Lawful GM

When PCs acquire political power it will strain the foundations of your setting; your players will want more information and desire opportunities to test their political might. How you address these demands may strain your sanity. If you provide too much detail you are wasting your time and possibly overwhelming your players, if you provide too little then you aren't going to truly engage your players. What follows is an approach that usually works.

STEP ONE: REMEMBER YOUR GOALS

Let's say that you have two players in your campaign, they are playing princesses of a royal family that rules a planet in a sci-fi setting of your own creation. There's a lot of background information you will need to conjure for this to work, yet you have to keep in mind two specific goals.

First, you want the setting to be intuitive. If you have to spend an hour explaining the setting's economy or political structures to the players for them to understand it then you are wasting everyone's time. Novelty is fine, but clarity is better. Keep things as simple and intuitive as possible.

Second, the setting exists to create stories. Good setting design is rich in potential drama, this doesn't mean there's lots of drama at the start just that the setting provides you tools for creating compelling adventures down the road. If your setting is a utopia where the economy and politics are well balanced then you are going to struggle to come up with varied stories. On the other hand a complete dystopia or chaotic setting deprives you of the nuances that make law and politics so compelling.

For our example we want to create an intuitive economic and political structure for the planet that will one day be ruled by the princesses. My advice is always to stick to capitalism, as everyone understands it and that makes it intuitive. I am also a fan of settings with nobility and democratic institutions. There's are a reason this model is pretty popular, it's very intuitive and allows you to explore a wide range of stories. In one adventure the princesses could be dealing with a feud between noble families and in the next have to save a popular politician from assassins. Novelty is fine, but solid is better.

STEP TWO: REAL WORLD RESEARCH

We live in a glorious age. If you want information on just about anything, it is available. If you want to know about medieval farming or how life might be in an orbital space station, it is just a quick online search away. The challenge is extrapolation. If your PCs control a space station then what real world reference do you use? You might look at airports or seaports to get an idea of potential traffic and volume, while looking up a city with a similar population to your space station for additional ideas.

For our sci-fi world I would look to the Earth as a whole and modern developed nations for economic and demographic numbers. I would also consider the setting: where do I want this world falling in on the interstellar scheme of things. Considering this, I decide on a population of 500 million; this is a modest population for a planet and is in the ballpark of the population of the United States so I can use that as a reference point.

STEP THREE: GUESSTIMATE

You cannot develop a realistic amount of detail for any setting. Imagine how much information you would need to just determine our world's interstellar commerce. What goods are traded and with whom? What quantities? What's the cost, what are their tariffs? What laws apply? What public safety and labor issues are involved with this trade? For gaming purposes, all we're trying to do is guesstimate and come up with intuitive ballpark figures.

For our sci-fi world I decide that we're not dealing with much interstellar trade. I pick 60 million tons of goods coming and about the same leaving in a year. That comes to 10 million tons of trade in a month. If we assume a typical space freighter is moving 10,000 tons then we're looking at 1000 ships a month coming and going from our planet. That's about 33 ships a day. That gives us an idea of how big of a starport we need and we could probably guesstimate the value of commerce for the world.

If you have given your guesstimates a little thought they will be fine, you don't need precision you just need a good faith effort. You also don't need to share all your calculations and numbers with your players, just the minimums needed for the story that is being told. Trust me, I've provided detailed information to my players and they just glaze over it, the real person who needs this information is the GM.

STEP FOUR: DELEGATE

Most players just want to game and don't have any enthusiasm for world-building, yet if you have a player who does have this passion then punt setting design to them. Provide guidelines and let them flesh it out. For our sci-fi world I might punt designing the seven noble houses that serve the royal house to the players. I have found this technique to be pretty useful and a great way to engage your players as well as to develop a richer world. All GMs have a degree of sameness to their settings and having players inject some of their mojo into the setting is almost always a positive, plus it will help you sharpen your GM skills to weave their ideas into the setting.

STEP FIVE: COMMUNICATE ORGANICALLY

How do you deliver setting information to your players? Encyclopedic handouts is one method...that isn't very effective. Short handouts are better and finding in-character means to deliver the information is even better. I do a news & rumors page that is composed of comments overheard by the PCs at various locations. This approach has a couple of advantages. First, it's more fun to read and write. Second, writing information in a NPC's voice lets you express it in a more real, often emotional way, providing more resonance to the story.

I do have a couple of caveats on all this. If you're lucky you will have a player who takes notes, otherwise just accept that you should be repeating information and names. Don't punish players for not taking notes if their PC should remember a name then remind them of the name. You can also provide handouts that condense information, though once again most players want to just game not go back through handouts and notes. This is why really detailed settings are usually wasted work, at best players will only internalize a few data points from an adventure. If you give then a score of facts about the setting, most will not sink in. It is always easier for the GM to remember this stuff; after all, it's your stuff. Whenever your players remember anything, take that as a tremendous success.