Making A Diverse World

[RATED-RKOFRANKLIN]

When making a traditional RPG game do you think about how to make your world's cultures and nations? In my opinion this is a very important piece of the puzzle. I am amazed by games that have diverse cultures and nations. It appears more effort was put into the game.

I am personally thinking of combining the Samurai RPT with the original VX and ACE RTP. The samurai RTP will not be mixed with the VX RTP. The samurai RTP will be used to make another nation with a different culture. Do you think this a good idea or a terrible idea?

 

[Shablo5]

In all honesty, diversifying the world was always a problem with me. Luckily this time, I have a writer, and she knows her **** so hopefully I can trust her to create diverse races and cultures (Seeing as it is important to my story).

About the "Samurai" pack.. I don't feel like I use it very much, so I can't say if it'd feel right plopping it in a game, seeing how it's kinda limited. And combining it with RTP... Eh. I'm not sure. Your best bet is to make a sample map, and ask for advice on that front, seeing as not everyone has bought it.

I'm interested in hearing what other people have to say on this matter.

 

[Espon]

I started small then expanded. What was one a small area with just humans has now expanded into a world with multiple races, all of which have their own countries and cultures. In fact there's 4 different worlds build on top of each other, each having different a different set of characteristics for the races that live within in.

 

[Mewens]

I hear ya -- too often, games have a cast of cultures that all look at the world in the same way, have the same sayings and all seem to have the same motivations.

Personally, I think the key is twofold:

First, the designers and writers need to know how each culture looks at the world. Do they see it as a hostile place? As welcoming? Do they see humanity as inherently great? Inherently flawed? They also need to know what pressures the culture faces. Do its people live in an area with limited water? Oppressively cold winters? Aggressive, dangerous fauna? Other humans? (Sure, there's _tons_ more that goes into culture, but that's a good enough base for us as storytellers. It gives us an idea of where the people are coming from and what their heroes, villains and outcasts will look like.) From this, the details of your culture can easily emerge -- I'm not a fan of "Avatar," but there's a clever scene (and a good example) in that movie where The Love Interest explains what the Na'vi mean when they say, "I see you." It has a special, cultural meaning that's not apparent to outsiders. The cultures in any work of fiction should be similar -- they should have rules and ideas about the world that are obvious to their members, but lack any significance to others.

Secondly, each culture needs to be visually distinct. This means your sprites ought to be recognizable as being from region X; ideally, you shouldn't have to tell the player that a northerner, a southerner and a coast dweller walk into a bar; you could just show them and they'd know. This is important because it allows designers to quickly set up scenes -- and player expectations -- without tons of exposition. Think of the difference between the nobles and the peasants in "Final Fantasy Tactics." Clothing was used to visually separate the two groups -- essentially two separate cultural groups -- and became a shorthand (at least in the first two or three chapters) for goals and alignment. (If you never thought about it before, look at the clothing during your next FFT playthrough. It's actually quite clever -- when the game is about nobles v. the poor, the fancy-rags dichotomy is very strong. As the story progresses, and it's more about good v. corruption, that dichotomy is intentionally erased; by the time the civil war has broken out, everyone is wearing the same thing. It's a nice metaphor for the moral gray areas the game veers into.)

 

[Genii Benedict]

"Why I gotta be the 'visually distinct' guy?" /WayneBrady

 

[Mewens]

Lol -- yeah, that's the easy way out. But culture is about a _ton_ more than skin color -- the ancient Athenians and Spartans were visually distinct, despite both being Greek, for example.

 

[Dark Gaia]

Distinct cultures are less about skin colour and visual differences, and more about the actual "feel" and "atmosphere". You can make two cities in your game feel very different just by giving them a different music style and different background. The way the NPCs talk, the things they talk about, and the things that are important in the town's backstory can all be used to create two nations that seem different from each other. Personally, I base the places in my games off real world places - I like to real cultures for inspiration, and try to replicate the basic "feeling" of those cultures. The key thing is to just not make your entire world based around the same place (medieval Europe) because in a believable world, cultures will be different from country to country.

That said, don't try to shoehorn other cultures in just for the sake of having them. They should be a part of your world, and a part of its backstory. If there's a samurai guy in your party, there should be an actual Eastern inspired country for him to have come from - he shouldn't just be there for the sake of being there. He's a denizen of your world too, and he didn't just appear out of nowhere.

If you have trouble diversifying your world in a "realistic" way, why not set your game in a small region of your world, rather than the whole thing? This way you can focus on one or two specific countries, and there won't be a need to make the world seem more cultured, since the player will never actually visit these far Eastern lands they hear about.

 

[Probotector 200X]

This is one of my favorite (and least favorite) parts of making RPGs!

On one hand, it's very fun making all kinds of different cultures and such, some heavily based on real world cultures, some combining various aspects from different cultures, some inspired by fictional cultures, and some just, I don't know where the idea came from, heh. And throwing all kinds of "non-humans" into the mix (elves, fairies, werewolves, minotaurs, harpies, robots, talking cats, dragons, etc.) is a load of fun!

But on the other hand, that can be very, very time consuming! Thinking all of this up, having it work in-game, not only designing the cultures for humans (well, not all of my ideas have humans) but for the other races as well....Like hey, maybe even though humans and centaurs live together and have the same culture and religion for the most part, they still typically have quite different world views...That also includes designing their appearances, which means lots and lots of drawing and tons and tons of spriting...

