Quote:
Originally Posted by unipus
I think this is also just a natural reaction to the way the hobby has developed. Back in the day, "session zero" wasn't a thing anyone had heard of. These days, everyone putting a game out assumes you're going to houserule and poke at it -- so why not leave it wide open to do so.
Hell, it gave me the opportunity to publish an entire book on a very specific setting. You can definitely argue that stuff should have been in the core book (although it never was, in any edition of the game), but the fact that it wasn't left the door open for me to create an interpretation that made sense to me and was fun at my table... which probably wouldn't be 100% the case had it been in the core book, really! And I'd have a lot less sales. 
On the topic of "what's left of the USN?" ... well, it's the same thing. If your players want to sail home and you want to say that's going to be the adventure of a lifetime just finding a seaworthy ship and crew brave enough to risk it, then you can do that. If you want to play it that the war in Europe is still sustainable and there's just enough word and supplies coming from back home to make that viable, you can do that too. If you want a game where ships are still out there volleying missiles at each other now and then, you can do that too. You could of course always do all of these things, but now at least you're not contradicting the written word to do so. |
Of course! I bought your book btw, it's great.
Like I said in the other worldbuilding thread, I get that maybe everyone just wants to do their own thing, and that's all fine. But I do worry that with so many content creators just making products, eventually there's going to be just a ton of discrete modules, none of which work together, and IMO that's going to hurt the game in the long run.
Any Ref that's looking to run more than one module with their group is going to be running the risk of those modules not working together, in which case they'll have to houserule, potentially extensively, in order to make it work for their players. In my mind, it makes more sense to at least try to flesh out the world a little more, at a really high level, just to help center the game around a default timeline. For example, knowing which countries are fighting which, and why, etc. Hell, even knowing which countries are still in existence (Yugoslavia anyone?).
As an example, say we have multiple modules be released for the US by various content creators over the next few years. One may have Russia and Mexico/Cuba invading as in the original games. Another may not, or may have some other group invading. Others may have no one invading the US, but perhaps New America has taken a bigger chunk of the country.
Each of those options is fine, and those Refs are free to determine their own games as they see fit. But it might help them if there was something to build off of *as an option*. And if a default timeline helps to ensure that there are multiple modules made inside the same cohesive "world", then all the better.