I think this one is true, a line of thought that i’ve heard come up in friends at the table, wrt what changing a game means for a setting means, is that changing the game system they play in changes what is *possible* in the world.
They’ve got some settings where they’ve played half a dozen games in at least, and those settings are fundamentally shaped by the possibility space that the system allows, because they’re buying into the constraints the game sets as a co-author of sorts.
I think it goes both way too. they’re not gonna choose a game that doesn’t fit the demands of the setting, it necessitates a system that’ll work for the story they want to tell. “Kingdom” makes for a much more malleable world than say, Blades in the Dark. both of those can have great change
enacted in the world, but in one it’s a much more uphill battle and i think the type of game that gets chosen is often due to the demands of the setting. because the way those games are written, they’re written with “setting constraints” in mind. it’s a conversation between the two
medieval fantasy isn't allowed to have evocative mechanics that make the setting and system feel one in the same (compared to something which does that, like, say, panic at the dojo) because of the mental image of high fantasy roleplay being so inextricably linked to d&d
Comments
(it's the last section of this blog post, it's a thread somewhere too but bsky isn't working well enough for me to get it rn)
https://aryxymaraki.blogspot.com/2024/12/design-threads-compiled.html
https://bsky.app/profile/aryxymaraki.itch.io/post/3kbax4cvwkx2h