A Namespace About Story Worlds

The Character Sheets make sense to me because a work can have a lot of characters with a lot of tropes.

The amount of settings a work has is typically 1. If we group by a list of cities/planets like we do characters, they all unlikely get anything more than the one corresponding setting trope.

I see no utility or need for an additional subpage when that can be on the main page.

I'd rather progammically label tropes if they are story/character/setting/mechanics tropes like we have tags for Trivia and YMMV and be able to sort/filter examples, but that sounds more like a DB 2.0 feature.

Edited by Amonimus on Oct 6th 2023 at 12:51:58 PM

You know what? This idea could probably fit Original Character Tournaments (some of them anyway).

But wouldn't the character sheet variation work better in this regard? I mean I've seen a few character sheets that list not only the characters but the location they're from, as well as go into detail about aspects of the state of location as well as aspects of its history in certain cases.

I guess what I'm saying is; why not capitalize on it since the blueprint is already there? Why not expand on the very land certain series take place in by giving its own section instead of simply bunching it together with the character tropes or just standard tropes in general?

And with many location/stage tropes the site has, as well as how big certain series such as Naruto or Pokemon are, I honestly think this would be good for adding extra detail to certain pages and expanding aspects of this site.

"few character sheets that list not only the characters but the location they're from, as well as go into detail about aspects of the state of location as well as aspects of its history in certain cases. ... simply bunching it together with the character tropes"

Sounds like a violation of the namespace content.

Like with many hypotheticals, it'd be easier to argue if Sandbox.Naruto Locations and Sandbox.Pokemon Locations were made to see if it's even feasable.

Yeah, character pages should not be discussing things that aren't, well... characters. Nor should they really be getting into the nitty-gritty details. We're about the tropes, and that's what should be prioritized.

I got here from this ATT/~darknessRising's thread primarily intrigued by the idea of a setting or location oriented category. And well, given that we have so many tropes describing characters and so few describing locations and settings, perhaps we should figure out if we can make tropes for them?

Off the cuff I can think of Forest, Desert, Mountain and similar, and while they do all sound very chairsy to a ridiculous degree, browsing YKTS seems to point to There Are Two Kinds of People in the World: those that remember a lot about characters and those that remember a lot about locations/settings — and indeed, some literature has brown/purple prose that describes locations just as much as characters and activity.

What do you think?

"and while they do all sound very chairsy to a ridiculous degree"

That's the crux of the problem.

Characters are the driving element of a story and can be described with so many things the too-long thread really has issue with Shonen villains.

A location can get a 0-2 tropes on average because they are meant to be nothing but scene backdrops, so even if collected through entire work, I believe works with enough worldbuilding that could warrant a split would be rare exceptions.

Edited by Amonimus on Dec 18th 2023 at 7:00:32 PM

Please remember, it is off the cuff, but another thought could simply be to make Useful Notes or definition only articles that deal with them.

Now, I must rephrase and clarify, locations both real and fictional appeal to me a lot so I frequently check California Doubling simply for traveling to some locations that are mentioned there. And also, I frequently check concept-art from designers that are doing environmental-design and level-design for films/tv/animation and games.

On a further note, I have a prototype in my sandbox about Persona-Locus Segregation, sounds suspiciously similar to Gameplayand Story Segregation or what wiki describes as Ludo-Narrative Dissonance, right? — this is because it is an actual writing/design technique (that simply doesn't have a single mainstream name), that has to do with a setting lending characterization to characters and the other way around.

I understand that this thread deals with a category, where I'm mostly interested in locations, but the forum has so little to do with these concepts that searching yielded this only recent discussion related to it (of which I am aware of primarily for having read it in Oct when it was in ATT) — so I did not want to start a new thread.

If we're talking about something that's similar to the nominal point of a character page—to separate off character tropes when there's so many of them it's just plain easier to follow and avoid lots of bullet points—then I don't see why not.

We already see character pages being (mis)used for this, e.g. Arknights has multiple pages on the various countries in the world. But while this is a namespace misuse, the idea is perfectly sound—we have a lot of tropes that cover similar discrete blocks of the work in question, split them off into their own page because that's better for organising them and keeping the main page less cluttered.

The difference is that, as Amonimus pointed out, there's enough tropes focused on characters that the split is warranted. But just in terms of "better organization" I don't think there's enough of a problem there to warrant a split. Even as someone who'd call themselves an enthusiast of good worldbuilding, I still don't quite see the need for its own section of the wiki.

An improvement doesn't necessitate that there be an active problem. Is it better, especially where main pages are repeatedly hitting the length cap, to take a chunk of related tropes and an organisational structure into a subpage? Yes, definitely.

And I don't think there are so few tropes applicable to settings as a whole and their subdivisions that the exercise is entirely pointless.

IMO, these kinds of tropes should stay on a work's main page.

Was just redirected here by WarJay, and I just want to chime in and say I'd support an idea like this. Story worlds are fascinating to trope, and cataloging/organizing them so that tropes related to the world specifically instead of having to dig through main pages seems efficient and interesting.