Oh...but it's so fun to create all this though...I for one like using some ethnicities in different ways too. Like, notice how elves are almost always European inspired? How about some Brazilian elves? Mongolian elves? Indian elves? Extra layers like that always just make things more complicated though! (I think it's worth the effort though)

Lately I've actually gotten a fair bit of inspiration from Magic the Gathering. It has some interesting settings with varied cultures, especially amongst the humans. And in some of the worlds, the ones called humans look a fair bit different from the humans you and I are used to. I always love the "world-building" articles they have around the time a new "block" comes out with a new world to learn about. Oh, would I love to see one of those "style guides" they have, all that detail about everything and all kinds of reference stuff, and hmmm...

Oh, and you know what else muddles the mixture too? Really "out-there" fantasy settings, like places with giant mushrooms and purple sky and stuff. How would the culture and society and religion of the people who lives there be?

 

[Emmych]

Something I've found works is going on the whole "single idea + various beliefs about it = separate tribes splintering off" route -- you go back thousands of years, set your world up with a good ol' creation myth or something, then interpret it a few different ways and see how cultures would have built up around that.

EXAMPLES~

Say your creation myth was the one out of Zelda: three goddess come down, make the world and poop out a golden triangle. One group of people might build their culture around the idea that the Triforce represents perfect balance, so their society is one that avoids conflict, doesn't believe in classes, and places value in those possessing all three of the main virtues (Power, Wisdom, Courage). Another group could interpret it as women being the creator of all things, so it becomes a matriarchy, as women are those with the power to create and gift the glories of heaven to the people of the world. Finally, another group could see it as the goddesses creating nature and then ceasing to interfere with it, so they decide to live in caves and huts instead of building cities so as not to disturb the natural order of things.

This is also a pretty rad way to generate conflict -- I mean, Islam, Judaism and Christianity are based on the same texts, but have been interpreted very differently over the years to the point of out and out warfare. (PS THIS IS HOW GOOD RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS GO, NOT THE USUAL "GOD IS EVIL" ROUTE)

This way of doin' things works when you're focusing on a smaller area, which I would actually recommend more game makers do! It's more realistic to have a country spanning epic rather than a planet one. I mean, seriously -- the folks in Chrono Trigger can take a ferry half way around the world before breakfast? OTL

COME ON, NOW.

 

[Paladin-Cleric of Awesome]

In my Thorntop World I have a number of different cultures.

I look at it this way.

1)Religion-- There are three Gods, 6 reglious groups, each with at least 3 sects each (if that)

2)Race--What sort of creatures are they? Human? Goblin? Orc? etc

3)Classes--Are they mostly wizards, warriors, theives, Clerics?

As an example I'll give you the Helitians

They believe that there is one god, but that this god is split into three hands, the Hand of Life (which to other cultures is the Goddess of Life), the Hand of Death (The Caller of All Souls) and the Hand of Punishment (The Dragon of Oblivion). They are Human, and in my own defination of them, are warlike by nature but like to pretend to be civilised. The predominant classes are Clerics and Knights. They are ruled over by a Monarchy, but the church is a major part of their exsistance.

This means that when the church and the crown are getting along, the whole Kingdom benefits. But when they start to argue you have something very close to the Three Musketeers, the Musketeers (The Kings guard) and the Cardinals Guard (the Churches Clerics).

This way I have a culture, a new kingdom, and some conflict within without a whole lot of planning. (I may have drawn huge inspiration from the Three Musketeers, but I never noticed until after I'd actually made the world)

 

[Samven]

I have an odd approach to culture-building. I try to think of a few cool things and then make a country's culture around them.

So, in my current project, I started thinking about mediums: so I thought about creating a nation of spirit-speakers. Then I thought, "What if magic comes from the link between person and ghost" so that ended up being a part of it. Before long, I had a culture of psychics whose social hierarchy was based on how much they could alter reality through their ghost-pacts.

I don't see that as too different to mixing a few existing settings: so by all means use what you think is going to work well together and go for it.

 

[slaQ]

I'm not sure about this, but I think in general I start by thinking about the pyramid of power (sorry don't know the official term) The pyramid of all the layers of the population.

So first off, does it have a king or a president, is it a democracy or something else. And you work your way down until you've established what kind of different classes there are,

what their roles are and how they influence eachother. From that base I kind of let it freeflow during the buildig of the game. Cultures kind of naturally form in different ways for me from that point.

 

[Luminous Warrior]

I mean, Islam, Judaism and Christianity are based on the same texts, but have been interpreted very differently over the years to the point of out and out warfare.

Also, Christianity has multiple other groups that believe differently too. There's the conflict between Catholics and Lutherans that happened in the 1500s, when Martin Luther separated from the Catholic church. Also, the Pilgrims came to America for religious freedom. So religious beliefs have always been a major cause for events in history.

My current project involves two major religious groups that stemmed from the same myth. In the beginning the world was in chaos, and ruled over by the Ancient One. But, after thousands upon thousands of years, his eight most trusted generals betrayed him, and brought the world out of chaos. The two groups each believe this myth, but interpret it differently. One group , the Noriads, believe that the eight generals are to be revered as deities for what they did, but the other group , the Kaotins, believe that, because the world was originally in chaos, that it should have stayed in chaos, and the eight generals disrupted of the natural order of the universe. Also, there are sub-groups of both the religious groups, and conflicts between them. The Kaotins are mostly content with living in, what they believe, is a disrupted world, until the Ancient One returns and restores the natural order, but another group of Kaotins believe that the natural order will never be restored unless they take matters into their own hands.