Like anybody writing any setting bible, when I am writing for Flat Black I have to strive for the golden mean on a couple of dimensions.
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I have to give strong support to the requirements of the intended adventures — that is, I have to write exotic cultures, societies, and governments that seem vivid and bewildering without being actually bizarre. But as I am doing that I have to be careful not to put uncomfortable strain on players’ (and, perhaps, other GMs’) suspension of disbelief.
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I have to provide enough detail to be actually useful and convincing. Players reading a world briefing must not feel that they are being denied vital, need-to-know information that their characters would get from the tourist brochure and Wikipedia Galactica. Players designing a character from a colourful homeworld (and, maybe, GMs preparing to set an adventure on a world) must get a working mental model of what happens on the world when they read the briefing. Readers’ suspension-of-disbelief can often be assisted by explanations and justifications. But I have to be careful not to write at such length that no-one will read the briefing or be able to remember its contents if they do.
Each of these constraints bears on the other. I can make the cultures more exotic and simultaneously more believable if I spend word count on ranges of variation, corroborative detail, and justifications in history. For example, see the thread about Tau Ceti. But doing that sort of thing for enough worlds for a GM or character-generating player to be getting on with would take a lot of time to write, and everyone but me would baulk at reading it.
To thread these two needles I need to know where their eyes are. I need information about what prospective users find too simple to be believable and what they find too complex and detailed to be readable. I need to know how convinced my readers are that the customs of their island and their tribe are laws of human nature. (I know that the social universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. I can cite instances of real people in the past doing things that my friends have declared it impossible that fictional people in Flat Black would do in the future. But citing instances and arguing analogies costs me word count that I can’t afford.)
This being the case, I would like to provoke a general discussion among some role-players who include and otherwise resemble the prospective and possible readers of the Flat Black material that I am about to start writing. I’d like it to range over the topics of:
- how much socio-cultural difference between worlds they are inclined to think plausible, given colonisation by crackpot ventures from future-Earth, centuries of development in isolation, and thin interstellar traffic flows over the last eighty years;
- how much social consistency they are inclined to accept across a typical world, given that it has developed with global communications;
- how much convincing and of what kind would be necessary to get these values close enough to “about as much as you need for Flat Black to work” that willing acceptance of genre conventions will cover the rest, and un-ironic play be possible?
In short, are people having trouble accepting that planets in Flat Black will deviate from a mainstream human culture that is basically WEIRD? Or are they having trouble accepting that they have in most cases a global culture that shares deviations from the WEIRD? In other words, is the problem that planets have hats, or is the problem that each wears only one hat? What could I do to ameliorate that trouble, in either case? I’d like people to discuss these issues (and I’d like to be able to resist the temptation to justify features of Flat Black while they were doing it).