests, the overall setting, such as the Forgotten Realms, the Galaxy of Star Wars, or “the world” or Cyberpunk 2099. The Frame is an immediate slice of that setting that showcases the good parts of it and has plenty to, and is easily communicated and absorbed. Situation is the immediate framing of the game – it’s what’s happening now that calls for adventurers or cyberpunks or whatever.

These are not terms of art – just loose sketches. Each one can be used differently and encompass a wide variety of things. Settings can range from encyclopedic mammoths to slim volumes. Frames can range drastically in scope and immediacy. Situation can just as easily be “the adventure” (or, “the module” for old folks) as it could be “the tilt” in fiasco-influenced parlance. I don’t use them in any kind of strict way, but I like the general mental model they create, so just accept they’re a loose kind of outline I’m using to make these things easy to talk about. Maybe some other day I’ll talk about all sorts of interesting exceptions to and variants of the model, but for now, it’s a solid enough start.

The trick to all this is that the *reason* I like this model is that its fragmented, flawed approach aligns pretty well with with my experience of RPG setting as something flawed and fragmented. And that’s a good thing. To put it more concretely, different people respond to different things in a setting, and I feel like the model comes closer to acknowledging that than past attempts I’ve seen.

Consider, for example, the Forgotten Realms. Tremendously popular, and also just huge beyond all measure. Is it a good setting? That’s a hard question to answer, at least when framed that way, because the very things that make it very appealing to some (depth of lore, richness of content) are the same things that make it dense and impenetrable to others.

And it’s not a simple binary. Bear in mind there are also tons of FR fans whose exposure is as a setting in another context, such as a video game or a novel. They may be strongly invested, and may even be huge nerds, but that investment may be for a particular slice of things. That makes for a very organic model which ends up looking a lot like frames – a specific subset of the larger setting that has all of the elements necessary for engagement.

Recognizing this can trigger an instinctive reaction to suggest that the larger corpus of FR material is kind of unnecessary in this context. If all that people need is the frame, then isn’t the rest of it just kind of overhead? And while that might be true in a specific situation, it overlooks two very critical facts. The first is that, structurally, the breadth of FR lore contains the seeds for many frames[2]. Second, and more importantly though – for some players. that corpus is fun.

Of course, however you end up slicing it, at some point you must answer the question of “Why are we playing tonight?”, and there are so many different answers to that as to make me feel like a bit of a cheat folding them all into one bucket and calling it “situation”, but I do so out of necessity – specifically the necessity of not totally sidetracking myself into a discussion of the many things that make up this idea.

This is where the rubber meets the road for RPGs, and just as the setting who’ll hopefully provide rich meat for Frame ideas, the frame hopefully provides many ideas for situations. Or at least if that’s what you want in a game. There are plenty of games that are nothing but situation, with all other elements of setting flowing from its specifics (or being invented in play).

That is neither a good nor bad thing, it’s just one of those things you want to be aware of and decide how it aligns with your own fun. For my part, I want to explicitly acknowledge it as an approach, but also to set it aside for the moment because the interesting problems it solves are not the problems I’m thinking about now.

But saying that raises questions of its own. Why do I want to think about situation as part of this tiered context rather than just thinking of it as the only thing, since it’s the element closes to actual play?

Hard question. Super valid question too. But I do have an answer.

I am most interested in settings as shared content, at least in this context. Settings having existence outside of their creating fiction is just something that appeals to a certain sort of nerd, of which I am one. The thing that Daggerheart got me thinking about what not setting themselves so much as the question of how we share and use them as a community. It’s not the applicability to this model to setting design which intrigues me (though there’s some cool stuff there) as much as its applicability to setting presentation.

Daggerheart’s template is a good start. It has a structured outline with clearly defined section and, perhaps most critically, firewalls off the mechanics into its own section. With a few tweaks an additions, the model could be used very flexibly, to cover setting material up and down the tiers. And with the discrete sectioning, it can support a lot of interesting licensing approaches.

More concretely, I could, I believe, write all the setting material for something – setting, frame & situation all – and release that under Creative Commons, just leaving out the rules chapter. I could then write multiple rules chapters (or, perhaps more powerfully, invite others to do so if they wish), with each chapter under its own license, allowing me to not particularly sweat about the Daggerheart OGL vs WOTC’s whatever it is vs Fate Vs my own homebrew. (Yes, this gets a little complicated if I’m invested in protecting my IP rather than opening up my setting, but even that can be addressed with clarity of license.)

So, that’s why I’m intrigued by this model. The multi-tiered outline structure is usefully applicable from both a gaming AND a publishing perspective, and I admit I’m currently toying with figuring out what I think such a template could look like.

Anyway, I suppose this I mostly just a warning that there may be more setting noodling coming in the future.

1 – This is probably a topic that will merit its own post someday, but the short form is that I think that the Darggerheart model is a pretty solid starting point, and most of the changes I’d make would be to expand it to add a few more elements by default.

2– And even other settings. Take the example of Waterdeep. Structurally, you would expect it to be a frame within the larger FR setting, and you absolutely can use it that way. But it also has so much volume of material available for it that you could reasonably view it as a setting, and construct more specific frames within it. This kind of multi-layering is a big part of why I don’t think this is really a rigidly 3 tier model, since it’s entirely possible for some layers to repeat themselves, depending how you approach them.