Genre Police: The Thinimblin Line

It happened a week or so ago. In a long-running game set in my core D&D world that has lots of groups, one of the players wanted to say ‘non-Newtonian’ and was having trouble because Newton doesn’t exist in a fantastical setting. 

So, we stopped and briefly decided the honour of such a scientific discovery would probably fall to the royal family of Timekeep, a scientific Gnomish city and that the concept would instead be named after them. 

I then paused and realised we’d reached a turning point in the campaign. In that moment, I understood a concept I’ve felt in other long-running gameworlds. We’d reached the Thinimblin line. And it made me sad.

What This Is It?

Well, it’s a term I just invented, but I’m taking the name of the gnomish family because while I have seen this happen before, this was the first time I saw it happen in front of my eyes. As we decided that we were settling on ‘non-Thinimblin substance’ as a workable phrase and that I would inform other groups based in the world about this, I imagined a person entering a part of this world and missing a minor detail like this, not understanding what it meant when someone said it, or feeling bad when they said ‘non-Newtonian’ and were then corrected. 

I suddenly remembered back to a player who joined my Mutants and Masterminds campaign in year five of the game and quit five sessions later with, ‘I’m really enjoying it…but it’s just too dense, you know? I love it, but I don’t understand it’. And I realised that now, this gameworld we’d created has crossed a line where the uninitiated would find it incomprehensible, filled with too much minutiae to ever grok. New players are going to have a harder time engaging with it, and older players’ lore knowledge will consistently outpace them. The setting has moved out of standard pre-assumptions and into very specific ones. This moment, to me is the moment the setting ‘Crosses The Thinimblin Line’.

I’m far from the only one to do this with a setting or world. There are loads of fictional settings that reward lore collection, some of which make way more sense if you delve deeper. Some of them, like Star Wars or Hellboy or Runequest are all settings in different media that feel like massive worlds where learning multiple different pieces of lore and setting detail makes your interaction with it deeper and more developed.

So Why Was I Sad?

Because RPG games are complicated. While players discovering lore and finding parts of story out during play is fun and rewarding, it can also quite quickly become a maze of unpicking one story after another. 

For example, charting the actual life story of Kallidius, a Lich in one of my game worlds, actually requires a working knowledge of two separate game worlds in the same star system, understanding of both the final wars of the Fallen World, the crafting of the demon armours, the Godswall of Vedathon, the two brothers and the war for Teros, the saga of Dragonhall, a knowledge of spelljamming, the planes and so on. 

These events were not originally told in the right order; only people who are in two separate campaigns have the whole story, really. Which for the players at the time is great. It allows them to uncover a story in their own way when it is relevant to their experiences and tells a deep story that players can share with each other outside of the game. This means they are sharing information back and forth through the groups, a sort of ‘meta-game’ if you will. But it creates a problem for newer players and for the flow of the game in general.

In Mutants and Masterminds, we’d gotten to the point where a newer (under a year of campaign time) player asking about one supervillain would likely derail the game. Someone would, in character, go back and explain how they used to be called something else when they studied under a different villain who was, in turn, a clone of somebody else – who has actually shown up two sessions ago but we forgot to mention that – and then the players that were there for those events would chime in with their experiences. And I began to realise that the game had entered a phase where it was being talked about more than played. Once we’ve crossed the line, a game is beginning to sag under it’s own continuity.

So What Do I Do?

So, the first option is to close the world – realise that you need to finish the story you are telling before introducing new content. That’s what I did with the Mutants and Masterminds game – the fifth year was its last full year. I triggered a war that shook the fundamental structures of the comic book the game took place in and ended it on a high note. 

I have visited the world twice since then, to fill in a few unanswered questions. But the second game I used some new players who really made me feel like the weight of the game world made them feel lost with and this caused a bad reaction. Add to the fact most of the original players aren’t in my life anymore, I haven’t returned. 

That was 2018 and while I occasionally think of new ideas about that game world, I am still happy a story was told and I knew when to finish it.

But I’m not sure I want to take that approach this time. So in order to avoid the creaking weight of (at this point) 5+ years of continuity generated by many ongoing games set in this same star cluster of worlds, 

I’m going to have to choose to make a concerted effort to do something in order to get past the line and continue with the world. To do that, next time, I’m going to go back to media franchises that seem to have become this burdened with backstory and look at how they’ve all dealt with the issue. They should provide us with some idea of what to do when our settings get long in the tooth.