Furthermore, with there being friction against classifying planets, societies, countries and the like as characters, it would be a nice place to redirect them.

I think this really only makes sense for situations like tabletop gaming where the setting is fairly divorced from the gameplay: not in the sense of Gameplay and Story Segregation, but, for example, the fact that you can play a game of Pathfinder in the standard Golarion/Lost Omens setting, or port Greyhawk over to it, or make a homebrew game (e.g. my group's last campaign was in an original Gunpowder Fantasy setting using some optional firearms rules).

See, there seem to be at least two if not more assumptions about what a 'setting' namespace would be.

1. A media namespace for settings that are independent of any other work.
2. A subpage like characters to handle setting-level tropes in an organised way.

I don't think there's much scope for the first one—independent constructed settings are basically limited to system-agnostic tabletop settings, and there's precious few of those. While you can play most anything in e.g. Eberron, it's still primarily a D&D setting.

But the second one keeps happening in character pages anyway, which to me completely negates the idea that there's no need for it. People keep doing it.

I'm probably biased since I have a beef with character pages for so many of them being major messes that are impossible to clean properly, and people shoehorning everything onto them is part of why I dislike them.

My main concern is that if we do allow people to put the setting tropes somewhere else, we won't only be having more cleaning to do on another new namespace, but we'd also have smaller and less informative main pages. It's hard enough getting people to follow the rules about what belongs on character pages; I'm not sure how much valid info we can get on a settings page before people start adding anything that tangentially belongs there.

I'd argue that less information on main pages is a good thing, actually. It's not exactly fun to scan through an entire page hoping to find some information/tropes about a specific setting in one franchise when it's littered with character and narrative tropes, especially if the work itself has so many tropes on the main page that they have to split it into subpages. Being able to organize and specify tropes based on setting like we do with Characters would make it far easier to navigate and categorize stuff.

The issue is that people don't understand what makes something a narrative/plot trope and what makes it a character trope, and this may only get more confusing with another split. I don't want a super bloated page, but I also don't want the bloat to be moved elsewhere by people too eager to make subpages (which is a recurring problem).

The other problem is that people often prioritize making subpages over fleshing out the main page. It happens all the time; you'll see a stubby main page and an equally un-filled character page because people perform the split before it's necessary. I just don't know if people will be able to avoid rushing into making a setting page before such a split becomes warranted.

On that note, how many setting tropes can we realistically expect most works to have?

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 22nd 2023 at 1:21:01 PM

I would be up for a /Setting tab, but only for works whose setting goes beyond the needs of the plot and so can be troped separately.

Though I think a /Gameplay tab would be more useful, to keep story and gameplay tropes separate (both for video games, board games and tabletop RPGs.

Guess I'll have to draft something up related to what I was saying up there. Because I'm seeing artists, well, concept artists and designers doing a great deal of work for passages in scripts, adaptations and source material that are as lengthy as dialogue.

I think that heavily depends on the story. Something that's set in the modern day, or a close analogue? Probably barely any.

Fantasy stories and sci-fi where you start to have lots and lots of cultures and new political entities and entire races? Lots of entries. An awful lot of them. If narrative tropes are what the world and characters do, the setting side is everything that covers what the world is.

While I'm probably biased because I can't relate to searching for settings tropes in the main list and consider them same as narrative,

I may have said it before but the best way to move the argument is if someone sandboxes a hypothetical Settings/ page and try it with as many works as possible. Like I've said it may work out for Star Wars or Sonic the Hedgehog, but trying to come up with random popular books in my head I'm unable to say anything about their settings unless they are specifically fantasy adventures.

Edited by Amonimus on Dec 22nd 2023 at 9:57:20 PM

"You wouldn't need a settings page for media that doesn't develop a novel setting" doesn't seem like a flaw of the premise.

I can see people being eager to add the new namespace though, and as mentioned people already make unnecessary character page splits so they'd make unnecessary setting splits, too. And that's just more to clean up and keep track of.

But like I said, I'm kind of biased since Characters/ pages also sort of irritate me, and those are well established pages with a clear purpose for a large number of works. Maybe there will be more to add on Setting/ pages than I imagine and maybe it won't be as chaotic to try and keep the namespace in a manageable state, but it's hard for me to not picture a bunch of problems on each page.

I wouldn't be unwilling to make some experimental pages in a sandbox though, so see what sort of things people would add, how they'd be formatted, and if they'd be robust enough to be a warranted split.

I agree with that quote (though I'd also like to know where you are quoting it from), because narrative, character and setting are "usually" equally important, and in relation to eachother. I find it strange to conceptualize a narrative and characters that are otherwise in a void (Gravity plays with this intentionally ;), and there are works that do this, they do it for some imaginative fill-in-the-blanks from the work's audience, not just literature or theater plays, but songs and operas as well. Conversely, there are very setting oriented works that only go so far as describe some dialogue but mostly, and objectively, what the character does through a setting, and we could go so far as include videogames settings that are first-person and exploration based.